Robert Latham Owen - Later Life and Death

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 the 1928 Presidential election, he 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 Owen's subsequent deep regret, he endorsed the candidacy of Republican Herbert Hoover. He returned to the Democratic fold in 1932 to support 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. Owen's only grandchild assumed his grandfather's name, as Robert Latham Owen III. 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.