Robert Latham Owen

Early and family life

Owen was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, on February 2, 1856, the younger of two sons of Confederate Col. Robert L. Owen Sr. (1825–1873), a civil engineer and former surveyor who had become president of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, and his wife Narcissa Clark Chisholm Owen (Cherokee Nation). His family attended an Episcopal Church in his youth.

Owen's paternal ancestors had emigrated from Wales, and the family had a record of public service as doctors and teachers. His grandfather, Dr. William Owen, and uncle, Dr. William Otway Owen Sr. (1820–1892), both practiced medicine in Lynchburg, and the latter served as surgeon-in-chief in charge of thirty hospitals in Lynchburg (which became a major wartime hospital center) throughout the Civil War. His father Robert Latham Owen Sr. served in the Virginia State Senate after the American Civil War.

During Owen's boyhood, the family lived in Lynchburg's best-known mansion, Point of Honor. Owen attended private schools in Lynchburg and in Baltimore, Maryland.

The American Civil War destroyed most of Virginia's railroads. In late 1867, Robert Latham Owen Sr. resigned his position as president of the Virginia and Tennessee Railway because he opposed a proposed railway consolidation led by the colorful and highly political former Confederate General (and future U.S. senator, 1881–1887) William Mahone, who replaced him as president.

In June 1873, however, when Owen was 16, his father died a financially ruined man, due to the Panic of 1873, which struck the consolidating railroads especially hard. Writing in 1934, Owen described the family's hard times: "the value of my father's property was completely destroyed, and my mother, from a life of abundance, was suddenly compelled to earn her living by teaching music." With support from scholarships, initially obtained via his mother's contacts, but subsequently including the 1876 merit-based President's scholarship, Owen graduated in 1877 as valedictorian from Washington and Lee University. He also received the university's gold medal for debating prowess. His older brother, William Otway Owen Jr. (1854–1924), meanwhile, attended the Virginia Military Institute and the University of Virginia, and went on to a medical career with the U.S. Army, eventually retiring with the rank of colonel.

Early career in Oklahoma

On the advice of Col. William Penn Adair, a family friend, former Confederate Colonel and a leader among the Cherokees, Owen moved in 1879 to Salina in Indian Territory (now Salina, Oklahoma), where he was accepted as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He served from 1879 to 1880 as the principal teacher of the Cherokee Orphan Asylum. His mother joined him in 1880 and taught music for several years at the Cherokee Female Seminary.

Owen read law and was admitted to the bar in 1880. From 1881 to 1884, he served as secretary of the board of education of the Cherokee Nation, and worked on reorganizing the Cherokee school system. In parallel, he served in 1882, 1883, and 1884 as the president of the Indian International Fair at Muskogee), the only fair held in Indian Territory at the time. He was owner and editor of the "Indian Chieftain" newspaper, based in present-day Vinita, Oklahoma, in 1884. In 1885, with a Democrat in the White House, Owen launched a successful lobbying campaign that saw him appointed as the federal Indian agent for the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, described by one student of his career as "the most important position to be held in Indian Territory". In the absence of a court system, Owen promoted the use of compulsory arbitration to settle thousands of civil cases between 1885 and 1889, when he assisted in the establishment of the first United States Court in Indian Territory. His mother served as his hostess until his marriage on New Year's Eve of 1889 to Daisy Deane Hester. The couple had one daughter, Dorothea, born in 1894.

After the White House again changed hands in 1889, Owen left government service and organized the First National Bank of Muskogee in 1890, serving as its president for ten years. He later wrote that the bank's narrow survival of the Panic of 1893 was to influence his thinking about the need for fundamental reform in the U.S. banking system:

This bank, like many other banks, lost fifty percent of its deposits within as many days because of the panic, which frightened people and caused them to withdraw their funds for hoarding throughout the United States and led creditors to strenuously press their debtors for settlement ... This panic demonstrated the complete instability of the financial system of America and the hazards which businessmen had to meet under a grossly defective banking system.

Political career

Owen served as a member of the Democratic National Committee during 1892–1896. He helped promote passage of an act in 1901 to give citizenship to residents of Indian Territory. He subsequently played a leading role in the group that in 1905 organized the Sequoyah Constitutional Convention in pursuit of the admission of Indian Territory to the Union as the State of Sequoyah. Despite receiving overwhelming support in a referendum, the Sequoyah campaign ran—entirely predictably—into the opposition of President Theodore Roosevelt and many in Congress, and Indian Territory was combined with Oklahoma Territory to be admitted into the Union in 1907 as the state of Oklahoma.

