Robert F. Wagner
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- For other persons with the name, see Robert Wagner (disambiguation).
Robert Ferdinand Wagner (8 June 1877–4 May 1953) was a Democratic United States Senator from New York from 1927 until 1949. He was born in Nastätten, Province Hesse-Nassau, Germany and immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1885. His family settled in New York City and Wagner attended the public schools. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1898 and from New York Law School in 1900 and was admitted to the bar in 1900.
Wagner commenced practice in New York City and was a member of the State Assembly (1905 - 1908), member of the State senate (1909 - 1918), the last eight years as Democratic floor leader, chairman of the State Factory Investigating Committee (1911 - 1915), delegate to the New York constitutional conventions in 1915 and 1938, and justice of the supreme court of New York (1919 - 1926).
Wagner was elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate in 1926, reelected in 1932, 1938, and again in 1944, and served from March 4, 1927, due to ill health. He was the chairman of the Committee on Patents in the Seventy-third Congress, of the Committee on Public Lands and Surveys in the Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth Congresses, and of the Committee on Banking and Currency in the Seventy-fifth through Seventy-ninth Congresses. He was a delegate to the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944.
His most important legislative achievements included the NRA in 1933, the National Labor Relations Act, or Wagner Act, that created the National Labor Relations Board in 1935, and creation of the United States Housing Authority in 1937. He also introduced the Railway Pension Law.
Wagner and Edward P. Costigan sponsored a federal anti-Lynching law. In 1935 attempts were made to persuade President Franklin D. Roosevelt to support the Costigan-Wagner Bill. However, Roosevelt refused to support a bill that would punish sheriffs who failed to protect their prisoners from lynch mobs. He believed that he would lose the support of Southern Democrats in Congress and lose his entire New Deal program. There were 18 lynchings of blacks in the South in 1935, but after the threat of federal legislation the number fell to 8 in 1936, and to 2 in 1939.
He was the father of Robert F. Wagner, Jr., who became mayor of New York City.
Robert Wagner died in New York City and is interred in Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York City.
On September 14. 2004, a portrait of Wagner, along with one of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, was unveiled in the Senate Reception room. The new portraits joined a group of distinguished former Senators, including Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and Robert A. Taft. Portraits of this group of Senators, known as the "Famous Five", were unveiled on March 12, 1959.
Reference
- J. Joseph Huthmacher. Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (1968)
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