Robert Dale Owen

Robert Dale Owen (born November 7, 1801 in Glasgow , Scotland , † June 24, 1877 in Lake George , New York , United States ) was an American politician , diplomat and social reformer .

Life

Robert Dale Owen was the son of the British entrepreneur and social politician Robert Owen . He enjoyed private lessons and from 1820 to 1823 attended the school of the pedagogue Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg in Bern . He emigrated to America in 1825 with his parents , who settled in Posey County , Indiana . Owen supports his father in setting up the early socialist production cooperative New Harmony . After the failure of this project, he returned to Europe to study. In 1827 he returned to the United States and received citizenship . From 1828 to 1832, Owen co-founded and edited the Free Enquirer magazine in New York . Owen's book Moral Physiology (published in 1830 or 1832) was the first book published in America to advocate birth control. In 1832 he returned to New Harmony.

From 1835 to 1838, Owen was a member of the Indiana House of Representatives . After two unsuccessful candidacies in 1838 and 1840 , he was elected as representative for the first district of Indiana in the 28th Congress in 1842 , where he was a member of the Democrats . Owens sat in Congress until March 1837, heading the Congress Committee on Roads and Canal Construction. In 1850 he was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of Indiana and in 1851 again a member of the State Legislature .

As a leading member of the Democratic Party, Owen campaigned for the abolition of slavery . In Washington, DC , Owen drafted the law establishing the Smithsonian Institution . In 1853, President Franklin Pierce appointed him ambassador to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies ; he held this position until 1858. Back in the States, he devoted the rest of his life to writing about social problems. In the spring he submitted a text proposal to Thaddeus Stevens for the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States , which was submitted to Congress after major changes .

The city of Dale , Indiana, was named after Robert Dale Owen.

Works (selection)

Moral philosophy or a brief and plain treatise on the population question . Thomson Gale Publishers, Farmington Hills, Mich. 2006 (online text of the London 1844 edition)
Threading My Way. Twenty-Seven Years of Autobiography . Kelley Books, New York 1967 (reprinted London 1874 edition)
Footfalls on the boundary of another world ; Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1860 https://archive.org/stream/foot00fallsonboundowenrich#page/1/

literature

Richard W. Leopold: Robert Dale Owen. A biography . Octagon Books, New York 1969 (reprinted Cambridge 1940 edition).
Eric Lott: Love and Theft. Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class . OUP, New York 1993, ISBN 0-19-509641-X .
Arthur M. Schlesinger : The Age of Jackson . Little, Brown, Boston, Mass. 1989, ISBN 0-316-773441 (reprinted 1953 Boston edition).

Individual evidence

↑ Hans Louis Trefousse: Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1997, ISBN 0-8078-2335-X , pp. 184f.

Web links

Robert Dale Owen in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
Biography (English)

personal data
SURNAME	Owen, Robert Dale
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American politician, diplomat, and social reformer
DATE OF BIRTH	November 7, 1801
PLACE OF BIRTH	Glasgow , Scotland
DATE OF DEATH	June 24, 1877
Place of death	Lake George , New York

[1] Hans Louis Trefousse: Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1997, ISBN 0-8078-2335-X , pp. 184f.