Josephine Roche and the Production of Historical Obscurity

Robyn Muncy

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20004-3027

Delivered at the Berkshire Conference on the History of

Women

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

June 2008

Please do not cite or quote without permission

copyright Robyn Muncy 2008

2

In 1935, US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was asked to

name some of the women who inspired her. At the top of her

list were super-achievers Frances Perkins, the first woman

appointed to a Cabinet-level position in the US government,

and Josephine Roche, then Assistant Secretary of the

Treasury and former president of a coal-mining concern in

Colorado.1 Equally admirable to Eleanor Roosevelt’s way of

thinking, Perkins and Roche have not enjoyed equal staying

power in US history: While Frances Perkins is well-known to

US historians of the twentieth century, most have never

heard of Josephine Roche.

Roche’s lack of name recognition becomes all the more

puzzling when we learn that she was all over the news in the

1930s. Smith College awarded her an honorary degree in 1932

and was only the first among several institutions to do so

1ENDNOTES

? “Inspiring Women,” clipping, folder 7, box 8, Roche Collection.

3

in the decade of the Great Depression.2 Chi Omega, a

national women’s honorary sorority, awarded her its National

Achievement Award in 1935 in an extravagant and well-

publicized ceremony at the Cosmopolitan Club in New York.3

That same year a major poll named Roche “the most prominent

woman business executive in the country.” (Roche topped

Elizabeth Arden in that contest!)4 Radio stations in the

mid-1930s broadcast dramatic re-enactments of episodes from

Roche’s life, and schools in her home state of Colorado

displayed her photo next to those of Franklin Roosevelt and

Charles Lindberg.5 Writing in 1939, two historians called

her “famous as one of the most distinguished women in

American public life—Assistant Secretary of the Treasury,

chairman of the executive committee of the National Youth

Administration, and president of the Rocky Mountain Fuel

Company.”6 When the Congress of Industrial Organizations

held its founding convention in 1938, Roche was introduced

as “the greatest woman of our time.”7 Josephine Roche was a

sort of legend in the 1930s as well-known as Frances Perkins

and Elizabeth Arden. She was constantly in the news and

4

very much in demand as a speaker. But most US historians do

not know her now. Why?

When the question first dawned on me, my gut reaction

was to blame sexism pure and simple. History ignores women

generally, and why should Roche be different? If that

initial, huffy response really did capture the case, though,

the particular way that sexism operated to erase Roche from

the historical record would require exploration, and I

decided that I would like to undertake that task. More to

the point, some sort of blanket sexism actually did not seem

a compelling explanation when I considered that Eleanor

Roosevelt, Frances Perkins and Elizabeth Arden had not been

lost from the historical record. Not all women disappear

from history. Why do some?

This question became all the more interesting to me

when I read a fascinating piece by sociologist Judy Long in

which she argued that for feminist biographers the “social

production of obscurity” was often an important issue.8

“Women’s lives are caused to disappear,” Long insisted.9

They do not sink from view of their own weight. Some overt—

5

and thus researchable--process must pull them below the

historical horizon. In Long’s words, the “invisibility of

women results from an active process of omission operated by

human judgment and human agency.”10 It is that process of

8 Judy Long, Telling Women’s Lives Subject/Narrative/Reader/Text (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 106.

9 Long, Telling Women’s Lives, 106.

2Awards, folder 7, box 8, Josephine Roche Collection, Special Collections, University of Colorado Libraries, Boulder. She also received an honorary degree from Oglethorpe University in 1935 and another from Mount Holyokein 1935. The degrees are in folders 1 and 2 of box 9, Roche Collection.

3 Award itself is in folder 7, box 8, Roche Collection. “Chi Omega To Award Medal to Miss Roche,” New York Times¸ April2, 1935, p. 2; “Honor Miss Roche on Cultural Work,” New York Times, April 9, 1935, p. 23.

4 “Bamberger Poll Honors Mining Woman,” Star Eagle, March 11, 1935, folder 7, box 35, Roche Collection.

5 Mrs. Olive Douglas Bostick to Roche, November 30, 1934, folder 2, Box 30; Angelina Martorano to Roche, October 15, 1935, folder 1, box 33, Roche Collection.

6James R. Mock and Cedric Larson. Words That Won the War: The story of the Committee on Public Information. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939, 220.

7 Proceedings of the Founding Convention of the CIO, Pittsburgh, PA, November 1938, 197.

6

omission that I want to explore in the case of Josephine

Roche. Why did Josephine Roche disappear from public view

and our histories of the twentieth century while many other

women of her stature and accomplishment did not?

My argument here is that at least one of the most

significant processes accounting for Roche’s disappearance

was the anti-communist crusade of the late 1940s and 1950s,

which prompted Roche to work hard to duck out of view.

That is, I think that Roche actually wanted to don an

invisibility cloak and so participated in erasing herself

from history. Other historians have recently established

that the virulence of anti-communism in the late 1940s sent

many progressive women underground. They dodged the radar

in a variety of ways--by disappearing temporarily into

suburban motherhood, for instance, or shifting from national

to local activism. Josephine Roche's strategy seems to have

been to hide behind the institution that she was running—the

United Mine Workers Health and Retirement Fund—and the

unassailable patriotism of a "great man," in her case, John 10 Long, Telling Women’s Lives, 106.

7

L. Lewis, leader of the United Mine Workers of America. I

argue, then, that Roche actively helped to produce her own

disappearance in order to protect her work on behalf of

progressive health and retirement programs in the context of

virulent anti-communism.

