Robert Owen

Welsh social reformer

• Born: May 14, 1771
• Birthplace: Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales
• Died: November 17, 1858
• Place of death: Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales

Best known for his utopian community of New Harmony in Indiana, Owen was both one of the leaders of the early Industrial Revolution and one also of its greatest critics. He developed the cotton-spinning factory while demonstrating the efficiency and productivity that resulted from the benevolent treatment of workers. He pioneered in educational reform and became the chief spokesman for the cooperative movement.

Early Life

Born into a Welsh family of modest means, Robert Owen attended a small local school only until the age of nine. His education was considerably advanced through his own determined reading. By his account, he read, during his youth, a book each day. At the age of ten, he left home to seek his fortune, working as a shop-boy in textile stores, eventually making his way to Manchester in 1786 just as the Industrial Revolution, centered on the textile industry in cities such as Manchester, was beginning.

Owen was fifteen when he arrived in Manchester, and his success came early. He worked for three years as a shop assistant, but by early 1791 he had become a partner in a small cotton mill, and by the age of twenty he was the manager of a large, industrialized cotton-spinning factory. In this mill, Owen introduced the first use of American sea-island cotton, thus beginning the demand for that crop produced in the southern portion of the United States. The thread produced in Owen’s spinning factory was generally recognized to be of superior quality, and he was regarded, at this early age, as the master of this new industry. By 1795, he was manager and co-owner of the large Chorlton Twist Company and was on his way to amassing an enormous fortune.

Through business connections, Owen met Miss Anne Caroline Dale, the daughter of David Dale, a wealthy textile industrialist in New Lanark, Scotland. Owen not only fell in love with Miss Dale, but also determined to buy her father’s factories. With the financial backing of his partners, the deal was made, and the New Lanark Twist Company formed, with Owen as sole manager and part owner. On September 30, 1799, he and Caroline were married, making their home in New Lanark. Given his later radical views on marriage, it would be impossible to term theirs a happy union.

As the new century opened, Owen approached his twenty-ninth birthday. He was a good-looking young man, whose sensitive mouth and eyes were checked by a furrowed brow and prominent nose. In his youth, he affected the hairstyle and dress of the romantic, and he looked almost poetic. As he grew older, however, and his utopian ideas caused heated attacks against him, Owen appeared more somber, dressing in black broadcloth that accented his rugged looks. Financial success came early in Owen’s life, and with the new century he looked forward to addressing a wide array of social problems, and with his enormous creditability as an industrialist he was confident he could change the world for the better.

Life’s Work

As a cotton-mill owner and manager, Owen first achieved national, and even international, recognition as a result of the reforms he instituted for his workers. In those early days of the Industrial Revolution, working conditions were worse than poor; they were deplorable. Along with the long hours of dehumanizing drudgery in the dreary factories, the poor sanitation, the terrible overcrowding, and the absence of schools were the associated problems of drunkenness, theft, and other vices. Most notorious of all was child labor. Owen found that among his two thousand employees were some five hundred pauper children as young as the age of six.

Owen determined to improve these conditions and the lives of his workers. As early as 1806, when his factory and others closed as a result of the American embargo, Owen persuaded his partners to take the extraordinary step of continuing to pay wages while his mills sat idle. With such an attitude, he won the loyalty and admiration of his employees, who surpassed all others in their productivity. He greatly improved housing, sanitation, and the physical plant in general. He provided free medical care, opened a company store where prices were low, controlled the sale of whiskey, and docked the pay of public drunkards. This benevolence was not without the price of authoritarianism, and Owen ran New Lanark with a firm hand, even levying fines for sexual promiscuity. Nevertheless, these measures were remarkably successful in improving not only the lives of his employees but also the output of his mills. In the latter regard, Owen proved a superb manager in reorganizing the factory system and in evaluating individual production.

These reforms were expensive, and Owen was always at odds with his partners over the cost of his social experiments. In 1813, he formed a new company, this time with partners of a more kindred spirit, one of whom was Jeremy Bentham, the leader of the Utilitarians. This new arrangement allowed Owen to proceed with the enterprise that was closest to his heart: education. He believed, as he often said, that man’s character was not made by him but for him; that is, environment played a greater role than heredity. Education was the answer to creating a proper environment and building good character. In 1814 at New Lanark, he began building an “institution for the formation of character,” which included facilities for education, public meetings, and a nursery school, an idea new in Great Britain at the time.

Owen expressed virtually all of his philosophy in a pamphlet that appeared in 1813: A New View of Society: Or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character . This essay, coupled with the great success of his factory system, brought him international attention, and he was in contact with many of the great leaders of his world. Visitors flocked to see New Lanark, including the Grand Duke Nicholas, the future czar of Russia. Owen was much admired, and his philanthropy was widely praised. He worked hard for legislation that would improve working conditions, and he was largely responsible for the Factory Act of 1819, although he was disappointed with its limitations.

