Amish Confidential (15 page)

For reasons I’ve never been entirely sure of, people like picking on my family. Things that others seem to easily get away with become issues for our branch of the Peacheys and the Stoltzfuses: driving cars, drinking too much, dating the wrong people. Things that might well be overlooked in others become federal cases for us.

One reason, I’m convinced, is that the Amish are often uncomfortable with widows and widowers. It’s almost considered a failure if one spouse dies young. In our family, that happened twice—with my dad and with my stepfather’s first wife. But that’s not the only reason we’re so often under the microscope (and the binoculars, too). The special scrutiny we’ve faced could also be due to the vibrant personalities we have. I’m not shy or retiring. Certainly, none of my brothers are, and my stepbrothers aren’t introverted, either. We’re loud. We’re considered rambunctious. Some of us have gotten into minor scrapes and trouble with neighbors and even the law. There’s no denying we’re all filled with energy and spirit. We do stand out. In some communities, that might be looked on as a plus, but standing out is rarely a good thing in Amish Country.

You can just imagine how some of my Amish friends have reacted to the
Amish Mafia
TV show and all the attention it’s generated. Let’s just say the controversy and publicity aren’t universally appreciated.

I’ve been attacked by strangers and critics, not to mention every two-bit politician from Harrisburg to Washington and back, for things I have said and done on the show. Just wait ’til they read this book! But I don’t know them, and frankly, I don’t care so much what
they say. It’s a little different when people I’ve known forever start attacking me for things I am tremendously proud of. I have thick skin—I have to, but still, that’s no fun.

I understand that partly, it’s the Amish quest for privacy. I realize I’ve exposed some long-simmering secrets, though nothing that would personally hurt anyone I care about. I’ve told some truths that very much needed telling, but there’s also a heavy dose of jealousy in here. I’m sure of it. Along with the praise I’ve gotten, I know there are lots of people talking behind my back right now. I’ve just come to expect that, and these aren’t just my mother’s quilting friends. These are people of my generation too, including kids I grew up with, guys I know from my Rumspringa gang or from just out running around. From time to time, one of them will approach me directly.

“Oh, you think you’re somebody now,” an old friend said one day. He definitely sounded angry. “Who do you think you are showing the Amish to the world?”

This wasn’t an overly sensitive TV critic. This was a guy I’d known since I was a kid. “Actually, no,” I answered. “I’m pretty much the same as I’ve ever been. Just Levi.”

That wasn’t the first time someone talked to me like that, and I’ve come to expect it sometimes, depending on the crowd. But the first time it happened I was genuinely surprised.

“You shouldn’t be talking about these things on television,” said an old drinking buddy, a guy I’ve known from hanging out in sports bars and playing softball. “You’re working against the church.”

I was caught off guard and decided to rib him a little. “How do you even know about the show?” I asked him. “You’ve been watching television?”

Okay, that was a cheap shot, but I couldn’t resist it. This friend might
have been watching the Phillies on the sports bar’s big-screen, but that didn’t explain how he knew about Merlin or Alvin or Ruck Davey.

It’s always funny hearing Amish complaints about something the traditional Amish aren’t even supposed to see. “I heard about it,” is often the answer.

But television-watching habits aside, I didn’t like the accusatory tone of his comment. “How’s telling the truth working against the church?” I asked my old friend. “That’s just telling the truth.”

“It’s a bad reflection, you showing off like that on television,” he said persistently.

His words didn’t strike me as fair or warranted. He didn’t know what was inside my head and he wasn’t exactly living his life above reproach.
People in glass houses . . .
, as the saying goes.

I decided it was time to give a little back. “You go to bars dressed Amish,” I told him. “Aren’t you showing yourself off? That’s disrespecting the Amish right there.”

“Oh,” he said, “are you judging me?”

“No,” I told him. “But it sounds like you’re judging me.”

I could feel it coming. Our talk was slipping into stupid fast. I was ready to end it, but my friend was not.

