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'''Owen, Robert Dale'''. Statesman, social reformer and author, b. at Glasgow, Scotland, Nov. 9, 1801; d. at his Summer home on Lake George, N. Y., June 24, 1877. Eldest son of Robert Owen and Ann Caroline Dale. Mother was the daughter of David Dale, proprietor of the cottonmills at New Lanark, where Robert Owen was beginning to put into practice his theory of social reform. Almost the whole of Robert Dale Owen’s life was spent in the U.S., and was shaped by his father’s influence. Possessed of much of his father’s gift for original and liberal thought in social matters, he added to it a practicality and patience all his own. Instructed in New Lanark school and by private tutors until the age of eighteen when for four years he attended the progressive {{Page aside|519}}institution of Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg, at Hofwyl, Switzerland, where his beliefs in human virtue and social progress were strengthened. Upon returning to his father’s cottonmill community, he took charge of the school and managed the factories in his father’s absence. Came to the U.S. with his father, November, 1825, where Robert Owen established a community at New Harmony, Ind., as an experiment in social reform. Robert Dale busied himself with teaching and editing the New Harmony Gazette. After the experiment failed, in the Spring of 1827, he became interested in another somewhat similar venture, the Nashoba (near Memphis, Tenn.) community founded by Frances Wright and devoted to the gradual emancipation of slaves. He went to Europe with her, meeting a number of prominent personalities. Back in the U.S., he engaged for about two years in the work of the “Free Enquirers,” a group opposed to organized religion and advocating liberal divorce laws, industrial education and a more equal distribution of wealth. In June, 1829, he moved to New York and devoted much of his time to editing the Free Enquirer; he took active part in various social and industrial reforms, meeting some degree of success as well as many obstacles. The work which he did in New York, promoting lectures, educational and health centers, and free-thinking publications, corresponded closely to the activities of his father, whom he joined in England in 1832. For a while, father and son were co-editors of The Crisis, but Robert Dale soon returned to New Harmony and began a different cycle in his varied life. He served three terms in the Indiana legislature (183638) and was elected to Congress in 1842 as a Democrat, serving two terms (1843-47), but was defeated for a third. In 1845 he introduced the bill under which the Smithsonian Institution was constituted and insisted that the work of the Institution should include popular dissemination of knowledge as well as investigation. In 1853, President Pierce appointed Robert Dale Owen charge d’affaire at Naples, and two years later made him minister. It was in Italy that Owen became seriously interested in Spiritualism, publishing later his two works on this subject: Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (1860), and The Debatable Land between This World and the Next (1872).


When Owen returned to America in 1858, he became one of the leading advocates of emancipation. His letter to the President, dated Sept. 17, 1862, published with letters to Chase and Stanton in a pamphlet, The Policy of Emancipation (1863), was credited by Secretary Chase with having “had more influence on him {{Page aside|520}}[Lincoln] than any other document which reached him on the subject.” In 1863, Owen was appointed chairman of a Committee to investigate the conditions of the freedman, out of which study grew his volume, The Wrong of Slavery (1864), an understanding treatment of the whole problem. Owen was opposed to the immediate enfranchisement of the Negro, advocating a plan whereby the suffrage should be granted freedmen after a period of ten years.
Besides the works already mentioned, Owen was the author of: Pocahontas·. A Historical Drama (1837); Beyond the Breakers (1870), a novel; and many pamphlets on questions of public interest. In 1873-75, he contributed a number of autobiographical articles to the Atlantic Monthly. The first of these (Jan.-Nov., 1873), covering his first twenty-seven years, were published in book form under the title, Threading My Way (1874).
Owen was married twice: on April 12, 1832, to Mary Jane Robinson, who died in 1871; and on June 23, 1876, to Lottie Walton Kellogg.
(Sources: Autobiogr. sketches, as mentioned above; G.B. Lockwood, The Neu) Harmony Movement (1905); F. Podmore, Robert Owen: A Biogr. (2 vols., 1906); L. M. Sears, “Robert Dale Owen as a Mystic,” Ind. Mag. of Hist., March, 1928.]
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