Biography
Karl H. Meyer is a pacifist and long-running direct-action organizer associated with the Catholic Worker Movement and with war-tax resistance campaigns. His activism has emphasized nonviolent protest, voluntary poverty and mutual aid, and highly visible “public witness” actions meant to force attention to war, capital punishment, and government policy. He has also been involved in experimental protest tactics tied to tax resistance and public demonstrations.
Meyer’s arrests are a consistent feature of his activism rather than an exception. He participated in the 1961 peace march to Moscow and later staged long-distance protests (including a death-penalty protest walk dragging a mock electric chair). He has described decades of repeated arrests during protests and civil-disobedience actions, alongside sustained conflict with the Internal Revenue Service over tax-resistance tactics. In recent years he has remained active in Nashville, including an arrest in 2024 after intentionally sleeping on the Tennessee state-capitol grounds as a protest against a law escalating penalties for public camping. Son of former U.S. Representative William H. Meyer of Vermont, born in a cabin in northern Wisconsin. At age 19 he attempted to open a Catholic Worker house of hospitality in Washington, D.C.; on July 12, 1957 he met Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy at the Chrystie Street Catholic Worker. After witnessing the imprisonment of war tax resister Eroseanna Robinson, he vowed never to pay federal income tax again, pioneering the W-4 extra-allowances method to block withholding. He received a two-year federal sentence for tax resistance and served about nine months of that sentence, as he recalled in a 2010 first-person account, as well as shorter terms in 20 different jails. In 1984 he defied the IRS "frivolous filing" penalty by filing a frivolous return every day that year, was assessed $140,000 in penalties, and coined the term "cabbage patch resistance."
Sentence length distinguished from actual time served
In his first-person article on original page3, continued on page6, Meyer recalled serving nine months of a two-year prison sentence for war tax refusal in1971. This distinguishes the nominal consecutive terms from actual imprisonment. His separately verified May21,1971 admission and February16,1972 release, and the271-day counter, remain unchanged. The article gives an April15 indictment anniversary but no sufficiently explicit indictment year; no new indictment or intake date is inferred.
The Supreme Court denied Karl Meyer’s petition in No. 72-5175 against Daniel Weil, executive director of the Cook County House of Correction, on December 11, 1972. On May 21, 1973 it denied leave to seek rehearing. These are procedural dates, not an additional custody episode or evidence replacing his separately documented admission, release or actual served time.
Supreme Court Journal, October Term 1972, PDF pages 281, 615.
Magistrate Barbara Holmes dismissed Meyer’s protest citation on June 11, 2026; no additional imprisonment is established.
