WAGNER, ROBERT F. 1877-1953

U.S. SENATOR (1926-1949)

A Voice for the Common Man

Robert Wagner, Democratic senator from New York, was one of the major architects of the modern American welfare state. A voice in the Senate for working people, the poor, and minorities, Wagner was a political activist who picked his political fights with care and often won. Wagner often relied on social scientists to conceive the initiatives he sponsored.

Background

Born in Germany, Wagner immigrated to New York City with his family at the age of eight. He attended City College of New York, earned a law degree, and then worked his way up the political ladder by forging an urban-progressive coalition. As a New York State assemblyman (1904-1909) and a New York State senator (1910-1918) he became a vocal advocate of laws to protect working people. Elected a justice on the New York State Supreme Court in 1918, he continued to champion the rights of labor.

A New Deal Senator

Wagner's concern for the wellbeing of working people continued after he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1926. In 1931 he sponsored a $2 billion public-works program, which President Herbert Hoover signed into law as the Emergency Relief and Reconstruction Act of 1932. After Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, Wagner became the Senate's leading advocate of New Deal legislation. In 1933 he sponsored the Federal Emergency Relief Act, worked vigorously for the inclusion of public-works provisions in the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), and was the primary advocate of its provisions supporting the rights of labor to organize and bargain collectively. That same year he became the first head of the National Labor Board. When the NIRA was declared unconstitutional in 1935, it was Wagner who sponsored the bill that salvaged its labor provisions as the National Labor Relations Act (often called the Wagner Act in his honor). In that same year Wagner introduced the Social Security Act on the Senate floor. At a time when African Americans were often the victims of brutal racist hate crimes, Wagner sponsored an unsuccessful effort to make lynching a federal crime. Always an advocate for the poor, he sponsored public-housing projects with the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act of 1937. In the late 1930s and early 1940s he was an advocate of health-care grants, national unemployment benefits, and government-sponsored health insurance. Resigning from the Senate in 1949 because of ill health, Robert Wagner died in 1953. His son, Robert F. Wagner Jr., was also involved in politics, most notably as mayor of New York City from 1954 until 1965.