"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. i'm 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 2007-2008. 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 1930's. 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 1930's. 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 women's historian. i had long been a women's historian. i was an expert in 20 century form. and i'd 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 1930's and it is not josephine roche. i bite my tongue now. so that began my search for who is this woman? i'm telling you it did not take any time at all to find out something about this woman because virtually every american in the 1930's 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 highest-ranking 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 1930's. 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 1940's through the creation of medicare and medicaid in the 1960's. 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 presidential candidate. and who's 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. i'll 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. i'm 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 rank-and-file workers and great society programs that emerged in the 1960's as well as new dynamics within u.s. women's history. roche's 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 kick-ass woman." and a history of progressive reform in 20 century america. the reason that roche's 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 1970's. 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. i'll spare you. what i want to offer here are the big historical arguments that roche's 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 1940-ish extended into the 1970's. this an argument about periodization. in roche's life we see cotton annuity's 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 1950's and 60's 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 1970's 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 1920's and another in the 1950's. 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. roche's 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. roche's story shows to the contrary that ambitious programs a private social welfare, like the once she created for miners in the 1950's and 1960's, sometimes generated demand for broader public programs rather than stymieing them. concurrently, roche's story reveals that, again, contrary to the dominant view, rank-and-file white workers helped to create pressure for men and a great society programs in the 1960's and 1970's. scholarship paints rank-and-filers as breaks on great society programs, as resistors of what lyndon johnson was pushing in the 1960's. coal miners encouraged by roche's work were among rank-and-file workers pressing for expanded social programs in the 1960's and 1970's 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, roche's 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 1920's. a gubernatorial candidate in the 1930's, and a prominent member of franklin roosevelt's 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. roche's life reveals a variety of ways that gender innovations were obscured from view with the result that they could not aspire other women's -- inspire other women to think roche's 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 can't support all of these arguments today but i'm glad to know that they are alive in the book. all right. we are going to start roche's story. the early part will explain who this woman was and how she became a progressive celebrity by the 1930's. 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. morgan's 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. roche's father, an ambitious small-town banker, was on the side of the encourager's 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. josephine's 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 family's 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 women's 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 roche's 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 1930's 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 denver's first policewoman in 1912. roche's 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, third-party 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 anti-labor 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, she added to her commitment to social science progressivism a set of commitments that historians now call labor progressivism. she became a reformer who believed that the self organization of workers was as important to the diminution of inequality as progressive public policy. in the course of the coal strike, roche came to believe that workers had interest different from those of those employees. a lot of people have talked about the belief that progressive believe that everybody's interests were all the same in the end. that is absolutely untrue of roche and her cohort from the 1910's. she came to believe that workers and employers have completely different interests and if workers were to achieve anything like a fair shake in american life, they had to be able to organize and bargain together on behalf of those interests. she also saw that even where there were progressive labor laws, the kinds of policies advocated by social science progressives, those laws were not necessarily enforced, just as they were not in colorado. colorado actually had great loss on the books, protecting coal miners. they were just completely ignored by the coal companies and no one could force them to do otherwise. so workers needed through organization to be able to shut down an enterprise to see that the law was obeyed. aggressive policies were not enough -- progressive policies were not enough to promote greater equality. workers had to be empowered through organizations at the point of production. roche would later say, hope to live to see all workers in america organized in unions. she also came to believe that private enterprise carried public obligations. workers and consumers had as great an legitimate and interest in private companies as shareholders did in her view and must have their interest satisfied if justice were to be served and capitalism survive. this was the creed of a labor progressive and strikes in the 1910's created a generation of labor progressives, women and men like roche, who would in the 1930's create the new deal. sometimes historians us see this alliance between progressives and workers developing later on, and as an element that distinguished the progressivism of the new deal from that of the early 20th century. but roche's life comes down firmly on the side of those who see the alliance emerging in the 1910's and connecting the progressivism of the early century with that of the new