Robert F. Wagner
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Robert Ferdinand Wagner (8 June 1877–4 May 1953) was a U.S. Senator from New York. He was born in Nastatten, 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, until his resignation on June 28, 1949, 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 author of the National Labor Relations Act, or Wagner Act, that created the National Labor Relations Board in 1935, a delegate to the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods in 1944. He also introduced the Railway Pension Law.
He was the father of Robert F. Wagner, Jr., a former 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.
| Preceded by: James Wolcott Wadsworth Jr. | U.S. Senator (Class 3) from New York 1927-1949 | Succeeded by: John Foster Dulles External link |