Robert Dale Owen

For more information on Robert Dale Owen, visit Britannica.com.

Robert Dale Owen (1801-1877), Scottish-born American legislator, was conspicuous among radicals in the 1820s and then won stature as an exponent of social legislation.

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, on Nov. 9, 1801, Robert Dale Owen, the eldest son of Robert Owen, attended the school his father had established at New Lanark. After studying for 4 years at Hofwyl, Switzerland, he came home to head his old school, which he celebrated in his An Outline of the System of Education at New Lanark (1824).

In 1825 Owen joined his father in his New Harmony, Ind., experiment, where he taught and edited its Gazette. He was impressed by the idealism of the social reformer Frances Wright, who was at New Harmony in 1825, and toured Europe with her. When Owen returned to New Harmony he found it in decay; still bent on social change, he organized a group of "Free Enquirers" who repudiated religion, exalted education for all, and urged lenient divorce laws and fairer distribution of wealth. Owen moved to New York City in 1829, and with Frances Wright urged his causes in the Sentinel and the Free Enquirer, as well as through the short-lived New York Working Men's party.

In 1832 Owen married Mary Jane Robinson in a ceremony repudiating male dominance. They visited England, where Owen helped his father edit the Crisis, and then settled in New Harmony. In 1836 Owen was elected for the first of three terms in the Indiana Legislature. There he advocated liberal causes, including universal education. In 1842 he was sent as a regular Democrat to the U.S. Congress. During his second term in Congress he prepared the bill (1845) creating the Smithsonian Institution.

Defeated for a third term in Congress, Owen helped liberalize rights for women in Indiana. President Franklin Pierce appointed him chargé d'affaires for Naples, Italy, in 1853. Back in America 5 years later, Owen joined other antislavery Democrats in crossing over to the Republican party. He was a moderate on slavery, but the increasing gulf between pro and antislavery forces gave contemporary distinction to such writings as The Wrong of Slavery (1864). In Italy, Owen had been converted, like his father, to spiritualism, and he wrote eloquently on its behalf in Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (1860) and The Debatable Land between This World and the Next (1872). His last years were hectic, owing to the death of his wife in 1871, embarrassments caused by unscrupulous spiritualists, and his own bout with mental illness in 1875, from which he recovered. He married Lottie W. Kellogg in 1876. Owen died at their summer home at Lake George, N.Y., on June 24, 1877.

Further Reading

Much of the writing on the elder Owen and New Harmony deals also with Robert Dale Owen. His autobiographical chapters in Threading My Way (1874; repr. 1967) are excellent, although confined to his early life. Studies of him are Richard W. Leopold, Robert Dale Owen (1940), and Elinor Pancoast and Anne E. Lincoln, The Incorrigible Idealist: Robert Dale Owen in America (1940).

Son of the British socialist Robert Owen. He was born November 9, 1801 in Glasgow, Scotland, and educated in Switzerland. Owen eventually emigrated to America. He lived for several years in his father's socialistic community, New Harmony, in Indiana. He served in the Indiana legislature and in Congress. He introduced the bill organizing the Smithsonian Institution and in 1846 became one of its regents and chairman of its Building Committee. Owen was a member of the Indiana Constitutional Convention in 1850. In 1853, Owen was appointed Chargé d'Affaires at Naples and Minister in 1855. He remained there until 1858.

Owen was disappointed to learn of his father's attachment to Spiritualism. But experiences with the famous medium D.D. Home during his stay in Naples started his career of psychic investigation. Owen worked to prove whether survival was a certainty or delusion. He published two books, Footfalls on the Boundaries of Another World (1860) and The Debatable Land Between this World and the Next (1871), in support of the Spiritualist movement. In spite of scandals, such as cheating on the part of the mediums Mr. and Mrs. Nelson Holmes in 1874, Owen continued to advocate his new faith until his death. He died June 17, 1877.

