Philip Levy papers on national labor policy

Philip Levy (1909-1970), was a government official and lawyer involved with national labor policy, civil rights and anti-lynching policy, immigration leniency for German refugees during the Nazi era, national health insurance initiatives, and banking and currency during the 1930s and 1940s. From 1947-1970 he practiced law in a private firm, dealing with Jewish refugees, congressional and political reform, and foreign claims against the U.S. government. Throughout his long career he maintained an interest in labor policy and lectured at American University Law School in Washington, D.C. Chronology List

• 1909 May 6 Born, New York City.
• 1925-1929 Attended College of the City of New York (CCNY). B.S., 1929. Phi Beta Kappa.
• 1929-1930 Served as assistant to Registrar Morton Gottshall (later Dean) of CCNY.
• 1930-1933 Attended Columbia University Law School. Kent Scholar, 1931. Served as research assistant to Professors Milton Handler, Karl Llewellyn and Edwin Patterson. Note Editor for the Columbia Law Review, 1932-33; author of note, "The Rule of Reason in Loose-Knit Combinations," Columbia Law Review, Vol. 32 (Feb. 1932), pp. 291-324. LL.B., June, 1933.
• 1933 Married Selma Friedman.
• 1933-1934 Employed as an attorney in the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst, New York City.
• 1934-1937 On April 9, 1934, Mr. Levy joined legal staff of National Labor Relations Board under General Counsel Milton Handler and Associate General Counsel William Gorham Rice, Jr. The Board was created under Section 7 (a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of June 16, 1933. NEW DEAL LABOR POLICY. The United States Supreme Court on May 27, 1935 in Schechter Corporation v. United States, 295 U.S. 495, held key sections of the NIRA invalid. The legal staff of the Labor Board had already been at work formulating a new national labor policy in cooperation with Senator Wagner and the Roosevelt administration. The National Labor Relations Act, 49 Stat. 449, known popularly as the Wagner Act, which became law on July 5, 1935, established a permanent National Labor Relations Board to assure good-faith collective bargaining in industries engaged in interstate commerce.
• 1935-1937 Served on legal staff of the National Labor Relations Board under General Counsel Charles Fahy. Mr. Levy rose to the position of senior attorney and chief of the Appellate Litigation Section and thus helped formulate the defense of the Wagner Act in the courts. He argued some cases in the lower courts across the country - in addition to brief writing. The United States Supreme Court on April 12, 1937 in five Wagner Act cases, led by NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, 301 U.S. 1, ruled the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 constitutional. [For a full discussion of this subject, see Irving Bernstein, The New Deal Collective Bargaining Policy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1950).]
• 1937-1944 COUNSEL TO SENATOR WAGNER. In November, 1937, Mr. Levy became Legislative Counsel to Senator Robert F. Wagner. Mr. Wagner (1877-1953), a Democrat from New York, served in the United States Senate from 1927 until 1949 when he resigned owing to ill health. As Legislative Counsel, Mr. Levy succeeded Leon Keyserling. His duties included service to Senator Wagner in his capacity as Chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee. [Regarding Wagner and the Senate in those years, see J. Joseph Huthmacher, Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1968). ] After Mr. Levy's service, the professional staff for Congress was vastly increased under provisions of the Legislative Reorganization Act of August 2, 1946. [P.L. 79601.] Mr. Levy helped draft legislation and arranged hearings on several subjects which Congress did not approve but which have had enduring importance. ANTI-LYNCHING BILL, 1938. Civil rights was one of Mr. Levy's major interests, expressed notably as one of the draftsmen of the Wagner-Van Nuys anti-lynching bill, an amendment to H.R. 1507, 75th Cong., 3d Sess. The bill made lynching a federal crime, would prosecute negligent law enforcement officials, and would fine the county within which the lynching took place. The Senate voted on February 21, 1938, to table the bill, following eight weeks of filibuster by the bill's opponents, including several Southern Democratic Senators and Senator William Borah, Republican of Idaho. Failure of President Roosevelt to take a strong stand in favor of the bill hindered its chances for passage. [For the civil rights context and a discussion of the momentous filibuster, see Robert F. Zangrando, "The NAACP and a Federal Lynching Bill, 1934-1940," Journal of Negro History, Vol. 50 (April 1965), pp. 106-117. Also a Bobbs-Merrill Reprint in Black Studies, No. BC-33l. The filibuster can also be followed in Congo Rec., 75th Cong., 3d Sess., pp. 138-161 and pp. 2090-2118 passim (1938).]
  
