Engendering america, and most recently relentless reformer, Josephine Roche and progressivism in 20th Century America, published in 2015. That book is available for purchase in signing after the session. It is on that subject, Josephine Roche, we will hear from robyn muncy today. Robyn . Thank you so much to christian and eric and the Woodrow Wilson center for inviting me to speak and thank you to amanda and peter for taking care of the logistics. Im delighted by the opportunity to launch this biography of Josephine Roche at the Wilson Center because i spent an absolutely glorious year of fellowship here in 20072008. Came back in the summer of 2009, spent that summer is a Public Policy scholar. It feels really good to bring this finally completed work to an institution that did so much to nurture it. I thought i would begin by explaining how it happened that i spent a decade of my life researching and writing the biography of a woman nobody has ever heard of. [laughter] it all started early in the 21st century when i was putting together a course on the history of democracy in america. I wanted to find the perfect document to illustrate for my students what americans meant by industrial democracy in the 1930s. I thought the Perfect Place to go for that document would be to the records of the congress of the national organizations. The Labor Federation that formed in the 1930s. So i was reading the huge proceedings of the Founding Convention of the cio. The congress of industrial organizations which took place in 1938. I came to a moment in these jubilant proceedings the hundreds of delegates at this huge coliseum in pittsburgh. A former coal miner gets up to the podium and he says, and now i would like to introduce these are his words the greatest woman of our day. In his words, the most outstanding liberal. And i think, of course, that is going to be Eleanor Roosevelt. Who else would that be . I go on to read. I think i know who this is going to be. He says this former coal miner Josephine Roche. I thought, who . What . I was a womens historian. I had long been a womens historian. I was an expert in 20 century form. And id never heard of Josephine Roche. I felt kind of miffed, because i guess i know a thing or two about the greatest woman of the 1930s and it is not Josephine Roche. I bite my tongue now. So that began my search for who is this woman . Im telling you it did not take any time at all to find out something about this woman because virtually every american in the 1930s knew who Josephine Roche was. She was constantly in the headlines. All i had to do was to go to the new york times, and i found her every page i turned. She was everywhere. And she was everywhere because she was the second highestranking women in the new deal government. As assistant secretary of the treasury, she oversaw an and him as expansion of the Public Health service during the 1930s. She shaped the Social Security act, the founding legislation of the u. S. Welfare state. She was executive director of the National Youth administration. She started the conversation that americans are still having about the federal role in health care. In fact, what the congress of and other organizations had invited roche to speak about that their convention in 1938 was the National Health plan she had just pulled together that year and was making a topic of household conversations across the country. It was a plan that had the support of the majority of the american public. And that provided the map for Health Policy decisions from the 1940s through the creation of medicare and medicaid in the 1960s. More on that in due course. Roche was so well known and admired among new dealers that Eleanor Roosevelt held her as a friend and inspiration. The literary digest suggested her as a president ial candidate. And whos who named her one of the most outstanding women in the republic. The accolades could go on and on, and in the book i confess it does. Ill spare you here, because she will get the point. Josephine roche was a political celebrity. And yet, historians and the 21st century knew nothing about her. Having discovered this confusing and annoying fact, i wanted then to learn how Josephine Roche became a Political Force in the new deal era. Then how she had fallen out of public view so that by the early 21st century, historians of women and social reform would never have heard of her. So, those of the questions that prompted my further research into her life. Im pointed take of those questions later. They will provide the bulk of the conversation. But first i want to explain that what began to emerge in the course of my research was a much bigger story than that of one important women lost to history. As important as i think that is. What emerged was a life that helps me understand the Progressive Political tradition in 20th Century America in a whole new way. And in the process, revealed the new dimensions of welfare states, new relationships between rankandfile workers and Great Society programs that emerged in the 1960s as well as new dynamics within u. S. Womens history. Roches story turned out to illuminate some of the biggest questions about 20th century u. S. History. I have written her life story as host the biography of a singular woman. Someone in the words of a reader called a kickass woman. And a history of progressive reform in 20 Century America. The reason that roches life could prove so revealing of the larger trends in history it was in part because she was involved and