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| Sculptor Dawn Yates designed this statue of Charlie Farnsley to invite people to sit down for a talk, just as the erudite, informal Mayor would have. The book the mayor has brought could be a topic. So could social justice, arts, history, technology and much more. |
But the Louisvillian who affects the most Americans the most often just may be a person with the obscure and deceptively ordinary name of Charlie Farnsley.
How relevant to the life of today’s online socially aware person is this lesser heralded Kentucky political figure of the 1930s and ‘40s?
Well, black lives mattered to Farnsley in the late 1940s, when as Louisville's mayor, he set up an institute to train southern police officers in methods of racial equality and non-brutality.
And the Internet? No mayor did more to bring the cutting edge communications technologies of that era to classrooms and homes.
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| Mayor Charlie Farnsley honors University of Louisville basketball standout Glenn "Ish" Combs in 1950. Combs had helped lead the Cardinals to a national tournament championship two years before. |
On the down side, there was no elected official who did more -- unintentionally; it’s complicated -- to set up today’s regressive taxation, meaning taxing the middle and lower incomes, instead of the rich.
Late in his life, no one encountering Charlie Farnsley on his morning walks in downtown Louisville would figure him for a progressive innovator. But in fact that fellow passing by on sidewalks in the 1970s clad in classic Kentucky Colonel white vest, black string tie and planter's hat was one of the upper south’s Civil Rights trailblazers and one of the nation’s noted intellectuals of the mid-1900s.
More about Farnsley than his walks was in the manner of Harry Truman.
A Louisville mayor, congressman and state legislator during various tenures in the 1930s through the ‘60s, Charlie Farnsley -- in keeping with the informal first name -- was plainspoken and admirably candid.
As mayor from 1948 to ‘53, Farnsley governed in a no-nonsense way, willing to rub complacent politicos the wrong way to get the job done.
The setting up of a Mayor’s Gripe Line phone number to allow Louisville residents to bypass city departments was one of several populist moves that garnered him national news attention.
Belied by his conventional fashion choices, Farnsley was erudite, well read and polished, having studied at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, as well as the universities of Louisville and Kentucky.
More in keeping with his full name of Charles Rowland Peaslee Farnsley, he was a nationally regarded historian, a lawyer, and an enthusiast in Asian literature who once spoke on the CBS radio show “Invitation to Learning” on a panel which included Eugene O’Neill.
As mayor, Farnsley ended racial segregation in Louisville’s libraries, parks, and the municipally funded University of Louisville, opening U of L to black students, many of whom had attended the historically black Louisville Municipal College.
In one of the most farsighted anti-racist moves by any white mayor, Farnsley, tapping Carnegie and Rockefeller foundation money, establish the Southern Police Institute, an academy where officers from many states would be trained in the importance and the methods of racial equality.
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Mayor Farnsley, left, unveils the University of Louisville's edition of Auguste Rodin's "The Thinker" in 1949. Representing coming generations, Nancy Speckman, a member of the family who donated the statue, stands behind the pedestal. (U of L Archives and Records center photo) |
Employing a governing style that combined the sophistication of a Charles with the get-it-done grittiness of a Charlie, Mayor Farnsley established a radio-public address system link to allow Louisville public school students to hear many cities' symphony orchestra concerts in their classrooms.
That technical setup morphed into one of Louisville’s current day public radio stations.
When WAVE-TV became Louisville’s first television station in November 1948, the mayor placed TV sets in city libraries for free public viewing of this must-see technology, which in those formative days included live operas in the studios of WAVE, notwithstanding it being a commercial station.
In yet another move that pays benefits to this day, Farnsley started a tree-planting program that still helps comfort the inner city from Ohio River Valley summer humidity.
Even more beneficial was the mayor’s creating of the Fund for the Arts, the spark of Louisville’s modern day status as a U.S. arts and culture mecca.
Life magazine’s Margaret Bourke-White did a photo spread on the eccentric populist mayor, and William Manchester did a piece in Harper’s magazine focusing on Farnsley’s successes at building up Louisville’s superb cultural life.
Also illustrating that Charles/Charlie mix, the mayor was every bit as at home honoring two University of Louisville basketball players who brought the college a national hoops tournament title in ‘48 as he was writing in Journal of Art in Society of his call to use academia and culture to create “Cities of Light.”
