Robert Owen

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Owen was born on the 14th of May 1771 in Newtown, a small market town in Montgomeryshire, Wales, the sixth of seven children of a saddler, ironmonger, and local postmaster. He left school at the age of ten. He would go on to address three former American presidents, reshape how working people were housed and educated, and become one of the founders of both utopian socialism and the co-operative movement.

  How does a boy who left school at ten become one of the most influential social architects of his age? What did he build at a remote Scottish mill that drew royalty and future tsars? Why did his most ambitious dream, an experimental commune in the American wilderness, collapse in two years? And what does it mean that Karl Marx, who dismissed Owen as a utopian, nonetheless acknowledged him as someone who grasped a truth at the heart of capitalism?

  Owen's life moved between extremes: great wealth and near-poverty, practical success and visionary failure, hard-headed mill management and a late-life belief that he conversed with the spirits of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The answers to those questions run through a career that stretched from Manchester cotton mills to the banks of Indiana's Wabash River, and from the floor of the United States Congress to a simple slate tomb in a Welsh churchyard.

• 2. From Draper to Mill Owner

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  At about the age of 18, Owen arrived in Manchester after years working in drapery shops, first in Stamford and then in London. His first significant foothold in manufacturing came when he borrowed £100 from his brother William to enter a partnership making spinning mules, a new technology for spinning cotton thread. Within months he exchanged his share of that partnership for six spinning mules of his own, which he operated in rented factory space.

  In 1792, mill-owner Peter Drinkwater made the roughly 21-year-old Owen manager of the Piccadilly Mill at Manchester. Owen voluntarily left that contract after two years to join other entrepreneurs and help establish the Chorlton Twist Mills in Chorlton-on-Medlock. It was during this Manchester period that the contours of his later thinking began to form. In 1793 he was elected to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, where Enlightenment ideas were debated, and he joined the committee of the Manchester Board of Health, which was pressing for improvements in factory workers' conditions.

  The decisive move came in July 1799, when Owen and his partners bought the New Lanark mill from David Dale. On a visit to Scotland, Owen had met Dale's daughter, Ann Caroline Dale, and married her on the 30th of September 1799. The personal and professional became inseparable: his father-in-law had established the mill with Richard Arkwright in 1785, and water power from the falls of the River Clyde drove one of Britain's largest cotton-spinning operations. Owen became the mill's manager in January 1800, and what he found there would test every idea he had been forming.

• 3. New Lanark's Experiment

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  About 2,000 people were connected to New Lanark when Owen took over, 500 of them children drawn from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, put to work at the age of five or six. Theft, drunkenness and other vices were common. Most families lived in one room. Education and sanitation had been neglected, and more respectable workers shunned the mill's long hours.

  Owen's truck store became an early model of what would later be called co-operative retail. Where other mill operators ran shops that charged high prices for poor goods and paid workers in tokens redeemable only there, Owen priced goods just above wholesale cost and passed bulk-purchase savings directly to his workers. He placed alcohol sales under strict supervision. These principles, the source notes, became the basis for Britain's co-operative shops.

  Discipline at the mill was redesigned around a device Owen called the silent monitor: a four-sided block hung above each worker's station, each face painted a different colour to signal the quality and quantity of that person's work. Owen opposed corporal punishment. The monitor made performance visible without a single blow. He raised the demand for an eight-hour working day in 1810 and had formulated the now-famous slogan by 1817: "eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest."

  The reputation of New Lanark spread far beyond Scotland. Social reformers, statesmen and royalty visited to study its methods, among them the future Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. Some of Owen's schemes displeased his partners enough that he was forced to arrange for new investors to buy his share in 1813 for the equivalent of US$800,000. The new group included the philosopher Jeremy Bentham and the Quaker William Allen, who were content to accept a £5,000 return on their capital. The ownership change gave Owen room to broaden his advocacy, pressing for workers' rights, child labour laws, and free education. An Institute for the Formation of Character opened at New Lanark in 1818, providing free education from infancy to adulthood.

• 4. The American Gamble

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  Owen and his son William sailed to the United States in October 1824 carrying a vision that New Lanark could not fully contain. In January 1825 Owen spent a portion of his fortune purchasing an existing town of 180 buildings and several thousand acres along the Wabash River in Indiana. The property had been built by George Rapp's Harmony Society, a religious community that had founded it in 1814 and then decided to relocate to Pennsylvania. Owen renamed it New Harmony.

  Before a single resident moved in, Owen went to Washington. On the 25th of February and the 7th of March 1825, he addressed the House of Representatives and others in the federal government, laying out his socialist vision. The audience included three former presidents, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, the outgoing president James Monroe, and the president-elect John Quincy Adams. Those meetings were, as the source notes, perhaps the first discussions of socialism in the Americas.

  Owen persuaded William Maclure, a wealthy Scottish scientist and philanthropist living in Philadelphia, to become his financial partner at New Harmony. Maclure brought with him scientists, educators and artists including Thomas Say, Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, and Madame Marie Duclos Fretageot, turning the community into a centre for educational reform and scientific research. By the end of its first year, New Harmony had attracted over a thousand residents.

