Post on 23-Feb-2023
Panel: Long-Haired Men and Short-Haired Women:The Making of Left Feminism during the New Deal Era
Berkshire Conference on the History of WomenJune 11, 2011
Heterosocial Networks in the Making of Left Feminism in the NewDeal Era:
Josephine Roche and the Long-Haired Men of Denver
Robyn Muncy
In Denver, Colorado during the spring of 1913, a political
struggle raged between an entrenched political machine and a
group of progressive reformers. By April, the most visible
leader in the progressive camp was 26-year-old Josephine Roche,
recently appointed to the police force to implement new anti-vice
laws affecting children. Just after Roche published evidence
that members of the city’s Fire and Police Board were themselves
blatantly violating anti-vice laws, one of the accused incumbents
fulminated: “I do not favor long-haired men and short-haired
women who step into the limelight and direct fathers and mothers
how they should bring up their children. It is useless and worth
nothing.”1
2
Although every man in Denver’s progressive community
actually sported cropped hair and every woman flowing locks, the
angry city official was on to something: Josephine Roche was
part of a heterosocial network of reformers who were reimagining
the meaning of manhood and womanhood as they tried to shove
business interests out of government and to diminish economic
inequalities in the city. Indeed, the men in that reforming
community were mentoring Roche in ways that would help her break
through one gender barrier after another. Most important for
our purposes, those men were helping to produce a variant of left
feminism, and they made it possible for Roche to operate as part
of a “left-feminist scene” in Washington during the New Deal
era.2
Historians Landon Storrs and Ellen DuBois have developed the
term “left feminism” to refer to progressives who did not from
the 1920s through the 1950s identify as feminists (because
1“Mayor’s Critic Out of Office,” Rocky Mountain News, April 25, 1913; “Discharge was Spite, Not Economy, Assert Miss Roche’s Friends,” Denver Republican, April 25, 1913; folder 5, box 10, Josephine Roche Collection, Archives, Norlin Library, University of Colorado, Boulder.2Landon first used this phrase in “Red Scare Politics and the Suppression of Popular Front Feminism: The Loyalty Investigation of Mary Dublin Keyserling,” Journal of American History 90 (September 2003): 491-524.
3
supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment had claimed the term for
themselves) but who nevertheless believed that systematic
practices and expectations enforced the subordination of women to
men just as a class system subordinated workers to employers.
Left feminists opposed both systems of oppression.3 [Roche’s
generation was much less consistent on racial injustice, but in
the 1930s, racial justice was emerging into their consciousness
in a new way, something I do not have space to elaborate here but
would love to discuss during our session.]
Historians have carefully analyzed the meaning of all-female
networks and institutions for the advancement of both individual
women and their social justice projects at various moments in the
twentieth century. Newer histories of feminism suggest, however,
that in the 1930s and 1940s at least left feminists developed and
pursued their agendas for social change within movements and
associations that involved men as well as women. Landon and I
3 See Storrs, “Red Scare Politics,” and Ellen Carol DuBois, “Eleanor Flexnor and the History of American Feminism,” Gender and History 3 (Spring 1991): 81-90. See also Amy Swerdlow, “The Congress of American Women: Left-Feminist Peace Political in the Cold War,” in U.S.History as Women’s History, ed. Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 296-312.
4
conceived this panel as a chance to expose and analyze the role
of informal heterosocial networks in the creation and maintenance
of left feminism during the New Deal Era.
My paper offers the case of Josephine Roche, a progressive
activist who participated in many heterosocial networks over the
course of her long reforming career and who became the second
highest-ranking woman in the New Deal government. When I
proposed the paper, I was certain that Roche was a participant in
what Landon has called a “left feminist scene” in New Deal
Washington. As I wrote, however, I worried, by turns, that she
was not sufficiently “left” or sufficiently “feminist” or
sufficiently “on the scene” to qualify. I will make a case for
positioning her in a left feminist scene, but hope our papers
might ultimately lead to a discussion of what exactly we imagine
the parameters of that scene to have been.
My paper does not explore a heterosocial network active
directly in the New Deal’s left feminist scene but rather a
mixed-gender group that produced a participant in that scene.
This group originated in early-twentieth century Denver, and its
significance lay in making Josephine Roche the kind of left
5
feminist she was and in opening unique opportunities for her that
made possible the particular roles she played in the New Deal
government. [Without this group and, more particularly, the men
in this group, Roche might well have served in Franklin
Roosevelt’s administration, but she would have done so in
agencies already claimed for women--like the Children’s Bureau or
the Women’s Bureau in the Federal Department of Labor.] Instead,
she operated in venues where women were rare, and the scope of
her work--from shaping a code of fair competition for the coal
industry to developing a national health plan--was unprecedented
among female policymakers. Perhaps one meaning of left-feminist
heterosocial networks, then, was to expand the purview of women's
authority beyond the parameters that more exclusively female
groups could by themselves achieve. Heterosocial networks may
have given left feminism its scope within the New Deal
government.
