Miyoko Inouye Bassett '47 and her husband, David, seek passage of the U.S. Peace Tax Bill as an alternative to paying a military tax.
Miyoko Inouye Bassett '47 and her husband, David, aren't saying they don't want to pay their fair share of taxes, and they aren't saying they want to eliminate veterans' benefits. But as Quakers and conscientious objectors, they are saying they want the 25 percent of their taxes that currently goes to support military expenditures to go instead to a U.S. Peace Tax Fund for life-affirming organizations such as Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and Head Start.
Because no such fund currently exists, the Bassetts, who have not paid the military portion of their taxes since 1972, have worked out what could be called a passive-resistance payment plan.
"We set up an account in a bank with money that we know the IRS can take from," says Miyoko. "Each year when we file our taxes, we tell the IRS where this account is, but we also tell them that if they take the money, they are doing it against our will. The IRS goes in, withdraws the money and the bank lets us know when it's been taken. Some years the IRS has sent threatening letters; other years they garnished David's wages; and for other years they have yet to collect. The IRS also charges us penalty and interest for their lateness. As of now, they're two years behind in collecting."
The Bassetts' unusual arrangement with the government is grounded in their Quaker beliefs. They joined the Swarthmore Friends Meeting in 1960. It was in the mid-1960s, when they lived in Hawaii, that their frustration over military spending grew. "Every night I would see jet tankers flying over the hospital, where I worked-on their way to Southeast Asia," says David, now a retired pediatrics physician. As conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War the Bassetts served two years of alternative military service with the American Friends Service Committee in Orissa, India.
The idea for a peace fund to support their beliefs began to grow in concept as the Bassetts left Hawaii and moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., in the early 1970s. There they formed the World Peace Tax Fund Committee (later renamed the U.S. Peace Tax Fund Committee) with like-minded individuals, had initial legislation written up, and hired an executive director/lobbyist for a Washington, D.C., office.
David is the father of the U.S. Peace Tax Bill. "We have a desire to prevent war and suffering. We want to be consistent with our feelings and beliefs," he says. "Forcing a person to pay for the killing of another person-we think it's a qualitative issue."
The Peace Tax Bill was first introduced in the House of Representatives in 1972 by Rep. Ronald Dellums of California. The Bassetts now say there are approximately 40 people in the Con-gress who support it. A Senate version of the bill was co-sponsored this past March by Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.).
Letters to the chair of the Senate Finance Committee asking for a hearing on the bill were sent by Hatfield, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), Sen. Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kan.), Sen. Carl Levin '56 (D-Mich.), Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.) and Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.).
Along with the campaign for the bill, the committee has organized the Peace Tax Foundation to inform the public about the concept of alternative tax payment programs that are based upon moral, ethical, and religious opposition to participation in warfare.
"We need to educate the public about this issue," Miyoko says. "We need to encourage the people to contact their elected officials." This movement continues to grow here and in other countries. Miyoko says there are people in eight countries who are currently working to pass this type of legislation. "It's been a difficult uphill struggle," says Miyoko, who first came to Swarthmore during World War II as part of the Japanese-American Student Relocation Council program with the help of then-Swarthmore President John Nason. "We've been reading a lot about women's suffrage and slavery and how long it took those movements. We're not discouraged. Perhaps one day the right of conscientious objection to the payment of military taxes will be recognized."
-Audree Penner
Retirement, what? Gretchen Ellsworth and her Masters Rowing teammates won a gold medal in the Head of the Potomac Regatta om September.
How does a self-described "organizational groupie" with a professional life crammed with activity, retire? Deciding that she should choose a retirement activity "that's really hard to do," and seeking both intellectual and physical challenges, Ellsworth enrolled in a masters women's (aged 30 and over) rowing program. She was not a total stranger to the sport, since she had already been involved in the organizational side of the activity at Wilson High School, the Washington public school attended by her three sons. So when jogging began to take too high a toll on her feet, she looked at rowing as an alternative.
"From a health standpoint, it's very good for you," she says. "It can stress your knees, but your feet don't get the pounding. Power comes from the legs, though upper-body strength is important. It's really an all-over activity." In all but dangerous weather, Ellsworth is out before sunrise four mornings a week practicing on the Potomac. "It's a very beautiful river," she says. "When the sun comes up behind the Capitol and the Washington Monument-well, it just makes you want to stand up and salute."
At the beginning of her rowing career, Ellsworth joined an intermediate-level club, where she learned the basic skills of the sport. Then in 1994 a neighbor told her about RowAsOne, an innovative summer rowing camp for masters women, founded by 1984 Olympic gold medallist women's eight rower Holly Metcalf. She signed up to attend. For five days she and 42 other women soaked up technical, and training advice, rowed morning, noon, and afternoon, and heard about the latest lines in women's rowing attire (clothing hitherto geared solely to men). They also listened to the inspirational words of invited speakers, such as Ernestine "Ernie" Bayer, an "icon of women in the rowing world," who took up the sport in the late 1930s when women were not welcome and has been pressing for increasingly higher levels of recognition for women's rowing ever since. Now in her mid-80s, she is still racing.