  Owen's participant Josiah Warren later described what went wrong in stark terms: "We had a world in miniature, we had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result." Warren argued that the community lacked individual sovereignty and personal property, and his analysis of its failure eventually contributed to the development of American individualist anarchism. The socialistic society was dissolved in 1827. Other Owenite experiments, at Blue Spring near Bloomington, Indiana, at Yellow Springs, Ohio, and at Forestville Commonwealth at Earlton, New York, had nearly all ended before New Harmony closed.

• 5. Socialism and Its Critics

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  In 1813 Owen published A New View of Society, the first of four essays outlining his philosophy of socialistic reform. He argued against Malthusian theories of scarcity, claiming that each new person could grow food to feed ten people if given the proper opportunity, and that capitalist management rather than any deep-seated human flaw was the cause of hunger and misery. His proposed communities would house some 1,200 people on land of 1,000-1,500 acres, with shared kitchens and dining halls alongside private family apartments; children would be raised communally after the age of three.

  Owen embraced socialism explicitly in 1817, a turning point he marked with a report to a House of Commons committee on the country's Poor Laws. The term socialism itself first became current in British terminology in discussions surrounding the Association of All Classes of All Nations, which Owen formed in 1835. By 1839, his secular principles had spread enough among working people that a prominent review noted they had become the creed of many in the working classes.

  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels viewed Owen's work as a direct precursor to their own. They recognised, as the source states, Owen's understanding that it is the working class that creates the unparalleled wealth in capitalist societies, and that under the existing economic system workers did not automatically receive the benefits of that wealth. But they drew a hard line between what they called scientific socialism and what they labelled utopian: Owen believed socialism needed only to be discovered and demonstrated to win the world over, whereas Marx and Engels held that the capitalist system could only be overturned by an independent revolutionary working-class party. The gap between demonstration and revolution is where their accounts of history diverged.

  Owen also ran a practical currency experiment in 1832, opening the National Equitable Labour Exchange in London, a system in which goods were traded using labour notes based on time rather than money. The London exchange ran until 1833; a Birmingham branch lasted only a few months until July 1833. He briefly led the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union before its collapse in 1834.

• 6. Spiritualism and Final Years

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  In 1817, Owen publicly declared that all religions were false. Nearly four decades later, at the age of 83, he reversed course. In 1854, following a series of sittings with Maria B. Hayden, an American medium credited with introducing spiritualism to England, Owen converted to spiritualism and made a public profession of his new faith.

  He claimed to have made medium contact with the spirits of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and others, and explained that their purpose was to change "the present, false, disunited and miserable state of human existence" and prepare the world for universal peace. He set out this new belief in The Rational Quarterly Review and in a pamphlet titled The Future of the Human Race. Spiritualists later claimed that after Owen's death his spirit had dictated the "Seven Principles of Spiritualism" to the medium Emma Hardinge Britten in 1871, a text that became the basis of their National Union's religious philosophy.

  By 1828, London had become Owen's permanent home after extended friction with his business partner William Allen led him to sever all connections with New Lanark. Having invested most of his fortune in New Harmony, he was no longer wealthy. He continued lecturing across Europe and publishing a weekly newspaper to promote industrial equality, free education, and better conditions in factory towns. He published his memoirs, The Life of Robert Owen, in 1857.

  Owen returned at the end of his life to Newtown, the Welsh town where he had been born. He died there on the 17th of November 1858 and was buried on the 21st of November. He died poor, sustained only by an annual income from a trust his sons had established in 1844. A simple slate tomb was installed at St Mary's Churchyard in Newtown; in 1902 the co-operative movement erected Art Nouveau railings around it as a monument.

• 7. Children Who Carried the Work

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  Five of Robert Owen's seven surviving children followed him to the United States and became permanent residents of New Harmony, Indiana. The eldest son, Robert Dale Owen, born in 1801, managed the New Harmony community after his father returned to Britain in 1825, co-edited the New-Harmony Gazette with Frances Wright in Indiana, and later co-edited the Free Enquirer in New York. He was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives for the terms 1836-1839 and 1851-1853, then to the United States House of Representatives from 1843-1847. While in Congress he drafted and helped secure the bill that founded the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. He was appointed chargé d'affaires in Naples from 1853-1858 and later argued at the Indiana Constitutional Convention of 1850 in support of widows' and married women's property and divorce rights.

  David Dale Owen, born in 1807, trained as a geologist and earned a medical degree before being appointed a United States geologist in 1839. His surveys covered Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Minnesota Territory. His brother Richard, born in 1810, fought in the Mexican-American War in 1847, taught natural science at Western Military Institute in Tennessee, and during the Civil War served as a colonel in the Union army commanding Camp Morton, a prisoner-of-war camp for Confederate soldiers at Indianapolis. After the war he became Indiana's second state geologist, chaired the natural science department at Indiana University from 1864-1879, and was appointed the first president of Purdue University in 1872-1874, though he resigned before classes began.

  Jane Dale Owen Fauntleroy, born in 1805, arrived in New Harmony in 1833, established a school in her home, and in 1835 married Robert Henry Fauntleroy, a civil engineer from Virginia. William Owen, born in 1802, organised New Harmony's Thespian Society in 1827 and used his knowledge of cotton goods manufacturing to advise the community after his father's departure, but died of unknown causes at the age of 40. The Owen children's collective presence in Indiana meant that New Harmony endured as a living community long after the utopian experiment itself had dissolved.