Since most of us do not know Josephine Roche at all, let me
briefly introduce her. She was born in 1886 to an aspiring
banker’s family on the Great Plains, attended Vassar College as
6
part of the second-generation of college-educated women, and
graduated in 1908 already a progressive reformer in that she
believed government a potentially valuable ally of workers and
consumers in conflicts with corporate interests.4 She pursued
graduate work in political science at Columbia University between
1909 and 1912, lived in a social settlement during those years,
stumped for women’s suffrage, and in the 1920s did a stint at the
Children’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor. 5 In all
these ways, her biography fits historians’ expectations of early
twentieth-century women reformers in the U.S.6
4Basic information about Roche may be found in Elinor McGinn, A Wide-Awake Woman: Josephine Roche in the Era of Reform (Denver: Colorado Historical Society, 2002) and Robyn Muncy, “Josephine Roche,” Notable American Women,ed. Susan Ware (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2004): 548-49. Works important to my thinking about Progressivism include Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1880-1914 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing ‘the People’: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006) ; Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998).5Roche to Lindsey, [Fall 1909], box 23; Roche to Lindsey, [February 1912], box 35; Roche to Lindsey, [February 1912], box 36; Roche to Lindsey, [Spring 1912], box 37; Benjamin Barr Lindsey Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. Katharine Lenroot, GeneralMemorandum on Editorial Division, 14 November 1922, file 1-3-7, box 164, Children’s Bureau Central File, 1921-25, RG 102, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.6For the “usual story,” see especially Susan Ware, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 18-42; Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (NewYork: New Press, 1994), 72-84.
7
Her life veered dramatically off that established path in
the late 1920s when she inherited her father’s shares in Rocky
Mountain Fuel (RMF), a coal mining concern in Colorado where her
dad was, by the time of his death, president. Instead of living
off the proceeds of her inheritance, Roche took a shocking tack:
she amassed enough shares to become the majority stockholder of
RMF, kicked out its anti-labor management, and invited her
progressive friends to run the company with her. 7 She was the
only woman in the U.S. to run a coal company during the 1920s and
1930s. She immediately invited the United Mine Workers of
America to organize the miners at Rocky Mountain Fuel and signed
an historic labor contract in August 1928.8 Labor reporters
referred to it as an “Industrial Magna Carta.”9
The decision to take over Rocky Mountain Fuel and to try to
introduce there a new relationship between labor and capital led
7Probate File of John J. Roche, Opened 31 January 1927, County Court ofthe City and County of Denver; Elinor McGinn, A Wide-Awake Woman: Josephine Roche in the Era of Reform (Denver: Colorado Historical Society, 2002), 63-64.8Agreement, Rocky Mountain Fuel Company and the United Mine Workers of America, District 15, 1928, folder 12, box 15, Roche Collection.9 “Industrial magna carta” is Louis Stark’s phrase in Louis Stark, “A Woman Unravels an Industrial Knot,” New York Times Magazine, February 7, 1932, pp. 6, 17.
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to the particular roles Roche would play in the New Deal
government, and it was this decision that the heterosocial
network in Denver especially explained.
Roche first eased into that network during the summer of
1907, between her junior and senior years at Vassar. Her parents
had moved to Denver so that her father could join the management
of Rocky Mountain Fuel, and Roche found summer employment there
in Benjamin Lindsey’s juvenile court. Lindsey’s famous
experiment kept children out of the criminal courts because he
believed their offenses were usually caused not by any fault of
the children but by an unjust economic system. Lindsey’s
approach appealed to Roche’s growing interest in creative uses of
government to diminish what she and so many other Americans saw
as increasing and untenable economic and political inequality.
Her summer experience in Lindsey’s court was so positive that
when she graduated from Vassar in 1908, she took up full time
work with him.10
10 Interview of JR by Gerry Dick, October 9, 1937, folder 2, box 36, Roche Collection; “Denver’s Dynamic Josephine Roche Takes Treasury Post,” Washington Post, December 1934, folder 6, box 35, Roche Collection.
9
[Lindsey was a supporter of women’s as well as children’s
rights. He had entered Denver politics after women won suffrage
in Colorado (1893), and he relied heavily on women voters to keep
him and his new-fangled court alive in its many contests against
the corporate interests that controlled both the Democratic and
Republican parties in the city and state. (Railroads and coal
constituted the biggest of those interests.) As a result of this
reliance on women voters as well as his view of mothers’
centrality to children’s welfare and poverty’s centrality to
juvenile crime, Lindsey advocated state-sponsored maternity
leaves for working mothers, publicly funded health care for
mothers and babies and public stipends for widows with dependent
children. Over many years, Roche worked with him on all of those
initiatives.11]
Lindsey was at the center of a fascinating group of men and
women reformers in the Mile High City. His inner circle included
Edward Costigan, a reforming lawyer and his activist wife, Mabel,
both of whom had fought political corruption and supported public
welfare programs alongside Lindsey for several years by the time
11 Charles Larsen, The Good Fight: The Life and Times of Ben B. Lindsey (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972).
10
that Roche joined them.12 The circle also included George
Creel, a self-righteous, muckraking newspaperman from Kansas
City.13 Other activists came and went, but this inner circle
remained crucial to Josephine Roche’s future.14 They constituted
what they called her political “gang.”15
The “gang” enlarged and shaped Josephine Roche’s life in
multiple ways. During the 1910s, they helped her break gender
barriers by offering job opportunities that allowed her to emerge
as an independent public leader in her own right as well as the
chance to manage a male workforce. They also constituted her
interpretive community when a tumultuous coal strike rocked
southeastern Colorado in 1913-14. These were formative
experiences for Roche, experiences that explained many of her
political ideals as well as her veering off of the political and
professional paths most familiar to women reformers in the 1920s.
12 Lindsey and O’Higgins, The Beast, p. 196.13 George Creel, Rebel At Large: Recollections of Fifty Crowded Years (New York: G.P. Putnams’ Sons, 1947), pp. 85-97.14 Among those were Harvey O’Higgins and his wife, Anna, Edward Keatingand William Raines and later Oscar Chapman.15 For warmth of these relationships, see O’Higgins’s correspondence inRoche Collection.
