National Labor Relations Act

About the Author

Although he was born in Germany, Robert F. Wagner (1877–1953) was a thorough New Yorker. He attended public schools in New York City, went to college there, attended New York Law School, and was admitted to the bar in 1900. Elected to the state assembly (1905–1908) and then to the state senate (1909–1918), where he became Democratic floor leader, he left to become a justice of the New York Supreme Court (1919–1926). His eminence in state political life was recognized when he was appointed chairman of the New York State Factory Investigating Commission, set up in the wake of the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City in 1911—the largest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York, causing the deaths of 148 garment workers. Winning a fight for the U.S. Senate in 1926, Wagner went on to become one of the most effective senators in U.S. history. He left his stamp on virtually every piece of major legislation passed under the New Deal. He introduced the National Industrial Recovery Act into the Senate in 1933, was the major sponsor of such relief agencies as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, introduced (unsuccessfully) two antilynching bills in 1934 and 1938, and steered passage of the NLRA. He was “the legislative instigator and tactician, and before Congress, the President, and the public he was its most ardent champion” (Huthmacher, p. 197).

Wagner was a product of the new urban America—pro-immigrant and pro-labor. From 1926 until his resignation in 1949 due to ill health, Wagner served four terms in the Senate. He became one of the most distinguished and accomplished senators in the history of the nation, dubbed by his biographer as the “Legislative Pilot of the New Deal” (Huthmacher, p. 137).