deal. despite the support of progressives like roche and the men in colorado who were her most important political mentors, the miners decidedly lost their strike. by the end of 1914, the united mine workers of america, the union that had organize the strike comments was driven out of colorado's coalfields. it remained out for 15 years. but the strike and roche's reading of it were another element in explaining her future reforming career. and even the new deal. at the very moment when roche was emerging as a labor progressive committed to the self organization of workers roche's father, with whom she was living at the time, was an officer in a colorado coal company and was as opposed to organize labor as anyone ever could be. father and daughter were devoted to each other and when in the late 1920's, john jay roche died, josephine roche inherit his shares in the rocky mount fuel company. the coal company of which he was by that time president. in response to her inheritance josephine roche defied every convention. and her life went entirely off the gender rails. she had spent the 1920's doing what many women reporters did -- she worked for immigrant rights and child welfare. now she saw in her shares of rocky mount fuel a slender chance to in her words, right the wrongs of ludlow. and she took it. in an exhibition of nerve, she refused to sell her shares and rocky mount fuel or live off their proceeds as all of her father's lawyers had advised her to do. and instead, amassed enough shares to become the majority stockholder, kicked out the sitting and came labor management and invited her progressive friends to run the company. these included not only the men with whom she had worked on the progressive party but also john lawson, the leader of the coal strike in 1913. his hiring righted a particular wrong of ludlow. roche at first assumed the vice presidency of the company but very soon appointed herself president and general manager of the firm. the work at rocky mount fuel was so different from anything she had ever done before that she exclaimed to a friend, it seems as though i have migrated to a totally new planet. and left behind every familiar experience. as soon as she gain control of the company, in 1928, right before the great depression hits everybody, not just coal, she invited the united mine workers of america to organize coal miners in her company and negotiated in a strike union contract that was hailed by the labor press as labor's magna carta. one of many labor magna cartas. but here's another. she had brought organized labor back to the coalfields of colorado for the first time since the coal strike in 1913. because of her commitment to running a company in the interest of workers and consumers as well as stockholders, roche was hailed by the labor press and reformers as a progressive industrialist who was pioneering a way to make capitalism just. she was also a feminist heroine who was assuming the position of coal magnate. women were not industrialists in the 1920's. the political celebrity that roche enjoyed in the 1930's began with her coups at rocky mount fuel, a coup unimaginable has she had an older brother to inherit her father's property had she not had the political mentorship of the men in denver, and had she missed the coal strike in 1913. what's more, her experiment in progressive industrial relations was one of many experience -- experiment devised by those across the country who even though they had lost power in the 1920's were trying out ideas for diminishing inequalities throughout the decades of the 1920 which was the first reversal in the age of reform. collaborating with miners at every turn, roche paid the highest wage in the industry outside of montana in the late 1920's. she paid in cash. she turn the schools over to the county and she met other demands made by coal miners to guarantee just payment and daily safety. one miner explained that because of her innovations at rmf, he said, a miner feels like an american city. the equal of any man in the world. working conditions are approved out of all semblance to all conditions. moreover, roche did everything she could to spread labor organizing to the companies of competitors in colorado. her evangelism on behalf of organized labor did not in dear her to the likes of john d rockefeller junior, the largest stockholder of colorado fuel and iron. so furious were her competitors that they try to drive roche out of business by first to starving her company of credit. she could get no credit from any bank and all of colorado. quite remarkable. she finally went east and got she could get no credit from any bank and all of colorado. quite remarkable purchase finally went east and got some help there. they opened a price war against her. in which they are paying the other companies -- charging the company under the cost of production to try to get her out of coal. in a dramatic moment in 1931 the miners at rocky mount fuel saved the company themselves. they they loaned her half her wages to make a payment. boy, did that draw good press. the way they press represented her helps explain why her ascension as a captain of industry did not serve as an opening wedge for other women. in many cases, this is not exclusively true. in many cases, roche's work at rocky mount and fuel was represented as the work not of a captain of industry, but that of a humanitarian. a social worker. a joan of arc. of the coal fields, whose female qualities of compassion, cooperation, healing, were expressed in her leadership of rocky mount and fuel, rather than her qualities of organization, efficiency, and command. rocky mountain fuel is construed in articles as a social work experiment instead of an industrial company. she commanded an exclusively male workforce. when she left the company in the 1940's, she had run the company or a couple decades. one journalist even said that her labor policy was, and these are his words, her labor policy was magnificent, but it was not business. this preposterous contention was one of many ways that observers tried to write off her labour party -- or labor policies and economic justice it self as somehow, outside the realm of real business activity, or real business leadership. these same kinds of conservative representational moves were often made in terms of her gender innovations. i imagine her to be an example for us of a much larger trend. these kinds of conservative representational moves were made in terms of her gender, which i believe kept them from forcing a change in views of women's national -- capacity and expectations for power and position in us life. at rocky mountains fuel, roche maintained relatively high wages, even as the depression set in. she increased workers say in the operation of the company. the way she ran the company, and tried, tried but failed, to cooperate with other