11
At many points, “the gang” lowered the walls separating
women’s from men’s realms for Roche, expanding her notion of
where exactly women belonged. A subtle example occurred in 1912.
When Roche had been in grad school at Columbia for three years,
her Colorado friends drew her into the new Progressive Party, a
third-party effort that nominated Theodore Roosevelt as its
standard-bearer in the presidential contest that year. Ben
Lindsey served on the Party’s national board and was very nearly
nominated its vice-presidential candidate; Costigan was the
Colorado party’s gubernatorial candidate. Even though Roche was
living in New York at the time, she attended the national
Progressive Party convention as Colorado’s only female delegate.
“I was the only woman incidentally in the Colorado crowd of
twenty,” she reported to a friend, adding, “I can’t say I was at
all disturbed by my oneness.”16
Roche was also one of only about 20 official female
delegates at the convention and though she met with those other
women, she was more deeply intrigued by the glimpses of power
provided by her male mentors.17 After breakfasting at Hull House
with Jane Addams and other female delegates, she confided to a
12
friend, “I’ll have to confess, however, that the most interesting
part of it all to me has been the interviews Ed [Costigan] and
the Judge [Lindsey] have included me in with Roosevelt. . . .”
Those interviews focused on a situation in Colorado that tested
Theodore Roosevelt’s loyalties. Roche observed of Roosevelt, “He
has been a most interesting person to watch and listen to during
the proceedings.” After a final midnight conference at which
Costigan won what he needed from Roosevelt, Roche reported with
relief, “a public statement has been secured and the fall
campaign will be the most thrilling yet out there.”18 By
including her in these back room negotiations, Lindsey and
Costigan gave Roche a sense that none of the walls between
women’s and men’s worlds was unbreachable.
16 Roche to Read Lewis, August 1912, Read Lewis Papers, private collection, copies in author’s possession. Roche does not seem to have attended meetings of New York’s Progressive Party, where many of the women in her reform community were active. She preferred to participate in politics in Colorado because she exercised the vote there. She felt that she had greater political traction in Colorado because she was a full citizen there in a way that she was not in New York. As she would put it later on, explaining her love of life in Colorado, “I suppose it’s because I find a certain quality in life here that I hungered for in vain all the time I worked in New York . .. I think perhaps I can express it by saying I feel more master of myself here.”Roche to Read Lewis, January 2, 1914, Read Lewis Papers.
13
The Denver gang also gave Roche less subtle opportunities to
break into male bastions of power as, for instance, when they
recruited her to be Denver’s first policewoman. In the elections
of 1912, her reforming crowd in Denver won a number of local
government positions, which they used to create, among other
things, two new positions on the police force. They begged
Josephine to fill one of those positions. With a bit of
trepidation but also terrific excitement, Roche ditched grad
school to police Denver’s vice districts and wage a campaign
against the corruption that connected Denver’s city government to
commercial establishments purveying alcohol and sexual
opportunity to youth. That battle turned so ugly in spring 1913
that George Creel had to leave town and Ben Lindsey suffered a
nervous breakdown, leaving Roche to lead the movement. She did
so with gusto, producing regular mile-high headlines that
connected the city fathers to prostitution, drunken children, and
illegal gambling. Every night in the spring 1913, Roche met with
local organizations to expose the business interests that
17 Melanie Gustafson, “Partisan Women in the Progressive Era,” Journal of Women’s History (Summer 1997): 7-30.18 Roche to Read Lewis, August 1912, Read Lewis Papers.
14
controlled their city government and, in her view, threatened
their children’s welfare. When she finally published evidence
nailing members of the Fire and Police Board for violating
Denver’s vice laws, the mayor fired her. That dismissal was
illegal, and a judge soon reinstated her, but within months Roche
resigned in protest against the refusal of the district attorney
to indict a city official for demonstrable violations of the vice
ordinances.19 Despite her losses, Roche had, as Denver’s first
policewoman, developed her political chops and a stomach for
public showdowns. She had emerged as a public leader in her own
right.
George Creel, who had convinced Roche to take the police
job, offered her another crucial position just a few years later.
This one convinced Roche that she could manage a workforce of
men. Creel achieved infamy during World War I for his leadership
of the Committee on Public Information, a federal agency charged
with generating enthusiasm for US involvement in World War I.
Roche grieved that involvement, but when Creel asked her to
19Documents in folders 5 and 6, box 10, Roche Collection; Roche to Sonya Levien, 30 August 1913, with enclosures, HM 56542-56547, Sonya Levien Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
15
create a division of his agency that would reach out to foreign
language communities, she grabbed the opportunity. In her view,
Creel offered a chance to integrate immigrants more fully into
the U.S. political community and to convince nativists that
immigrants were loyal Americans.20 With the exception of a few
stenographers and clerks, the staff members of Roche’s division
were men from the foreign language press, and after the war was
over, she continued their work in a voluntary organization called
the Foreign Language Information Service. By the time she turned
the FLIS over to a successor, Roche had done what few women in
the 1920s had done: she had for many years run an organization in
which men constituted the bulk of the employees.21
Perhaps the most important position that Roche’s male
mentors opened to her was organizer for Colorado’s Progressive
Party in 1914. That job required Roche to crisscross the state,
organizing for the party in the midst of a widespread and bitter
coal strike. Her friend and mentor, Edward Costigan, was the
party’s gubernatorial candidate in 1914 and head of the state
party. Costigan insisted that the coal miners must be permitted
to organize on their own behalf and that the state should come to
16
their aid against the brutal and oppressive coal operators who
routinely violated both state laws regulating the coal industry
and workers’ constitutional rights to free speech and assembly.
