Welfarer

The 56,000 employes of the U. S. Treasury Department sat down to their suppers one evening last week with easy hearts. From now on they were going to be looked after by a woman who has spent all her life making other people happy. To be Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, President Roosevelt had appointed Josephine Aspinwall Roche, famed Colorado coal operator. Second woman ever to attain sub-Cabinet rank,* her special province was to be the U. S. Public Health Service, the welfare of Treasury employes.

Born in small Neligh, Neb. to a hardbitten, union-hating coal operator father, Josephine Roche started early to have ideas of her own. At 12 she wanted to go down in a mine, was told it was too dangerous. "If it is dangerous for me," piped Josephine, "why isn't it just as dangerous for the men?" It was to be 29 years before she could do much for coal miners, but she did not forget them. The years between were busy. She took an A.B. at Vassar, an M.A. at Columbia in 1910 with Frances Perkins who became her fast friend. After some welfare work in New York she went back to Colorado, whither her parents had moved in 1906. As Denver's first policewoman, she cleaned up theatres and dance halls so thoroughly that their proprietors had her job abolished. Josephine Roche had herself made a deputy sheriff. She organized Colorado for Progressives, did Belgian relief work in England and New York, directed the girls' department of Denver's Juvenile Court, investigated the cost of living in New-York and Baltimore. Between 1918 and 1923 she headed an Americanizing service for foreigners in New York, married and divorced Edward Hale Bierstadt, Manhattan writer. For nearly two years she managed the editorial division of the U. S. Children's Bureau. Then her father's failing health took her back to Denver where she busied herself as chief probation officer, referee and clerk in Judge Ben Lindsey's famed Juvenile & Family Courts. In 1927 her father died.

From him Josephine Roche inherited a large but by no means controlling block of stock in Rocky Mountain Fuel Co., third biggest coal mining company in Colorado. Crushed and disorganized by long and bloody industrial warfare, Colorado miners were then brooding another strike. The strike broke. Six workers were killed, 35 injured at the Rocky Mountain Fuel Co.'s Columbine mine. Instead of scuttling back to the peaceful East, Josephine Roche bought control of the company, set out to create "a new era in the industrial relations of Colorado." She invited the dreaded United Mine Workers of America to unionize her five mines. She made an oldtime labor leader her manager. She upped wages to $7 a day, highest in the State. She provided for arbitration of disputes, for better working conditions. All this she put down in writing in one of the famed Labor-Capital compacts of U. S. industrial history.

Sullen employes became her loyal partners. Up went efficiency and profits but down on her came the wrath of the industry. Led by the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Co., her competitors started a cutthroat price war. With a high wage scale, Operator Roche was not prepared to fight. Her friends fought for her. Employes volunteered to lend half their pay for three months. Colorado unionists launched a State-wide sales campaign for her coal. Her opponents crawled from the field.

Today Miss Roche is proud that, despite Depression, her company is making more than in the days when her father spent tens of thousands on machine guns and barbed wire to strew around the mines. But she is not rich. Most profits go back into the company. She drives a battered Buick, stays at the home of her friends Senator & Mrs. Edward P. Costigan when she visits Washington. Surprisingly, she is a small, gentle, thoroughly feminine person with a soft voice, a quick, nervous laugh. Even in her coal mining office she dresses as most women dress for tea. At 47 her dark hair is greying, the lines of her firm jaw broadening, but her blue-grey eyes have lost not a spark of their vitality and fervor.

Last summer Miss Roche campaigned for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Colorado on an out & out New Deal platform, lost by a close margin to Governor Edwin C. Johnson. Left without a campaign of her own, Miss Roche joined her warm friend Mrs. Roosevelt in stumping successfully for the election of Mrs. Caroline O'Day as U. S. Representative-at-Large from New York.

At the National Coal Association convention in Washington last month, Miss Roche predicted the coming of a new era of security and well-being for workers throughout the land. Last fortnight President Roosevelt appointed her to his advisory council on legislation to that end--unemployment, old age, health insurance (see p.11). If & when those New Deal flowers blossom, they could logically be planted in the Treasury Department. And in or out of the Department it would be hard to find a more sympathetic, experienced and able gardener for them than Josephine Roche.

* First: Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Assistant Attorney General (1921-29).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.