Robert Owen: New Lanark Mills, the New Harmony Utopia and a Late Seance

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Robert Owen was born in Newtown, Wales, in 1771, the sixth of seven children of a saddler and postmaster. He left school at 10 to apprentice as a draper in Stamford, moved to Manchester at 18, and borrowed 100 pounds from his brother to run spinning mules. By 21 he managed the Piccadilly Mill, overseeing hundreds of workers, and in 1793 he joined the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. He concluded that human character is formed entirely by environment. In 1799 he married Caroline Dale and took over her father's mills at New Lanark on the River Clyde, a village of about 2,000 people including 500 pauper children from Edinburgh and Glasgow. There he replaced the company store's truck system with a shop selling quality goods near wholesale cost, opened the Institute for the Formation of Character with schooling from infancy, and in 1810 began promoting an eight-hour day.

Investors, including Jeremy Bentham, chafed at profits spent on welfare, and in 1825 Owen bought the town of Harmony, Indiana, on the Wabash River and renamed it New Harmony. He addressed the U.S. House of Representatives with James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison present. The community collapsed by 1827 and cost him most of his fortune. Back in London he opened the National Equitable Labour Exchange in 1832, trading goods for labor notes based on hours worked, and briefly led the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union before it collapsed in 1834. Marx and Engels labeled him a utopian socialist. In 1854, at 83, he converted to spiritualism. He died in 1858.

• His slogan was eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.
• His silent monitor, a four-sided block colored black, blue, yellow and white, publicly displayed each worker's daily conduct.
• William Maclure helped fund the boatload of knowledge that carried scientists and educators to New Harmony.
• Resident Josiah Warren blamed New Harmony's failure on its neglect of individual sovereignty and went on to found American individualist anarchism.
• His son Robert Dale Owen served in Congress and drafted the bill that founded the Smithsonian Institution.