Robert Dale Owen (1801 - 1877)

Robert Dale Owen

Robert Dale Owen was a British-born American social reformer and political activist, newspaper editor and writer.

The son of English reformer Robert Owen, Robert Dale Owen was imbued with socialist philosophy in the Scottish town of New Lanark, the elder Owen's model industrial community. In 1825, father and son emigrated to the United States, where they founded a successful socialist community in New Harmony, Indiana.

Robert Dale Owen edited the New Harmony Gazette, worked with reformer Fannie Wright, visited Europe, then edited the Free Enquirer newspaper. This newspaper was the center of radical free thought in New York City: it opposed evangelical religion, advocated more liberal divorce laws, a more equal distribution of wealth, and widespread industrial education.

Owen served three terms in the Indiana legislature, where he advocated public funds for public schools, and two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he introduced a bill to establish the Smithsonian Institution. For several years in the 1850s, Owen represented the United States as a diplomat in Naples and Italy. Upon his return in 1858, he became an outspoken supporter of emancipation. And at the outbreak of the American Civil War, in a letter to President Lincoln, he called for an end to slavery, a letter that Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase said greatly influenced the president.

In 1863, Owen chaired a committee to study the plight of the freedmen and wrote the book The Wrongness of Slavery. The town of Dale, Indiana, is named in Owen's honor.