The tax we love to hate; good or bad? American or un-American? The federal income tax has provoked intense debate, but it has paid for wars and funded America's rise as a superpower.

• Author: McCollum, Sean
• Position: Times past

In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

--Benjamin Franklin

Death and taxes may be certain, but we don't have to die every year.

--Anonymous

Taxes have long been a ripe subject for sardonic humor. But few Americans are laughing in the days leading up to April 15--the deadline for filing federal income-tax returns. The complicated forms, the math anxiety, the resentment over giving up part of their paychecks --all contribute to Americans' fear and loathing of income taxes.

In popularity, the tax may rank below dental work. But Americans asked for it literally. When there was no federal income tax more than 100 years ago, a movement arose to create one. Many in the middle and working classes were convinced that the wealthy needed to pitch in more to pay the country's bills, especially the costs of wars. To the non-wealthy, an income tax seemed fairer than a tax on property or sales.

Opponents have criticized the tax as an unfair penalty for success, a blank check for spendthrift politicians, and a bloodsucking leech feeding on wage earners and businesses.

But advocates have viewed the income tax as a source of national unity and strength. "I like to pay taxes," said legendary Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. "With them, I buy civilization."

BEARING THE BURDEN

In America's first 100 years, lawmakers rarely entertained the idea of a peacetime national income tax. They paid for government operations with a sales tax and tariffs on imports. It was not until 1862 that President Abraham Lincoln and Congress began using income taxes to pay for the Civil War.

But the tax expired in 1872, even as the economy was undergoing the Industrial Revolution. A nation of farms was making way for cities. Wealth was shifting from farmers to businessmen and other professionals. The question arose: Should the rich be taxed more than the rest?

Laborers and small farmers were increasingly saying yes. In 1893, a Congressman from Tennessee, Benton McMillin, argued the case for an income tax rather than a sales tax:

Are we going to put all of this [tax] burden on the things men eat and wear, and leave out those vast accumulations of wealth? ... And yet when it is proposed ... to shift it from the laborer who has nothing but his power to toil and sweat, to the man who has a fortune made or inherited, we hear a hue and cry raised.

The hue and cry reached a crescendo in 1894, when Congress passed a new income tax: Any money...