Robert Dale Owen: A Biography

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, $4.50

THE American reformer Robert Dale Owen (18011877) was the eldest son of the Welsh reformer Robert Owen (1771—1858). The son was quite as famous as the father while both were living, and rather more famous in America, which was the locus of his versatile career from 1825. He was the author (1830) of the first American argument for what is now rather ineptly called birth control. He was a founding father of the organized labor movement in this country and an early patron saint of workingmen’s education. He played a signal part in the early history of the labor press. He was a bold agnostic, a militant feminist, an apologist of what today would be called companionate marriage, and an able advocate of everything that was the early nineteenth century’s equivalent of ‘progressive’ education, including manual training. He spent a substantial share of his years and his energies fighting with the utmost dignity and good temper tor ideas that were ahead of his era; for example, the idea that the mechanization of industry was bound to militate against the worker’s interests under a system of private ownership. Strangely, almost incredibly, there has existed no comprehensive and rounded account of his career until the present generously documented volume of the Harvard Historical Studies. Mr. Leopold, who performs his task with an admirable combination of thoroughness with selectiveness and of sympathy with perspective, has given the general reader some important and by no means overfamiliar chapters of the intellectual and social history of America in its most formative decades. W. F.