Representative William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska was sympathetic to the complaints of farmers and workers burdened by sales taxes. He championed a graduated income tax to draw federal revenue at a higher rate from the rich than from the poor. A 1913 cartoon lauded the new federal income tax that affected the wealthy as well as the working class.
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
Representative William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, photograph, ca. 1902
A National Income Tax
In 1872 Congress repealed a national income tax that had helped finance the Civil War, but the question of whether to tax income reemerged after a financial panic in 1893 heightened the need for federal revenue. Representative William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, along with farmers, populists, and progressives, advocated a graduated income tax. When an income tax bill passed Congress in 1894, however, the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. Congress finally secured its power to tax income in 1913 after it approved, and the states ratified, the Sixteenth Amendment.
But gentlemen have denounced the income tax as class legislation. . . . why should not those sections pay most which enjoy most?
Representative Williams Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, Speech to the U.S. House of Representatives, January 30, 1894
Representative William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska was sympathetic to the complaints of farmers and workers burdened by sales taxes. He championed a graduated income tax to draw federal revenue at a higher rate from the rich than from the poor. A 1913 cartoon lauded the new federal income tax that affected the wealthy as well as the working class.
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
