(b. Germany, 8 June 1877; d. 4 May 1953) US; US Senator Wagner emigrated with his family to New York in 1885. He was educated in New York and qualified as a lawyer. He made his reputation in fighting many high-profile labour cases. He was elected as a Democrat in the state Senate and became the party's floor leader. At the time he had to work with the notorious Tammany Hall political machine. As a pro-labour politician, he sponsored bills covering wages and working hours for women and children and workmen's compensation. He became a judge in 1918. In 1926 he was elected to the Senate for New York and he was re-elected three times until his retirement from ill-health in 1949. In the Senate he continued with his interest in labour and employment issues and was a strong supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. He introduced the National Recovery Act (NRA), to provide for minimum wage and maximum hours and tackle unemployment by public works construction programmes. His Wagner Act (1935), passed after the Supreme Court struck down the NRA, protected workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively through their own representatives and forbade employers from discriminating against unions. He also helped to establish the National Labor Relations Board, to rule on disputes arising from the act and to settle inter-union disputes. Some of these gains for labour were later reversed by the *Taft-Hartley Act passed in 1947 by a Republican Congress. In his first term in the Senate, he sponsored a bill for a census of the unemployed, a scheme of public works, and the creation of an employment agency to assist in the transfer of labour from areas of high to low unemployment.

A lawyer and public official, Robert F. Wagner (1910-1991) was one of New York City's last Tammany Hall mayors, 1954-1965.

A New York City mayor for 12 years, Robert F. Wagner was intimately involved in politics from childhood. His mother died when Robert was nine. His father, a senator, was a powerful figure in the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party and a sponsor of several significant reform acts, including the Wagner Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board. Wagner reaped the benefit of his father's famous name as well as his enormous popularity when he ran for public office.

Early Start in Politics

Young Robert attended a public school in New York and the Taft School in Watertown, CT, and received his law degree from Yale Law School in 1937. In that same year he was elected to the New York State Assembly and remained there until 1941, when he entered the U.S. Air Force. He served for the rest of World War II and was discharged in 1945 as a lieutenant colonel decorated with six battle stars. In 1942 Wagner married Susan Edwards of Greenwich, CT.

After the war, Wagner, with the backing of the Democratic Party and Tammany Hall, the infamous New York City political machine which had controlled city affairs for more than a century, rose rapidly up the political ladder. He won appointments as city tax commissioner and as commissioner of housing and buildings, and then as chairman of the city planning commission. Elected Manhattan borough president in 1949, Wagner made a bid for the 1952 Democratic senatorial nomination but lost. The following year Wagner challenged the Democratic incumbent mayor, Vincent Impellitteri, in the primary and beat him by nearly a two to one margin. With the backing of controversial Tammany Hall boss Carmine De Sapio, he went on to win the mayoralty in 1953, a post he would hold for 12 years. He again ran for the U.S. Senate in 1956 but lost. Wagner and his wife had two sons, Robert F. Wagner, III, who also had a long career in New York City politics, and Duncan Wagner. After his first wife's death in 1964, Wagner married Barbara Joan Cavanagh the following year, and after their divorce in 1971, he married Phyllis Fraser Cerf in 1975.

Mayor of New York City

As mayor, Wagner pushed through the city council measures barring discrimination in the rental and sale of housing, thoroughly revised New York City's zoning ordinances, pushed slum clearance and public housing projects forward, enlarged the police force, and streamlined the budget-making process. During his first two administrations Mayor Wagner encouraged the formation of municipal unions with what was called the "little Wagner Act," giving the city's employees, except the police, the right to form unions and to engage in collective bargaining. He became so powerful nationally that his support of John F. Kennedy in 1960 helped win Kennedy the presidential nomination.

Wagner broke his alliance with Tammany Hall in 1961, when he was at the peak of his popularity. He defeated his Tammany Hall-supported opponent in the Democratic primary and with the support of a growing Manhattan reform movement and the powerful Central Labor Council went on to win a third term by a large margin. Wagner's power as mayor was also enlarged by a new charter approved that same year by the voters. But his last term proved to be a troubled one, as his administration was caught up in the urban unrest of the 1960s. Facing increasingly heavy social obligations and massive increases in welfare spending, Wagner resorted to economic expediences to pay the bills. With the permission of the state legislature he increased the city's borrowing limits and issued "revenue anticipation notes" not only for the current fiscal year but for fees and taxes that were estimated to be available the following year. In 1965 Wagner submitted a record budget of $3.8 billion. Later critics would cite that budget as the beginning of the heavy deficit spending that would get the city into serious financial trouble a decade later.

Wagner was placid and methodical, and critics said he was too slow to act to curb the city's growing urban problems. After rioting broke out in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Wagner launched several new programs, including a city jobs program for disadvantaged youth. With the backing of the federal government and the Ford Foundation he initiated a program called Mobilization for Youth (MFY) which aimed at retraining inner-city youth. He also launched another anti-poverty program called Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited and Associated Community Teams (HARYOU-ACT). But critics were not satisfied, and Wagner decided not to seek a fourth term. On leaving office, he said: "The days of scandal, the days of political influence, getting contracts and assistance from the city have disappeared, and I believe I hand on to my successor a government that had changed radically in this way."

During his administration, Wagner had helped bring a World's Fair to Flushing Meadow, helped establish the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and helped created the Jamaica Bay wildlife preserve. New York lost major league baseball's Giants and Dodgers to California, but gained the Mets.