Before making this case, I surely need to re-introduce

the now-obscure Roche. Born in 1886, Roche led a life both

typical and atypical of early twentieth-century women

reformers in the United States. She shared her cohort’s

educational privilege, enjoying a private education in

Nebraska—the state of her birth--followed by four years at

Vassar College. Graduation in 1908 propelled Roche onto the

progressive reform scene. By that time, the set of reform

campaigns known as Progressivism, which aimed to diminish

inequalities of wealth and power in America, had begun to

expand government at all levels and to redefine the

relationship between citizens and the state.11 Roche’s

first job enrolled her in this expansion as she worked in

Judge Benjamin Lindsey’s juvenile court in Denver. From

8

there, she pursued graduate work at Columbia University

where she first met future New Dealer Frances Perkins.

While living at a social settlement in Greenwich Village,

Roche studied immigrants and prostitutes; supervised a boys’

club; and organized for women’s suffrage.12 In the 1920s,

she headed up the Editorial Division at the female-centered

Children’s Bureau in Washington, D.C.13 In all these ways,

Roche’s life epitomized those of many female reformers of

her generation.14

But Roche’s biography also diverged from the usual life

story of such women. Unlike them, she was as deeply

embedded in reforming communities dominated by men as she

was in those ruled by women. She left New York for Colorado

in 1912, for instance, at the behest of reformer George

Creel, who hired her 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 urban youth.

That job led to a titanic struggle between her and corrupt

city officials who illegally fired her; it concluded with a

9

reinstated Roche’s self-righteous resignation in protest

against the refusal of the district attorney to indict the

city’s Commissioner of Safety for violations of the vice

ordinance.15 Through it all, Judge Lindsey remained an

important ally, as did muckraking journalist, Harvey

O’Higgins. Edward Costigan, the progressive lawyer whose

political mentorship did most to pave Roche’s way to

Washington, drew Roche into the Progressive party. While

organizing for that third party in 1914, Roche came face-to-

face with the anti-labor violence in Colorado’s coal

industry that came to be known as the Ludlow Massacre.16

Ludlow was a turning point in Roche’s life. As for many

male progressives, Ludlow cemented Roche’s commitment to

organized labor. The convictions she formed in response to

Ludlow did not reduce her commitment to governmental

rectifications of economic inequities but added a belief

that political democracy could be sustained only where

workers organized themselves and bargained with employers

for what they defined as their share of industrial wealth.

These commitments set Roche firmly in the congealing

10

community of labor progressives but slightly at odds with

reformers who continued to view the state as the most

significant lever for improving working-class lives.17

If Ludlow set Roche askew of some future New Dealers,

it set her wholly at odds with her father, who was by 1914

an officer in a coal-mining concern called the Rocky

Mountain Fuel Company (RMF). John J. Roche’s commitment to

the fullest prerogatives of industrial ownership included

antipathy to organized labor. Nevertheless, when he died in

1927, his shares in RMF fell to his daughter, and, instead

of living off their proceeds, Josephine Roche took her

sharpest turn off the usual path of female reformers: She

purchased a majority share in RMF, kicked out the anti-labor

management, and invited three friends to run the company

with her. Those friends were labor progressives Merle

Vincent, Edward Costigan, and John Lawson. To the great

consternation of her competition in the Colorado coal

fields, she then welcomed the United Mine Workers of America

(UMW) to Colorado to unionize the miners at RMF.18 In

August 1928, Roche and the UMW signed an historic contract

11

that promised high wages, decent health care, and some

involvement of workers in managing the company. The

contract also initiated Roche’s long and productive

relationship with union president John L. Lewis.19 Roche

thus became that most unusual of women reformers—a

progressive industrialist.

Roche’s experiment in industrial management won such

broad favorable publicity that she was well known by the

time of Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933. Almost

immediately, the new president appointed Roche to several

positions, including the coal group in his National Recovery

Administration (NRA).20 The goal of the NRA was to

stabilize the deteriorating US economy by allowing business

leaders in each industry to set wages and prices as well as

to divvy up markets. Roche led the small and otherwise all-

male group of coal operators eager for government

intervention in their “sick industry.”21

Proving herself a stalwart of the Roosevelt Democrats

in her losing 1934 gubernatorial campaign in Colorado and

supported by now US Senator Edward Costigan, Roche won

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appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in

November 1934. The Public Health Service (PHS) was situated

in the Treasury, and Roche was appointed to oversee that

expanding agency. Her popularity and administrative ability

gained her other assignments as well. She represented the

Department of the Treasury on the Committee on Economic

Security, the Cabinet-level group charged with devising a

national program of social insurance. She was appointed

Executive Director of the National Youth Administration.

She was constantly involved in crafting legislation to allow

economic planning in the coal industry.22

Most important was Roche’s appointment in 1935 to

chair the Interdepartmental Committee to Coordinate Health

and Welfare Activities. This committee was to integrate

the health and welfare activities of the rapidly multiplying

New Deal agencies, especially by negotiating agreements

between competing agencies in the federal government.23

Most strikingly, Roche pacified relations between the male-

dominated Public Health Service (PHS) and the female-

dominated Children’s Bureau in the Department of Labor.24

13

The two agencies had fought over turf in the field of

maternal and infant health since the mid-1920s, and Roche’s

success in bringing the rivals into cooperative

relationships astonished all parties.25

The Interdepartmental Committee also took up the task

of devising a national health plan. When the Committee on

Economic Security (CES) had begun its work in 1934,

participants believed that in addition to proposing programs

of old age insurance and unemployment compensation, their

draft legislation would include a health plan. In the end,

the provisions for health proved so controversial that the

Committee omitted them so as not to sink the whole bill.

