After Yale, he served as a private in the Volunteer Army in the
Puerto Rican Campaign during the
Spanish–American War. Upon leaving the Army, he entered the livestock and farming business, first in New York and then
Texas. He became active early in Republican politics. He was a member of the
New York State Assembly (Livingston Co.) in
1905,
1906,
1907,
1908,
1909 and
1910; and was
Speaker from 1906 to 1910. In
1912, he ran for
Lieutenant Governor of New York on the Republican ticket with
Job E. Hedges, but was defeated. In
1914, at the first popular election for the U.S. Senate (prior to the
Seventeenth Amendment, U.S. senators had been elected by the
New York State Legislature), Wadsworth defeated Democrat
James W. Gerard (the incumbent
United States Ambassador to Germany) and Progressive
Bainbridge Colby. Wadsworth was
Senate Minority Whip in 1915, as the Democrats held the majority of Senate seats. He was re-elected in
1920 but defeated by Democrat
Robert F. Wagner in
1926. In 1921, Wadsworth was considered for the post of
Secretary of War by President
Warren G. Harding but was ultimately passed over in favor of
John W. Weeks. Wadsworth was a proponent of individual rights and feared what he considered the threat of federal intervention into the private lives of Americans. He believed that the only purpose of the
United States Constitution is to limit the powers of government and to protect the rights of citizens. For this reason, he voted against the
Eighteenth Amendment when it was before the Senate. Before
Prohibition went into effect, Wadsworth predicted that there would be widespread violations and contempt for the law. By the mid-1920s, Wadsworth was one of a handful of congressmen who spoke out forcefully and frequently against prohibition. He was especially concerned that citizens could be prosecuted by both state and federal officials for a single violation of prohibition law. This seemed to him to constitute
double jeopardy, inconsistent with the spirit if not the letter of the
Fifth Amendment. In 1926, he joined the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment and made 131 speeches across the country for the organization between then and repeal. His political acumen and contacts proved valuable in overturning prohibition. He served in the
U.S. House of Representatives from 1933 to 1951, and, like
Alton Lennon,
Garrett Withers,
Claude Pepper,
Hugh Mitchell,
Matthew M. Neely, and
Magnus Johnson, is one of the few modern senators to serve later in the House of Representatives. In the House, he opposed the
isolationism of many of his conservative Republican colleagues, opposed anti-lynching legislation on
states' rights grounds, rejected
minimum wage laws and most of FDR's domestic policy. Although Wadsworth never ran for president, his name was mentioned as a possible candidate in 1936 and 1944.
Winifred C. Stanley, a representative from
Buffalo, New York, was kept off the
U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary by Wadsworth, who was in charge of assignments. Stanley made clear that she wanted to maintain in "peacetime the drive and energy which women have contributed to the war." Thus in 1944, Stanley had introduced a bill for the
National Labor Relations Board to bar discrimination in pay on the basis of sex. The bill died in committee. Wadsworth's reason was his opposition to women in the workplace, according to a House of Representatives history of women in Congress. A confidential 1943 analysis of the
House Foreign Affairs Committee by
Isaiah Berlin for the British
Foreign Office described Wadsworth as He was a hereditary companion of the
Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States and was also a member of the
United Spanish War Veterans. ==Personal life==