Robert Latham Owen

Robert Latham Owen

Robert Latham Owen, Jr. (February 2, 1856 – July 19, 1947) was one of the first two U.S. senators from Oklahoma. He served in the Senate between 1907 and 1925. He earlier came to public notice as a successful lawyer of Cherokee ancestry, who in 1906 won a major court case on behalf of the Eastern Cherokees seeking compensation from the US Government for eastern lands the Cherokees had lost at the time of the Indian removals.

A Democrat active in many progressive causes, including efforts to strengthen public control of government, and the fight against child labor, Owen is especially remembered as the Senate sponsor of the Glass-Owen Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which created the Federal Reserve System. He subsequently became highly critical of what he saw as the Federal Reserve's bias towards deflationary policies during the early 1920s and again in the early 1930s, which he attributed to excessive influence by the largest banks upon the Fed, and which he identified as largely responsible for causing the Great Depression: a minority view at the time, but one widely accepted by economists in recent decades. In 1920 Owen unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party's nomination for the presidency.

Owen's mother, Narcissa Chisholm Owen (1831–1911), who did much to foster her son's career, published a set of memoirs in 1907 about her life lived between Cherokee and mainstream US societies, which have recently attracted scholarly attention and which were republished in a critical edition in 2005.