In court, Costigan defended coal miners accused of violence and
other crimes, including the strike’s leader, John Lawson.
Against Costigan’s pleas, the state militia sided exclusively
with employers, producing conditions that resulted in one of the
century’s most infamous instances of anti-labor violence: the
Ludlow Massacre. In that April 1914 conflagration, miners’ wives
and children died as did many miners themselves and state
militiamen. Nothing short of class war then took hold in the
20 Kennedy, Over Here, 61-74. Stephen Vaughn, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980, 78. Roche to Read Lewis, September 15, 1913. Lindsey to Harvey O’Higgins, November 9, 1918, box 59; Lindsey to Harvey O’Higgins, February 5, 1919, box 60; LindseyPapers. Roche to Read Lewis, May 6, 1918, Read Lewis Papers. Roche in Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information 1917; 1918; 1919(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920), 81. 21 Mr. Joy to Mr. Persons, April 19, 1921, folder 15, box 4, Records ofthe Immigrants and Refugee Service of America, University of Minnesota(hereafter IRSA). Statement of Expenditures of the FLIS, February 1st–September 30, 1920, page 11, folder 15, box 4, Records of the Immigrant and Refugee Services of America, Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Roche to FrankPersons, March 17, 1921; Expenditures of the Bureau of Foreign Language Information Service, February 1-Setpember 30, 1920; folder 15, box 4, IRSA. Roche to Frank Persons, March 17, 1921 folder 15, box4, IRSA.
17
coal fields of Colorado, a war put down only when federal troops
were finally sent in.22 In response to the outbreak of violence,
many Coloradans called for Law and Order and even some
progressives insisted that the miners had become insurrectionists
when they took up arms against the militia. Costigan, Roche and
the Progressive Party, however, preached Law, Order and Justice,
arguing that “Law and Order without Justice could be no permanent
Law and Order.”23
Witnessing the coal strike while working with Costigan in
the Progressive Party transformed Josephine Roche into (what
historian Joseph McCartin has called) a labor progressive.24 She
saw that even where good public policy allegedly protected
workers, employers could be as exploitive as they wished if
workers themselves were not empowered to enforce the good
policies. She came to believe that the self-organization of
workers was as crucial as good social legislation to diminishing
inequalities of wealth and power. She would later say, “My
ambition is to live to see all workers of America organized in
unions.”25 Moreover, in the aftermath of the strike, which
included the near extinction of organized labor from Colorado
18
coal mining, Roche committed herself to “right the wrong of
Ludlow.”26 The long-haired men of Denver, in positioning Roche
as an eye-witness to the strike and serving as her interpretive
community during the event, shaped the political ideals that she
took into the New Deal. [I emphasize the importance of the
interpretive community here because Roche had also been in New
York City at the time of the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand
(1909-10) and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911), but because
her interpretive community there emphasized good public policy as
22 George S. McGovern and Leonard F. Guttridge, The Great Coalfield War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972). Roche to Read Lewis, February 23, 1914, Read Lewis Papers.Edward P. Costigan and James Brewster, “Conditions in the Coal Mines of Colorado,” Brief for the Striking Miners, presented to Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Mines and Mining, House of Representatives, 63 Congress, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914. Copy in folder 1, box 12, Roche Collection. Roche to Read Lewis, March 12, 1914;Roche to Read Lewis, April 29, 1914; Roche to Read Lewis, May 5, 1914,Read Lewis Papers. Costigan to Clarence Dodge, May 16, 1914; Ira DeLong to Edwin Miller, June 15, 1914, folder 2, box 7; Costigan Papers. J. Homer Dickson to Costigan, June 39, 1914, folder 10, box 7, Edward P. Costigan Papers, Archives, Norlin Library, University of Colorado, Boulder. Costigan to Edwin Miller, June 13, 1914, folder 4,box 7, Costigan Papers. Lindsey to William Allen White, June 15, 1914, box 138, Lindsey Papers. George Eisler to Lindsey, June 27, 1914, box 47, Lindsey Papers. John Crone to Costigan, June 29, 1914, folder 2, box 7, Costigan Papers. E.E. McLaughlin to Lindsey, June 18, 1914, box 47, Lindsey Papers.23 For instance, L.F. Cornwell to Costigan, July 8, 1914, folder 2, box7, Edward Costigan Papers, Archives, Norlin Library, University of Colorado, Boulder.
19
the best response to class inequality and work place
exploitation, she had not taken up the cause of organized labor
to the degree she did after Ludlow.]
