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 served two years in federal prison for tax resistance and 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."