Sources:

Harrison, John F. C. Quest for the New World. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969.

Oved, Yaacov. Two Hundred Years of American Communes. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publications, 1993.

Owen, Robert Dale. The Debatable Land Between this World and the Next. London: Trubner, 1871.

——. Footfalls on the Boundaries of Another World. Philadelphia: Lippencott, 1860.

——. Threading My Way; Twenty-Seven Years of Autobiography. 1874. Reprint, New York: A. M. Kelley, 1967.

Robert Dale Owen from Who-When-What Book, 1900

Robert Dale Owen (November 7, 1801–June 24, 1877) was a longtime exponent in his adopted United States of the socialist doctrines of his father, Robert Owen, as well as a politician in the Democratic Party.

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Owen emigrated to the United States in 1825, and helped his father create the Utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana. After the community failed, Owen returned briefly to Europe, then moved to New York City and became the editor of the Free Enquirer, which he ran from 1828 to 1832. Owen's Moral Physiology, published in 1830 or 1831, was the first book to advocate birth control in the United States (specifically, coitus interruptus). Along with Fanny Wright, he was an intellectual leader of the Working Men's Party. In contrast to many other Democrats of the era, Owen and Wright were opposed to slavery, though their artisan radicalism distanced them from the leading abolitionists of the time. (Lott, 129)

He returned 1833 to New Harmony, Indiana, and served in the Indiana House of Representatives twice (1835–1838; 1851–1853). After two unsuccessful campaigns, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1842, and served from 1843 to 1847. While in Washington, he drafted the bill for the founding of the Smithsonian Institution.

Owen was elected a member of the Indiana Constitutional Convention in 1850, and was instrumental in securing to widows and married women control of their property, and the adoption of a common free school system. He later succeeded in passing a state law giving greater freedom in divorce.

In 1853, Franklin Pierce appointed Owen as United States minister at Naples. After leaving that post in 1858, Owen retired from political life, but remained an active intellectual.

He wrote to President Lincoln on September 7, 1862, urging him to end slavery on moral grounds. A few days later the Emancipation Proclamation was read to the Cabinet.

In March 1865, he submitted a radical initial draft of the Fourteenth Amendment that was eventually modified into the final draft.

He was a strong believer in Spiritualism (despite admitting having been duped into believing in a spirit named "Katie King") and was the author of two well-known books on the subject: Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (1859) and The Debatable Land Between this World and the Next (1872).

Owen died at his summer home in Lake George, New York, and was buried in New Harmony, Indiana. The town of Dale, Indiana was named after him.

Books authored

• Moral Physiology; or, A Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question (1830/1)
• LABOR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS PROSPECTS (1848)
• The Policy of Emancipation (1863)
• The Wrong of Slavery (1864)
• Beyond the Breakers (1870)
• Threading My Way (1874)

References

• Robert Dale Owen at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Robert Dale Owen (1801-1877) social reformer
• Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Age of Jackson. Boston : Little, Brown, 1953 [1945].
• Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Oxford University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-19-509641-X.
• Threading my Way, Twenty-seven Years of Autobiography, by Robert Dale Owen (London, 1874).
• Democracy Reborn by Garrett Epps (Henry Holt, 2006).
• Owen's letter to President Lincoln.
• Greenberg, Joshua R. Advocating The Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 154-189.

United States House of Representatives
Preceded by George H. Proffit	Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Indiana's 1st congressional district 1843–1847	Succeeded by Elisha Embree
Diplomatic posts
Preceded by Edward Joy Morris	United States Ambassador (as Chargé d'Affaires and Minister Resident) to the Two Sicilies 1853–1858	Succeeded by Joseph Ripley Chandler

Persondata
NAME	Owen, Robert Dale
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	United States politician
DATE OF BIRTH	1801-11-07
PLACE OF BIRTH	Glasgow, Scotland
DATE OF DEATH	1877-06-24
PLACE OF DEATH	Lake George, New York

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)