The accumulation of experiences made possible by Roche’s
heterosocial network in Devner also meant that in 1927, when she
inherited her father’s shares in Rocky Mountain Fuel, she saw her
inheritance in a way few women could have. First, she saw it as
an opportunity to follow through on her pledge to right the wrong
of Ludlow: she could facilitate the return of the United Mine
Workers to Colorado’s coalfields. Second, she, unlike most
American women, could imagine taking over a coal company because
she had already presided over an organization employing mostly
men and been shown repeatedly that the bulwarks that kept women
out of powerful positions were definitely breachable. Finally,
her heterosocial network gave her access to the expertise she
needed to help her run the company. She invited Costigan, John
Lawson, the organizer of the 1914 coal strike, and Merle Vincent,
another crony from her Progressive Party days, to run the company
with her. Together, they renewed collective bargaining in the
coalfields of Colorado, where Roche ran her company in
20
consultation with the miners at RMF and with enthusiastic support
from Colorado’s State Federation of Labor. While companies that
were paying lower wages and offering fewer benefits fled into
bankruptcy in the early 1930s, Roche was advertising an operating
profit and paying the highest wages of any coal operator in the
state.27
Taking over Rocky Mountain Fuel and drawing organized labor
back to the coalfields of Colorado moved Josephine Roche into the
progressive spotlight.28 She was even lauded on the floor of
the U.S. Senate as “a prophet of a new and wiser social order.”29
Especially as the Great Depression deepened and raised new
questions about the viability and value of capitalism, Roche’s
apparently profitable coal company seemed to suggest that some 24Joseph McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921 (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1997). See also Shelton Stromquist, Re-inventing “The People,” Chapter 7.25 Gerry Dick, typescript interview with Roche, October 9, 1937, folder2, box 36, Roche Collection. 26Ludlow documents, folders 3 and 5, box 12, Roche Collection. See also A.B. Macdonald, “Daughter of Man Who Once . . .”, KC Star, 8 July 1934, Roche file, Vassar Alumnae Office, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie,New York; “Denver’s Dynamic Josephine Roche Takes Treasury Post,” Washington Post, 9 December 1934, folder 6, box 35, Roche Collection; Roche’s Biographical Notes, Biographical Notes File, box 32, RG 220, Records of the Interdepartmental Committee to Coordinate Health and Welfare Activities, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.
21
version of capitalism could be both sustained and just, making
her a sort of progressive celebrity. [It is tempting to say
Progressive Rock Star, in reference to her work in coal, but it
is probably just too corny.] Roche’s apparent commitment to
capitalism at this moment might seem to keep her out of the left
feminist camp. While she seriously considered voting for the
Socialist Party’s presidential candidate in the 1916 and thought
Norman Thomas far and away the best option in1932, she ultimately
went with Democrats in both elections because she thought the
Socialists could not possibly win. For Roche, as for many other
labor progressives, capitalism was on trial in the late 1920s and
1930s, neither yet fully condemned nor fully vindicated. This
set her on the left edge of progressivism certainly, but I will
be interested in what others think about the proper label for
her.
In any case, her expertise as a progressive industrialist
perfectly matched the hopes of Franklin Roosevelt’s
administration when it took power in 1933. Indeed, shortly after
27Just for instance, Alberta Pike, “She’s a Tender-Hearted Battler: Josephine Roche, Candidate for Governor,” Draft article for Rocky Mountain News, May 25, 1934, folder 10, box 24, Roche Collection.
22
FDR was sworn in as president, Roche’s participation in his New
Deal began with helping to devise a code of fair practices to
govern the coal industry under the National Recovery
Administration, the country’s first peace-time attempt at federal
economic planning. 30 Roche thus began building her relationship
with the New Deal as an industrialist and through an agency in
which few other women participated, a situation made possible by
the mentoring of Denver’s long-haired men.
The cementing of her relationship with the New Deal
government was also directly facilitated by those men, especially
Edward Costigan, who had been elected U.S. senator from Colorado
in 1930. In 1934, dismayed at Colorado’s resistance to New Deal
programs, Roche ran for governor of the state with the support of
Costigan’s political organization. Roche ran on the slogan,
“Roosevelt, Roche and Recovery,” to indicate her intention to
integrate Colorado fully into new national programs. By the time
she lost the Democratic gubernatorial primary, she was extremely
well-known and valued by the administration. Roosevelt then
appointed her as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and part of
23
her brief at the Treasury was oversight of the Public Health
Service (which was, oddly, in the Treasury in the 1930s).31
Roche could be appointed Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
in large part because she had successful experience as a
progressive in business. Her leadership at Rocky Mountain Fuel was28 “Woman Social Worker Inherits Vast Holdings in Strike-Bound Mine,” Camden Courier, January 18, 1928, clipping, Roche File, Vassar Alumnae Office; Mabel Cory Costigan, “A Woman’s Way with Coal Mines,” The Woman’s Journal, March 1929, 21; Sigrid Arne, “She Runs Mines: JosephineRoche,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, May 25, 1934, folder 4, box 17, Roche Papers;Louis Stark, Á Woman Unravels An Industrial Knot,” New York Times Magazine, February 7, 1932, 6+, Roche File, Vassar Alumnae Office. Nancy Cattell Hartford, “Josephine Roche—Industrialist,” Independent Woman (November 1932), 393, 420. Mary Anderson to Staff [at the Women’s Bureau], May 19, 1929, frame 359, reel 1, Mary Anderson Papers, Papers of the Women’s Trade Union League, Schlesinger Library,Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. “Miss Roche to Address Club Women Thursday,” Fort Collins Express-Courier, February 2, 1932, folder 5, box 11, Roche Papers. “Between You and Me,” Independent Woman, clipping, mid-1930s, p. 361, clipping, Gerrittson Collection: Women’s History Online, 1543-1945. The New Republic, September 19, 1928 and The Survey, December 15, 1928. Josephine Roche to Edward Keating, telegram, (1931); Josephine Roche to Edward Keating, telegram, July 22, 1931; folder 5, box 4, Roche Papers. See also, for instance, “Miss Roche Risks Personal Fortune to Protect Miners,”, June 9, 1931, Labor; “Josephine Roche Is Honored as Rival Cuts Wages of Miners,” July5, 1932; folder 7, box 17, Roche Papers. As for Colorado Labor Advocate, see for instance, “Entire New Staff of Officers Elected by UMWA Local,” Colorado Labor Advocate, June 25, 1931, p. 5; “A Mass Meeting of Miners Emphasizes Need of Organization,” Colorado Labor Advocate, August 20, 1931, p. 1. “Josephine Roche is Honored as Rival Cuts Wages in ofMiners,” Progressive Labor World, July 7, 1932, Roche File, Vassar Alumnae Office. Louis Stark, “A Colorado Mine War Peace Pact,” New York Times, September 23, 1928, p. XX3. Louis Stark, “A Woman Unravels An Industrial Knot,” New York Times Magazine, February 7, 1932, 6, Roche File, Vassar Alumnae Office.29 “Miss Josephine Roche, New Type of Industrial Leader,” Remarks of Senator Edward Costigan, in the Senate of the United States, June 15, 1932, 72
24
crucial to the particular roles she played in the New Deal
government, and that leadership was made possible in large
measure by her heterosocial network from Denver.
