Abstract
Mayor Robert F. Wagner constructed an interest group coalition to support the extension of social services in New York and an increase in the size and scope of local government. Mayor Wagner also increased the administrative strength of local government by reforming and professionalizing city agencies, and developing policy and budget capacity within the office of the mayor. Mayor Wagner allowed city workers to organize unions, established the municipal hospital system, increased education spending and built public housing. While Mayor Wagner initially partnered with Tammany Hall leader Carmine De Sapio in the 1950s, tensions mounted as the mayor sought to establish his independence from the city’s political party leaders, and to avoid traditional patronage politics at a time when reformers were growing increasingly unhappy with clubhouse politics.
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Notes
Warren Moscow, What Have You Done For Me Lately? (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 40.
L. H. Wittemore, The Man Who Ran the Subways (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 180.
Jewel Bellush and Bernard Bellush, Union Power and New York: Victor Gotbaum and District Council 37 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1984), 64.
Mark H. Maier, City Unions: Managing Discontent in New York City (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 44.
Jewel Bellush and Bernard Bellush, Union Power in New York (Westport CT: Praeger Press, 1984).
Maier, City Unions, chapter 4. For a summary of Wagner’s moves to bolster his power in comparison to mayors in others cities across time and space in the US context, see: Richard M. Flanagan, Mayors and the Challenge of Urban Leadership (Lanham, MD: Univ. of America Press, 2004), 72–73.
L. H. Wittemore, The Man Who Ran the Subways (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968).
Paul Peterson, City Limits (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981).
Public school teachers centralized and gained collective bargaining rights in 1961 with the formation of the United Federation of Teachers. On the public school interest groups of the 1950s and the early 1960s, see: David Rodgers, 110 Livingston Street: Politics and Bureaucracy in New York City Schools (New York: Random House, 1968), 165–210.
Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805–1973 (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 256.
Robert Caro, The Power Broker (New York: Random House, 1974).
Stephen M. David, “Welfare: The Community Action Controversy,” in Jewell Bellush and Stephen David, eds., Race and Politics in New York City (New York: Praeger Press, 1971), 25–49
J. David Greenstone and Paul Peterson, Race and Authority in Urban Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
Robb K. Burlage, New York City Municipal Hospitals: A Policy Review (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1967), 15
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© 2015 Richard M. Flanagan
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Flanagan, R.M. (2015). Mayor Robert F. Wagner and the Unfinished Business of the New Deal. In: Robert Wagner and the Rise of New York City’s Plebiscitary Mayoralty: The Tamer of the Tammany Tiger. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400871_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400871_3
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