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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

The Best (Progressive) Democrat You Probably Never Heard Of

Michael Kazin on Robert Wagner

Eric Alterman is lecturing and traveling in Israel and Jordan this week,
and so today's Altercation is authored by the historian Michael Kazin,
a professor of history at Georgetown University and the author, most
recently, of What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party
, from
which the below is adapted.

To judge by media coverage of the Democrats, you'd think nothing is
going on within the party but battles between progressives who want to
pass sweeping pieces of legislation like Build Back Better and the PRO
Act and "moderates" who fret that increasing federal spending will
add to inflation and alienate business. This may be unfair-the
mainstream media often are-but we would be fooling ourselves were we
to fail to admit that the party itself has a serious identity problem.

In fact, there are more influential progressives or leftists (or
whatever your term of choice) inside the Democratic Party now than at
any time in decades. To make a lasting difference in the life of the
country-rather than winning Twitter fights or gaining face time on
MSNBC-they might learn something from the career of a bygone senator
from New York who may have been the most powerful progressive who never
ran for the White House in the two centuries the Democrats have existed
as a mass institution.

During that span, a remarkable array of heroes and villains have made
the party their political home. The virtuous set obviously includes
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed into law Social Security and other
pillars of the limited welfare state, and led the nation to victory in
World War II. It also includes John Lewis, who fought for voting rights
for all Americans as a young activist and then spoke out for economic as
well as racial equality during his 19 terms in Congress. Among the
rogues are Roger Taney, a close aide to Andrew Jackson, who appointed
him chief justice of the United States. From the bench in 1857, Taney
intoned that Black people "had no rights which the white man was bound
to respect." And then there is George Wallace, the infamous Alabama
governor, who exploited white hostility toward civil rights and liberal
elites to become a darling of the far right in the 1960s and early
1970s.

But to name such figures, whether famous or infamous, neglects those
party stalwarts, scarcely remembered today, who labored hard and long to
enact critical reforms that stand as hallmarks of progressive
achievement. Throughout their history, Democrats have done best when
they espoused a vision of "moral capitalism" and policies to match.
At a time when Democrats are struggling to enact programs like universal
pre-kindergarten and expanded Medicare benefits, they can learn from the
careers of once prominent, now little known, lawmakers who won election
after election by championing policies to help the great majority of
working Americans.

Most prominent among the forgotten is Robert Ferdinand Wagner. Born in a
German Rhineland village in 1877, Wagner emigrated to New York City with
his parents a few years later. His father had owned a small business in
the Old Country but made his living as a janitor in the New World, at a
salary of about a dollar a day. Discontented with his lot, Reinhard
Wagner and his wife sailed back to Germany near the end of the 19th
century and never returned. But Robert completed high school and then
graduated from City College in Manhattan. He won an award as class
orator that presaged his future career in politics.

Wagner soon enlisted in the ranks of Tammany Hall, the city's potent
Democratic machine. In 1904, he got elected, with Tammany's
endorsement, to the New York state legislature. With the help of female
reformers like Frances Perkins (who later became labor secretary during
the New Deal), he worked to pass bills for accident compensation and
factory inspection aimed to prevent horrible events like the 1911 fire
at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company that killed 146 workers, most of them
female immigrants. Mary Dreier, a pioneer labor organizer, recalled
traveling with Wagner to vegetable farms in upstate New York where young
women toiled for as long as 19 hours a day. She recalled that Wagner
"was very astute asking questions about the children," who often
accompanied their mothers to the fields.

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In 1926, Wagner won a seat in the U.S. Senate by clinging to the
coattails of Al Smith, then his state's popular governor. On Capitol
Hill, he proposed measures to aid the unemployed and use government
funds to stabilize the economy. When FDR became president, Wagner seized
a unique opportunity to pass bold initiatives to markedly improve the
lives of working Americans. Leon Keyserling, a 27-year-old economist on
his staff, wrote the National Labor Relations Act, which the press
immediately dubbed the Wagner Act, although it was co-sponsored with a
congressman from Massachusetts. The senator also introduced bills to
erect millions of units of public housing and provide every citizen with
health insurance. Wagner's reputation as the most prominent and most
effective labor liberal in America made him the natural choice to
oversee the drafting of the 1936 Democratic platform, on which FDR ran
his campaign for re-election that carried all but two states and gave
the Democrats huge majorities in both houses.

Wagner was also one of the few Democrats in Congress whose empathy for
ordinary people never faded at the color line. In 1934, he proposed a
bill to make lynching a federal crime and fought, in vain, to stop
Southerners in his party from filibustering it to death. He also sought
to amend the Social Security Act and his own National Labor Relations
Act to include domestic workers and farmworkers-occupations held by
two-thirds of Black workers in the South. But the New Yorker and his
fellow liberals lost that struggle, too; Southern Democrats composed too
large a bloc in the party and had too much power in Congress. But Wagner
did show his unflagging commitment to racial equality when he proposed,
in 1940, a successful amendment to the new Selective Service Act that
outlawed discrimination in the Army Air Corps and other elite branches
of the military.

The German immigrant had come a long way from his days as a young cog of
the New York Democratic machine. Still, Wagner understood just how
essential both loyalty and a strong organization were in politics-and
so he kept the faith. "Tammany Hall may justly claim the title of the
cradle of modern liberalism in America," he told an Independence Day
crowd in 1937.

Wagner had another exemplary quality few politicians have ever
possessed: He was as lacking in egotism and a hunger for adoration as
any intensely public man could be. One New York journalist who followed
Wagner throughout his career described him as "an unassuming man ...
sincere and unaffected, he has neither the desire nor the talent for
self-exploitation." The senator, groused another reporter, "does not
put on a good show."

Yet in his modest fashion, he did as much as any New Dealer but FDR
himself to advance, in the words of his party's 1940 platform (which
Wagner drafted), "the essential freedom, dignity and opportunity of
the American worker." And he did this in a period of depression and
foreign war that tested the survival of democracy in the nation and the
world more than at any time in history.

Wagner remained in the Senate until near his death in 1953. A year
later, his only child, Robert Wagner Jr., was elected mayor of New York
City. The consistent labor liberal ran the metropolis until 1965. During
his final term, he broke with Tammany Hall, whose clout had weakened
considerably since it had launched his father's eminent career.

If Democrats hope to dominate national politics again. as they did
during the middle of the last century, they will have to develop leaders
able to build a strong organization committed to advancing the economic
interests of Americans who work hard but have too little to show for it.
This is the hard, unglamorous work of politics. It requires both
movement-building and deal-making, and if any current progressive
Democrat wishes to earn him- or herself a record like that of Robert
Wagner, they had better get to work on both.

Eric's Odds and Ends

Michael left us some room that should not go to waste, so here, from the
Journal of the History of Ideas, is a forum on Black intellectual
history that
definitely will not make it into any of the curricula in Florida or
Virginia anytime soon.

And I did not want to go two weeks in a row with no music. I am a fan of
cover versions and I wrote up some of my favorite way back when The New
York Times asked me to pick some in 2008, here
.
I am also a fan of Mr. Springsteen and so today's bonuses include
Bruce doing "Love Me Tender
" and "Drift Away
,"
"Like a Rolling Stone
," and the famous
Leipzig 2013 "You Never Can Tell
," with over 60,000,000
views. Bruce apparently did not remember that he did the song (also
unrehearsed) in 2009
,
but the bootleg I grew up listening to was from 1974. Listen to how
differently Bruce used to talk on stage back then: "I'm married,
I'm selling insurance
..."

And if you remember this song
(and useful metaphor)
fondly, as I do, then you ought to love this one
perhaps even more.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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