Charlie Farnsley left Louisville politics in 1953, but resurfaced 11 years later, being elected to Congress for a single term known as the Great Society years, 1964 to ‘66.
Farnsley eagerly voted for Lyndon Johnson’s Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, Job Corps, aid to education, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Family members said he intended to serve only one term, so he could vote for those liberal initiatives without re-election pressures. That plan proved wise in November 1966, as the district -- without Farnsley on the ballot -- went Republican as part of a 35-seat net Democratic loss in the House due to a push back against Civil Rights by many white voters.
If Charlie Farnsley’s mayoral and congressional terms helped spur progress toward racial equality and promoted the arts and health care, his greater legacy may lie in the less passionate but socially relevant issue of regressive taxation.
In the spring of 1948, Farnsley took the helm of a nearly broke city when he was chosen by the Board of Aldermen (the city council equivalent) to fill the term of Mayor E. Leland Taylor, who died.
To keep the city afloat during a time when the streets badly needed improving and child recreation needed expanding, the city could raise property taxes, or put small increases into a broad array of lesser taxes and fees.
But there was one other course of action -- one which Farnsley’s late son Burrel Farnsley (himself a candidate for nominations for mayor and Congress in the 1990s and 2000s) said was one of his father’s greatest legacies -- and it was a whole new concept.
Mayor Farnsley proposed expanding what had been a business license tax into an Occupational Tax on all employees whose workplaces were in the city. The tax would be paid based on whether a person worked, rather than lived inside the city limits.
Burrel Farnsley, who died in 2017 and age 71, said in the 1990s that his father invented the Occupational Tax. Although that precise point has not been verified by any other source, there is no question that Charles Farnsley being the nation's most innovative and publicized mayor, the Occupational Tax -- today a mainstay for U.S. cities -- rode to prominence on his fame.
In 1948, the mayor took to the airwaves on WHAS, the city’s largest radio station, to methodically explain Louisville’s fiscal situation and why this new revenue concept would help. He soon persuaded the Board of Aldermen to approve the Occupational Tax.
Taxing large numbers of people who lived outside the city, including the thousands of Southern Indiana residents who crossed the river to commute to their jobs, was revolutionary -- and politically risky because the newly chosen Mayor Farnsley would have to be formally elected by the voters in a special election in November 1948. The following year the next regular mayoral election would come around, so Charlie Farnsley would have to be elected twice while this new tax was still uppermost in voters’ minds.
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LINK: Farnsley's Crucial Moment - an Unelected Mayor Sells His Tax Plan (audio from WHAS radio)
The new mayor saw that suburbanization was about to -- in a horse city’s terms -- blast out of the starting gate, and urban planners and sociologists were already defining “suburban exploitation” by workers and shoppers from outside large cities’ limits. Their cars were wearing down pavement and potentially requiring fire and police protection from cities to which they didn’t pay property taxes.
So taxing them was considered eminently fair -- and today the occupational tax accounts for about 65 percent of the revenue the city collects in taxes. The remainder comes from Property Taxes, and relatively small amounts from taxes on deeds, bank shares and distilled spirits.
When all receipts in Louisville’s 2019-2020 city budget are added in, about half of the $825.9 million in revenue comes from the occupational tax.
The Kentucky League of Cities said 58 percent of the tax revenue in the Bluegrass State’s cities in 2017 came from occupational taxes, and that 83 percent of that OT revenue came from workers, rather than the business licenses of the self-employed.
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Speaking about Louisville’s occupational tax before the policy study group National Tax Association in 1953, Farnsley said:
“I can testify that such a tax, if passed with the proper press support and proper education and understanding of the people -- and followed immediately with a program of resurfacing streets and doing other things that people can see and understand -- is very successful.
“I did that and got elected a few months after the tax was put in and then was reelected a year later. The first year the tax was not an issue. The second year my opponent used it as an issue, but it apparently didn’t do him any good because I won by the same majority as the year before.”
But in a world so different from the late ‘40s and early ‘50s -- where the richest don’t pay anything close to their fair share in taxes and no longer invest wages and benefits to get good long term workers -- the reality of the occupational tax has been turned around.