mine owners in colorado, presaged new deal policies. in the mid-1930's, she was often credited with having been a new dealer before there was a new deal. predictably, once fdr was an offer -- in office, roche was tapped to help with new deal initiatives. to have -- early on, the most important was helping negotiate a code of fair business practices for the coal industry under the national industrial recovery act. it is during those negotiations that roche and john l lewis, president of mine workers of america, became political partners, a partnership crucial to roche's future. before this, she had seen lewis as an enemy because of the way he was running the united mine workers of america. she was constantly working around him. once roosevelt was in office lewis saw the winds changing. he became a partner to her. because of her support for the new deal and the reluctance of a democratic governor in colorado to cooperate with new deal programs, roche ran for governor of colorado in 1934 on the slogan, roosevelt, roche, and recovery. she ran a fantastically interesting whirlwind campaign but lost the primary. only to be scoop up by the roosevelt administration in december of that year. she was appointed assistant secretary of the treasury. roche was the second highest-ranking woman in the new deal government, only frances perkins, secretary of labor, out ranked her. from the treasury, she worked as a liaison between the administration and organized labor, as a link to feminists and a connection to progressives in congress who were often frustrated with the roosevelt administration's caution. she was also a darling of the washington press. reporters praised her feminine flow week dresses and hats while she rejected women's subordination to men. she was often in the position -- here is a woman, and that is josephine roche, she is in that position with men a whole lot. she became well-known for scoffing at these guys because they, too often, had no guts. on several occasions, she was the only woman at a meeting or conference, and someone would make the mistake of saying, oh what this meeting lacked before you arrived was beauty, or charm. and she would say, what this meeting needs is guts. she said this to -- to the administration as well. she said, what this administration needs is guts. when i interviewed her godson, a few years ago, one of the things he said was, she did not admire anyone who did not have guts. clearly, this was a major thing with her. roche had an overflowing portfolio, while in the new deal government. her first assignment was to represent the treasury of the committee on economic security which crafted the social security act, the founding legislation of the u.s. welfare state. she was one of only five people on the committee that created the old age pension and unemployment insurance programs on which millions of americans currently rely. if, however, you look at the list of names on the economic security bill, that eventually became the social security act you will see no sign of josephine roche. you will see listed secretary of the treasury henry morgenthaler. although he elected roche to represent the treasury in his state -- stead, once she was appointed, morgenthaler never attended another meeting although all the other cabinet officers did attend and participated in shaping the economic security bill. here is another way roche and, no doubt, other women were erased from view. her portfolio at the treasury also included public health service, which was in the treasury in the 1930's, and which was growing by leaps and bounds and the 1930's. the public health service experienced a several hundred percent increase in the budget while roche was in charge. she used the money to modernize public health infrastructure in the states, directing state health departments to involve themselves in industrial hygiene. being involved in the workplace was something that a state department had assiduously to -- avoided before the 30's. and moving into medical research in the provision of medical care. she was charged when nih broke ground in bethesda, for instance, a place we all know well now. she also chaired the worst-named committee in all of federal history. i am sorry to have to -- it is important, so i will have to name it, but i'm really sorry. she chaired the enter departmental committee to coordinate health and welfare activities. it was from that position that she supervised development of the first national health plan. health care had been omitted from the social security bill because of opposition from doctors. that opposition was so scary that fdr decided to leave health care aside. the decision was made really late, to put health care aside and put the bill forward with unemployment insurance and old age pensions, hoping they could get those throughout, and then he said, i will come back to health care. which he did. here he opened the issue after the social security act passed. he put roche in charge of that effort. the plant she devised included adding disability insurance to the social security system providing federal moneys to maintain and build community hospitals, allocating funds to increase the capacity of the public health service, and moneys to help states develop systems of either health insurance, or actual health services, to provide health care to residents. although roche preferred a national health system, she did not believe she could get such a plan through congress. roche unfurled a plan to the public at a major conference in the summer of 1938, which was widely covered by the press. she hit the lecture circuit as soon as the conference concluded, and wrote articles introducing the plant of the public. by the end of the year, by the end of 1938, most americans supported the plan. thus, roche generated the conversation americans are still having about the federal role in health care. from 1938 on, there is some conversation about health care in the federal government from that point on. she also succeeded in getting a watered-down version of the plan introduced into congress in 1939, but by that time, a much more conservative congress had been seated and the president had his eye on the upcoming war. roche plus efforts of enactment of what she considered a modest plan were stymied. still, over the next 20 years, much of her plan was enacted. in 1946, the hill burton act granted money for building community hospitals. in the 1950's, disability was added to social security. medicare and medicaid was a neck, at which time a senator from oregon held forth on the senate in this way. this is 1965. in a matter of months, he proclaimed, matter -- medical care for the aged will no longer be the dream it was almost 50 years ago. instead, it will be a reality. a reality made possible in no small part by the historic struggle of one of this country's most