CREDIT: Associated Press/JC
IF FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT was the New Deal’s pilot, Robert F. Wagner Sr. was its copilot. As a US senator from New York, he pushed through bills to create Social Security, provide workers with unemployment insurance and compensation for workplace injuries, construct government-subsidized housing for working-class families, and give workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively. These and other progressive laws faced enormous opposition from business groups, most newspapers, and many of his Senate colleagues, but Wagner—who saw himself as the labor movement’s strongest ally in Congress—used his remarkable political skills to outmaneuver his opponents.
Wagner did not begin his political career as a progressive crusader. When he was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1904 and the state Senate four years later, he was part of the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall political machine, known for its graft and corruption and for trading votes for jobs and other favors. But a tragedy—the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911 that killed 146 garment workers—transformed Wagner.
Born in Germany, Wagner came to America with his parents at eight years old in 1885. His father, unable to find work in his own craft, became a janitor, in part because the tenement building’s landlord gave him a free basement apartment as a part of his income. Young Robert sold newspapers and delivered groceries before and after school to help the family. The valedictorian of his high school class, Wagner attended City College, where he was quarterback of the football team and graduated in 1898. Two years later he completed New York Law School and began practicing law.
Like many young lawyers at the time, Wagner’s ambition and interest in public service led directly to Tammany Hall. He used his talents as a public speaker to help energize crowds on behalf of Tammany’s candidates. By age twenty-six, he was a candidate himself and was elected to the state legislature. Charles Murphy, the Tammany boss, admired Wagner’s skills, and in 1910 he passed over more experienced politicians to install the thirty-three-year-old as the youngest Senate leader in New York history.
The state’s Democratic power brokers depended on immigrants’ votes and could not ignore their growing protests over miserable working, housing, and public health conditions in New York City’s factories and tenements. In November 1909 over 20,000 shirtwaist makers, led by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, walked off their jobs. In July of the following year, another group of garment workers—over 60,000 cloak makers, mostly men this time—went on strike. The strikers demanded better pay, shorter hours, and safer workplaces.
On March 25, 1911, on a Saturday at 4:45 p.m., close to quitting time, a fire broke out on the eighth and ninth floors of the Triangle Company building. Factory foremen had locked the exit doors to keep out union organizers and to keep workers from taking breaks and stealing scraps of fabric. Other doors only opened inward and were blocked by the stampede of workers struggling to escape. The ladders of the city’s fire engines could not reach high enough to save the employees. As a result, workers burned or jumped to their deaths. Experts later concluded that the fire had probably been caused by a cigarette dropped on a pile of “cut aways,” or scraps of cloth, that had been accumulating for almost three months.
News of the fire spread quickly, catalyzing public opinion and energizing a broad coalition of unlikely allies, including immigrants, muckraking journalists, clergy, unionists, socialists, and the wives and daughters of some of the city’s wealthiest businessmen. On April 6, 30,000 New Yorkers marched—and hundreds of thousands more lined the march’s route—behind empty hearses to memorialize the fire’s victims. Numerous rallies, broadsides, and editorials called for legislative action ranging from fire safety codes to restrictions on child labor.
In response, New York governor, John Alden Dix, created the Factory Investigating Commission, a pioneering body with broad subpoena powers and teams of investigators. He put Wagner and his State Assembly counterpart, Al Smith, in charge of the investigation.
Some reformers figured that the commission was a political ploy to avoid doing anything by studying the problem until the public forgot about the tragedy. But Wagner and Smith accepted their responsibility with incredible zeal, hiring leading reformers to staff the blue-ribbon group. They took the commission members up and down the state holding hearings, visiting over 3,000 factories, and interviewing almost 500 witnesses. They found buildings without fire escapes and bakeries in poorly ventilated cellars with rat droppings. Only 21 percent of the bakeries even had bathrooms, and most of them were unsanitary. Children—some as young as five years old—were toiling in dangerous canning factories. Women and girls were working eighteen-hour days.