  WAGNER-ROGERS BILL FOR CHILD REFUGEES FROM NAZI GERMANY, 1939. Passionately concerned with the harsh policies of Nazi Germany, Mr. Levy helped draft the Wagner-Rogers Bill, S.J. Res. 64, 76th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 1278 (1939). An attempt to liberalize the Immigration Act of 1924, the bill allowed for the entrance of twenty thousand German refugees ages fourteen and under, during a two-year period. These refugees would not be counted against the national quota for Germany. Patriotic orders, such as the American Legion, opposed the measure, claiming it would "deprive American children." Once again the President failed to give the bill his strong support, and on June 30, 1939, the Senate Immigration Committee barely passed a hopelessly emasculated bill that would not allow the refugee youths to be counted independently of the national origins quota for Germany. [For details, see David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938-1941 (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968), and Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (New York: Random House, 1967).]
  
  NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE. The Medicare programs developed as law in the 1960s were anticipated by the pioneer health bills developed in part by Mr. Levy and championed by Senator Robert F. Wagner in the 1930s. President Roosevelt never recommended a national health insurance program and the Social Security Act became law August 14, 1935 without it. In 1943 the first "Wagner-Murray-Dingell" bill (S. 1161, H.R. 2861, 78th Cong., 1st Sess.) was introduced. This measure included a compulsory national health-insurance system for persons of all ages, to be financed through a payroll tax. The bill died in 1944 at the end of the 78th Congress. Mr. Levy cherished his legislative work on this idea as the most important in his career. [For a full account of this episode, see Daniel S. Hirshfield, The Lost Reform: The Campaign for Compulsory Health Insurance in the United States from 1932 to 1943 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).]
• 1944-1946 In World War II, Mr. Levy served in the United States Army, Judge Advocate General Office, in the European and Mediterranean theatres. He entered the service in February, 1944 and was discharged in March, 1946.
• 1946-1947 Following the war, Mr. Levy returned to serve as counsel to the Senate Banking and Currency Committee then chaired by Senator Charles Tobey (1880-1953), a Republican from New Hampshire and member of the Senate from 1939 to 1953. SENATE BANKING AND CURRENCY COMMITTEE. Mr. Levy estimated 80 per cent of his time as a lawyer in the United States Senate was spent on the activities of the Banking and Currency Committee, which covered a wide area. Those subjects included early public housing, urban renewal, work of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, export controls, Treasury Department, Federal Reserve Bank, International Monetary Fund and domestic relief programs. The Committee also dealt with wartime economic controls and small business liquidation.
• 1947-1970 WASHINGTON LAWYER. From 1947 onward Mr. Levy was in private law practice in Washington, D. C., in partnership with Charles Fahy. Mr. Fahy left the firm in 1952 upon his appointment as Circuit Judge in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia by President Truman. Sharing a suite with Fahy and Levy were Rufus Poole and Milton Denbo, John A. Danaher and Barrett Quirk. This loose-knit firm existed for about six years. From 1953 to 1970 Mr. Levy was a self-employed lawyer in private practice in Washington. [For a broad discussion of this topic, not connected specifically to Mr. Levy's work at all, see Charles Horsky, The Washington Lawyer (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1953).] PALESTINE. Senator Wagner was vitally interested in the plight of the Jews and in Palestine, and Mr. Levy was his close advisor. Their tireless effort to save lives of Jews in Nazi Germany before and during the Second World War was followed by an active concern for refugees and the establishment of a Jewish state afterwards. Mr. Levy prepared a number of Senator Wagner's speeches on these subjects. In law practice, Charles Fahy and Philip Levy together represented the government of the then Palestine a short time before the declaration of the State of Israel. On May 14, 1948 the State of Israel was proclaimed at Tel-Aviv. On the same day it received de facto recognition from the United States through the action of President Truman. After that time, Mr. Levy had no formal or professional ties, other than that of the concerned citizen.
  