Once the Social Security Act passed in 1935, however,

Roche’s committee returned to the issue and developed a

health plan that found its way to Congress early in 1939.26

By that time, Roche was entering some very choppy

waters. She had resigned her position in the Treasury

Department because of difficulties at RMF but continued to

chair the Interdepartmental Committee. While she commuted

between D.C. and Denver to run her company and to shepherd

14

the health plan through Congress, FDR was looking for

someone to oversee a new agency that would pull together

federal programs devoted to social welfare. For obvious

reasons, Roche’s name rose to the top of many lists of

nominees. Since 1935, she had been doing the job

effectively as chair of the Interdepartmental Committee. It

seems that she really wanted that job, but the appointment

did not materialize.27 During the year of that

disappointment, two of her closest friends and political

allies died—Grace Abbott and Edward Costigan. And, of

course, World War II broke out in the fall, derailing her

hopes for continued expansion of federal social welfare and

labor programs. Moreover, RMF was in such financial trouble

that Roche spent a good part of 1939 and 1940 trying to get

a federal loan to stave off bankruptcy. FDR helped a little

but the loan granted just before the November presidential

election was not enough. During the war, RMF went into

receivership.28

Roche remained in the news during the 1940s but not

always in a positive light. As she applied for financial

15

aid from the New Deal government that she was a part of—a

potentially corrupt undertaking in itself--reporters

discovered that RMF had been kept afloat by secret loans

from the UMW.29 Although those loans were legal, their

secrecy made Roche’s public commitment to worker-management

cooperation seem hollow. If workers were supposed to be

treated as citizens in their industries, as she constantly

insisted they should be, then shouldn’t miners have been

able to debate whether they wanted their union dues paying

off the bonded indebtedness of a coal company?30 The press

treated the revelation as a scandal, and Roche was outraged—

as were her supporters.31 But the impression that Roche and

Lewis were involved in some shady dealings stood. The

subsequent bankruptcy of RMF was hardly a point of pride.

At that moment, one could easily understand why Roche might

want to step out of the limelight.

But she did not. Even when pretty much all the

publicity she got was bad publicity, she made no attempt to

disappear from public view. In the early and mid-1940s, she

remained under contract to the W. Colston Leigh speakers

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bureau, which booked her to make speeches all over the

country.32 She remained president of the National

Consumers’ League from 1939 to 1944. In 1945, she attended

and published her observations of the International Labor

Conference in Paris, which was the first postwar meeting of

the International Labor Organization.33 In 1945-46, the New

York Herald Tribune contracted Roche for a study of coal

mining in postwar Britain and France. The Russell Sage

Foundation and Survey Graphic also sponsored that

investigation, which resulted in multiple articles and

reports with her by-line in the mass media as well as more

technical reports for Sage and the International Labor

Organization.34 She also made speeches in Britain and

France while she was abroad studying the coal industry.35

When RMF re-organized after the bankruptcy, she agreed to

serve as president while the company sold off its assets.36

Then, in 1948, she took on a wholly new project: John L.

Lewis asked her to direct the United Mine Workers Health and

Retirement Fund, a brand new endeavor that would provide

health care and retirement pensions to coal miners all over

17

the country.37 In 1949, she defended the administration of

the Fund before a Senate subcommittee, insisting that “Every

American should fight for this fund.”38 In 1950, she became

one of three trustees of the Fund as well as its director,

and resigned from RMF to devote herself exclusively to the

Fund.39 She ran it until 1971, when she was in her mid 80s.

In the course of her work at the Fund, she, among other

things, created a health care system for miners that

pioneered managed care and built a system of state-of-the-

art hospitals in Appalachia that transformed health care in

the region.40

Given her stature in the health and welfare field and

her extraordinary position as head of this remarkable

undertaking, Roche might well have remained in the headlines

during the 1950s and 1960s. Her hospitals certainly made

the news.41 John L. Lewis was pretty well constantly in the

headlines.42 Issues with which Roche had long been

connected routinely hit the papers: the development of

federal disability insurance and union pension plans in the

18

1950s; Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. But Josephine

Roche herself largely faded from public view.

I believe she did so deliberately, although admittedly

all of the evidence is circumstantial. The evidence begins

with an abrupt end to Roche’s frenetic mobility, service on

the lecture circuit, and writing for the mass media. After

a lifetime of public speaking and running from place to

place, often holding down jobs in Colorado and on the East

Coast simultaneously, she stopped traveling. She withdrew

from the lecture circuit after 1947, but more than that, she

was really not circulating at all.43 To one friend, she

confessed in the 1950s that she hardly ever got away from DC

any more “even to New York.”44 To another, she confided,

“The United Mine Workers of America Welfare and Retirement

Fund has completely absorbed me since Mr. Lewis achieved his

great victory in establishing it in 1946.”45 When old

friends complained that they never saw her, she replied, “I

do so hope to see you before long, but these present weeks

seem to be exceptionally full of work demands, reaching into

evenings and weekends.”46 When the Fund won awards during

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the 1950s, she rarely attended the ceremonies but sent

someone else to receive the kudos. When, in 1956, for

instance, the Fund won the prestigious Albert Lasker Award

for creating “a model program of health services to a

million and a half workers and their families in the mining

towns from Alabama to Alaska,” Roche declined to attend the

awards luncheon.47 She begged off in response to Mrs.

