Robert F. Wagner

New York senator who wrote the National Labor Relations Act and helped build the New Deal welfare state.

Overview

Born in Germany and raised in New York City, Wagner rose through Tammany Hall politics and, after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire, co-led a state commission whose findings produced a wave of factory safety laws. Elected to the Senate in 1926, he became one of the chief legislative architects of the New Deal. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, still widely called the Wagner Act, guaranteed workers the right to organize and bargain collectively, and he played a central role in the Social Security Act and the Housing Act of 1937. Ill health forced his resignation in 1949.