During her years in the New Deal government, Roche operated
on the feminist left.32
She served as an icon of feminist achievement and worked for
women’s advancement in the labor market and politics. She was
continually held up by the press and women’s organizations as a
model for other aspiring women. Literary Digest suggested her as a
presidential candidate, and Chi Omega, a women’s honorary
society, awarded her a medal in 1935, which was for a woman who
contributed “to the culture of the world.”33 Women’s colleges
awarded her honorary degrees; women’s organizations clamored to
Congress, First Session, Congressional Record, folder 3, box 18, Roche Collection.30D.W. Buchanan to Roche, 29 May 1933; Roche to D.W. Buchanan, 31 May 1933; Charles O’Neill to All Bituminous Coal Producers, 7 June 1933; Roche to Charles O’Neill, 14 June 1933; Report of the Coal Committee, 19 June 1933; Roche to Buchanan, 21 June 1933; Roche to Buchanan, 22 June 1933; List of Coal Operators Participating in National BituminousCoal Code Conference, Washington, D.C., 7-13 July 1933; Senator Essington et al to President, 13 July 1933; Transcript of Roche’s Testimony, Hearings on Coal Code; Roche to Kenneth Simpson, Deputy Administrator, NRA, 7 and 12 September 1933; folder 9, box 18, Roche Collection. “Coal Code Signed in Bitter Battle,” Washington Post, 17 September 1933.
25
engage her as a lecturer; the Women’s Division of the Democratic
Party identified her as one of its most popular speakers in 1935-
36.34
31 “Woman May Enter Race for Governorship of Colorado,” Pueblo Star Journal,March 27, 1934, folder 2, box 29, Roche Collection. Telegram, Edward and Mabel Costigan to Roche, May 11, 1934, folder 1, box 73, Roche Collection. Telegram, Roche to Honorable James A. Marsh, Chair, Democratic State Central Committee, May 23, 1934, folder 8, box 22, Roche Collection. “Josephine Roche Runs for Governor,” Rocky Mountain News, May 24, 1934, folder 3, box 28, Roche Collection. First radio address, reported, for instance, in “Closer Cooperation With RooseveltChief Pillar of Miss Josephine Roche’s Program,” Labor, September 4, 1934, p. 1. Copy of that August 8, 1934 address is also in folder 24, box 10, Roche Collection. Radio Address by Josephine Roche, Denver Colorado, September 5, 1934, folder 24, box 10, Roche Collection. Josephine Roche, “Economic Values and Human Needs,” August 10, 1934, folder 24, box10, Roche Collection. Roche, “Rebuilding American for Present and Future Citizens,” for Teachers’ Magazine, August 23, 1934 and Press Release, July 19, 1934, folder 24,box 10, Roche Collection. See also “Economic Values and Human Needs,”August 10, 1934, folder 24, box 10, Roche Collection. Josephine Roche, Press Release on speech before the Annual convention of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs in Colorado Springs, July 17, 1934, folder 24, box 10, Roche Collection. Declaration of Acceptance of Designation by Assembly,” July 30, 1934, folder 2, box 25, Roche Collection. “40-Day War Raging for State Democrats,” Rocky Mountain News, August 1, 1934, folder 1,box 28, Roche Collection.32 As for her feminist ideology, Roche insisted at every turn that women and men were more alike than different and in all things affecting public life—professions and politics—utterly the same. Whenasked whether her peculiar womanly gifts had made it possible for her to make peace with her workers at RMF, for instance, she responded, “Some women like some men can untangle situations and set business in motion, but it is not by means of feminine insight nor yet because of a ‘masculine grasp.’” She wanted women organized into labor unions
26
Roche loved campaigning on behalf of women candidates[—Caroline
O’Day, elected to Congress from New York in 1934 and Dorothy
Belllanca, a labor party candidate for Congress in Brooklyn later
in the 1930s were two of her favorites--]and she participated in
just as men were and to be included as workers in all the social democratic benefits of the New Deal, but she also believed that women needed special protections in the labor market because sexist discrimination peculiarly disadvantaged them there, and she vociferously opposed the Equal Rights Amendment because of its threat to those protections. She also supported a family wage for men (and women) because she recognized that many if not most women thought of domesticity as their first priority.