illustrious citizens, josephine roche. he laid out in that 1965 speech, not only the work roche had done in the cabinet, but -- i forgot to keep moving through the pictures. but also the work she had done by that time as director of the united mine america's health fund. in the late 30's and 1940's, roche lost patience with the roosevelt administration, left it, and at the end of the 1940's, turned over the reigns of rocky mount and fuel, so that she could go to work for the workers. in 1948, john l lewis appointed her director of the united mine workers welfare and retirement fund, and institution aimed at providing coal miners with state-of-the-art health care and the dignified retirement. lewis had run the fund out of coal mine companies in a series of confrontations that convinced companies to create a fund for coal miners by paying a royalty on every ton of coal mined. she ran the fund from 1948-1971. she ran the fund from aged 61 until she was 84. as director of the mine workers welfare fund, one of the largest private welfare programs in the world during the postwar. she developed an array of benefits that included generous benefits in the early 1950's, death benefits for survivors, a variety of disability benefits and for a while, monthly stipends to widows and orphans. she was creating an expanded new deal for coal miners, in the absence of expanded governmental programs. most famously, she bill -- built what a journalist called the miners cost medical empire. she oversaw the health care of a million and a half miners and their families. in the 26th states where they labored. early on, she decided against paying for medical insurance for commercial -- for commercial medical insurance, as most unions were doing in the 40's and 50's. instead, she assembled a medical staff in washington, her offices were not far from here. and, throughout coal country, to identify qualified doctors clinics, and hospitals, and pay the bills of minors or miners's families to -- no moneys came out of their pockets at all, they paid noted dr. bubbles, no co-pays -- no deductibles, no co-pays. where she found medical care lacking, she built new health care institutions. in the appellation mountains where most coal miners lived she built state-of-the-art hospitals. those hospitals, one bill -- journalist called them the glassy as to hospitals. they housed auch patient -- outpatient clinics and supplied education for technicians and nurses. by the end of the 50's, her hospitals were winning awards for both treatment and research. roche was winning awards for the service she did for the disabled. the awards recognized another one of her signature programs. this program tracked down miners who had been disabled in mining accidents. there were hundreds of them. it transported them to the finest rehabilitation hospitals in the country. some of them went to new york, some came to d.c., some went to california. some of the men had been injured as long ago as 28 years by the time she found them. they were so misshapen by their injuries and lack of medical care, their backs had often been broken. a were in -- they were so misshapen they would not fit on stretchers and had to be carried out of mountain cabins in their own beds to reach ambulances or railcars that would whisk them to treatment centers. by the late 1950's, roche interfund were celebrated for making the field of physical rehabilitation possible. roche also developed mobile health units that provided psychiatric care to the hidden hollows of the appalachian mountains, and she's bonded -- sponsored research to recognize black lung as a disease, rather than lethargy on the part of coal miners. in a decade, she convinced coal miners in america who had long suffered some of the worst imaginable health care, to believe that they were entitled to the best health care in the world. when senator wayne morris praised roche in 1955 for her her heroic struggle, he concluded like this. the medical care program of the mine workers welfare and retirement fund created and operated by you, josephine roche, exemplifies the best in medicine, and social account of the -- accomplishments. he did not exaggerate. by that time, politics had changed significantly, twice since roche had left the roosevelt administration. because of the emergence of the cold war in the late 1940's, the anti-communist strain in political culture received a boost and shifted the american political mainstream to the right. in this context, roche and other progressives, whether from sincere conviction or pragmatism, muted their critiques of inequality in america. the kind of class analysis that permeated 1930's political culture was criminalized in these years, and talked about general reek -- reconstruction of institutions was dangerous. the second reversal of progressivism was underway in the 50's. despite the reversal, josephine roche continued in her work at the welfare fund to diminish inequalities of wealth by offering material support to coal miners and families, and in the process, strengthening their labor union. her commitments remain the same as in the early 20th century. moreover, she believed that she was preparing for a day when broader reform might again be possible. here is how that worked. during her work in health policy in the 30's and 40's, roche had labored with some health reformers who argued that national health insurance, or any cut of national health plan, would be impractical as long as doctors work as individuals in their own offices and required separate fees for every service rendered. these reformers brought from the progressive era their belief that medicine would have to be reorganized. in order for it to be both high quality and fully accessible. this group convinced josephine roche that the reorganization of medicine, with doctors of multiple specialties working in community centers and clinics on salary, was a necessary first step in building a medical infrastructure that could support national health insurance, in which she believed, by the 1950's. in the 1950's, when government policies were not moving towards the provision of health care when it was hopeless to hope for such a thing, our used to position at the fund to promote reorganization of medicine by creating health centers throughout coal country, where doctors were on salary, rather than paid fees for service, and bryant reducing what we now call managed care. progressivism thus lived on in bits and pieces in her private sector health work in the 50's. even during this time of the reversal of progressive reform. that reversal had other consequences for josephine roche and for other reformers. because she had been allied with the labour left in the 1930's and anti-communist crusaders were construing that as bad, she did her best to stay out of the public spotlight in those years, she was undertaking