Lasker’s personal invitation: “the pressure of my work here

at the Fund makes it impossible for me to attend.”48 Surely

Roche was not more overwhelmed with work in 1956 than in

1935 when she managed to travel to New York from Washington

to receive the Chi Omega award. Moreover, those interested

in the history of health care or social welfare periodically

urged her to write memoirs or an autobiography. She always

flatly refused.49

Roche’s abstention from travel and lecturing might have

had other explanations than an increased wariness about

personal publicity. For instance, she was getting older—in

December 1946, she turned 60. One might guess that she was

just tired or suffering physical disability. The evidence

20

suggests otherwise. Only months before Roche turned 60, she

traveled all over France, England, Wales, and Scotland,

going down into coal mines day after day, where she hiked a

mile or more to each coal face, sometimes bent double the

whole way or even crawling on her stomach through

claustrophobic mine tunnels. After breaking her wrist at a

coal mine in the north of England, she continued on to

Scotland, carrying all her luggage with her one good arm.50

This was not a woman whose sense of adventure or energy

seemed to be ebbing as she aged. Except for hearing loss

and deteriorating vision—both of which she effectively

corrected with technology--her health was excellent in the

1950s, and she seems to have had plenty of energy for

work.51 She rarely took a day off, and she ran circles

around her younger subordinates, who wished to heaven she’d

give them a day off now and then!52

Another explanation for her staying closer to home

might have been that she actually did find the Fund utterly

absorbing, that the restlessness that had characterized her

life before she turned 60 disappeared when she finally found

21

a task worthy of her full attention. I do think this is

part of the explanation, but it is not sufficient to explain

Roche’s sudden narrowing of geographical scope or her

refusal to write articles under her own name or to appear at

awards ceremonies. Taking over Rocky Mountain Fuel in the

late 1920s and early 1930s was a similar kind of absorbing

task, yet she did not remain at her desk in Denver. She was

constantly traveling to the mines, for instance, and using

every opportunity to go back East to raise money and tout

her experiences in the mining industry. During that phase

of her life, she gave speeches and wrote articles under her

own name about labor-capital cooperation.53 Developing the

UMW pension plan and especially the medical program of the

Fund gave her marvelous material for speaking and writing

under her own name in the 1950s, but she avoided doing so.

The Fund would have benefited tremendously if Roche had

traveled to the miners for whom she had so much

responsibility in the 1950s. Instead, she hunkered down in

Washington.

22

Further evidence for Roche’s deliberate disappearance

lay in missives to her friends and well-wishers. In the

1950s and 1960s, instead of writing newsy, personal letters

to them, she routinely insisted that the best way for them

to learn about her was through the enclosed Annual Report of

11 Works important to my thinking about Progressivism includeRobert 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).

12Roche 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, Library of Congress.13

? Katharine Lenroot, General Memorandum on Editorial Division, November 14, 1922, file 1-3-7, box 164, Children’sBureau Central File, 1921-25, RG 102, Children’s Bureau Records, National Archives, College Park, Maryland. 14

? For the “usual story,” see especially Susan Ware, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 18-42; Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, MA:

23

the United Mine Workers Health and Retirement Fund.54

Characteristic of her letters was this phrase: “Perhaps the

simplest account I can give of myself is to send you the

enclosed publications of the UMWA Welfare and Retirement

Fund of which I have been director almost since the

Harvard University Press, 1994), 72-84.

15 Documents in folders 5 and 6, box 10, Roche Collection; Roche to Sonya Levien, August 30, 1913, with enclosures, HM 56542-56547, Sonya Levien Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

16 Ludlow documents, folders 3 and 5, box 12, Roche Collection. See also A.B. Macdonald, “Daughter of Man Who Once . . .”, KC Star, July 8, 1934, Roche file, Vassar Alumnae Office, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York; “Denver’s Dynamic Josephine Roche Takes Treasury Post,” Washington Post, December 9, 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.17 Joseph McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Stromquist, Re-inventing “The People,” Chapter 7.18 Probate File of John J. Roche, Opened January 31, 1927, County Court of the City and County of Denver; Elinor McGinn, A Wide-Awake Woman: Josephine Roche in the Era of Reform (Denver: Colorado Historical Society, 2002), 63-64.19 Agreement, Rocky Mountain Fuel Company and the United MineWorkers of America, District 15, 1928, folder 12, box 15, Roche Collection; Steve Fraser, “The Labor Question,” in TheRise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989),

24

beginning and more recently also one of the Trustees.”55

She thus slipped behind the organization she was running.

She put the Fund forward rather than herself. She seemed to

prefer standing in its shadow. The Annual Reports

79, n. 11.

20“Public Works Boards for 48 States Named,” Washington Post, July 27, 1933. “U.S. Drafts 50 To Help Solve Job Problem,” Washington Post, August 13, 1933. 21

? D.W. Buchanan to Roche, May 29, 1933; Roche to D.W. Buchanan, May 31, 1933; Charles O’Neill to All Bituminous Coal Producers, June 7, 1933; Roche to Charles O’Neill, June14, 1933; Report of the Coal Committee, June 19, 1933; Rocheto Buchanan, June 21, 1933; Roche to Buchanan, June 22, 1933; List of Coal Operators Participating in National Bituminous Coal Code Conference, Washington, D.C., July 7-13, 1933; Senator Essington et al to President, July 13, 1933; Transcript of Roche’s Testimony, Hearings on Coal Code; Roche to Kenneth Simpson, Deputy Administrator, NRA, September 7 and 12, 1933; folder 9, box 18, Roche Collection. “Coal Code Signed in Bitter Battle,” Washington Post, September 17, 1933.22

? “Josephine Roche Assistant Secretary of US Treasury,” RockyMountain News, November 16, 1934 and other documents in folder6, box 35, Roche Collection; Roche to Henry Morgenthau, November 11, 1934, Roche file, box 240, Henry Morgenthau Papers, FDR Library. “Chairwoman for Youth,” New York Times, July 14, 1935, folder 7, box 35, Roche Collection; NYA-Executive Committee file, box 13, Aubrey Williams Papers, FDR Library; June 25, 1935, book 7, Morgenthau Diaries, FDR Library; JR, Speech to Milbank Memorial Fund, March 28, 1935, folder 3, box 35, Roche Collection. Folder 4, box 19;folder 3, box 20; Roche Collection; Roche to Morgenthau, May

25

themselves were glossy, informative books that featured many

photographs. In the Reports, which were authored by Roche,

she rarely appeared.56 She was named as Director of the

Fund and listed as a Trustee, but otherwise she was pretty

well invisible. John L. Lewis by contrast appeared in big,

20, 1936, Roche file, box 240, Morgenthau Papers.23

?Correspondence with Miss Roche file, box 5, Records of the Interdepartmental Committee; FDR, Executive Order #7481, October 27, 1936, folder 5, box 6, Roche Collection.24

?Perkins to FDR, August 2, 1935; Perkins to Early, August 14, 1935; Early to FDR, August 15, 1935; box 1, Official File 1731, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library. Minutes of Meeting of USPHS, CB, SSB to Consider Joint Administrative Problems, April 20, 1936, folder 5, box 34, Roche Collection; Roche to Morgenthau, May 8, 1936, Roche file, box 240, Morgenthau Papers.25

?Michael Davis to Roche, October 28, 1937, folder 2, box 37,Roche Collection.26 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), 131-149. 27

? For a full analysis of Roche’s failure of appointment to head the Federal Security Agency in 1939, see my “Women, Gender and Politics in the New Deal Government: Josephine Roche and the Federal Security Agency,” forthcoming in the Journal of Women’s History.