Owen was active in a number of efforts to increase popular control of government. He was also a consistent supporter of Prohibition (it was common in late 19th and early 20th century America for supporters of Prohibition also to be supporters of popular control of government, and vice versa). He campaigned for women's suffrage (though it did not make it into Oklahoma's original statehood constitution). He also worked successfully to place the direct primary, the initiative and referendum, and the recall (a combination of measures sometimes described as the Oregon System) in Oklahoma's state constitution. He was a sometimes outspoken critic of corruption in politics. He was among the organizers of the National Popular Government League, and served as its president from 1913 until 1928.

By the time of statehood and the 1907 elections that accompanied it, local Democrats had managed to harness popular resentment of large corporate trusts to overturn the earlier Republican political dominance of Oklahoma Territory. In the words of a history of Oklahoma politics, "The November elections of 1907 made Oklahoma a Democratic state for half a century to come."

Owen himself first ran in a non-binding primary for U.S. Senator. The Democrats of Indian Territory recommended him to the voters as a "statesman, lawyer, businessman," and, significantly, "as an Indian." Owen took first place in the primary and was subsequently officially elected by the legislature as a Democrat to the United States Senate. As two senators were being elected simultaneously, Owen and Thomas Gore, the two men entered a lottery to determine which of them should serve the longer and which the shorter term before needing to run for re-election. Owen won the draw, and hence went on, as a member of the Senate's Class 2, to serve a first term of over five years, ending on March 4, 1913. Owen was elected United States Senate Democratic Conference Secretary on December 3, 1913, despite not being sworn in officially as a U.S. senator until December 11.

Banking issues and formation of the Federal Reserve

Owen entered the Senate at a time of heightened concern over the volatility of the U.S. financial system, as exemplified by the Panic of 1907, during which, in the absence of a central bank, J. Pierpont Morgan had felt obliged to intervene personally to lead a rescue of the U.S. financial and banking system. Owen had taken a close personal interest in financial sector issues since his days at the First National Bank of Muscogee. Inter alia, he had traveled to Europe in the summer of 1898 to study the operation of major European central banks, including meeting senior officials at the Bank of England and Germany's Reichsbank. He made banking issues the subject of a pugnacious maiden speech in the Senate, which—unusually—was interrupted extensively by senators such as Reed Smoot, Nelson Aldrich and Charles Curtis, who did not appreciate his attack on the power of the larger banks. During his early years in the Senate, Owen proposed a range of financial reforms, including several unsuccessful efforts to institute at the national level a system of insurance for bank deposits parallel to those operated in several states, including—from 1908 onward—Oklahoma (in the event, federal deposit insurance was not adopted until 1933).

The 1912 elections saw the Democrats take control of the White House and the Senate (they already held the House). Owen lobbied successfully for the creation of a new Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, and then became its first chairman (a position he was to retain throughout 1913–1919). In this capacity, and working with the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, Owen was to be the Senate sponsor of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, also known as the Glass-Owen Act, which created the Federal Reserve System. A series of financial panics had convinced many that the United States needed an effective lender of last resort comparable to the central banks found in European countries and other advanced economies. Many, too, saw a need for what was then described as a more "elastic" currency. This concept had multiple dimensions, including: (i) a money supply that could respond over time to the development of the real economy, and (ii) given that the U.S. economy was still heavily dependent on agricultural production, monetary arrangements able to handle the seasonal bulge in demand for credit as the yearly harvest worked its way through the distribution system, without draining money from the industrial and commercial sectors of the economy. This said, many Americans retained an almost visceral fear of the concept of a central bank as such.

Informed debate at the time focused to a significant degree on issues of governance and control. In common with other congressional Progressives, Owen opposed a proposal from Senator Aldrich for a system explicitly controlled by the large banks. Owen countered, in the words of an early biographer, that "the remedy presented in the form of the 'Aldrich Plan of 1912' was not satisfactory because it provided for private control of what should be a great public utility banking system."

Committee chairmanships

Owen's chairmanship of the Committee on Banking and Currency through three Congresses, discussed in the section above, was his most prominent chairmanship by far. His other chairmanships were, by comparison, relatively mundane (if not obscure) in nature.

Committee on Indian Depredations, Sixty-second Congress (1911–1913). This committee had the narrow focus of overseeing claims under the Indian Depredation Act, which allowed for citizen claims against the federal government for crimes committed by Native Americans. Together with many other committees by then considered obsolete, the committee was to be wound up in 1921 under a major rationalization. The evidence suggests that Owen assumed the leadership of the committee briefly following the death of the original chairman in November 1912.

Committee on Pacific Railroads, Sixty-second Congress (1911–1913). This committee was appointed following an investigation into the finances of the Union Pacific Railroad, which was heavily indebted to the United States Government (it was first established as a select committee in 1889 and became a standing committee in 1893). This committee, too, was to be terminated in 1921.

Committee on Banking and Currency, Sixty-third through Sixty-fifth Congresses (1913–1919). See Banking issues and formation of the Federal Reserve above.