“You’re judging me,” he repeated.

I was wrong, he maintained, for using my place on a television program to bust some myths. But, just like it says in John 8:32, I knew I wasn’t doing anything wrong: “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

I just shrugged and said: “At least I’m not pretending I’m something that I’m not.”

I knew he’d be gossiping about me tomorrow.

CHAPTER 16

VALENTINE’S DAY IN COURT

T
here’s a big rumor that the Amish don’t pay taxes. The rumor isn’t true. I’m not sure what your tour guide told you, and I don’t care what you heard from someone at the molasses-cookie shop. The Amish pay income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, federal taxes, state taxes, inheritance taxes, capital-gains taxes, so many taxes it’s impossible keep them all straight. And we complain about those taxes just like most Americans do. We hate ’em and we pay ’em, year after year.

It’s right there in the Bible, Mark 12:17: “Jesus said to them: ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ ” The Amish do plenty of rendering to God, and I don’t have to tell you how many Caesars keep coming around with their hands out, the United States Internal Revenue Service being only the most famous and most despised.

The Amish could never get away with not paying taxes. We ride on public roadways, we walk on public sidewalks, we drink water from public reservoirs, we benefit from the protections of the United States military, even though we don’t choose to sign up. Those things
aren’t cheap, and someone has to pay for all that. Not paying taxes would make us freeloaders, and that is something we are not.

The Amish pay taxes, all except for one.

We don’t pay Social Security taxes.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have Social Security numbers or Social Security cards or even a file down at the Social Security Administration. I have all those, like almost all Amish do, whether they work on or off the farm. When so many don’t have driver’s licenses, that’s our basic ID card. It’s something you need to open a bank account or get a hunting or fishing license. Don’t forget, many Amish people won’t carry photo identification of any sort, and plenty don’t vote. That Social Security card becomes important, even if they never make a single contribution to the federal retirement program or accept a single penny of benefits.

Therein lies a fascinating piece of Amish history that reveals a lot about the relationship between the Amish and the outside world.

The story features a crotchety Amish farmer named Valentine Byler, who had a long red beard and lived in New Wilmington in western Pennsylvania. He’s dead now, but for more than half a century, old Valentine has been a quiet inspiration to tax haters everywhere. Recently, his name was even whispered in the fight over Obamacare. We’ll get to Valentine in a moment, but just know that while most Americans have no choice about paying their Social Security taxes, Valentine considered it his moral, Amish duty not to pay his.

This all goes back to 1935, when Congress passed the Social Security Act. That law required most Americans to pay a small percentage of their wages into a retirement trust fund. When those people reached retirement, checks would start arriving in the mail. Social Security was a key part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal,
pulling America out of the Great Depression and lifting millions of older people out of dire poverty. It’s one of the most popular and successful government programs ever devised. If you don’t believe me, try running for office just about anywhere but an Amish community and promising you’ll kill Social Security. Good luck with that.

It took twenty years, but in 1955, Social Security was extended to people who worked on farms, and that’s when the Amish started to care about it.

The Amish hated the whole idea of Social Security.

It’s the family’s job and church’s job, they believed—not the government’s—to care for people when they get old or sick. A group of Amish bishops laid out the principle clearly, as soon as they realized that Social Security could soon apply to many Amish: “It has been our Christian concern from the birth of our church group to supply those of our group who have a need, financial or otherwise.” The whole idea of insurance payments and benefit schemes, they said, was really ungodly.

Pennsylvania farmer Valentine Byler agreed with the bishops. He was totally anti–Social Security. He said his religion forbade him from buying any kind of insurance, the private or the government kind. Told that Social Security wasn’t exactly insurance, the farmer supposedly waved a small-print government document, stroked his red beard and fumed: “Doesn’t the title say ‘Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance’?”

It sure did.