28Application to Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1939 and 1940, file 452, box 25, Rocky Mountain Fuel Company Records, Manuscript Collections, Denver Public Library. Memo, Rocky Mountain Fuel to Wilbur Newton, February 29,

26

beautiful photographs. So invisible was Roche in these

representations of the Fund that her friends often commented

on it.57 An old Colorado friend who received one of these

impersonal mailings, which included a copy of the latest

1944, folder 16, box 20; Roche to Trustee, February 29, 1944, folder 10, box 20, Roche Collection; Clipping from Chicago Sunday Tribune, September 29, 1940, folder 4, box 17, Roche Collection. Correspondence, especially, Telegram from Mildred Lea to Mrs. Thomas McAllister, October 30, 1940 and McAllister’s handwritten not on her phone call with Roche, in Mrs. Thomas McAllister file, box 76, Papers of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. Seealso JR’s appointment calendars, box 43, Roche Collection.

29 See, for instance, “Josephine Roche Seeks U.S. Loan to PayOff Lewis,” Denver Post, September 29, 1940; “Million in UMW Funds Invested in Mining Firms,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November1, 1942; folder 4, Box 17, Roche Collection.

30For Roche on workers as citizens of industry, see Address before the Fifth Annual Convention of the National Lawyers Guild, Detroit, Michigan, May 31, 1941, printed in the Lawyers Guild Review, 1,#4, July 1941, 11-15, folder 2, box 8, Roche Collection.

31 Mary Dublin to Roche, August 2, 1939, frame 216, reel 33, Records of the National Consumers’ League, Library of Congress.

32 Contracts with W. Colston Leigh from 1940-1947, folder 2, box 8, Roche Collection.33

? Josephine Roche, “By Their French Bootstraps,” Survey Graphic, 1946, 476-494, clipping, folder 2, box 45, Roche

27

annual report and a magazine article on the Fund, responded,

“Your name does not appear either in the report or the

magazine article, and I believe I know the lady responsible

Collection.34

? Mary Van Kleeck to John G. Winant, August 24, 1945; Mary Van Kleeck to Roche, September 6, 1945; Roche to Mary Van Kleeck, February 17, 1946; Mary Van Kleeck to Roche, May 10,1946; Roche, “Productivity and Related Conditions in British Coal Mines During Pre-War Decade and Present Conditions,”; Mary Van Kleeck to Roche, January 6, 1947; Roche folder, Mary Van Kleeck Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. Paul Kellogg to Whom It May Concern, September 12, 1945; HHC Prestige to HE Stebbins, December 31, 1945; RM Shipley to Mr. Ambassador, August 13, 1945; folder 2 box 44; articles for Survey Graphic are in folder 2, box 45; articles for Herald Tribune are in folder 6, box 45; Roche to Paul Kellogg, September 22, 1946; folder2, box 45; Roche Collection.35 See, for example, Ethel Wood to Roche, December 14, 1945; Gladys Boyd to Roche, February 21, 1946; Margaret Brown to Roche, February 16, 1946; folder 6, box 45, Roche Collection.

36 Roche to Mary Van Kleeck, July 11, 1946 Roche file, Van Kleeck Papers.

38JR, Testimony before the Committee on Banking and Currencyin the US Senate, August 1, 1949, folder 5, Box 53, folder 5, Roche Collection.

39 JR to Board of Directors of RMF, Oct. 12, 1950, folder 4, box 22, Roche Collection.

28

for that.”58 He was absolutely right that Roche herself was

responsible for her erasure from the tableau.

The disappearance of Josephine Roche into her

institution in the 1950s seems to reflect a pattern of

women’s self-effacement in their autobiographical writings.

40 Roche, Supplement to Chronology,” folder 3, box 51, RocheCollection. Roche, Annual Reports, folder 2, box 52, Roche Collection. “Miners Deserve Better,” Fairmont Times, May 4, 1971, folder 6, box 59, Roche Collection. Ira Wolfert, Reader’s Digest, September 1956, folder 1, box 53, Roche Collection. Proceedings of the 45th Consecutive Constitutional Convention of the UMWA, Denver, CO Sept 4-13, 1968.

41 Ira Wolfert, Reader’s Digest, September 1956, folder 1, box 53, Roche Collection.

42 See, for instance, front page of the Washington Post, February 1, 1950; March 1, 1950; June 1, 1950; November 15, 1952; September 1, 1955; December 1, 1955.43

? Her contracts with W. Colston Leigh, a company that bookedlecture tours ended in 1947. They had begun in 1940. See contracts in folder 2, box 8, Roche Collection. 37 “Josephine Roche to Direct Pension Plan in New Post,” United Mine Workers Journal, May 15, 1948, p. 4, folder 3 box 48,Roche Collection.

44

? Roche to Lube, September 19, 1958, folder 5, box 64, RocheCollection.45

? JR to Morris Cooke, January 5, 1959, folder 1, box 65, Roche Collection.46

29

As an example, think of the disappearance of Jane Addams

into Hull House in her autobiographies.59 But Roche’s self-

erasure here is not, I believe, an expression of a longer

history of women’s obedience to cultural prescriptions for

? JR to Edward Keating, February 1, 1956, folder 5, box 4, Roche Collection.47

? Fund, Annual Report, 1957, folder 3, box 52, Roche Collection.