a brand-new departure and social where for -- social welfare at the fund, and she thought it might be destroyed if her left leanings were revealed. she was so afraid of anti-communist crusaders that she banned the funds doctors from developed -- delivering the present speeches unless she had vetted them. many officials and doctors considered her work at the fund to be an attempt at socialized medicine, and she had to walking airline to perfect -- protect her work from being tarred as un--american. her attempts to remain under the radar because of the anti-communist crusade in the early 1950's are part of the explanation for disappearance from history later on. by the mid-50's, the pressure from that anti-communist crusade had abated, somewhat, and various elements within the left had again allied with liberals to implement the great society. this is the second shift in u.s. politics since roche had left the roosevelt administration. she was in the public eye again, as suggested by senator morse on the floor of the senate in 1965. social welfare farmers in -- reformers in the 1960's saw her as a predecessor and sought her out. in the mainstream press, airing the 60's, roche was represented as an old woman with hearing aids and a cane, which she was and her accomplishments at the welfare fund were attributed to her fellow trustee, john l lewis. this was a gross misrepresentation. at the fund, roche made all of the day-to-day decisions, and the overwhelming majority of major policy decisions. john l lewis knew virtually nothing about health care or retirement pensions, which is why he hired roche to run the fund in 1948. the two worked hand in glove to run the fund, but it was often roche who developed decisions and can -- convinced louis of their merit. she was anything but a rubberstamp to the great man. josephine roche disappeared in history, in part, because of the anti-communist crusade that prompted her to do -- dodge the spotlight for a long enough that you was largely forgotten by the public. then, when the easing of political pressures allow her to reemerge, assumptions about the frailty, powerlessness ineffectiveness of old women prevented most writers from being able to imagine that a wiry old woman with thick glasses and hearing aids and a cane could command the likes of john l lewis or run an innovative multimillion dollar operation like the united mine workers welfare and retirement fund. from the 70's on, when a lot of anger was spilled on the operation of the fund and the union, roche was represented as little more than a yes woman to john l lewis. nothing could've been further from the truth. i hope this biography will put that understanding to rest. and by doing so, perform a small act of gender justice. because of time, i will skip her last campaign. she leaves the fund in 1971, she is forced out. she has one more campaign left in her, if you want to hear about that we can talk about that later. early in 1976, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and she died in bethesda at the age of 89. in conclusion, roche's life draws a line from the progressive era into the 1970's. she carried her progressive commitments and self ordered -- organization of workers into those decades. your public assistance assistance programs, and the regulation of industry, she found express and in the new deal, the creation of the epa, to mention only the tip of the iceberg. the age of reform did not and in 1940. roche's legacy to american life is vast. she had a hand in crafting policies and institutions that affected nearly every american during the second half of the 20th century. she presided over the expansion and modernization of the public health service, participated in the drafting of the social security act, social security's disability insurance as well as medicaid and medicare, and promoted the first national health plan in american history. additionally, her chain of hospitals, reorganized since the 60's, remain in operation today. they won their most recent award for rural health care in 2010. the chain remained in 2013, the largest employer in southeastern kentucky. that medical unit is fulfilling the dream that progressives of developed in the 1930's. the welfare fund also pioneered managed care, a direction for health care in the late 20th century. i could go on and on, but i will spare you. i will close with her own tribute to her beloved friend and ally, greg abbott, who died in 1939. at his service, she insisted the only memorial worthy of him was, in her words, to hold ourselves relentlessly to the task of correcting the inequalities wide put -- widespread denials, and fears that are in violation of democracies commitments. efforts to diminish wealth and power would be the most -- memorial most cherished by josephine roche. her life illuminates a powerful heritage for those who wish to build that memorial. [applause] >> and now, it is your turn. we could ask that you wait to be recognized, wait for the microphone, speak and the microphone, and identify yourself before you speak. we will start with you. >> thank you. don walton's burger the wilson center. welcome back, this looks like a wonderful book. your decade has paid off. i wonder -- you mentioned in passing frances perkins. from my recollection of history, she is given a lot of credit for social security as well. was there a relationship? was she on the committee? also, where the afdc came about at the same time. roche had worked in child welfare before she got to the new deal. was she instrument will in the child welfare aspect of the 35 act as well? >> thank you so much, don. it is great to see you again. roche and perkins were both graduate students in 1910. they knew each other for years. they lived in new york and worked on campaigns in new york in the teens. they had both been active with the national consumers league. there is so much i did not have time to tell you. that was an important arena, especially for perkins, but also for roche. they were longtime allies and acquaintances by the time they want up together in the new deal government. frances perkins chaired the committee on economic security. there were five people, two of them women, roche and perkins. roche's main interest was health care and unemployment compensation. she pushed so hard to make -- she really wanted unemployment comp -- compensation to be a national program, not one administered by the states. there were legal issues involved, so she did not win on that one. issue made it a more expensive program, though. those were major interest lay, in the committee and economic security. she did not have much to do with adc. that came out of the children's bureau. grace abbott was one person who developed that provision within the social security act. grace abbott was a great friend of roche. she had -- something else i couldn't tell