Robert Dale Owen

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

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

Biography

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Owen emigrated to the United States in 1825, and helped his father create the community of New Harmony, Indiana. After the community dissolved, Owen returned briefly to Europe, then moved to New York City and became the editor of the Free Enquirer, a socialistic and anti-Christian weekly, which he ran with Frances Wright from 1828 to 1832.^[1] 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). There he distinguished himself by securing appropriations for the public school system.^[1] 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 to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies at Naples.^[2] After leaving that post in 1858, Owen retired from political life, but remained an active intellectual.

During the Civil War, he served in the Ordnance Commission and the Freedmen's Bureau.^[1] He wrote an open letter 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 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. In 1911, the women of Indiana dedicated a memorial to Robert Dale Owen^[3] on the lawn of the Indiana Statehouse.^[4]

See also

• Birth control movement in the United States

Bibliography

• 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)

Notes

References

• Robert Dale Owen at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Robert Dale Owen (1801-1877) social reformer
• Owen, Robert Dale. 1875. "Touching Visitants from a Higher Life." The Atlantic Monthly. 35(207): 57-69
• 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.