48Roche to Mrs. Lasker, October 12, 1956, box 2, Series II: Hospital and Health services Correspondence, UMWA Health andRetirement Fund Collection.

49 Alice Hamilton, for instance, urged her to write an autobiography. Alice Hamilton to JR, Oct. 23, 1953, folder 14, box 3, Roche Collection.50

? Josephine Roche, “Difficulties in French Coal Mining,” NewYork Herald Tribune, February 19, 1946, folder 6, box 45, Roche Collection. Roche to Mary Van Kleeck, February 17, 1946, Roche folder, Van Kleeck Papers.

51 On hearing aids, see June 5, 1957, February 10, 1959, August 14, 1964 February 24, 1965, spiral notebooks with Roche’s schedules, box 46, Roche Collection.

52 Administration folder, Executive Medical Officer File---Subject Files, box 34, Archives of the United Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement Fund, Series III, Special Collections, University of West Virginia Libraries, Morgantown.

53On going to the mines, see, for instance, Roche to Villard,August 29, 1931, folder 3, box 5, Roche Collection; and

30

self-abnegation. I think it was something else because

Roche had herself so utterly rejected self-effacement at

other times in her career and deliberately chosen obscurity

only when it seemed best for the causes she cherished. In

Louis Stark, “A Woman Unravels an Industrial Knot,” New York Times Magazine, February 7, 1932, p. 17. On contacts in New York, see for instance, JR to Harry Seager, March 3, 1930; JR to E.R. Seligman, August 5, 1929; folder 7, box 6, Roche Collection. See, for instance, “Opportunities for Harmony in the Coal Industry,” by Josephine Roche in Proceedings of Conference on New Relations Between Labor and Capital, Philadelphia, PA, February 2-3, 1929, pp. 40-49, folder 11, box 15, RocheCollection; “A Coal Company Adopts a New Program” draft article by Josephine Roche for the New Republic in August 15, 1928, folder 10, box 5, Roche Collection.

54 See for example, Ben Cherrington to Roche, September 9, 1966, folder 6, box 2, Roche Collection and letters to friends who sent her congratulatory letters in 1965 for her honorary degree at the University of Colorado. She responded by sending a brief note and enclosing copies of the last edition of the Fund’s Annual Report “which may be of interest to you.” Many examples are in folder 4, box 9, Roche Collection.55

? JR to Mrs. Esther Harlan of Berkeley California, Sept. 8, 1952, folder 13, box 3, Roche Collection.

56 Roche to John L. Lewis, June 11, 1951, folder 7; Roche to Lewis, September 14, 1951, folder 8;box 63, Roche Collectiondescribe her process of writing the report.

57 See, for example, annual reports in folder 3, box 52, Roche Collection.

31

1913, for instance, she had opened a very public campaign

against corruption in Denver’s city government by publishing

her accusations and evidence against sitting public

officials in the local newspapers under her own name at a

time when she was the lone reformer in Denver’s city

government. She also took her crusade to the women’s clubs,

churches, and streets of Denver in a wild and raucous

crusade during which the city fathers fired her and a

progressive county sheriff took his own whack at the

political machine by hiring her on as his deputy sheriff to

continue her investigations and political organizing.

Typical front page headlines screamed “Mayor’s Critic Out of

Office”; “Discharge was Spite, Not Economy Assert Miss

Roche’s Friends”; “Women Brand Ousting of Josephine Roche as

Infamous Outrage.” Roche, meanwhile, took the city to court

and won reinstatement under the civil service rules. After

58 Will Raine to Roche, September 7, 1952, folder 2, box 6, Roche Collection.59

? Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: MacMillan, 1910). See also Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).

32

appearing in Denver’s newspapers constantly in 1913, when

she decided that further publicity was hurting the cause

instead of helping it, she resigned from her position and

asked journalist friends not to write about the case for a

while so that the dust could settle.60 “As long as

‘notoriety’ helped any in the fight I didn’t care what they

thought or said,” she wrote to Sonya Levien, who wished to

do an article on her battle for the socialist Metropolitan

magazine. “But there would not be any advantage to come

from publicity now, so long after the actual row is over,

and I feel certain that any slight influence that I may

still have in a certain group would not be helped.” She

argued that “if I didn’t want to take part in the future

fight for certain things here . . . it would be different,”

but she concluded, “all considered it seems much best to me

to sink into oblivion as fast and as completely as possible—

best not only for me but for the things I care most

60For the full story of Roche’s struggle, see documents in folder 5, box 10, Roche Collection. See also Roche to SonyaLevien, August 30, 1913, Roche file, Sonya Levien Collection, Huntington Library.

33

about.”61 That is, Roche very deliberately chose publicity

for herself in 1913 when she thought it a good thing for the

causes she believed in. But she then chose obscurity when

continuing in the limelight might do her causes harm.

This pattern held up throughout her life. When she took

over Rocky Mountain Fuel in the late 1920s, she was

generally eager for publicity for herself and the firm

because she believed the publicity might promote progressive

industrial relations. When, however, she passed

information to the press meant to exonerate miners in the

outbreak of violence in a 1927 strike, she asked that her

name not be associated with the evidence because, of course,

readers would know her sympathies lay with workers and so

might suspect the evidence.62 Similarly, Roche demonstrated

that she was not averse to putting herself forward when she

ran for governor of Colorado, or when she spoke in defense

of New Deal policies multiple times every month while she

61Roche to Sonya Levien, October 26, 1913, Roche file, Sonya Levien Collection, Huntington Library.

34

was in Roosevelt’s administration.63 She was not generally

a woman who practiced self-effacement. Surely then, her

consistent shying away from publicity in the 1950s was a

deliberate decision, not an expression of internalized

cultural pressure to female modesty.

