Winslow Carlton

Who was Winslow Carlton?

Winslow Carlton was an American businessman and organizer of cooperatives.

After graduating from Harvard University in 1929, Carlton began work with the Federal Relief Administration, where he worked with self-help cooperatives in California. In this context he was assigned by the Roosevelt Administration to lead a successful project to determine whether it was feasible to develop an alternative mutual self-help economy, in part based on barter, to the conventional economy in which many people were homeless and starving in spite of having skills and being ready to work. In 1935, Carlton married Margaret Gillies, the national director of the Self-Help Cooperative Service. Upton Sinclair used Carlton as the model for his protagonist in his 1936 novel, Co-op: a Novel of Living Together. As in many historical novels, some of the motives attributed by the author to the protagonist were not those of the real person, a source of frustration for Carlton.

In 1938, Carlton founded Group Health Insurance, the first community based, non-profit insurance plan. Later it expanded to include the first dental insurance plan and the first mental health insurance plan. He later founded Health Insurance Plan of New York City, a non-profit insurance plan for city employees, the first HMO in the Eastern United States, and second in the United States as a whole. In the political domain, Carlton worked on Medicare/Medicaid legislation with Senator Jacob Javitz.