Taxpayers on Strike in Chicago

During an age of tax revolt, Chicago easily qualified as a potential trouble spot. In most of the rest of the country, the effects of the depression fueled the onset of taxpayer unrest. In Chicago, economic decline only fired the embers of a revolt well under way before the 1929 crash. These conclusions are fairly clear. The problem starts when we begin to wrestle with the tricky questions of how and why the legal forms of revolt evolved into an outright strike.

The breakdown of the tax-appeals system provided the immediate spark. A flurry of protest overwhelmed the traditional outlet for complaints, the Board of Review. In one day alone, 29 November 1930, 4,000 taxpayers jammed into the board's offices to file protests. When the board's members turned a deaf ear to the mountain of pending appeals, aggrieved taxpayers resorted to the only avenues of protest left open to them. In Chicago, this meant court litigation and/or nonpayment of taxes.

--David T. Beito, Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 60.