The timing of Roche’s disappearing act coincides very

precisely with the increased power of the anti-communist

crusade of the postwar era. Other historians have produced

compelling work that shows the devastating effect of

McCarthyism on the individual lives of left-leaning female

activists in the late 1940s and 1950s as well as the ways

that anti-communism twisted and narrowed—or perhaps in the

case of an emerging mass movement on behalf of women’s

advancement, destroyed—social democratic movements. Betty

Friedan, a left-leaning labor journalist in the 1940s,

disappeared into suburban family life not fully to re-emerge

until 1963 in The Feminine Mystique, which focused much more

exclusively on middle-class women than the working-class

women who had occupied her earlier writing.64 Mary Dublin

Keyserling, a left-feminist activist in the 1930s and 1940s

35

underwent more than one harrowing loyalty investigation and

left government service in the 1950s.65 Leftist historian

Gerda Lerner has written affectingly about the dread that

pervaded her own life in the 1950s and continuing anxieties

that kept her quiet about her radical past until the twenty-

first century.66 The Congress of American Women, perhaps

the focal point for an emerging women’s movement, was killed

by inclusion on the Attorney General’s list of Subversive

Organizations in the late 1940s.67 Roche’s good friend,

Mary Van Kleeck, was called up before Joseph McCarthy’s

Senate Committee on Government Operations and was not

permitted to leave the country in the 1950s.68

Given that context, a context that Roche was well aware

of because so many of her long-time friends were directly

affected and because she even testified at the loyalty

hearings of Mary Dublin Keyserling, Roche had to feel that

she herself was at risk.69 In the 1930s, she had been

closely associated with the Congress of Industrial

Organizations, the new and more militant labor federation,

which openly hired Communist Party members as organizers.

36

Indeed, at the founding convention of the CIO, Roche was

introduced to discuss her national health plan as “the

greatest woman of our time.”70 She was routinely invited to

and attended events at the Soviet Embassy in the mid-1930s,

was dear friends with communists like CIO-general counsel

Lee Pressman, socialists like Norman Thomas, and suspected

subversives like Mary Dublin and Mary Van Kleeck.71 She was

never out of touch with Dublin and Van Kleeck, and was in

touch with Thomas and Pressman, certainly, in the early to

mid-1940s.72 She had vociferously condemned Martin Dies

Committee in the 1930s, the first House Un-American

Activities Committee and organized the National Consumers

League against the investigations of that Committee.73 She

lent her name to the organizing drive of the League of Women

Shoppers in Washington, D.C., which was later listed among

subversive organizations.74

Although by 1948, Roche was distancing herself from

those earlier associations—and sometimes in the crudest

terms—she had to know that her record might well tarnish the

reputation and future of the United Mine Workers Health and

37

Welfare Fund. Nothing meant more to her than protecting the

Fund, and I suspect that she imagined she had better slip

from view as much as possible to protect her new project

from red-baiting.

The result was that when, against her will, Roche

reappeared in the public eye in the late 1960s and early

1970s, few remembered her long history of progressive

activism, and she could be represented only as a little old

lady who, as Director and Trustee of the United Mine Workers

Health and Retirement Fund, just took orders from the

legendary John L. Lewis. Roche’s reappearance on the public

stage occurred in a rather spectacular context. She was

pushed out of hiding by a dramatic battle for leadership of

the United Mine Workers union. John L. Lewis died in 1969,

and his successor as trustee of the Fund was the infamous

Tony Boyle. In order to improve his chances of being

elected president of the United Mine Workers’ union later

that year, Boyle managed to raise retirement pensions for

miners from $115 per month to $150 per month. Roche was

furious because she believed the increased pension

38

financially irresponsible, and Boyle put it through the

Board of Trustees by claiming that Roche had agreed to it

while she was in the hospital with a broken hip. Boyle then

did defeat his reforming rival Jock Yablonsky for the

presidency of the union in December 1969. In a shocking

move, Boyle had Yablonsky, his wife, and daughter murdered

on New Year’s Eve 1969. In March 1970, the US Senate

Subcommittee on Labor and Public Welfare opened hearings to

determine whether Boyle engineered the pension increase in

order to guarantee his election, a move that violated

pension laws. Roche was called in to testify. She swore

that Boyle had lied about her support for the pension

increase and that he would not have gotten it past the Board

of Trustees without her support. The hearings, including

Roche’s testimony, were broadcast on national television,

and 83-year-old Roche was thereafter reviled by miners for

criticizing their union president and refusing her support

for an increase in their retirement pensions. Thereafter

followed a class-action lawsuit that accused the Fund of

mismanaging revenues, a lawsuit that resulted in Roche’s

39

retirement from her cherished organization in 1971 only

months before her 85th birthday.75

In books written by journalists that hit bookstores

almost immediately after the debacle, Roche was consistently

represented as little else than an elderly yes-woman to John75

? Richard P. Mulcahy, A Social Contract for the Coal Fields: The Rise and Fall of the United Mine Workers of America Welfare and Retirement Fund (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2000), especially chapter 6. On Roche’s testimony before the Senate committee on March 17, 1970 and the reaction to it, see Memos and correspondence in folder 6, box 63, Roche Collection. Testimony itself is Stenographic Transcript of Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Labor, Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, US Senate, Volume 3, United Mine Workers’ Election, Washington, DC, March 17, 1970, Alderson Reporting Company, folder 8, box 58, Roche Collection.62

?Night letter, Roche to Edward Keating, Editor of Labor, November 26, 1927, Roche Collection. 63 On her gubernatorial campaign, see, for instance, the correspondence in folders 5 and 6, box 22, Roche Collection;her radio address, August 8, 1934; Alberta Pike, “She’s a Tender-Hearted Battler,” Mary 25, 1934 Rocky Mountain News; “Issues of the Colorado Campaign,” Press Statement by Roche, August 21, 1934; Press Release, July 3, 1934; Press Release, file copy; Radio Addresses, September 10, 1934 and September 5, 1934; all in folder 10, box 24, Roche Collection. Campaign fliers and other materials in folder 8,box 24; Roche collection. Her speaking engagements and popularity as a speaker in person and on radio are confirmedby documents in folders 1-4, box 8; folder 1, box 31; and folder 2, box 33; Roche Collection.

