This chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This biography explains first how Josephine Roche moved from a small town on the Great Plains, where she was born in 1886, to the nation's capital, where she joined Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration in 1934. Especially significant in explaining her achievements were her education at Vassar, mentoring by a progressive reform community in Denver, and the meaning she made of the momentous coal strike in Colorado that culminated in the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. This biography also explains why, having achieved renown in the 1930s, Roche largely disappeared from history and memory, a disappearing act made all the more mysterious by her stunning post-New Deal resume.