NY Presidents pop quiz #6
In honor of Presidents Day, AOA has decided to slack off today. A little bit. But only because we're honoring the presidents. And with that in mind, we've put together a little presidential pop quiz -- we'll be posting one question for each of the six presidents from New York today.
Question: What New York president took the name for his economic plan from a Mark Twain story, created a tax bracket that affected only one man and was warned by a presidential predecessor not to take the job?
Answer: Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Our 32nd president was a big fan of the work of Mark Twain. The name "The New Deal" was taken from a passage in Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court."
The 1935 wealth tax instituted by FDR raised the top tax rate to 79% for incomes above $5 million a year. There was only one person was in that tax bracket at the time: John D. Rockefeller.
Though FDR was related -- either through blood or marriage -- to 11 former U.S. presidents, it was a predecessor from outside the family who warned FDR to not take the job. When Roosevelt was a boy he and his family paid a visit to then-president Grover Cleveland, who is said to have put his hand on young Franklin's head and wished for him that FDR would never become President of the United States.
Franklin was elected to the office four times. So much for that.
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... said James at 45 about Rediscovering a Capital Region childhood