DURHAM, N.C.

IN the next two weeks, Americans rushing to file their returns by April 15 are unlikely to pause to celebrate the centennial this year of the 16th Amendment, which authorized the federal income tax. But we should.

The defining feature of the federal income tax is that it requires most Americans to do something — preparing and filing a return — beyond merely parting with some money. If, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, “taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” the filing of Form 1040 draws our attention to our duties as citizens in a way that no other levy, including a national sales tax, could.

Long before TurboTax and H&R Block, the tax return was a cultural touchstone, and not always a bad one. I’ve examined more than 200 New Yorker cartoons about the income tax. My favorite is one by James Thurber, from 1937, in which a husband struggles to complete his return while his wife tells a visitor, “He says he’s just about got the government where he wants it.” But the richest commentary comes from World War II and after, when the income tax truly became a mass tax, enforced through wage withholding, just as TV and radio sitcoms bloomed.

In a 1943 radio episode of “The Great Gildersleeve,” the protagonist opts not to declare $2.16 of interest income on his tax return. He changes his mind, however, after hearing his nephew’s school essay on “The Privileges of Being a Taxpayer.”