Roche had developed her position on the issue of protective legislation while a grad student at Columbia in the 1910s, and it is worth elaborating because it goes such a long way toward revealing thesort of feminist she was. As a young researcher in the ‘teens, for instance, she argued that women and girls received lower wages than men and boys not because of their lesser productivity, time in the labor force, strength or skill--that is, not because of anything natural or economically necessary--but because of what she called “an instinctive tendency to discriminate” against women and girls.? “Ingrained in people’s minds so deeply that it may not consciously guide their reasoning and action,” she explained, “is the traditional conception of woman as a dependent, engaged in the home in activities for which she receives shelter, food and care, but never monetary recompense.” This traditional conception, Roche called “an antiquatedcondition,” a “time-worn opinion” that employers nevertheless continued to accept, believing the girl has “somebody to keep her fromhaving to live entirely on the wage she earns.”? [All quotes are from her M.A.thesis at Columbia.] In other words, Roche identified what we would call sexism as the explanation for women’s and girls’ low wages and advocated minimum wage laws and other protective labor laws for women workers because of this systematic subordination of women in thelabor market. Special treatment was not in her case justified by women’s natural weakness or dependency but by discrimination in the labor market that men did not face. Roche was a feminist advocate of protective labor legislation.
27
Democratic Party institutes to prepare the mass of women voters
to participate in politics.35 [Roche joined the leftist League
of Women Shoppers as it formed to improve working conditions of
women wage-earners in the late 1930s, and she supported the work
of women in the Workers’ Alliance, a group representing the
unemployed, which constantly badgered the New Deal administration
for higher relief payments and higher wages from government work
33 On the discussion of Roche as presidential material, see Mary Margaret McBride, “Woman President Boom is Gaining,” Kentucky New Era, February, 28, 1935, p. 3 and “Women Leaders Open Drive for Presidency of the U.S.,” Christian Science Monitor, February 12, 1935, p. 1.The Chi Omega award itself is in folder 7, box 8, Roche Collection. For “culture of the world,” see “Miss Roche to Get Medal,” New York Herald Tribune, April 13, 1935. For full ceremony and speeches, see The Eleusis of Chi Omega, September 1935, folder 7, box 8, Roche Collection.34 Roche, “Points to Remember,” August 28, 1936, folder 5, box 33, Roche Collection. Roche to Mrs. Charles Tillett, November 23, 1936, folder 1, box 31, Roche Collection. “Pageantry and Sport Fill Convention Week,” Christian Science Monitor, June 22, 1936, p. 3; Roche to Morgenthau, June 8, 1936 and June 15, 1936, Roche file, box 240, Morgenthau Papers. Evidence of Roche’s participation in the fall campaign in is Roche folder, box 18, Records of the Women’s Division, Democratic National Committee, FDR Library. For some of her radio broadcasts, see Miss Wais to Miss Dewson, September 3, 1936 and Mrs. Morgenthau to Miss Dewson, September 22, 1936, Roche folder, box 18, Records of the Women’s Division. For speeches to labor, see, for instance, Roche to Morgenthau, August 18, 1936, Roche file, box 240, Morgenthau Papers.Mrs. Kenneth Gould to Miss Betty Lindley, October 28, 1936, folder 3, box 35, Roche Collection. See also documents in folder 2 box 33, Roche Collection for her participation in the campaign. “Warns Against Privilege,” New York Times, October 12, 1936, p.21; Press release, Roche at American Labor Party Forum, Brooklyn Academy of Music, October 11, 1936, folder 3, box 36, Roche Collection.
28
programs.36 She would at the very end of the 1930s become the
first woman president of the National Consumers’ League, a
position she held through the early 1940s and through which she
mentored younger left feminists like Mary Dublin soon-to-be
Keyserling.37]
Even more than her feminism, though, Roche was known in the
administration for her fierce opposition to class inequality, and
her feminist contributions were mostly embedded in one way or
another in the fight against class inequities. Roche’s major
role in the New Deal government was liaison to the more militant
and egalitarian contingent within the labor movement. John L.
Lewis, leader of that emerging contingent and president of the
United Mine Workers of America (UMW), was, next to Costigan, her
closest political ally. [Roche fought long and hard for policies
to support organized labor (such as the Wagner Act) as well as
the unemployed (as, for instance, the Works Progress
Administration).] At the Treasury, Roche battled Secretary Henry
Morgenthau’s proposal to cut back the New Deal’s most important
jobs program in 1937, and, even after the Supreme Court had
overruled the New Deal government’s attempt at national economic
29
planning, Roche testified repeatedly on behalf of legislation
that would promote planning at least in the coal industry, a
cherished goal of the UMW.38 Indeed, Roche was such a staunch
advocate of organized labor that, though she remained the
35 Telegram, Roche to Caroline O’Day, November 10, 1934; Caroline Wolfeof the Women’s Division to Roche, October 8, 1934; Roche to Caroline Wolfe, October 17, 1934; Ritchie, secretary to Miss Roche to Mrs. Caspar Whiney, November 27, 1934; folder 7, box 25, Roche Collection.Telegram from Roche to Bellanca, Oct. 1938, folder 10, box 1, Roche Collection. Kathleen McLaughlin, “Women Politicians Swamping Capital,”New York Times, May 2, 1940, p. 23. Josephine Roche, “What Do Women Want in the 1940 Democratic Platform,” May 4, 1940, National Institute of Government Publicity Speeches, box 119, Records of the Women’s Division, Democratic National Committee, 1933-44, FDR Library. See also Records of the National Consumers’ League, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.36 See also “First Lady Asks Ceiling on Profits,” Washington Post, December 16, 1940, p. 15 in re a speech Roche made for League of WomenShoppers. “Confer at Capital on Aid for Women,” New York Times, May 13, 1940, p. 20 and No title, Washington Post, May 13, 1940, p. 24.37 Roche, quoted in NCL Bulletin, late 1938 or early 1939, reel 6, Records of the National Consumers’ League, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. Mary Dublin to Roche, August 2, 1939, frame 216, reel 33, NCL Records. Minutes of the Board, September 26, 1939, frame 451, reel 2 and Mary Dublin to Roche, October 19, 1939, frame 212, reel 33, NCL Records. Minutes of the Board, September 26, 1939, frame 451, reel 2, NCL Records. Report of the General Secretary, November 21, 1938-January 12, 1939, frame 421, reel 2, NCL Records. Minutes of the Board Meeting, September 12, 1939, frame 448; Minutes of the Board Meeting, September 12, 1939, frame 448, reel2, NCL Records. For threat to FLSA, see Dublin to Roche, August 2, 1939, frame 216, reel 33, NCL Records. Minutes of the Board Meeting, September 12, 1939, frame 448, reel 2, NCL Records. Minutes of the Board Meeting, November 9, 1939, frame 454, reel 2, NCL Records. Roche, “Industrial Justice—a Bulwark to Democracy,” Address before the39t5h annual meeting of the Consumers League, OH, October 10, 1939, frame 201, reel 33, NCL Records.