Committee on the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians, Sixty-sixth Congress (1919–1921). The Five Civilized Tribes is a term that historically was applied to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. All had a significant presence in Oklahoma. Owen was the last chairman of the committee, which was another of those wound up in 1921. Owen paid consistent attention throughout his time in the Senate to issues that affected Indian groups (both these five tribes and others), and was actively involved in debates over Indian land rights (see Other issues below) and Indian mineral rights cases, as well as disputes over membership in different Indian nations. It is not, however, clear that he made any special use of his chairmanship to promote significant new initiatives.

Beyond his chairmanships, Owen's committee assignments included service inter alia on: (i) Banking and Currency after the end of his chairmanship; (ii) Indian Affairs in all but the 64th Congress; and (iii) Appropriations from the 62nd through the 67th Congress.

Other issues

Although remembered primarily for his role in the establishment of the Federal Reserve, Owen worked on a wide range of other issues during his time in the Senate, many of which either reflected the policy agenda of the Progressive Movement or had a direct bearing on the interests of his constituents.

In 1908, he helped to pass the Removal of Restrictions Act, which lifted then-prevailing restrictions on the sale of many of the individual allotments of Indian land in Oklahoma, an issue on which he had run in 1907. This extended an earlier process of converting Indian lands from communal to individual ownership. These policies have long been controversial. Critics of converting Indian land from collective to individual tenure (and removing restrictions on its alienation) have argued that: (i) traditional tribal structures were thereby undermined, and (ii) many Indians were induced to part with their land rights on unfavorable terms. Owen countered that the restrictions were paternalistic in spirit, bureaucratically applied, ineffective in their stated goal of protecting Indians from exploitation, and an obstacle to economic development.

In common with Woodrow Wilson, Owen was a supporter of lowering tariffs. He made an exception for the oil industry, where he argued that protection was needed for small independent producers, such as those in his state, against the ability of Standard Oil to import large volumes of cheap Mexican oil. Standard Oil was one of several trusts that Owen opposed during the course of his public career. He sought unsuccessfully to strengthen the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. In 1916, he attacked what he described as the "Lumber Trust," which he said had bribed members of the Illinois legislature to elect William Lorimer to the Senate in 1909 (Lorimer's election had been overturned in 1912 due to evidence of "corrupt methods" including vote-buying), and had, Owen said, subsequently retaliated against Owen himself for his role in exposing the Lorimer scandal by funding efforts to defeat his own re-election. Owen made several unsuccessful efforts to mandate effective disclosure of corporate campaign contributions in the interests of open government. He was a supporter of the Sixteenth Amendment, passed by the Congress in 1909, which allowed the Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the states or basing it on census results; a federal income tax was required inter alia to make up for the revenues lost to the federal government by reductions in tariff rates.

In the Senate, Owen continued his work in support of greater popular control of government. He made repeated attempts, starting in 1907, to propose a constitutional amendment providing for the direct public election of U.S. Senators, in place of election by state legislatures, until the Senate passed the Seventeenth Amendment to this effect in 1911. He also continued his strong support for extending the franchise to women (while opposing an amendment that would have restricted the franchise to whites only), until the successful passage in 1919 of the Nineteenth Amendment. He made several unsuccessful attempts to have the initiative and referendum adopted at federal level. He also campaigned unsuccessfully for the election and recall of federal judges, and to prevent federal courts from declaring acts of Congress unconstitutional, a power which, he argued, they had assumed illegally. He was likewise unsuccessful in his efforts to make it easier to amend the Constitution

Campaign for Presidency and final years in politics

Owen launched a run for the presidency in Oklahoma on May 19, 1919, and undertook a tour of several states, seeking support, in the spring of 1920. He published a number of books during this period, publicizing his involvement in the passage of the Federal Reserve Act and his views on a variety of economic and foreign policy issues (see Works by Robert Latham Owen below). Owen received some indications of support from his fellow-Progressive and long-time ally, the party's three-time standard-bearer William Jennings Bryan, who joined him on his campaign visits to some of the Western states, but Bryan's support for Owen was lukewarm, his influence in the party was past his peak, and he placed much of his focus in 1920 on promoting the cause of prohibition, the main theme of his eventual speech at the convention. Bryan declined to run for the nomination himself for multiple reasons — his health was problematic (he described himself to one journalist as "at the end of life") and he expected the Democrats to go down to defeat — though he privately left open the possibility of accepting the nomination in exceptional circumstances. Owen, for his part, gained few significant endorsements.