reform from the earliest 20th century when progressivism first emerged in u. S. Political culture until the 1970s. She was an activist through all of those decades. The longevity of her activism is part of what makes her life so revealing. In addition, roche had her hand in an astonishing array of progressive causes over more than 60 years of active political life. She should be best known for her work and Labor Relations in health care, she was also a separate just, a juvenile justice crusader, a vice cop, an advocate for immigrants and opponent of child labor and the list could go on and on again. Ill spare you. What i want to offer here are the big historical arguments that roches life has led me to make. I will not have a chance to bear out all of those argument in this talk. In fact, maybe none of those arguments, but i want you to know about them that they are alive in the book and come back to them during q a. The largest of these arguments is that the age of reform let me see if i can get us there the age of reform which was identified as the years between 1890 and 1940ish extended into the 1970s. This an argument about periodization. In roches life we see cotton annuitys connecting the early 20th century, the new deal and a Great Society, that historians have not detected before. Roche took into her work in the 1950s and 60s the very values political commitments and hopes and dreams that she had developed as a young reformer in the early 20th century. And her life lets us see that many others did the same. She is a great vehicle for watching other people, not just herself, in the process of establishing progressive reform. The historical argument is that the age of reform extended from the late 19th century into the 1970s through the full period of corporate industrialism in the United States history. And that there were two temporary reversals, one as hofstadter argued, in the 1920s and another in the 1950s. The reversals did not thrive in the National Government and politics. But remained vital at the state and local levels as well as in the private sector. That is where we will see roche do her most important work. I argue that at the heart of progressivism was a desire to diminish inequalities of wealth and power, which we will talk about later. Roches life also eliminates the history of Welfare State Development can i want to say what about the arguments there. It shows the deficiency of current understandings of the relationship between the public and private sectors of the social welfare regime in the 20 century u. S. Current scholarships maintains that the u. S. Will for state has been so anemic because a story and created such robust private Health Insurance and Retirement Systems offered to employers that these private systems crowded out Public Programs. Roches story shows to the contrary that ambitious programs a private social welfare, like the once she created for miners in the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes generated demand for broader Public Programs rather than stymieing them. Concurrently, roches story reveals that, again, contrary to the dominant view, rankandfile white workers helped to create pressure for men and a Great Society programs in the 1960s and 1970s. Scholarship paints rankandfilers as breaks on Great Society programs, as resistors of what Lyndon Johnson was pushing in the 1960s. Coal miners encouraged by roches work were among rankandfile workers pressing for expanded social programs in the 1960s and 1970s and helping to win innovations as medicare, medicaid, and the Occupational Safety and health act. Ok, one more big argument, and then we are on to roche. For those eager to understand how american women could have achieved so much in the way of liberation and empowerment and yet remain so distinctly unequal to men, roches life is illustrative. Josephine roche hurdled over one gender barrier after another in the early 20th century. She became a vice cop and 1910. A coal magnate in the 1920s. A gubernatorial candidate in the 1930s, and a prominent member of Franklin Roosevelts new deal government. Yet, her gender breakers did not serve as an opening wedge to other women who still had trouble obtaining some of the same kinds of positions today. Roches life reveals a variety of ways that gender innovations were obscured from view with the result that they could not aspire other womens inspire other women to think roches path open to them. The most significant of these was her erasure from history altogether following her death which i do hope to explain this afternoon. Again, i cant support all of these arguments today but im glad to know that they are alive in the book. All right. We are going to start roches story. The early part will explain who this woman was and how she became a progressive celebrity by the 1930s. Josephine roche was born on the plains of nebraska in 1886 and came into political consciousness during the great populist revolt. That result was part of a vital political debate in nebraska and across the u. S. Between those who believed that emerging National Preparations like railroads, and j. P. Morgans financial empire should be encouraged and those who believed such corporations exercised entirely too much power in American Life and should be regulated or broken up altogether if democracy were to survive. Roches father, an ambitious smalltown banker, was on the side of the encouragers kid opposed any governmental intervention in the prerogatives of property. But many