Robert Latham Owen

Robert Latham Owen ( born February 2, 1856 in Lynchburg, Virginia; † July 19, 1947 in Washington DC ) was an American politician of the Democratic Party. He was one of the first two U.S. senators from Oklahoma after the founding of the state.

Robert Owen attended private schools in his hometown of Lynchburg and in Baltimore (Maryland). In 1877, he graduated from Washington and Lee University in Lexington. Owen, whose mother belonged to the Cherokee people, moved in connection to Salina in the Oklahoma Territory, where he worked as a teacher at a school of Cherokee. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1880. From 1885 to 1889 he acted as Indian agent, the interests of the Federal Government in the " Five Civilized tribes ". In 1890 he co-founded the First National Bank of Muskogee, as its president, he served for ten years.

From 1892 to 1896 Owen was a member of the Democratic National Committee. After Oklahoma was admitted as State in the Union, he and Thomas Gore were elected as its first representatives in the U.S. Senate in Washington; previously he lived in Oklahoma City at even the swearing in of the first Governor Charles N. Haskell. His term began on December 11, 1907, and ended after two re-election on 3 March 1925.

During his time as a senator, he was, among other things the Committee on Banking and Currency, and was in this capacity at the relevant initiators of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, by which the Federal Reserve System of the United States was created. The law was also known as the Glass -Owen Bill, named after Robert Owen and Carter Glass, a congressman from Virginia, the then Secretary of the Treasury under President Woodrow Wilson was in 1918. Later, Owen distanced from the thus created system that does not have the desired effect from it. In his view, it should lead to the control of the Central Bank by the Government; Instead, the influence of the big banks to the Federal Reserve System had led a decisive factor to the Great Depression. Despite this critical attitude Owen is being recognized today as a founder of the Federal Reserve System; on the grounds of the Eccles Building of the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington reminded of Robert Latham Owen Park to the Senator.

1920 accompanied Owen Oklahoma Governor Haskell, with whom he was friends, to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. There Haskell tried to get him to talk about a run for the presidency; ultimately, the delegates decided but for James M. Cox, Governor of Ohio. In 1924, Owen then came not seek re-election as senator. He worked subsequently as a lawyer in Washington, where he died in July 1947. The burial took place in his native Lynchburg.