Raising the taxes of the wealthiest Americans to meet a crisis — soaking them, if you will — is a grand, old, bipartisan tradition, almost as old as the income tax itself.In fact, the federal income tax was only 4 years old in 1917 when Woodrow Wilson raised the tax rate on the rich from 15 to 67 percent to help pay for the war.The first president to increase taxes on the rich to deal with a depressed economy and high unemployment wasn’t, as one might suppose, Franklin Roosevelt. It was his predecessor, the conservative Republican Herbert Hoover.But unlike Barack Obama, Herbert Hoover didn’t simply increase taxes on the rich by a few percentage points. He raised the Harding and Coolidge era top rates from 25 to 63 percent. It remains the second largest tax hike for the wealthy in our history, only surpassed by Wilson’s. Hoover also doubled the estate tax, known in Republican circles as the death tax, and increased corporate taxes by 15 percent.There wasn’t a word from his fellow Republicans about class warfare or soaking the rich or socialism, but his opponent, Roosevelt, did accuse Hoover of reckless and extravagant spending, and John Garner, the reactionary Texan running for vice president, said he feared the country was heading down the path to socialism.But the Depression worsened and near the end of Roosevelt’s first term, Americans were losing hope. As he would say in his second inaugural address, one-third of the nation was ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished, one out of five was unemployed and there were growing doubts that the economy could be fixed.In addition, Roosevelt was threatened by a group far more dangerous than the Tea Party movement, Huey Long’s 27,000 Share Our Wealth clubs, which were attracting millions with the promise to make every man a king with a guaranteed annual income of $2,500, free education through college, a $5,000 homestead grant with a car, radio and washing machine, and old age pensions of $200 a month. Roosevelt’s response to Long’s demagoguery was the Revenue Act of 1935, which raised the Hoover rate on the wealthiest to 79 percent and financed many New Deal reforms, including Social Security and its old age pensions. And, incidentally, saved capitalism. I bring up these numbers to point out Obama’s alleged assault on the rich is miniscule compared with Roosevelt’s or Hoover’s or most others’. It would make you wonder what the fuss is about if you didn’t already know it was about 2012.The president is calling for a modest increase from 35 to 39.6 percent in the rate paid by those earning more than $250,000. This would restore the rate to where it was during the Clinton presidency and, as the former president has noted, the nation — and especially the rich — prospered during his two terms. To achieve that goal, Obama would do no more than end the Bush administration’s “temporary” tax cuts that he was forced to extend last year. Since World War I, the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers have usually been taxed at a much higher rate than they are today. It reached a high of 94 percent during World War II, a time when we paid for our wars and expected all of the people, rich and poor alike as we liked to say, to make sacrifices.Roosevelt’s taxes also financed the greatest and most successful entitlement program in American history, the GI Bill of Rights, which created and educated a prosperous middle class that endures to this day. The high rate for the rich was reduced for a time after the war, but the Korean War brought it back up to the 90 percent range, where it remained until it was lowered to 77 percent by, of all people, the Democrat John Kennedy.It got all the way down to 70 percent in the Johnson and Nixon years and was reduced — to 50 percent — by Ronald Reagan. Imagine. Reagan had his richest supporters paying half of their income to the federal government until he got the rate reduced to 28 percent in his last year in office. Finally, it should be noted that of all the presidents since Harding and Coolidge, only Reagan in that one year, the two Bushes, Clinton and Obama maintained tax rates of under 40 percent for the wealthiest. The rest — Republicans and Democrats — soaked the rich and, in good times and bad, the rich did quite nicely. Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.
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Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton\u2019s Main Street in 1985.
Provided
For Hermans, the award has prompted some reflection about why he has spent so much of his life involved in community projects.
“I was thinking about it this morning: Why do I do what I do?” he said. “And I think no matter what I’ve done, whether it’s been school board or rail trail, I’m trying to be useful to the communities I’m associated with.”
Hermans is perhaps best known as the longtime co-founder and steward of Oblong Books in Millerton, a business that began almost by accident. He and his first wife, Holly Nelson, were living in Millerton and looking for something to do during the winter. They had been painting houses, including the Grange Hall in Millerton, a job Hermans got through his aunt, who belonged to the Grange.
At the time, Hermans was also working in insurance for his father, doing collections.
“It was fine except I was doing collections, and it really kind of left me cold,” he said.
He and Nelson began thinking about what they might do together. Nelson was an avid reader, while Hermans had studied journalism and had worked in a record store. They noticed a chain of book and record stores operating elsewhere in the Hudson Valley and decided to follow that model.
And so Oblong was born.
Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton’s Main Street in 1985.Provided
“We really learned it by the seat of our pants,” Hermans said.
The business would eventually become a beloved and integral part of Millerton’s commercial life. But although Hermans may have learned the book business as he went, his affinity for retail — and for the connections that happen across a counter — had begun much earlier.
As a child, his second-grade teacher operated a little cardboard pencil shop in the classroom, and Hermans still remembers the satisfaction of selling a pencil for a nickel.
“I really liked selling somebody a pencil for a nickel,” he recalled. “I can remember that experience, and it was so pleasant.”
Later, while living in Arizona, he helped establish a food co-op and worked at the counter.
“I kind of knew that I liked doing that kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a nice way to be pleasant with people, but without making too much commitment to them.”
