Robert Ferdinand Wagner

Robert Ferdinand Wagner , 1877-1953, American legislator, b. Germany. He arrived with his family in the United States in 1885 and grew up in poor surroundings in New York City. After he received his law degree, he became attached to Tammany Hall and was elected (1904) to the New York state assembly. In the state senate (1910-18), Wagner was noted for his investigations of factory conditions; as justice (1919-26) of the state supreme court, he did much to protect the rights of labor. He served (1927-49) in the U.S. Senate, where he was one of the chief leaders in directing New Deal legislation, particularly the acts establishing the National Recovery Administration (1933), the National Labor Relations Board (1935), social security, and the U.S. Housing Authority (1937). In the 1940s he sponsored bills calling for the extension of federal housing. He resigned from the Senate in 1949 because of ill health. His son, Robert Ferdinand Wagner, Jr., 1910—91, b. New York City, entered politics with his father's encouragement. He was a member of the New York state assembly (1938-41), and after service in the air force in World War II, he became successively New York City tax commissioner (1946), commissioner of housing and buildings (1947), chairman of the City Planning Commission (1948), and president of the borough of Manhattan (1949). Elected mayor of New York in 1953, he was overwhelmingly reelected in 1957. Wagner broke (1961) with the Tammany organization after long association and, after defeating the organization candidate in the primary election, won a third term as mayor. In 1965 he chose not to run for reelection. He was appointed (1968) U.S. Ambassador to Spain, but he resigned in Feb., 1969, and ran unsuccessfully in the New York Democratic mayoral primary in June of that year.

Wagner, Robert F. (1877–1953), U.S. senator.Born in Germany, Wagner immigrated with his family to New York City at the age of nine. After graduating from the City College of New York (1898) and New York Law School (1900), Wagner practiced law and entered ward‐level politics, where he attracted the attention of the Tammany Hall leadership of the Democratic party. Elected to the state assembly in 1904 and the state senate in 1908, he became that body's youngest president pro tempore in 1911. There he teamed with his assembly counterpart Alfred E. Smith to enact an impressive body of labor and welfare legislation, including fifty‐six factory safety laws passed after the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in 1911. Widowed with a young son (the future New York mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr.), in 1919, he was appointed to the state supreme court, where he championed consumers, labor unions, and government economic legislation.

Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1926, Wagner compiled an unparalleled body of social legislation before his resignation owing to ill health in 1949. Known as the “Legislative Pilot of the New Deal,” he was instrumental in the enactment of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, the Social Security Act, and the Wagner‐Steagall Housing Act. Wagner also crusaded for national health insurance, veterans' benefits, and a federal antilynching law. At his death, the New York Times lauded Wagner's “deep‐seated humanitarianism” and “sympathy for those handicapped in the race for life.” Pick any law designed to help common people, the Times proclaimed, “and the chances are that Bob Wagner's name is attached to it.”
See also Federal Government, Legislative Branch: Senate; Housing; Lynching; National Recovery Administration; New Deal Era, The; Progressive Era; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano.

Bibliography

Joseph Huthmacher , Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism, 1968.

John D. Buenker