  CONGRESSIONAL AND POLITICAL REFORM. An abiding interest in American political institutions on the part of Philip Levy was expressed in a series of essay reviews on Congress and the parties. Mr. Levy reviewed Congress at the Crossroads by George B. Galloway and Twentieth Century Congress by Estes Kefauver and Jack Levin [Columbia Law Review, Vol. 47 (Nov. 1947), pp. l246-l248]; Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System, a report on a committee of the American Political Science Association chaired by E.E. Schattschneider [Harvard Law Review, Vol. 65 (1952), pp. 536-541]; and Congress at Work by Stephen K. Bailey and Howard D. Samuel, and Next Steps in Congressional Reform by George B. Galloway [Columbia Law Review, Vol. 53 (June 1953), pp. 888-890].
• 1949-1969 FOREIGN CLAIMS WORK. Philip Levy's activities before the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission of the United States are widely regarded as significant and beneficial both for the clients whom he represented and for the Commission itself. He was counsel in almost all the programs of the Commission, commencing in 1949 with the first claims program against the Government of Yugoslavia. Exacting, precedent making work was done by Mr. Levy alone, and claims work occupied most of the last two decades of his life and represented his flowering as a mature legal thinker.
  
  Two acts of Congress, the War Claims Act of 1948 (62 Stat. 1240) and the International Claims Settlement Act of 1949, was amended (64 Stat. 12) and Reorganization Plan 1 of 1954 (68 Stat. 1279) form the basis of the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission of the United States. This three-member Commission has jurisdiction to determine claims of United States nationals against foreign governments for compensation for losses and injuries sustained by them. Available funds have their sources in international settlements, liquidation of foreign assets in this country by the Departments of Justice or the Treasury, and from public funds when provided by Congress. These programs were conducted from 1949 to 1954 by the International Claims Commission and since 1954 by the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission.
  
  Mr. Levy's claims work has been praised by Mr. Svonko Rode, senior review attorney at the Claims Commission, in these words: "In claims programs, such as against the Governments of Bulgaria, Rumania, Italy, Hungary, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Cuba, and in the war damage program which encompassed war losses sustained by American companies and individuals in Albania, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Danzig, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Yugoslavia, Philip Levy was representing substantial claims of American industrial enterprises. His views and opinions on numerous questions in the field of international law were always held in high regard, and in many instances influenced the final determination made by the Commission. He was also known as a very precise and accurate worker, giving a high degree of attention to minute details in the preparation of his statements. briefs and arguments that he used to deliver before the Commission. In the field of international claims the late Philip Levy was one of the leaders in the professional community, and among the representatives appearing before the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, his name will always be associated with the most outstanding attorneys who entered their appearance before that agency." [Statement of Svonko Rode, Esq., March, 1971.]
• 1949-1969 LABOR LAW. Mr. Levy held a steady interest in the development of national labor policy. For many years he was a teacher of labor law as a Lecturer at American University Law School in Washington, D. C. He followed Congressional policy closely. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower named him a member of the National Emergency Board of Inquiry, under the Taft-Hartley Act, to deal with the American Locomotive Company dispute in 1952-53. Mr. Levy was also a member of the National Panel of Arbitrators of the American Arbitration Association.
• 1959-1960 Member, Board of Commercial Arbitration, American Arbitration Association.
• 1963-1970 Member, Board of Governors, Washington Foreign Law Society.
• 1963-1965 President, Columbia Law School Alumni Association of the District of Columbia.
• 1966-1967 Chairman, Committee on International Law, District of Columbia Bar Association.
• 1969 Prepared oral history contribution about the 1930s for the Cornell University Labor History Program
  
  For a year Mr. Levy did valuation work as an arbitrator for the Agency for International Development. A.I.D. had been established in 1961 to carry out United States overseas programs of economic and technical assistance to less developed countries designed to bring countries to a level of self-sufficiency.
• 1970 May 22 Died, Washington, D. C., at age 61