His relationship with Millerton also predates Oblong. His grandparents lived in the village, and he first came to Millerton as a baby. Over the years, he has watched the town change through several generations.
He remembers a Millerton with a much broader array of businesses, when stores such as Delson’s, the Main Street department store that stood for nearly 40 years in what is now Millerton’s Antiques Center, seemed to carry almost everything a resident might need.
“You could find everything from a set of dishes to a shotgun,” he recalled.
The rise of shopping malls changed that kind of downtown retail, he said, but Millerton has remained a lively commercial village.
“For us, it’s been a great place to have business,” Hermans said. “It’s a busy village.”
For Hermans, running a store was never simply about selling books and records. It was a way of being part of a place.
Music has remained another constant. Hermans continues to sell music at Oblong and hosts the radio program “New Harmony” on WKZE. The business of selling music has changed dramatically over the years, particularly with the rise of streaming, but Hermans has adapted.
He was initially reluctant to bring vinyl records back into the store because of their expense. But about four or five years ago, he began stocking LPs again, and they have become the main form of music the store sells.
He finds that many of the customers buying them are reconnecting with music they loved years ago.
“I do best with classic albums that people may have had when they were young,” he said. “And now that they’re retired, they want to hear it again.”
Hermans still reviews between 700 and 1,200 new music releases each week through the store’s distributor, Alliance Entertainment, carefully deciding what belongs on Oblong’s shelves.
That same commitment to place has led Hermans into a wide range of community projects. His work with the Harlem Valley Rail Trail is among the efforts he mentions when reflecting on his years of civic involvement. He has also served on the school board and has been involved with the Millerton Business Alliance and the Irondale Schoolhouse. He is now involved with The New Pine Plains Herald, which he sees as complementary to the work of The Millerton News and The Lakeville Journal.
“I really think that the important thing about this award is that people understand what a newspaper does to connect them to their community,” he said. “And if that means anything to their lives, they gotta support it.”
Hermans knew Mary Lou and Robert Estabrook and remembers them as people who were deeply conscious of their responsibilities to the community.
“They were really nice folks,” he said. “They were very conscious of what their role in the community was.”
There is, in fact, still plenty on his plate. Hermans admits he needs to scale back because he has taken on more than his current abilities can comfortably accommodate.
“To be given this award is very special,” he added. “But I don’t feel like I’m done.”
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Adamah Farm crew members planning out the day’s tasks on a late September day.
Janna Siller
Over my 15 years of growing vegetables in Falls Village, I’ve exerted my will over all kinds of conditions, from drought to humidity to crows with a taste for cantaloupe. That’s what farming is all about. You zip around the field, hopping on and off tractors, moving hoses and chasing weeds, all in an effort to arrange conditions in favor of your crops. It is the crops’ job to gulp up sunlight and move water through their stems, to transform solar energy into your next pesto or ratatouille or butternut squash soup. It is the job of the farmer to irrigate just enough but not too much, to slice dandelion leaves without damaging delicate cabbage roots, to pander and pamper and stay in tune with what plants need to thrive.
The easy part of farming is trusting plants’ resilience. I have seen bright green shoots barrel ahead out of a plant torn to shreds by hail. I’ve watched wilty, heat-stressed seedlings turn rigid overnight and greet the next morning with vigor. The hard part is letting go of what you can’t control. As our crops lapped up Friday’s gentle sunshine and I considered the weekend forecast, I imagined roots holding tight to wet earth and branches supporting each other in sideways, pelting rain. I made sure all of our storage crops were already harvested and tucked away. I battened down the sides of our greenhouses and wished the remaining field crops good luck.
The nor’easter didn’t materialize too dramatically in our corner of New England. A few broken branches and debris blown about, nothing like the July Fourth storm that sent half a tree crashing onto the deer fence and left crates of fresh veggies in coolers without power.
Fall storage crop harvests amid soil building cover crops at Adamah Farm in Falls Village. Janna Siller
Farming is an exercise in acceptance. To do it well and return year after year, you have to balance hubris and humility. The prize can often be a certain equanimity, a training in the art of moving into the next day even when the last one scrambled all your plans.
Epic change is not always about the unexpected. It also comes like clockwork on the seasonal calendar. As I type, the last of summer’s watermelons wait naively on the vine for a few hot days to finish ripening. Broccoli are holding their leaves wide as they did in June and July, only to find that the hours of sunlight decrease with each earlier sunset. Plants can’t pick up and go south or call the manager to order a bonus round of sunshine. Their growth slows and they get a resigned look to the hue of their leaves, so different from the frenzied growth of summer.
The release of fall is not tragic or gloomy. It is not an ending because so many fall tasks are about setting up for the new beginnings in spring.
We turn the vines that yielded thousands of pounds of fruit into the soil, where healthy microbes feast on their rotting stems. Then we plant cover crops — a mix of cereal grains like rye and oats and legumes like peas, vetch and clover. Cover crops hold the soil and its nutrients in place over winter, feeding the soil food web and adding organic matter that next season’s crops will need to grow.
We sort sprinklers and repair hoses. We inventory tarps. We take notes about which plants did well where and how we might try a new approach for this or that. We stack crates of cured garlic and onions and winter squash in a cool, dark room.
We save seeds from tomatoes and beans and lettuce, carefully labeling each variety for next season’s long, sunny days.
Janna Siller is the farm director at Adamah, a community farm in Falls Village offering CSA shares, educational programs and a food access program.
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