40

L. Lewis. Knowing nothing of Roche’s life before she took

over the Fund, Joseph E. Finley referred to her as “The

little gray lady who administered the Fund,” in his book,

The Corrupt Kingdom.76 He represented her as always ready “to

do the will of Lewis.”77 “She was,” Finley claimed, “no 64 Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst:University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).

65Landon Storrs, “Red Scare Politics and the Suppression of Popular Front Feminism: The Loyalty Investigation of Mary Dublin Keyserling,” Journal of American History, 90 (September 2003): 491-524.66

?Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 326-28, 334-36, 346. See also Ellen C. DuBois, “Eleanor Flexner and the History of American Feminism,” Gender and History 3 (1991) 1, 81-90.67

?Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,2001).68

?Smith College, Biographical Note, Mary Van Kleeck Papers, online http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss150_bioghist.html, accessed March 5, 2008. 69

? Roche’s testimony at the first Dublin Keyserling hearing is in Transcript, Before the Loyalty Board, Department of Commerce, In the Matter of Mary Dublin Keyserling, August 24, 1948, Record Group 478, Records of the Office of Personnel Management, Civil Service Commission/Office of Federal Investigations, Oversize Personnel Security Investigation Case Files, 1928-1982, File of Mary Dublin

41

better able to resist John L. Lewis than the thousands of

cheering miners who followed his will in convention after

convention.”78 Brit Hume also wrote about the mine workers

in the wake of the Yablonsky murders and the trial that

found Tony Boyle guilty of ordering that vicious act. In

Keyserling, box A170.70

? Proceedings of the First Constitutional Convention of the Congress of IndustrialOrganizations, Pittsburgh, PA, November 14-18, 1938, 197.

71Attendance at events at the Soviet Embassy, see for instance, “Diplomats at Musicale, New York Times, Mary 14, 1935, p. 18. “Institute Head Guest at Fete of Soviet Envoy,” Washington Post, June 8, 1935, p. 14. “Soviet EmbassyDines Officials; Counselor’s Guest List Includes Miss Roche,” Washington Post, April 18, 1935, p. 12. “Fliers See DC Society at Troysenovsky Party,” Washington Post, June 29, 1937, p. 17.72

? Pressman to Roche, January 6, 1935; Pressman to Roche, October 5, 1936; folder 6, box 33, Roche Collection. Roche to Pressman, July 18, 1939, folder 13, box 5, Roche Collection. Roche to Pressman, March 29, 1939, folder 11, box 7, Roche Collection. In 1939 and 1940, Roche saw Pressman every time she was in D.C., often more than once and often for dinner. He was one of her most constant contacts in those years. See Roche Appointment books, folder 1, box 43, Roche Collection. For her relationship with Van Kleeck, see Roche file, Mary Van Kleeck Papers, Smith College.73

?Email communication, Landon Storrs to Robyn Muncy, July 2006, in author’s possession.74

42

his Death and the Mines, he represented Roche as “completely in

accord with his [John L. Lewis’s] wishes, whatever they

were.”79 Little did these reporters know that this gray-

haired old woman had a long history of progressive activism,

an iron will, and a commitment to organized labor and social

welfare that predated her acquaintance with John L. Lewis

not to mention their births! Indeed, Roche voted with Lewis

on issues related to the Fund only after the two of them had

thrashed out the issues in private, and often Roche

? Landon Storrs, “Left-Feminism, the Consumer Movement, and Red Scare Politics in the United States, 1935-1960,” Journal of Women’s History, 18, 3 (Fall 2006), 40-67, with info on Roche at 50 and 58. “Service League of St. Andrews Church,” Washington Post, May 7, 1937, p. 20. 76

? Joseph E. Finley, The Corrupt Kingdom: The Rise and Fall of ht United Mine Workers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), p. 188.77

? Finley, Corrupt Kingdom, p. 198.

78 Finley, Corrupt Kingdom, p. 291.79

? Brit Hume, Death and the Mines: Rebellion and Murder in the United Mine Workers (New York: Grossman, 1971), p. 35.

43

convinced Lewis to take her position rather than vice

versa.80 Such influence was unimaginable to the reporters,

in part, no doubt, because of ageism and sexism, but most

especially because Roche had so successfully hidden from the

public eye for twenty years that when she was forced from

hiding, she re-emerged as though from the head of Zeus,

disassociated from her more radical past.

In Roche’s case, Judy Long was right. Falling into

historical obscurity was not some natural process that did

not need explaining. Roche disappeared from public view

during her lifetime at least in part because the anti-

communist crusade of the 1950s scared her into hiding.

Fearing that her association with radical organizations and

individuals in the 1930s and 1940s might taint the United

Mine Workers Health and Retirement Fund in the 1950s, Roche

withdrew from public life almost entirely. She battened 80

? Evidence of their consultations is in, for instance, theircorrespondence, box 1, Board of Trustees Correspondence, Director’s File, UMWA Collection, Series II, Archives of theUnited Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement Fund, Special Collections, University of West Virginia Libraries.

44

down the hatches in Washington, rarely going anywhere but

home and office for the last twenty years of her

professional life. She no longer wrote articles for the

mass media or spoke on the radio; she refused to write

memoirs or an autobiography; she withdrew from the lecture

circuit. She gave the public time to forget her with the

result that she did not bring negative publicity to her

beloved experiment in social security provision. The

invisibility of this woman did indeed “result from an active

process of omission operated by human judgment and human

agency,” as Long insisted. Explaining historical obscurity

is indeed one of the tasks of feminist biography.

45