By the time of the 1920 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, whatever Owen's own ambitions, his candidacy had a "favorite son" appearance to it. He received 33 votes on the first ballot, which increased to 41 on the twentieth ballot. His support came primarily from his own state, together with some votes from Nebraska (Bryan's adopted state). On the fortieth ballot he again received 33 votes, putting him in fourth place. The Oklahoma delegates remained loyal until on the forty-fourth ballot Owen released them so as to ensure a unanimous vote for the party's nominee, Governor of Ohio James M. Cox. The chronicler of Owen's senatorial career relates that "efforts to secure Owen's consent to accept the nomination for vice-president failed," but any such efforts do not appear to have originated with the party's nominee, who was decisive in his preference for Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his running mate. The Cox-Roosevelt slate went down to defeat by a landslide.

Owen's later views on international affairs did not escape controversy. Though initially a firm supporter of the Treaty of Versailles, including its assertion of German responsibility for the outbreak of World War I, during 1923 his views changed radically under the influence of "revisionist" studies, including the publication of extensive (though incomplete) materials from the diplomatic archives of the pre-War Tsarist Russian Foreign Office. He made a major speech in the Senate on 18 December 1923 attributing primary responsibility for the war to France and (especially) Russia rather than Germany. Owen hoped that a public revisiting of the issue of war guilt might encourage reversal of some of the penal clauses imposed on Germany under the Versailles settlement, and pave the way to reconciliation between Germany and France, but his attempts to promote a Senate investigation of the war guilt question were narrowly defeated, largely along party lines — with many of his fellow Democrats concerned not to undermine the reputation of Woodrow Wilson — while an expert report prepared by the Legislative Research Service of the Library of Congress, though broadly supportive of Owen's arguments, was in the event never published as it was considered unlikely to obtain the support of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 1926, following his retirement from the Senate, Owen was to publish a book advancing his revisionist thesis, under the title: The Russian Imperial Conspiracy, 1892–1914: The Most Gigantic Intrigue of all Time.

Later life and death

On Owen's retirement, the Democratic Party failed to retain his seat in the Senate. This reflected a split in the party over the candidacy of former Oklahoma governor Jack C. Walton, who had been impeached and removed from office as governor in November 1923, over accusations (inter alia) that he had acted unconstitutionally in suspending habeas corpus in the face of race riots fanned by the Ku Klux Klan. Although Walton won the nomination, largely on an anti-Klan platform, many local Democratic leaders, including Owen, declined to support his candidacy, and the seat was won in a landslide by the Republican candidate, William B. Pine. The seat reverted to Democratic control in 1930 when Thomas Gore was re-elected to the Senate.

After his retirement from the Senate, Owen initially practiced law and undertook lobbying in Washington, D.C. In 1923, he formally adopted his only grandchild, who took the name Robert Latham Owen III. In the 1928 Presidential election, Owen felt unable to support his party's nominee Al Smith, due to Smith's strong anti-prohibition position and his connections to Tammany Hall; to his subsequent deep regret, he became the first prominent Democrat to endorse the candidacy of Republican Herbert Hoover. He returned to the Democratic fold in 1932 to give a strong endorsement to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In retirement, Owen worked on a personal proposal to develop and promote a universal alphabet based on phonetic principles. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1941. In his later years Owen was functionally blind. His wife predeceased him in 1946, and he died in Washington of complications from prostate surgery on July 19, 1947. He was buried in Spring Hill Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia, near his beloved mother and other family members. Carter Glass, his fellow sponsor of the Glass-Owen Federal Reserve Act, with whom Owen had experienced a frequently strained relationship, lies nearby.

Works

This list focuses on Owen's book-length works, and excludes shorter pieces such as his prolific journalism or reprints of individual speeches:

The Code of the Peoples' Rule: Compilation of Various Statutes, Etc. Relating to the People's Rule System of Government. Washington DC, Government Printing Office, 1910.

The Covenant of the League of Nations: What It Proposes and What It Does Not Propose. Washington DC, Government Printing Office, 1919.

The Federal Reserve Act. New York, The Century Co., 1919.

Foreign Exchange. New York, The Century Co., 1919.

"Foreword" (dated October 29, 1934) to Money Creators by Gertrude M. Coogan, Chicago, Sound Money Press, 1935.

The Russian Imperial Conspiracy, 1892–1914: The Most Gigantic Intrigue of all Time. First edition, 1926, privately printed. Second edition, 1927, published by Albert and Charles Boni, New York.

Where Is God in the European War? New York, The Century Co., 1919.

Yellow Fever; a Compilation of Various Publications: Results of the Work of Maj. Walter Reed, Medical Corps, United States Army, and the Yellow Fever Commission. Washington DC, Government Printing Office, 1911.

A recording of Owen delivering a speech, dating from 1920, may be heard on the Library of Congress website at: http://frontiers.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/nfor:@field(DOCID+@range(90000067+90000068)).

There is an archive of Owen's papers at the Library of Congress. There are smaller collections, largely covering the period after his retirement from the Senate, at the University of Oklahoma's Carl Albert Center (see link below) and at the Federal Reserve.