""Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender""

“Nobody else has comprehensively detailed the activities of tax protesters during the Great Depression, and Upham-Bornstein does this very effectively. This book will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that taxpayer politics are a long-standing American tradition. ‘Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender’ provides useful analyses of how these movements relate to trends in law and politics, as it provides a wealth of empirical details and richness for this relatively understudied topic.”—Lawrence Glickman, Professor of American Studies at Cornell University, and author of Free Enterprise: An American History “In the depth of the Great Depression, middle-class property owners spontaneously organized to ‘raise hell and lower taxes.’ This extensively researched, sensibly organized, and thoughtfully argued book presents nonpartisan political activism, judicial intervention into local government, and a pivotal moment in the fiscal history of the United States. It also reaches a surprising but utterly convincing conclusion: most tax revolters sought not a smaller government but a more efficient and progressive one.”—Daniel R. Ernst, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal History at Georgetown University Law Center, and author of Tocqueville’s Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America, 1900–1940 ""Upham-Bornstein is refreshingly evenhanded, and she avoids taking cheap shots or making simplistic generalizations. Her fair-mindedness deserves acknowledgement.... Most of Upham-Bornstein's analytical points are sensible. She makes a convincing case that New Deal subsidies dampened the motivation for tax resistance, either legal or illegal, and she poses intriguing questions about the extent to which African-American poll tax resistance counts as a form of tax revolt.... Backed by meticulous research and thoughtful analysis, 'Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender' should be a model for future studies of the oft-neglected story of American tax revolts.""—Reason ""Upham-Bornstein’s book sheds much-needed light on the history of America’s antitax movements""—Tax Notes