There was fierce opposition from the business community, but Wagner and Smith, fortified by a vibrant progressive movement, ignored it. In the first year, the commission proposed and the legislature quickly passed a package of laws requiring mandatory fire drills, automatic sprinklers, and outward-swinging doors that were to remain unlocked during work hours. They also created rules on the storage and disposal of flammable waste, and they banned smoking from the shop floor. In the second year, the legislature passed additional reforms. They set the maximum numbers of workers per floor; they established codes requiring new buildings to include fireproof stairways and fire escapes. They required employers to provide clean drinking water, washrooms, and toilets for their employees, and they gave labor commission inspectors the power to shut down unsanitary tenement sweatshops. Finally they ruled that women could work no more than fifty-four hours a week and that children under eighteen could not work in dangerous situations.
The duo’s impressive leadership in shepherding these landmark reforms through the legislature catapulted Smith to the governor’s office in 1918 and Wagner (after a seven-year stint as a New York State Supreme Court justice) to the US Senate in 1926.
In Washington, Wagner displayed the same talent for reform. His two greatest achievements occurred in 1935 when Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (often called the Wagner Act), guaranteeing labor’s right to organize into unions, and the Social Security Act, which provided old-age pensions. Wagner played a key role in almost every major New Deal program. He helped draft and sponsor the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which established the National Recovery Administration to administer codes of fair practice within each industry, including the first federal minimum wage.
Wagner also led the successful fight to pass the 1937 US Housing Act, which provided the first significant government subsidies for low-cost housing. Wagner hoped the bill would stimulate construction jobs to build public housing. But some of the more radical components of Wagner’s proposal were clipped after aggressive lobbying by the real estate industry, the banks, the lumber industry (which feared that public housing would be built with concrete and steel, not wood), and the US Chamber of Commerce. The provision that spurred new housing sponsored by unions, cooperatives, and nonprofit housing groups was killed. Wagner had intended public housing to be for middle-class families as well as the poor. But after World War II, the real estate industry recognized the pent-up demand for housing and, fearing competition from public housing (which it claimed was an opening wedge for socialism), sabotaged the program by pressuring Congress (in the 1949 Housing Act) to limit it to the very poor.
Short and stocky, with a heavy New York accent (for example, saying “woik” for “work”), Wagner mastered the details of the legislative process and found ways to persuade more-conservative colleagues to support liberal laws. But Wagner was not simply FDR’s point man in Congress. He was more progressive and bolder than the president and frequently had to persuade FDR to support his proposals, often with the help of labor unions and other groups. But in two significant arenas—lynching and national health care—Wagner’s efforts failed.
In 1932 African Americans—who had typically supported the Republican Party out of loyalty to Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionists—switched to the Democrats and helped elect FDR. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People hoped that once in office, FDR would support federal legislation to end lynching, especially because his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, had been a longtime opponent of lynching. In 1935 Wagner, along with Senator Edward Costigan of Colorado, agreed to draft a bill punishing sheriffs who failed to protect their prisoners from lynch mobs. But FDR refused to support the bill, worried that southern white voters—almost all of them loyal Democrats—would abandon the party. The legislation helped stir a national debate over the issue, and the bill received support from many members of Congress, but the opposition of southern Democrats defeated it.
In 1943 Wagner cosponsored the first meaningful national health insurance bill introduced in Congress. The American Medical Association, which feared government intrusion into medical practice, immediately labeled the bill “socialized medicine” and launched a campaign to kill it. With his attention diverted by World War II, FDR did not embrace Wagner’s proposal. The bill never reached the floor of either house of Congress.
Despite these setbacks, Wagner’s accomplishments improved the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans over many generations. According to Time magazine, which put Wagner’s photo on its March 19, 1934, cover, Wagner “never forgot what a working man’s life was like.” Pick any law designed to help common people, the New York Times noted in its May 5, 1953, obituary, “and the chances are that either Bob Wagner’s name is attached to it as a sponsor, or else he was one of its more active legislative protagonists.”