Valentine was far from alone in not wanting Washington’s Social Security. In 1959, fourteen thousand Amish people, more than one-third of the entire United States Amish population at the time, signed a petition asking Congress for a special religious exemption
from the whole program. “We do not want to be burdensome,” they said, “but we do not want to lose our birthright to everlasting glory, therefore we must do all we can to live our faith!”

The IRS really wasn’t in the everlasting-glory business. This was a tax-collection agency. The two sides made some effort to negotiate. Meetings were held between the Amish bishops and IRS supervisors, but talk of a compromise got nowhere. The IRS finally decided enough time had passed, and it was time for the Amish to pay up!

“We don’t ask people their race or religion when we administer the tax laws,” the chief of collections in the IRS Pittsburgh office pointed out. Therefore, “people have no right to use their religion as an excuse not to pay taxes.”

The dispute was starting to sound like one of those old you-must-pay-the-rent movie-house melodramas featuring a mustachioed villain and a damsel in distress.

“You must pay the Social Security tax!”

“We won’t pay the Social Security tax!”

“You must pay the Social Security tax!”

Neither side sounded ready to budge. Valentine Byler was the issue’s Amish poster boy—although, since he was Amish, he couldn’t have his picture on any posters, of course.

The IRS took the case to court, filing a lawsuit in 1960 against him and several other Amish defendants at the U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh. Valentine was summoned to appear, but he didn’t show. He was cited for contempt. The U.S. Marshals drove out to New Wilmington and found Valentine at his farm. They put him in their car and drove him back to the courthouse in Pittsburgh. When the Amish farmer finally stood before the bench, the judge didn’t seem angry with him. It was the government agents he reamed out.
“Don’t you have anything better to do than to take a peaceful man off his farm and drag him into court?” the judge demanded before dismissing the government lawsuit outright.

The agents didn’t miss a beat. Valentine still had an unpaid Social Security tax bill, and it totaled $308.96, going back four years. The IRS finally moved to collect.

On April 16, 1961, while Valentine was out plowing the fields for his annual spring planting, IRS agents came to his farm. The agents seized three horses and some harnesses and sold them at auction to satisfy the bill.

Agency officials explained themselves in a lengthy press release: “Since Mr. Byler had no bank account against which to levy for the tax due, it was decided as a last desperate measure to resort to seizure and sale of personal property. It was then determined that Mr. Byler had a total of six horses, so it was decided to seize three in order to satisfy the tax indebtedness. The three horses were sold May 1, 1961, at public auction for $460. Of this amount, $308.96 represented the tax due and $113.15 represented the expenses of the auction sale, including feed for the horses, leaving a surplus of $37.89 which was returned to the taxpayer.”

Keep the change, Valentine!

To get his plowing done, he borrowed a horse from a neighbor.

IRS officials said later they got no pleasure from seizing and auctioning Valentine’s horses, but what choice did they have? “The Byler case, like all others in the same category, presents an unpleasant and difficult task for the Internal Revenue Service,” the agency said almost apologetically. “We have no other choice under the law.”

The agents did seem to be on solid legal footing, but there was something they failed to anticipate: the public-relations fiasco their
horse seizure would cause. The national media went berserk. The
New York Herald Tribune
complained: “What kind of ‘welfare’ is it that takes a farmer’s horses away at spring plowing time in order to dragoon a whole community into a ‘benefit’ scheme it neither needs nor wants, and which offends its deeply held religious scruples?” The Norfolk
Ledger-Star
called the seizure “a milestone in the passing of freedom—the freedom of people to live their lives undisturbed by their government so long as they lived disturbing no others. It was a freedom the country once thought important.”

The rhetoric got a little overheated at times. One Amish man told
Reader’s Digest
: “Allowing our members to shift their interdependence on each other to dependence upon any outside source would inevitably lead to the breakup of our order.”

There is only so much bad press any government bureaucracy can withstand. The IRS officials didn’t back down immediately—not yet—but some of the fight seemed to drain out of them.

