Preview

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.

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.