30
president of a coal company at the time, she was introduced at
the founding convention of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations, Lewis’s aggressive labor federation, as “without
doubt the greatest outstanding liberal in our country” and “the
greatest woman of our time.”39
In all of her official positions, Roche represented the most
progressive pole on the New Deal spectrum. For instance, Roche
represented the Treasury on the Committee on Economic Security, a
cabinet-level agency that drafted the landmark Social Security
Act. In that capacity, she argued for fully national programs of
unemployment compensation that covered the most workers possible
and with equal benefits for all; she wanted the old-age pensions
proposed in the legislation to cover (often female and non-white)
domestic and agricultural workers, not just the (largely white
and male) industrial workers ultimately included.40 She did not
want the president to drop disability or health insurance from
the social security bill and, after he did scrub them, Roche
spearheaded an attempt to draft and legislate a federal health
and disability program. [She did so as chair of the very
unfortunately named Interdepartmental Committee to Coordinate
31
Health and Welfare Activities.] In the course of negotiations in
that committee, Roche insisted that the health plan should not
cover only the poorest Americans but all those who were
“medically indigent,” that is any American who would be
financially hard pressed by a major illness. This would have
included 80% of the population. The war intervened to stymie
progress on this plan in the late 1930s, but much of Roche’s plan
was implemented piecemeal over the course of the postwar period,
culminating in passage of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s.
Left feminism had a genuine impact on American life not only in
the 1930s but well beyond.
Roche’s role in the New Deal government—feminist icon and
activist, social democrat and labor ally--was made possible in
large part by the long-haired men of Denver. Those men shaped
her political ideology and opened opportunities to her that made
it possible to break through even the most progressive gender
expectations of the 1920s. Roche belongs, I think, in the new
history of left feminism, which sees feminism maintained in
Popular Front associations, the labor movement and consumer
32
organizations during the period between passage of the suffrage
amendment and the resumption of a mass movement on behalf of
women’s advancement in the 1960s.41 This vision is fast
replacing the earlier view of the period between 1920 and the
1960s as the feminist “doldrums.” Instead, these decades
constituted a period of feminist activism embedded in a variety
of movements, organizations, and networks often more explicitly
dedicated to reducing class (or racial) inequalities but that at
38Correspondence with Miss Roche file, box 5, Records of the Interdepartmental Committee; FDR, Executive Order #7481, 27 October 1936, folder 5, box 6, Roche Collection.“Josephine Roche Assistant Secretary of US Treasury,” Rocky Mountain News, 16 November 1934 and otherdocuments in folder 6, box 35, Roche Collection; Roche to Henry Morgenthau, 11 November 1934, Roche file, box 240, Henry Morgenthau Papers, FDR Library; Roche, Speech to Milbank Memorial Fund, 28 March 1935, folder 3, box 35, Roche Collection; Folder 4, box 19; folder 3, box 20; Roche Collection; Roche to Morgenthau, 20 May 1936, Roche file, box 240, Morgenthau Papers. ?Editorial Division of CB to Roche, November 1934, folder 2, box 30; Katharine Lenroot to Roche, November 1934, folder 8, box 32; Anna Rude to JR, 27 November 1934, folder 2, box 34; Roche Collection. Also, even after the Supreme Court had overruled the New Deal government’s attempt at economic planning, for instance, Roche testified repeatedly on behalf of legislation that would promote planning at least in the coal industry. See, for instance, Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 131-49. Roche to President Roosevelt, Regarding the National Health Plan, [late 1938 or early 1939], folder 2; clippings, folder 1;box 38, Roche Collection. Statement of Josephine Roche Before Representatives of the US Bituminous Coal Commission,” January 15,1938, folder 3, box 20, Roche Collection.39 Proceedings of the Founding Convention of the CIO, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 1938, p. 197.
34
40 “Report of Committee on Unemployment Insurance,” September 26, 1934,Reports and Minutes of Committee on Unemployment Insurance File, box 1, Committee on Economic Security, Social Security Administration Records, National Archives and Records Administration, Baltimore, MD. Roche and Wallace’s agreement, see Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, p. 290-91.
35
41 Storrs, “Red Scare Politics”; Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Makingof the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst:University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore, 2001); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).