you, roche had worked in the children's bureau in the federal department of labor in the early 20's, and she and abbott became close friends. they are both from nebraska, they had a lot of common experiences, and when roche ran for governor of colorado in 1934, grace abbott left washington, and was one of her great campaign supporters on the campaign trail. grace abbott and catherine lynn wrote -- linroot also supported that program. don't be scared to ask a question. but you will get an earful. >> let me ask about something we did not hear about in the talk. i think it gets touched upon only a bit in the book. that is the question of reform new deal reform and race. at the hands of historians these days, the new deal doesn't always fare so well when it comes to labor legislation, when it comes to social security, the agricultural adjustment act, the consequences for african-american workers, let's just say, were not always favorable, certainly not the same as it was for whites. in the book, you mentioned that this is not something she approved of. and that she saw these as opening gambit's that things could change later on. could you say something more about josephine roche and african-americans? the race question, the ways in which these new deal programs replicated and extended racial inequality, to some degree, at the same time that these programs worked to reduce inequality and other spheres? >> one of the reasons to think and see discontinuities among the big three, progressive reform, progressive era, the new deal and the new society, one reason to see discontinuity is that, instead of class, race became the primary axis of inequality, of concern during the great society, which was a change. it was really not until -- for so many other white progressives, roche became fully conscious of racial discrimination, and the possibility that racial inequality might not be solved by solving class inequality. she became aware of that, as so many other white progressives did, in the 1930's. that was a slow revelation to her and her cohort in the 30's. there is a moment in the book, i go through this in the book, where she is considered to be a great friend of the struggle for rasul -- racial justice. she is invited in 1935 to speak to a naacp convention. one of the guys who was her most important political mentor was a cosponsor of anti-lynching legislation before the congress at that moment. she was invited to the convention in st. louis of the naacp, and she talks about -- she talks with great passion about the anti-lynching campaign and how important that is. then she says, and this is just a part of the larger problem of social and economic injustice that we are all fighting for in programs like the social security act, and at that point it was still the economic security bill, and by that time, she knew that the occupations in which the majority of african-americans labored, had been excluded from coverage, both of unemployment insurance and old age pensions. she knew that. she had worked on the committee of economic security, as others had, frances perkins included, wanted a much larger range of occupations to be in the economic security bill, to be covered by old age pensions and unemployment compensation. in congress, those groups got pushed out. those two most important programs of the welfare state, largely excluded african-americans from benefits. that had happened when she went before the and ugly cpnaacp, and she represented this larger program of striking strike -- at inequality, when at that moment, it did not strike at racial injustice. to me, that is a really revealing moment. she is trying to get this thing, but she does not get this thing, yet. i think that is representative as i say, of white progressives, very largely, in the mid-1930's. she did not approve of segregation, but there comes a moment in the treasury when she is working hard to get african-americans hired in some kinds of positions other than janitorial positions in the treasury. there are african-americans were lobbying to get clerical jobs. she thinks, why not? let's do that. what she came up against was the expectation in the government -- and this was general, throughout the federal government -- that a black employee could not be hired, or should not be hired, in any position that would put that were -- black worker next to the white worker unless it was ok with the white worker. so she found herself in the situation of going around two offices in the treasury, saying, wouldn't it be ok, there are all these qualified people who need work and have terrific qualifications. is it ok? and just, now and then, finding somebody who said ok. one person at a time, she was placing. she was getting frustrated with that, and she went to morgan ball and said, maybe it makes sense to have a segregated section of some agency within the treasury. there was this moment, where you think, ok. you see that overcoming racial segregation and subordination is really going to be hard. but, you don't get what it takes to overcome it. segregation is not the answer, you have to require of white workers that they accept lack workers next to them. she was not ready to make the full assault on segregation that it would take. it is a bracing moment. in the 40's, like many americans, she became ever more keenly cognizant of what it might take. she was a big supporter of the fair practices committee, making it a permanent commission. at that point, she was president of the national consumers league. she was the first woman president of the league. it always had a woman of executive director, but the president was always a man until 1939. that year, she push the consumers league to support the fcp and the like. she was working with organizations that pushed for racial justice, but it was a slow process, and very imperfect, and the 30's and 40's, for roche. by the time the 50's happened, i hope you saw in the pictures of the hospitals and clinics, that roche founded in appalacihia that was all racially integrated. at that point, she is publicizing -- those pictures and photographs are photographs that she asked to have taken. she wanted to demonstrate, our institutions are integrated. this is the way it should be. there is development there. i think what her experience demonstrates is, to a large degree, this very stop and go process of white progressives coming to grips with the fact that the kinds of programs they were suggesting for the working class in general, were not going to solve, of themselves, racial injustice. >> i am from the wilson center. thank you so much for wreck -- rescuing roche from history and sharing her with us. i wanted to ask about something you just touched on. you said progress at -- progressivism was alive and well from the early 20th century through the 1970's, and perhaps beyond. and that josephine roche