In the history of American politics, there have been few figures quite like Richard J. Daley, the Democratic mayor of Chicago from 1955 to 1976. Called “Hizzoner” by both supporters and detractors, Daley was the godfather of American mayors. His readiness to use political power to help his family was legendary, summed up as, “If a man can’t put his arms around his sons and help them, then what’s the world coming to?”
Donald Trump as president has taken that sentiment — and the use of naked political power to enrich his family — to levels never seen in American history. In his latest example of political collusion and self-dealing, Trump tried to benefit from something no other American in history — president or otherwise — had ever enjoyed: a guarantee that the Internal Revenue Service can never audit his back taxes or those of his relatives or their family businesses, that is until a judge found last month that the president misused the court.
In a deal crafted by Todd Blanche, then the acting attorney general and Trump’s former personal lawyer, the president put in place a family protection plan that Daley could have only dreamed of, one possibly worth upward of $100 million.
Attempting to strong-arm the IRS into receiving favorable tax treatment has been tried before, of course, but it wasn’t always so easy — even for one of America’s most revered military figures who was a former presidential candidate himself.
In 1863, Gen. Winfield Scott, newly retired as commanding general of the Army and an American hero, complained about his taxes to the newly installed first commissioner of the IRS, George S. Boutwell, a distant family member of mine and former governor of Massachusetts.
Having retired in November 1861 at age 75, Scott was voted a lifetime pension at full pay by Congress that, by executive order from President Abraham Lincoln, could never be reduced.
It was on that basis that Scott wrote to Boutwell, asking to be excused from paying the 3% income tax being levied on his pension. The country’s first income tax had just been introduced by Congress, in July 1862, to help raise badly needed funds for the Union Army in the second year of the Civil War. Lincoln himself despaired that “the bottom is out of the tub” on how to pay for a war against the Confederacy that, in the summer of 1862, was going badly. That same month, Boutwell was appointed by the president to head the newly created Internal Revenue Bureau and oversee the expansion of the government’s tax-collecting capabilities in support of the war effort.
In writing to Boutwell, perhaps Scott felt he could strike awe in the newly arrived revenue commissioner, unschooled in the ways of Washington. If so, he was mistaken.
Boutwell replied to Scott that, no, the general’s pension was not being reduced. The income tax was just that, a tax, similar to what thousands of other American civilians and military officers were paying. The general’s request was denied.
As it happened, even Frederick Douglass, famed Black abolitionist and public figure, got into the act. Douglass reported on the affair in his newspaper, Douglass’ Monthly, noting with satisfaction that Boutwell had stood up to Scott, intimating that, at a time when Union troops were fighting and dying for their country, the general’s petty demand was “very small business” indeed.
Today, the same can be said, in spades, of Trump’s attempts to leverage the power of the presidency to obtain his IRS “family protection plan” in the midst of another war, the undeclared and unsuccessful conflict with Iran, that is fueling inflation and greatly increasing the economic stress felt by the vast majority of Americans.
Jeffrey Boutwell, a retired public policy specialist and long-ago staffer with the City News Bureau of Chicago, is the author of the book “Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy.”
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