Owen’s early success went to his head, and he came to believe that he could solve all of society’s problems. Within a few years, he declined from being a highly regarded industrialist to being dismissed as an eccentric crank. The first hint of his radical ideas came on January 1, 1816, when he gave the main address at the opening of his institute. On that occasion, he dismissed all existing institutions as false and based on erroneous principles.

Owen claimed to have discovered new foundations that would allow the creation of a perfect society, and he asserted that his ideas were supported by world leaders, philosophers, and educators. The following year, he proposed that the problem of the poor could be solved by having them live in small communal villages based on agriculture. Owen summarized this plan and its call for so-called Villages of Cooperation in the Report to the County of Lanark, of a Plan for Relieving Public Distress and Removing Discontent, by Giving Permanent, Productive Employment to the Poor and Working Classes, Under Arrangements which Will Essentially Improve Their Character, and Ameliorate Their Condition, Diminish the Expenses of Production and Consumption, and Create Markets Co-extensive with Production (1820).

What really damaged Owen’s reputation, however, was his deliberate and public assault on organized religion, a surprise attack that he delivered in a London address on August 21, 1817, and an attitude that doomed his other reform schemes by their association with atheism. Afterward, his continued baiting of the clergy compounded his notoriety. However, Owen remained firmly unshaken in his purpose. Next he proposed that a community be founded where his principles could be tested. At his own expense, he created such a model at New Harmony in Indiana in 1825. The experiment lasted for three years and attracted a broad range of weird reformers and misfits as well as sincere adherents to Owen’s principles of cooperation and association. The end was foreordained: New Harmony, after using up most of Owen’s fortune, failed, and Owen returned to Great Britain in 1829.

In 1828, Owen had sold his share of the New Lanark Company. In 1831, his wife died, and all of his surviving children lived in the United States. Alone and no longer a wealthy industrialist, Owen became the chief spokesperson for a movement that was later termed utopian socialism (to distinguish it from Marxist socialism). Indeed, the actual term “socialism” seems to have become popular in meetings of the Association of All Classes of All Nations, which Owen founded in 1835. He worked tirelessly on behalf of his form of socialism, for cooperation, and against religion. He also openly opposed the institution of marriage and in his later life expressed a deep interest in spiritualism.

By the mid-1830’s, Owen was actively involved in the trade union movement, establishing the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, which for a time had a membership of more than half a million. His several organizations went through numerous name changes, and all were ultimately unsuccessful. In 1858, he became seriously ill and requested that he be taken back to his native village of Newtown. There, on November 17, 1858, he died. By his wish, he was buried in a churchyard next to the graves of his parents. His three sons did well in the United States. Robert became a member of Congress and a diplomat, David was a geologist, and Richard was a college professor.

Significance

Despite the controversy and failures that accompanied his life, Robert Owen left a remarkable set of legacies. In industry, he proved that high wages and good employee relations improve productivity. In education, his nursery school idea and the importance of environmental influences became standard concepts. His theories on cooperation gave birth to the cooperative movement, which demonstrated remarkable endurance. His attempt to build a model community was repeated numerous times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The impetus he gave to the trade union movement was of particular historical significance. Despite the unfortunate personality traits that made him combative and difficult to deal with, he played a leading role in the attempt to resolve the social consequences of the early Industrial Revolution.

Bibliography

Cole, Margaret. Robert Owen of New Lanark. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1953. A brief and general but useful introduction.

Donnachie, Ian. Robert Owen: Owen of New Lanark and New Harmony. East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell, 2000. Reprint. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2005. Comprehensive biography of Owen, describing his work as a factory owner and social reformer.

Harvey, Rowland Hill. Robert Owen, Social Idealist. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949. A scholarly, yet highly readable, biography.

Holloway, Mark. Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680-1880. New York: Library Publishers, 1951. 2d ed. New York: Dover, 1966. Properly includes Owen’s New Harmony experiment and Owen’s influence in America.

Jones, Lloyd. The Life, Times, and Labours of Robert Owen. 2 vols. London: Sawn, Sonnenschein, 1890. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1971. This early biography is useful because the author, born in 1811, was an adult during Owen’s later years.

Noyes, John Humphrey. History of American Socialisms. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1870. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1966. This work, by one of the most famous American utopians, includes contemporary accounts of New Harmony and other Owenite communities.

Owen, Robert. A New View of Society and Other Writings. London: Everyman’s Library, 1966. One of the most important and the most generally available works by Owen.

Podmore, Frank. Robert Owen: A Biography. 2 vols. London: Hutchinson, 1906. Reprint. New York: Haskell House, 1971. First published in 1906, this remains the standard biography of Owen.

Royle, Edward. Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium: A Study of the Harmony Community. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Chronicles life at Harmony in Hampshire, England, one of the two utopian communities personally established by Owen.

Thompson, Brian. Devastating Eden: The Search for Utopia in America. London: HarperCollins, 2004. A history of two experimental communities at Harmony, Indiana. George Rapp initially founded a Christian community there in 1815; ten years later, he sold the town to Owen, who renamed it New Harmony and established a socialist society. Thompson describes life in both communities, chronicling their successes and failures.