Indeed, to the extent there was popular revulsion, it was directed not against the income tax but against the Supreme Court's decision striking it down:
"The Sixteenth Amendment was a direct response to the Supreme Court's decision in
Pollock v. Farmers Loan & Trust.147
Pollock struck down a federal income tax on the ground that it was a "direct" tax, which under Article I, Section 2 must be apportioned among the states. 148 But Pollock was a surprising decision that did not reflect the way the law was understood at the time and did not much change the direction in which the law subsequently evolved. 149 Before
Pollock, the Supreme Court had repeatedly rejected claims that the category of "direct taxes" - a particularly ill-defined notion 150 - included inheritance taxes, taxes on notes issued by state banks, or taxes on insurance premiums. 151 In 1881, just fourteen years before
Pollock, the Supreme Court upheld an income tax that was imposed during the Civil War but not repealed until 1872.152
"As a result, when the movement for a federal income tax gathered speed in the late nineteenth century, the constitutionality of the tax was not seen as an important question. 153
Pollock was widely and immediately condemned; one commentator, writing at the time, compared the hostility to
Pollock to the reaction to the
Dred Scott decision. 154 President and Chief Justice-to-be William Howard Taft said: "Nothing has ever injured the prestige of the Supreme Court more..."155 After
Pollock was decided, there was considerable sentiment in Congress for simply enacting an income tax statute - not so much as an act of defiance but because many were convinced that the Court would not adhere to
Pollock.156 The Court did little to dispel this conviction. A few years after
Pollock, the Court upheld an inheritance tax, reasoning that it was an excise tax and therefore indirect. 157 In accepting the Republican nomination for President in 1908, Taft endorsed an income tax and suggested that a constitutional amendment would be unnecessary, both because the Court's decisions might be interpreted to allow some kind of income tax and because the Court's membership had changed.158
"After Taft became President he changed his view about the need for an amendment, and in i909 - as part of a package of complex political maneuvers by both supporters and opponents of the income tax - Congress (with the Senate voting unanimously) proposed the Sixteenth Amendment to the states.' 159 At nearly the same time, Congress enacted a tax on corporations that was measured by their income; while the proposed amendment was before the state legislatures, the Court upheld the corporate income tax, again narrowing
Pollock by reasoning that the tax was not an income tax but an excise tax on the privilege of doing business in corporate form. 160 After the Sixteenth Amendment was adopted, the Court, in upholding the new income tax, characterized the amendment as restoring power that Congress had assumed to exist before Pollock was decided. 161
"In this instance, too, the primary mechanism of change was not the amendment process but the long-term development of popular opinion. The Supreme Court essentially accepted the income tax both before and after the Sixteenth Amendment.
Pollock was a momentary aberration, as the Court itself all but admitted. It is true that the amendment dispatched
Pollock cleanly and decisively; without an amendment,
Pollock would have continued to cast a cloud over the income tax. But
Pollock had all the earmarks of a precedent that was destined to be overruled: it was inconsistent with earlier cases, subsequent cases immediately construed it narrowly, and it faced strong popular opposition. The Sixteenth Amendment put an end to the sideshow that
Pollock began, but a sideshow was all it was."
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2986&context=journal_articles