Whereas spreading the collecting of taxes horizontally to include non-resident workers was Farnsley's focus, today, communities desperately need to spread taxes vertically to make the rich pay their fare share.
All those “incentive packages” of the last 40 years giving tax breaks and deferments to lure corporations to big and small cities have meant that taxing the workers via the Occupational Tax, which was intended to stop a free ride by suburban exploiters, has also allowed a free ride by corporations and the rich. Many studies have shown that this effect makes tax breaks for corporations a net job loser for cities and towns.
Yet very few politicians explain to the public that the rich not paying taxes is why you pay more, choosing instead to pander to the popular resentment of the poor for being "takers."
In 1948, mayors saw the Occupational Tax in the aforementioned horizontal terms, not seeing the future failure to tax upwardly.
Starting in the ‘80s, states and localities facing cutbacks in federal aid prompted by the Reagan Administration's corporate tax cuts, while also struggling with revenue shortages caused by their own incentive packages, started raising or creating occupational taxes, sales taxes and local income taxes.
Rock-ribbed Republican Indiana, for example, allowed counties to adopt income taxes, and it raised the already regressive state sales tax -- both under a GOP governor.
Regarding that “suburban exploitation” that made the occupational tax so needed, one of Charlie Farnsley’s earlier political initiatives greatly contributed to that problem.
In the late 1930s, Louisville wanted to annex a one-half square mile area with eight whiskey distilleries which opened after Prohibition was lifted.
State legislator Charlie Farnsley supported a bill making it harder for the state’s largest class of cities (Louisville being alone in that class) to annex territory -- a bill tailored for these distilleries’ owners.
The bill became law and soon suburban sections of Jefferson County began taking advantage of the streamlined requirements to incorporate. The postwar housing boom accelerated the trend and by 1948, Mayor Farnsley’s city was hemmed in due to his own prior efforts as State Representative Farnsley.
By the early 1960s, the county had 60 separate cities, many of which were formed out of single subdivisions of fewer than a thousand residents. Charles Farnsley's twin accomplishments of the incorporation law in the '30s and the Occupational Tax a decade later meant that taxing non-resident workers was now much easier than annexing their homes into Louisville’s city limits.
And just as in Louisville, taxing people based on where they work, rather than live has filled municipal financial coffers nationwide. That’s why in the last 60 years Chicago’s population falling from 3.5 million to 2.5 million, Philadelphia’s from 2 million to 1.5 million, and Saint Louis’ from 750,000 to 319,000 does not seriously worry city halls.
So whereas he was one of the great influencers in racial justice, the arts and learning, the greatest legacy of Charles Farnsley may be -- in a tribute to the power of unintended consequences -- that a person is worth more to their hometown as a paycheck stub than a resident.
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Brian Arbenz, who started paying Mayor Charlie Farnsley's Occupational Tax in 1978, appreciates daily all the aesthetic triumphs the mayor has brought his city.
"Very interesting! Thanks for sharing this.
ReplyDeleteYou cover a whole lot of ground, none of which I’d heard before. I’m afraid we didn’t learn much about local history in school.
It’s very interesting that he created occupational taxes - and unfortunate that they have been taken advantage of for corporate welfare. Also sad that cities have been left to bribe corporations to their locations, desperate for the resulting jobs, which leaves them disadvantaged in the negotiations.”
So much research went into that piece. Powerfully written! I heard about Farnsley but never knew his real impact. I recall hearing his son talk about him on the TARC bus to whomever would listen. Thank you so much for sharing this beautifully written piece.
ReplyDeleteThanks to both of you, Ellen and Henry. Most kind words!
ReplyDeleteMy mother told me about Louisville's most unconventional and visionary mayor back in the late 1970s. My father had attended Charlie Farnsley's press conferences while working as a news writer for WAVE-TV and radio just after graduating college. My parents described Farnsley as having candor and brilliance beyond those of any other elected official.
I was fortunate enough one morning in 1978, when I was 20, to be placing the plants outside of the restaurant where I worked just as a colonel-clad man walked by who could be only Charlie Farnsley. It was like watching a spirit take human form.
"Hi, Mayor Farnsley!" I said in one of my few moments of exuberance while enduring that job. He smiled back and said. "Hello."
That was magic!
Great job, Brian. You should submit an abridged version to The Courier-Journal.
ReplyDelete