was the keeper of a flame. obviously, she would not have been the only keeper of the flame. can you place her in the context of other people, other institutions that were working to keep progressivism alive, even if underground? from the 1940's until the 1960's. >> thank you, your another person who has nurtured this project for years. roche was definitely -- i would argue that the kinds of organizations and agencies that work active in the new deal and the early 20th century, we are seeing them do a lot of the same kind of work in the 1950's. but, they are doing it below the radar, or without much success rather than with the kind of publicity they were getting in the 30's, and the kind of success they got in the early 20th century and 1930's. the organizations like the national consumers league itself, the american association of university women, the labor movement, those are all crucial keepers of the flame in the 1950's. and, during the 50's, ever more important to progressivism become the agencies of racial justice. the naacp is a crucial component in the struggle, as well. one of the things the changes as a result of the anti-communist crusade in the late 40's and through the 50's, is that these organizations and associations that had, in the 1930's, coalesced, come together to fight the fight together, those organizations and campaigns were forced apart. talking about social reconstruction is a general principle, a general need of american institutions in american life, was jane -- dangerous. you could struggle on in a smaller, a narrower channel, as did the struggle for racial justice and the labor movement and as did some women in organizations for women's advancement as well. you cannot go public with a joint effort, a general demand for social reconstruction. all of these groups and campaigns and interests get pulled apart in a way they hadn't been. they had been going in the other direction in the 30's and 40's, where you see the cio and the struggle for racial justice coming together, the cio and women's advancement, participating together to advance women's best interests as well as class interests. those groups are seeing how all of those injustices, all of those inequalities, feed each other and fit together. they are pulled apart and forced to go it alone in the 1950's. a lot of the same organizations, but they are not able to ally publicly in the same way they had earlier. >> kent? >> i beg your pardon. kent hughes from the wilson center. thank you, a wonderful presentation. i wish i was one of your students. julia louis was a force in organized labor. -- louis was a force -- john l lewis was a force in organized labor. >> roche, and a lot of people in the labor movement in the 40's and 50's, were interested in health care. the labor movement was crucial in general, to innovations in health care. in health care, and a whole bright he ways. developing institutions like community clinics, and health insurance, and health services like our banks that -- roche's, they were instrumental in funding research on diseases and injuries that were hers -- workers suffered from. the labor movement is sort of broadly interested in health issues, especially in the 1950's. so roche is a kind of leader in that whole coalition. one of the first moments, when she pops her head back up above the parapet, she has been under the radar for several years, comes in 1958, the very first time she goes public in a long time. it was at a labor health conference, held in 1958 here in washington dc, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the 1938 conference that she had organized and chaired. everybody there is from the labor movement. they all claim, we are the rebels, we will reorganize medicine. we are in this together. we will overthrow the way medicine is delivered in this country, or we are doomed. there is a large, active, smart group that was working in the 50's, across the labor movement on issues of health. really important was the cio itself. the cio had people involved, and active crew was in the amalgamated clothing workers and the international ladies garment workers union. they do interesting health work in the 1950's. especially around community clinics that are controlled by the unions. very interesting. >> dana? >> dana kennedy, national history center. thank you, this is fascinating. like most of us, i knew nothing about her. you have persuaded me, she is an important figure. what is remarkable is, of course, she is a woman dealing with the constraints that women faced. you did not say much about what her views were on women's role in society. and, what sort of -- how she sort of viewed herself in that context. >> thank you for asking that. really, from the time that she was at vassar on, she was a feminist in a way that anybody would recognize. she was not a maternal list. -- a maternalist. a lot of female activists in the early 20th century argued, because women were different from men, they are to have power in society, position in society that it they did not have. they should have the vote. roche did not go for that. she did not believe men and women were different. she thought they were more alike than different. she did not have any truck with that difference business, except that treated -- history had treated men and women differently. she did not see anything natural in that. there are great moments with the press, where they would say, oh, it is because you are a woman, don't you think? that you have been able to into -- untie the industrial not. she would say, no, i don't think that. she would say, some men have a gift for this kind of thing, and some women have a gift for this kind of thing. i'm one of the women who has a gift for this thing. but it is not because i am a woman. she struggled a lot. i considered showing you -- and i should have -- a photograph of her when she was a vice cop in denver. herself presentation was so tough, it makes me tremble. she looked really tough. she had a broad brimmed hat and rimless glasses, and she just looks fierce some. she is wearing her badges, she is really, really borrowing all kinds of masculine props to assert her authority in that position. once she stops being a vice cop, by the late teens and early 20's, she goes with a more conventionally feminine self presentation. she wears dresses, flow ease -- flow we kinds of things. i call this "new deal womanhood." she embodied it brilliantly, and it was this. she seems to accept, in her appearance, certain markers of male-female difference, that put lots of people at ease. but, she was then how to even by those same reporters that would comment on her snazzy hats, they would say, boy, she has masculine rationality, masculine command. they still construed those qualities as masculine. it was fine with them, they loved it, that she embodied both of these sets of