Rochester, Anna

ROCHESTER, ANNA (1880–1966). The great-granddaughter of Colonel Nathaniel Rochester, founder of Rochester, New York, Anna Rochester became one of the leading Marxist scholars of the 1930s and 1940s. Under the auspices of the Labor Research Association (LRA), which she cofounded with life-partner Grace Hutchins and colleague Robert Dunn in 1927, Rochester wrote profusely on political theory, labor economics, and social welfare. The LRA published bulletins, pamphlets, reports, and books for use by labor unions. Rochester died at the age of eighty-six, having lived for more than forty years with Hutchins in Greenwich Village.

Born in New York City into a wealthy aristocratic family, she grew up in Englewood, New Jersey, and attended Bryn Mawr College in 1897. Rochester left Bryn Mawr after her sophomore year in order to care for her mother and went on to study music. She gave up a promising career as a pianist to work full-time in the field of economics and labor issues. In 1910, Rochester joined the Socialist Party, actively campaigning for Eugene Debs. By 1912 she had become a member of the executive board of the New Jersey Consumers’ League and the New York Child Labor Committee. During this period she also represented the Englewood Woman’s Club within the Department of Industrial Conditions and Social Welfare of the New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs. In connection with the successful campaign for a ten-hour working day for women, Rochester chaired the publicity committee of the New Jersey Consumers’ League, writing the press articles that were sent out in connection with the campaign. Her first paid employment was with the National Child Labor Committee in 1912, where she again worked in publications, producing the Child Labor Bulletin, a quarterly publication. From 1915 to 1921, Rochester worked with the Children’s Bureau as Julia Lathrop’s private secretary and, later, as director of publications. Here and in her earlier positions she learned the skills for which she would later be so well known: researching, analyzing, writing, and editing numerous bulletins, reports, and books.

Rochester had strong religious leanings during her early career, believing in Christian advocacy for peace and social justice. She served on the executive committee of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a Christian-pacifist organization, and, working with Devere Allen, became editor in chief of its widely circulated journal, the World Tomorrow. In 1926, however, Rochester traveled abroad with Grace Hutchins, visiting, among other places, China and the Soviet Union; upon her return, she broke formal ties with the Fellowship of Reconciliation. She was now convinced that the teachings of Marx, as developed by Lenin, offered the only scientific solution to the multiplying social and economic contradictions of capitalism. In 1927 Rochester joined the American Communist Party and cofounded the LRA, which became the institutional context for Rochester’s and Hutchins’s writing and political careers. Not so prominent within the Party as Hutchins, Rochester concentrated her energies on her scholarship. Her published texts include Labor and Coal (1931); Rulers of America: A Study of Finance Capital (1936); Why Farmers Are Poor (1940); Lenin on the Agrarian Question (1942); The Populist Movement in the U.S. (1943); Capitalism and Progress (1945), revised and updated as The Nature of Capitalism (1946); and American Capitalism, 1607–1800 (1949). Pamphlets of the 1930s included Profits and Wages, Wall Street, and Your Dollar under Roosevelt.

Allen, Julia M. Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013.

Lee, Janet. Comrades and Partners: The Shared Lives of Grace Hutchins and Anna Rochester. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2000.

Grace Hutchins Papers. University of Oregon Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives.

Labor Research Association Records. Guide. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor. Archives. New York University.

Anna Rochester Papers. 1880-1958. University of Oregon Libraries. Special Collections and University Archives.