A meeting was called in Washington in September of 1961. The Amish bishops sat down with Mortimer Caplin, commissioner of the IRS. This time, the bishops didn’t argue the law. They began by citing Bible verses—and not the one about Caesar. This time, they started with Timothy 5:8: “But if any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel.”

It all seemed cut-and-dried to the Amish, but Timothy didn’t seem to sway the men in suits and ties, nor did any of the other scripture the Amish bishops quoted. Nor did the new petition the bishops left with Commissioner Caplin and his people that day. “We believe in a supreme being and also the constitution of the USA, and we feel the Social Security Act and Old Age Survivors Insurance is abridging
and infringing to our religious freedom,” this one said. “We believe in giving alms in the church according to Christ’s teaching.”

With all the Bible quotes and references to Christ’s teachings, the meeting seemed more like a church service than a legal debate. “Our faith has always been sufficient to meet the needs as they come about,” the new petition went on, “and we feel the present OASI is an infringement on our responsibilities; as a church we feel grieved that this OASI has come upon us.”

The meeting didn’t have the sweeping results the Amish had hoped for. Caplin didn’t exempt the Amish, but they got something for all their trouble. The IRS commissioner issued a moratorium on seizing horses for payment.

That victory wasn’t nearly enough for Valentine Byler. He was ready to file a lawsuit, which was a huge leap for an Amish man, a major breach of Amish tradition. The Amish do not like going into court under any circumstances, much less to launch a highly contentious battle with the United States government. But a lawyer was hired, and legal papers were drawn up, as Byler felt like he had no choice.

As the court date grew near, the bishops pleaded with him not to go forward with the suit. This wasn’t the Amish way, the bishops argued—any more than paying Social Security taxes was. Valentine knew in his heart that the bishops had a point. At Valentine Byler’s request, in January 1963, U.S. District Court judge Rabe Marsh signed a stipulation dismissing the case.

The bishops assured Valentine Byler that they hadn’t abandoned him or the important cause he had championed, they just had another approach in mind. Instead of a lawsuit, they said, they would seek relief from Congress and the president, the same two
branches of government that had created Social Security in the first place.

It worked.

In 1965, the House of Representatives passed the Medicare bill, expanding the Social Security safety net to provide medical care to millions of older Americans. Buried in the bill’s 138 pages was a brief provision exempting the Amish and similar religious groups. That was the door they needed to crack open. A special rider was added and soon the exemption was expanded to cover regular Social Security, too.

The Senate approved the bill in July, and the law was signed by President Lyndon Johnson on August 13, 1965. That made it official, and the Social Security Administration canceled the tax bills of fifteen thousand Amish.

It was a great victory for Amish tradition. It would leave older Amish men and women completely dependent on their families and the church to care for them in later life, and it would add a whole new load of pressure on the bishops and other elders to make sure that really happened in the years to come.

Bishop David Fisher didn’t sound worried about that.

“We take care of our own people,” he said, “and if we start paying in, the next generation will collect, and we don’t want government handouts.”

There was happiness across Amish Country. The great power and majesty of the federal government had bowed to a small but passionate church.

Sadly, one person was not able to share fully in the Amish celebration. Valentine Byler never got to toast the victory that his objections had helped to spark. On May 3, three months before President
Johnson signed the Amish exemption to Social Security and Medicare, Valentine was on his farm in New Wilmington when he fell from a grain drill and broke his neck.

It was a terrible accident, and it left him nearly paralyzed. He could barely use any part of his body. He really couldn’t speak. His recuperation, if it ever came, was going to take months or years.

When August came and with it the news from Washington, Valentine was lying quietly in a hospital bed in the front room of his farmhouse, which was the cheeriest room in his house.

Told what had just happened, he seemed to understand, though no one could really say for sure. One witness reported the slightest flicker of a smile crossed Valentine’s lips, framed by his long red beard.