Later Career

After leaving office, Wagner returned to his private law practice with Finley, Kumble, Wagner, Heine, Underberg, and Casey. Still visible in Democratic Party circles, Wagner entered the New York mayoral primary in 1969 and lost. A deal that would have made him the Republican-Liberal candidate for mayor in 1973 collapsed. He was appointed ambassador to Spain, 1968-1969, and continued to serve as a political adviser on the national scene. President Jimmy Carter appointed him as his unofficial personal envoy to the Vatican, 1978-1981. In 1976 Wagner's law firm merged with another, and he continued in private practice until his death. In the 1980s Wagner was a member of the city's Charter Revision Commission. In 1989 New York University named its school of public service for him.

Wagner died of cancer on February 12, 1991 at his home in Manhattan. New York Governor Mario Cuomo eulogized him: "A large, living piece of our best political history has fallen away, and there is nothing adequate to replace it. Robert F. Wagner was a superb public person, servant of the people, and adviser to their leaders."

Further Reading

For general information on Wagner see Political Profiles: The Johnson Years (1976) and Edward Kenworthy, "The Emergence of Mayor Wagner," New York Times Magazine (August 14, 1955). For some of the conflicts and accomplishments of the Wagner years see Warren Moscow, The Last of the Big-Time Bosses (1971); Robert Caro, The Power Broker (1975); William F. Buckley, Jr., The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966), and Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson, City Politics (1963).

For more information on Robert Ferdinand Wagner, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: June 8, 1877, Nastatten, Germany
• Political party: Democrat
• Education: College of the City of New York, graduated, 1898; New York Law School, graduated, 1900
• Senator from New York: 1927–49
• Died: May 4, 1953, New York, N.Y.

Short, stocky, with a heavy New York accent (saying “woik” for “work”), Robert F. Wagner may have appeared to be a typical machine politician. But he proved to be one of the most effective legislators of the New Deal era. Wagner worked best behind closed committee doors, making his case for legislation, reaching necessary compromises, and rounding up votes before going into debate on the Senate floor. Wagner sponsored a long list of important legislation, but his two greatest achievements occurred in 1935: the Wagner Act, guaranteeing labor's right to organize into unions, and the Social Security Act to provide old-age pensions to most Americans. Milton Handler, a young New Dealer who watched Wagner firsthand, credited Wagner's legislative success to these qualities:

First, his ingrained, humanitarian, progressive philosophy; second, his uncanny capacity to recruit good men to do the detail work for him; third, his masterful ability to maneuver bills through the legislative mill; and fourth, and most important of all, his willingness and determination to stick to his basic conviction through thick and thin—in a word, his “guts.”

Sources

• J. Joseph Huthmacher, Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1968)

(wăg'nər) , 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.

Robert Ferdinand Wagner served as a U.S. senator from New York from 1927 to 1949. Wagner was a strong believer in the social welfare state and sponsored many federal laws that have shaped U.S. law and society. In the 1930s he worked closely with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and helped to implement much of Roosevelt's New Deal agenda.

Wagner was born on June 8, 1877, in Nast;auatten, Germany. With his family he immigrated to the United States in 1885, settling in a New York City tenement neighborhood. He graduated from City College in New York in 1898 and studied law at New York Law School, where he earned his degree in 1900.

Wagner was admitted to the New York bar in 1900 and practiced law on his own for a short time. He then abandoned his law practice to enter Democratic party politics. Wagner worked his way up the party ladder and won a seat in the state legislature in 1904. In 1908 he was elected to the New York Senate, where he soon established himself as a socially progressive leader, investigating industrial working conditions and introducing legislation that sought to use the power of government to improve the lives of blue-collar workers and the poor.

Wagner became a judge of the New York Supreme Court in 1919 but resigned in 1926 to run as the Democratic party candidate for the U.S. Senate. He won the election and took office in 1927 during the heyday of the "Roaring Twenties." The U.S. economy was at its postwar zenith, and the Republican party controlled Congress. Wagner introduced legislation to help organized labor and the unemployed, but his proposals were unsuccessful.

Wagner's political fortunes changed dramatically with the Great Depression of the 1930s and the election of President Roosevelt in 1932. Like Wagner, Roosevelt believed that the federal government needed to play a larger role in the activities of the national economy and in the lives of U.S. citizens. Wagner helped draft and sponsor the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 (48 Stat. 195), which established the National Recovery Administration to administer codes of fair practice within each industry. Under these codes, labor and management negotiated minimum wages, maximum hours, and fair trade practices for each industry. The Roosevelt administration sought to use these codes to stabilize production, raise prices, and protect labor and consumers. In Schecter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495, 55 S. Ct. 837, 79 L. Ed. 1570 (1935), however, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the NIRA.

Wagner also sponsored the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C.A. §301 et seq.), the bedrock of U.S. social welfare law. He is best remembered for the Wagner Act, also known as the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (29 U.S.C.A. §151 et seq.). The Wagner Act recognized for the first time the right of workers to organize unions and to collectively bargain with employers. The statute also established the National Labor Relations Board to enforce labor-management relations in the United States.

Wagner sponsored numerous New Deal programs, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and the U.S. Housing Authority, which provided loans for low-cost public housing. When World War II began, the country's attention shifted to international issues, and Wagner's social welfare agenda fell out of favor. He lobbied unsuccessfully for a national health care system and for antilynching legislation.

Wagner resigned from the Senate for health reasons in 1949. He died on May 5, 1953, in New York City. In 1954 his son, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., was elected mayor of New York City and served until 1965.

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