Fair Labor: The Remarkable Life and Legal Career of Bessie Margolin (1909–1996)

Abstract

Fair Labor: The Remarkable Life and Legal Career of Bessie Margolin (1909-1996) MARLENE TRESTMAN1 On January 28, 1972, more than 200 co­ workers, family and friends, as well as dozens ofprominentjudges and government officials, arrived at the Washington Hilton Hotel for a formal dinner to mark the retirement of Bessie Margolin, Associate Solicitor ofLabor. This was no ordinary retirement party for a Washington bureaucrat. Earl Warren, the retired ChiefJustice of the United States, was a guest speaker; he would sing the praises of Margolin, who had argued cases in every one of the eleven circuits and twenty-eight cases in the Supreme Court, including fifteen before Warren himself. Warren and other distinguished speakers would reminisce about her thirty-three years at the Department of Labor, where she oversaw the court enforce­ ment ofthe Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), and later the Equal Pay Act. When it was his turn at the podium, War­ ren summed up her contribution to labor law: “... I would like to thank [Margolin] tonight, because the bare bones ofthat Act would have been wholly inadequate without the imple­ mentation she forged in the courtrooms ofour land. Hers must have been an exciting experi­ ence, because the labor laws and particularly the FLSA were anathema to many segments ofour society. Miss Margolin has been largely responsible for making both of them mean­ ingful and respectable in all quarters.” Warren also captured the essence ofMargolin’s signif­ icance to women: “What a satisfaction it must be for her in this day and age when women are crying out for equality, to realize that she has proved equality for them in a man’s world, by prevailing in the highest courts ofthe land in a larger percentage ofher cases than any lawyer ofmodern times. And all ofthis in the interest ofthe working men and women ofAmerica.”2 Margolin’s distinguished career as a gov­ ernment lawyer was all the more impressive considering her religion, gender, and hum­ ble origins. “Becy Margolyn,” as her name originally was recorded by the neighborhood mid-wife, was born in Brooklyn, New York FAIR LABOR 43 in 1909, the second child of recent RussianJewish immigrants, Harry and Rebecca Goldschmidt Margolin. Within a few years af­ ter Bessie was bom, the Margolins left New York’stough and crowded conditions and made their way to Memphis, Tennessee, to join other Jewish immigrants. There, Rebecca died shortly after giving birth to a third child, Jacob, leaving Harry alone and without means to care for their three, very young children. Harry’s plight caught the attention of the Memphis Hebrew Benevolent Society, which arranged for four-year-old Bessie and her sib­ lings to be admitted as “half-orphans” to live in the New Orleans Jewish Orphans’ Home.3 Originally founded in 1855 as the Home for Jewish Widows and Orphans, the Home in which Margolin was raised was situated prominently on St. Charles Avenue, near the stately mansions of New Orleans’ most prosperous citizens. Guided by philan­ thropic trustees who sought to enhance their wards’ potential for success by integrating them into the city’s social and economic power structure, the Home provided a nurturing envi­ ronment where Margolin and her siblings grew up together with more than 100 other orphans and half-orphans from throughout the Deep South.4 The Home’s forward-thinking benefactors had also established the nearby Isidore New­ man Manual Training School, which admit­ ted children “without discrimination because of creed... after our own wards are provided for.”5 One of the best preparatory schools in the South, Newman prided itself for teach­ ing that “wealth is no evidence of worth, that the favored must make a return in propor­ tion to their advantages, and that the only re­ spectable aristocracy is an aristocracy ofhon­ orable achievement and personal decency.”6 By Margolin’s time, wearing Home uniforms was no longer required, allowing Home chil­ dren to mix more comfortably with Newman classmates, many of whom represented the city’s most affluent families. In school, Margolin forged a lifelong friendship, and a shared interest in fashion, with Kate Polack, whose prosperous family welcomed Margolin into their gracious home.7 Within the...