RowAsOne was so successful that it has become a prototype for others, and last summer four camps were held throughout the United States, from Boston to Seattle, each attracting 40 to 50 women. "The interest in masters women's rowing is really exploding," Ellsworth says, quoting some of the wonderful names the groups have come up with, such as Martha's Moms or The Hot Flash Four. And as "a nice kind of different twist," the women's camps have sparked the interest of the men-the first masters men's rowing camp was offered in 1996.
Now Ellsworth is a member of the Washington, D.C., Potomac Boat Club competitive masters women's program. To compete, members must "seat race," to be selected for places in a boat. Rowers are grouped in a boat to row a certain distance against the clock; then one rower is replaced by another, and the procedure is repeated, to see which one accelerates or slows the pace. This, Ellsworth says, is a difficult time for a team, as team members, so used to working together in total coordination, compete against one another. "But racing is fun," Ellsworth says, "like having a party after the cooking class-different from just going out and rowing." Ellsworth has obviously found the recipe for success. At the Masters National Championships in Syracuse, N.Y., in early fall, she and her fellow crew members took silver and bronze medals. Then to top that, at the end of September, as a member of a masters women's eight crew, she won a gold medal in the Head of the Potomac Regatta. "And our group of rowers had the highest average age of the four boats in the event," she says proudly. "Our average age was 47, with four of us over 50 and one over 60!"
One of the things that appeals to Ellsworth about rowing is the camaraderie and deep sense of teamwork. She says, "I love the team boats. They make me work hard. If you're by yourself in a boat, and you get tired, you can stop. In a team boat, you keep going as long as everyone else does. And, when a boat is really rowing, it's very exhilarating because people have to be really meshed together, in total physical and mental synchronization. Unlike a soccer game where the players cooperate but you can still have a star forward, there are no stars in team rowing."
Ellsworth bemoans the fact that, a little like tennis, rowing still retains an aura of elitism and exclusivity. Coming out of a patrician tradition, it is still predominantly male, still predominantly white, and still quite expensive. Efforts are underway to expand its base, and school crew teams are becoming more mixed, but, as she says, "that kind of barrier-of people not going where they haven't been before"-is still very much in existence, on both sides.
When not bending to the oar herself, Ellsworth is busy directing the high school rowing program on the Potomac. She serves as chairwoman and board and committee member of multiple community organizations: a bilingual multicultural learning center, a group to sustain a small urban park, and a program of activities to try to keep young people out of the criminal justice system, headed by her friend Chuck Ruff '62, corporation counsel for D.C., along with the U.S. attorney. And she's taking an intensive Spanish course ... and loves to cook ... and garden.... What was that about "gently down the stream?"
"My parents said, `Go find a job,' because they wanted me to be responsible for myself financially. So when a brokerage house came to campus to interview seniors for a two-year analyst's job, I signed up," says Leichter, an Honors graduate in economics. "It seemed relatively interesting and demanding, and I liked that." She was offered the job with Kidder Peabody and moved to New York.
Four years later she relocated to Boston, taking a new job with Putnam Investments, where she is now a senior vice president and senior portfolio manager. Leichter oversees seven mutual funds and two institutional accounts and directs daily portfolio transactions that average $3.5 million. "It's a lot of money, but it's not like I started this with zero," she says.
Leichter's job can be likened to an ever-changing puzzle. It's her responsibility to choose 100 to 200 securities to compose a portfolio that will yield the highest return possible. When one puzzle piece no longer fits, in that it fails to meet return expectations, it is switched for a more promising one.
When Leichter started her finanical career, she says she knew nothing about stocks and bonds. She hadn't even taken the College's accounting course, but admits she should have.
"Lots of people doing this type of job came out of the business schools. Swarthmore doesn't teach that kind of thing, but in the Honors program we learned to focus on ideas in groups and defend our ideas," says Leichter. "That skill has been very helpful in my work today. Putnam is very team oriented."
Her funds' performance has become even more important to the company in recent years because of the rapid growth in the mutual fund market, which she attributes in large part to the aging of the baby boom generation. "Many of them have finished paying for their children's college educations, and they now have more money to invest. The market couldn't be stronger," says Leichter.
The challenges she finds in her work are balanced by those she finds as a wife, mother of two young children and competitive curler, a game where players slide curling stones across ice toward a target circle. She and her husband, Frederick Leichter '80, a computer systems manager at Fidelty Investments, joined the curling club that's near their home as a way to make new friends when they moved to Boston.
The pride Leichter says she takes in improving her skills on the ice are also ones she brings to her job. The performance of her accounts versus competing funds is what she is judged upon at Putnam. While her funds are successful, Leichter is quick to point out that decisions about them are not made in a vacuum.
"I work with groups of people who together examine trends and overall strategies," she says. "In some companies there are superstars. We don't promote one fund manager over another. Here it's a team approach."
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A mind for the market
Jennifer Evans Leichter '83 manages one of the nation's largest bond fund portfolios.
Jennifer Evans Leichter '83 strategizes with co-workers to choose the right bond funds. "It's a team approach."
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