qualities. it is interesting. so, she did tone down -- and did accept some very conventionally feminine aspects of appearance but she never accepted that men and women were fundamentally different. >> amanda? >> amanda moniz, national history center. she was involved in the three progressive eras. but she grew up in the populist era. i was wondering if you could say more about her experiences in the relationships she had during the populist era, given that her parents were not supporters of the movement. >> she was so young. there is little evidence -- i wish i had more evidence of what she overheard. i wish i knew what she overheard as a child in nebraska, which is, of course, one of the main places for organizing and leadership of the populist movement. the fact is, i do not know what she heard, or who she knew, and that kind of thing. i will tell you -- as i see it i do not see populism and progressivism is very distinct at all. i see them as part of -- as much more continuous than different. as i say in the book, i don't know whether it was because she overheard and became convinced of populist commitments and values as a child, or if it was the staying power of the ideals of the populists that explain her absorbing them later. if you look at the list of populist demands, if you look at the agenda, the political agenda, it is her agenda. it is the agenda of reformers, of progressive reformers through the 70's. i really just see -- of course there are changes. where race plays out and stands in respects to other inequalities, the changes dramatically. but, having it the heart of the political agenda the diminution of inequality, that stays the same without. -- throughout. he idea of using government as part of public policy, as a part of the toolbox for diminishing inequalities, as well as the empowerment of people and civil society as a part of that toolbox, that stays the same throughout. >> can i bring this back to the cold war? and maybe the evidence question can be addressed here, as well. the biography is a very favorable one towards a woman whose accomplishments were clearly many, in so many different areas. if i could discern one moment of disappointment, perhaps that is too strong of a word, but that is what i sense when you addressed roche's response to the cold war at home and anti-communist on the investment -- domestic front. she testifies at loyalty hearings, she is critical of communists, she refers to them as commies. this is a moment when, in your talk and book, you note how former alliances cannot be reconstituted, people read once worked together are forced apart by this environment. i am wondering, how much does josephine roche speak to what is going on in her mind? the world is not static the stove be -- the soviet union is adopting aggressive policies. it is not just, once i was not an anti-communist, now i am. she is responding to things. that she speak to these issues or are you -- are we assuming that she is thinking things that she is not saying, and saying things that she is not thinking? lacks the latter. >> the latter. i hope someone will find more evidence at some point. i actually do not know. an awful lot of what i have to say about her relationship to the anti-communist crusade, is about -- is not based, i don't know specifically, i do not have evidence of what is going on in her mind or what she is saying to her friends in confidence at that point. it is so frustrating. one of the great -- it is so sad. one of the reasons i do have knowledge of her interior life and what is going on in her head before the 1940's, is that she has a voluminous correspondence with a friend, read lewis, and i was able to get my hands miraculously, on that correspondence. it peters out in the 30's and early 40's, and it is over by the late 40's and 50's. they are using the telephone. that is a real bummer. it is crazy. it is a thing where i think, well, technology is getting in my way as a historian. they are talking on the phone, not writing back and forth. so, the record, then, of anything but what she is willing to say publicly, diminishes to almost nothing. the only place i get things -- and this does not have to deal with the anti-communist crusade or the left or anything of the sort, but one of the great discoveries of the research was that out in her records in boulder, colorado, she had stashed a bunch of these minutes of conferences at the united mine workers health and retirement fund, which, instead of leaving them in the fund archives. other historians have done work on the fund, and on the postwar. fantastic work. but they did not have access to these records that she held out, these records of the conference is, that demonstrate, for instance, that she is making the decisions and she is talking to john l lewis into things right and left. he gets credit for, or he is blamed for those things. people say lewis has destroyed the minor in this way. no, that was josephine roche's idea. you couldn't possibly know these things unless you had looked at her records. there are some great finds, in that way. the record of her interior life gets thinner and thinner after 1930, and is almost nonexistent. it is very sad. >> thank you. i think you are -- i think we are at the end of our time. we like to open each semester with a bang. when this biography was first brought to our attention josephine roche is the subject of -- >> never heard of her! >> >> thank you so much for the wonderful presentation. congratulations on the book, and thank you. >> here are some of our featured programs for this weekend on the c-span networks. on c-span2's booktv tonight at 10:00, white house correspondent for american urban radio april ryan on her more than 25 years of coverage. sunday at noon on "in-depth," walter isaacson whose biographies include ben franklin, albert einstein, and the international bestseller on steve jobs. on american history tv on c-span3 today at 6:00 p.m. eastern, on the civil war heather richardson on how the carboy or a reconstruction became symbolic of a newly unified america. we will tour the house of the american red cross and learn about the founder clara barton. find our complete schedule at www.c-span.org and let us know what you think about the programs you're watching. call us at the number on your screen. e-mail us. >> former member of president clinton's administration look back at the policies of president clinton's white house. they discuss achievements as well as policy setbacks. the clinton presidential center and the university of virginia's miller center hosted this event. it was part of the 10th anniversary of clinton presidential library. >> welcome, we are happy to see you here, i am susan page, i covered the 1992 campaign of the clinton campaign, and i can tell you that domestic policy is catnip for bill clinton. i believe that president clinton