"My Turn Has Come"

For more than two years, at every roll call, Senate clerks had written the words "necessarily absent" after the name of the senior Senator from New York. Nevertheless, Senate pages continued to tend the inkwell and sand holder at his vacant desk, and his name appeared from time to time (as a cosponsor) on Senate bills.

Last week, 64 years after he arrived in the U.S. from his native Germany and 44 years after he undertook his first public office (as a New York State assemblyman), 72 year-old Senator Robert F. Wagner said his farewell to politics. The famed old liberal, long disabled by the infirmities of age, wrote: "My turn has come to step down ... I have had my fair share of shining hours when the country approved my labors and when I saw the reforms for which I struggled so firmly established that many took them for granted . . ."

In his 22 years in the Senate, Robert Wagner had indeed had his shining hours. As a driving, unspectacular protagonist of the New Deal, Wagner had sponsored such far-reaching social legislation as the Social Security Act, the U.S. Housing Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA), the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Wagner Labor Relations Act.

A friend once pointed out that the New York Senator's own life was proof that it is possible to rise from the slums (his father was a janitor for a tenement house on Manhattan's East Side). Said Wagner bitterly: "That is the most God-awful bunk. I came through it, yes. That was luck, luck, luck. Think of the others."

Wagner quit just in time to do his fellow Democrats the most good. Had he resigned after July 8, Governor Thomas E. Dewey could have appointed a Republican successor to serve until January 1951. Now, although Dewey may appoint someone to fill the post temporarily, a special fall election must be held to elect a Senator to fill out Wagner's term. New Yorkers were in for some hot, midsummer politicking. The Senator's unexciting son, Robert F. Wagner Jr., hinted that he would like the job. Tom Dewey said he didn't want it himself, but wouldn't yet say whom he had in mind (one possible choice: Republican Foreign Policy Adviser John Foster Dulles). On the Democratic side, there was immediate talk of the party's wonder boy, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., who was elected to the House only six weeks ago. But Junior said he'd rather see it go to ex-Governor Herbert H. Lehman, who is 71. Lehman said he'd like to think it over a while.

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