Robert F. Wagner: Triangle Fire Investigator Who Wrote the Wagner Act

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Robert F. Wagner was born in Prussia in 1877 and came to New York in 1885, growing up in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, where his father worked as a janitor. He graduated from City College in 1898 and New York Law School in 1900, then rose through Tammany Hall to the state Assembly in 1905 and the state Senate in 1909, serving as president pro tempore from 1911 to 1914. After the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 workers, he chaired the Factory Investigating Committee with Al Smith as vice chairman. The committee took about 3,500 pages of testimony from 222 witnesses, walked through factories across the state, and produced 38 new laws that shifted the burden of workplace safety onto employers.

Wagner became a New York Supreme Court justice in 1919 and a U.S. senator in 1927. During the New Deal he sponsored the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Social Security Act and the Housing Act of 1937, which created the U.S. Housing Authority. When the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA in 1935, he wrote the National Labor Relations Act, guaranteeing collective bargaining and creating the National Labor Relations Board. His anti-lynching bill with Edward Costigan was filibustered without Franklin Roosevelt's endorsement, and the 1939 Wagner-Rogers bill to admit 20,000 Jewish refugee children died in committee. Heart trouble forced his resignation in June 1949, and he died on May 4, 1953.

• The Triangle factory owners had locked the stairwell doors to prevent unauthorized breaks and theft.
• Recorded lynchings fell from 18 in 1935 to eight in 1936 and two in 1939 as he kept pressing his bill.
• Raised Lutheran and a Methodist from college on, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1946.
• A confidential 1943 analysis by Isaiah Berlin called him a veteran liberal Tammany statesman.
• His son Robert F. Wagner Jr. served three terms as mayor of New York City.