Robert Wagner and the Rise of New York City’s Plebiscitary Mayoralty: The Tamer of the Tammany Tiger

Robert Wagner was New York City's true New Deal mayor, killed Tammany Hall. The world Wagner shaped delivers municipal services efficiently at the cost of local democracy. The story of Wagner's mayoralty will be of interest to anyone who cares about New York City, local democracy and the debate about the legacy of the City's important leaders.
New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner (1954–1965) governed during a period of momentous change in local politics. In this era—too often viewed as a mere prelude to the racial unrest of the John Lindsay years (1966–1973) and the fiscal crisis of the 1970s—important policy changes took place in the fields of housing, education, race and labor relations, and in the structures of local governance. Incongruously, however, despite all of the changes in politics and public policy in play in the 1950s and 1960s, Wagner himself is remembered as a “broker” politician who passively mediated the pressing demands of the city’s constellation of interest groups as if his decisions meant little in how the policies of the era were crafted. Interpretations of the Wagner administration are inevitability tied closely to his grayish leadership style and owlish public persona. The myopic focus on the man misses the institutional structures that were reconstituted in the three Wagner administrations, the role that the mayor’s own strategic decision-making played in forging the political changes of the era, and the long-term consequences of Mayor Wagner’s choices for future generations of city politicians and citizens.