in the places where josephine came of age in nebraska were on the other side and she would eventually take their part. The political context in which Josephine Roche came of age was part of the explanation for her subsequent leadership and progressive reform, for that leadership was promoted by her position in an aspiring family. She was the only child of john jay and ella roche. Two years before her birth, her mother had borne a son whom the couple named Joseph Aspinwall roche. He died at four months. When their daughter was born shortly thereafter, the roches named her josephine aspinwall roche. Josephines parents seem to have transferred to their daughter not only the name of their firstborn son but also all of the hopes, dreams, and assets that would have been invested in a firstborn male child. This position in her up with the mobile family is another piece in the puzzle of how Josephine Roche achieved gender breakthroughs throughout her life and eventually served in the new deal government. Her education, a result of her familys aspirations, was another part of the explanation. Roche did her undergraduate degree at vassar college, an institution that became renowned for turning out more progressive reformers than any other Womens College of the day. When Josephine Roche entered in 1904 it had yet to have one that reputation which explains why her father would have let her matriculate there. The culture insisted that women were as individual as men and on to be as independent and powerful. The introduced her to what they consider that horrors of sweatshops, child labor, and urban tenements. As students of economics and classics, at vassar, roche became a progressive reformer, an activist eager to diminish the inequalities of wealth and power that seemed to many observers to be undermining the foundations of american democracy. Those inequalities had grown dramatically in the very years of roches life because of the emergence of the corporate form of industrial capitalism. As a student at vassar and in the years following her graduation in 1908, roche worked on juvenile justice, enfranchisement, and the attempt to decrease the power of corporate interests in local government and politics and she did that especially in denver. She remained interested in those issues when in 1909 she ventured back east to new york city to do graduate work at columbia university. From which she earned an m. A. In1910. Almost all the people who wrote about her in the 1930s and who have mentioned are sent say she got her masters degree in social work at columbia. Just the beginning of a whole series of trivial and large erasures of her achievement of what were considered masculine goals. The progressivism she learned at vassar and columbia was what i am calling social science progressivism. A political stance that solve the Public Policy as the key to diminishing inequality. Social science progress is aimed to activate government power on behalf of consumers in an effort to counterbalance the power of gigantic corporations that seems to be dominating society. Progressive policies included things like minimum wage and maximum hours, prohibitions of child labor, the regulation of railroad rates, safety inspections of factories and drugs. Roche. Supported them all and went to work on a phd in political science. She was eager to get into the world and make what she considered real change could she jumped at the chance to become denvers first policewoman in 1912. Roches invitation these are her badges. She has a slew of them and they were carefully preserved. Which are now out in boulder. Her invitation to serve as the first policewoman and many of her professional and political opportunities resulted from her integration into a Remarkable Community of reformers in denver who were led by a lawyer and a Juvenile Court judge. Her mentorships by these men was another part of the explanation for her gender bending career. After a grueling and utterly failed campaign against vice in the mile high city, roche went to work for the Progressive Party, thirdparty initiated with Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. Her work with the Progressive Party began in the fall of 1913. Simultaneous with the outbreak of a massive coal strike that lasted until the end of 1914 and included an infamous episode of antilabor violence called the ludlow massacre. A lot of times americans at the time and historians since have referred to the entire coal strike simply as ludlow. The strike was a turning point for roche. And as strikes of its kind were for progressives elsewhere. During that strike, roche was traveling all over colorado organizing local clubs for the Progressive Party and she witnessed the conditions that cold miners lived in, visited with striking miners and interview their opponents. Coal miners lives in camps were there homes were owned by their employers and so were the local Grocery Store and casino peers share send judges were employees of the Coal Companies as well. Miners were paid in script recognized only by the local store. Coal companies paid local School Teachers and owned the schoolhouses and control the curriculum. They monitor the written material that came through the mail and throughout anything perceived as a threat to corporate power. Company guards wearing uniforms of deputy sheriffs chased Union Organizers out of town at gunpoint. Roche believed that these conditions deprived coal miners of the fundamental rights of american citizens. In response,