Robert Latham Owen - Political Career

Political Career

Owen served as a member of the Democratic National Committee during 1892-1896. He subsequently played a leading role in the group that in 1905 organized the Sequoyah Constitutional Convention in pursuit of the admission of Indian Territory to the Union as the State of Sequoyah. Despite receiving overwhelming support in a referendum, the Sequoyah campaign ran — entirely predictably — into the opposition of President Theodore Roosevelt and many in Congress, and Indian Territory was combined with Oklahoma Territory to be admitted into the Union in 1907 as the state of Oklahoma.

Owen was active in a number of efforts to increase popular control of government. He was also a consistent supporter of Prohibition (it was common in late 19th and early 20th century America for supporters of Prohibition also to be supporters of popular control of government, and vice versa). He campaigned for women's suffrage (though it did not make it into Oklahoma's original statehood constitution). He also worked successfully to place the direct primary, the initiative and referendum, and the recall in Oklahoma's state constitution. He was a sometimes outspoken critic of corruption in politics. He was among the organizers of the National Popular Government League, and served as its president from 1913 until 1928.

By the time of statehood and the 1907 elections that accompanied it, local Democrats had managed to harness popular resentment of large corporate trusts to overturn the earlier Republican political dominance of Oklahoma Territory. In the words of a history of Oklahoma politics, "The November elections of 1907 made Oklahoma a Democratic state for half a century to come".

Owen himself first ran in a non-binding primary for US Senator. The Democrats of Indian Territory recommended him to the voters as a "statesman, lawyer, businessman," and, significantly, "as an Indian." Owen took first place in the primary and was subsequently officially elected by the legislature as a Democrat to the United States Senate. As two senators were being elected simultaneously, Owen and Thomas Gore, the two men entered a lottery to determine which of them should serve the longer and which the shorter term before needing to run for re-election. Owen won the draw, and hence went on, as a member of the Senate's Class 2, to serve a first term of over five years, ending on March 4, 1913.

Owen was to be re-elected in 1912, after defeating a serious primary challenge from former Governor Charles Haskell, and again (without serious challenge) in 1918. He served all told from December 11, 1907 to March 4, 1925. Owen reportedly maintained a mailing list of 300,000 names.

On his arrival in the Senate, Owen became the second Senator at the time with acknowledged Native American ancestry, alongside Republican Senator (and future Vice-President of the United States) Charles Curtis of Kansas, whose maternal side was three-quarters' Native American, of ethnic Kaw, Osage and Pottawatomie ancestry. Curtis was the author inter alia of the 1898 Curtis Act, which dissolved the tribal governments of the so-called five civilized tribes, including the Cherokee, and promoted the allotment of formerly communal tribal lands to individuals, with a view to encouraging the assimilation of Indians into mainstream US society and the market economy. (See also Other issues below).

Very shortly after Owen was elected to the Senate, his mother published her memoirs (replete with references to "my son, the United States Senator"). Narcissa's exploration of her own cultural identity as a part-Cherokee woman navigating mainstream US society has recently attracted scholarly attention, and the memoirs were re-published by the University Press of Florida in a critical edition in 2005. In the words of the editor of the new edition:

Owen's identity becomes fluid in the process of self-representation: both less noble and less savage than the dominant culture has constantly demanded, she is a Cherokee, southerner, Confederate, Christian, friend, family member, teacher, community organizer, tribal translator, socialite, trickster, mother, Indian queen, wife, social activist, healer, painter, storyteller, widow and gardener, to name just a few.