Born into affluent circumstances in antebellum Lynchburg, Virginia, the son of a railroad company president, Owen suffered financial ruin by the Panic of 1873 and his father died while he was still in his teens.

Writing in 1934, Owen described the family's hard times: "the value of my father's property was completely destroyed, and my mother, from a life of abundance, was suddenly compelled to earn her living by teaching music.

[23] After the White House again changed hands in 1889, Owen left government service and organized the First National Bank of Muskogee in 1890, serving as its president for ten years.

"[29] By the time he launched his political career, the combination of Owen's lucrative legal and lobbying practice, sometimes controversial land deals,[30][31] and business activities including investments in ranching, mining and oil, had made him a wealthy man.

[36] He also worked successfully to place the direct primary, the initiative and referendum, and the recall (a combination of measures sometimes described as the Oregon System) in Oklahoma's state constitution.

[39] 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.

[42] 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.

Narcissa's exploration of her own cultural identity as a part-Cherokee woman navigating mainstream U.S. 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: [Narcissa] 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.

[52] A series of financial panics had convinced many that the United States needed an effective lender of last resort comparable to the central banks found in European countries and other advanced economies.

[56] Owen countered, in the words of an early biographer, that "the remedy presented in the form of the 'Aldrich Plan of 1912' was not satisfactory because it provided for private control of what should be a great public utility banking system.

Referring to the period from 1929 to 1933 he continued: Again, under President Hoover, the contraction of credit took place on such a colossal scale as to force the dollar index (purchasing power) to 166.

[71] In more recent decades, however, such a view has come to be widely accepted, due in large part to the influence of the 1963 study A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman and Anna J.

[79] Although remembered primarily for his role in the establishment of the Federal Reserve, Owen worked on a wide range of other issues during his time in the Senate, many of which either reflected the policy agenda of the Progressive Movement or had a direct bearing on the interests of his constituents.

Owen countered that the restrictions were paternalistic in spirit, bureaucratically applied, ineffective in their stated goal of protecting Indians from exploitation, and an obstacle to economic development.

He was likewise unsuccessful in his efforts to make it easier to amend the Constitution[89] In 1911, Republicans were blocking the admission of Arizona to statehood, while planning to admit New Mexico.

"[90] From 1910 onwards, with the encouragement of his brother William, a medical doctor who served for many years with the U.S. Army, Owen campaigned unsuccessfully for the establishment of a cabinet-level Department of Health within the Federal Government.

He promoted information on the achievements of Dr. Walter Reed and the Yellow Fever Commission, in part to demonstrate the potential of systematically organized programs in the field of public health.

In 1918, the act was struck down as unconstitutional by a five-to-four decision of the Supreme Court in Hammer v. Dagenhart, evincing a noted dissent by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Finally, in 1941, after Owen's retirement from active political life, a unanimous Supreme Court in United States v. Darby Lumber Co. overruled the 1918 decision (in the process endorsing and going beyond the principles set forth in Holmes's dissent) and ruled that the Commerce Clause gave Congress the right to regulate conditions of employment.

In November 1919, he wrote to Wilson warning that the gold standard had temporarily broken down, and urging the President to convene an International Exchange Conference to address the problem; he also emphasized the importance, in the post-war period, of the United States helping the European countries to obtain credit via the marketing of their securities.

He published a number of books during this period, publicizing his involvement in the passage of the Federal Reserve Act and his views on a variety of economic and foreign policy issues (see Works by Robert Latham Owen below).

Owen received some indications of support from his fellow-Progressive and long-time ally, the party's three-time standard-bearer William Jennings Bryan, who joined him on his campaign visits to some of the Western states, but Bryan's support for Owen was lukewarm, his influence in the party was past his peak, and he placed much of his focus in 1920 on promoting the cause of prohibition, the main theme of his eventual speech at the convention.

The Oklahoma delegates remained loyal until on the forty-fourth ballot Owen released them so as to ensure a unanimous vote for the party's nominee, Governor of Ohio James M. Cox.

[105] Owen hoped that a public revisiting of the issue of war guilt might encourage reversal of some of the penal clauses imposed on Germany under the Versailles settlement, and pave the way to reconciliation between Germany and France, but his attempts to promote a Senate investigation of the war guilt question were narrowly defeated, largely along party lines — with many of his fellow Democrats concerned not to undermine the reputation of Woodrow Wilson — while an expert report prepared by the Legislative Research Service of the Library of Congress, though broadly supportive of Owen's arguments, was in the event never published as it was considered unlikely to obtain the support of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In 1926, following his retirement from the Senate, Owen was to publish a book advancing his revisionist thesis, under the title: The Russian Imperial Conspiracy, 1892–1914: The Most Gigantic Intrigue of all Time.

This said, some have seen Owen's preoccupation with the war guilt question as, at least to some degree, symptomatic of a growing detachment on his part from current U.S. political issues following the Democrats' loss of the 1920 elections.

On the domestic front, the Harding administration's "return to normalcy" offered little scope for further advances on Owen's Progressive agenda; in international affairs, the post-1920 turn of U.S. policy towards isolationism and protectionism also ran counter to his long-held principles.

Twentieth-century concerns about employment and economic growth were heard but had little effect.Reflecting this intellectual heritage, Meltzer emphasizes (in common with Friedman and Schwartz in their Monetary History of the United States) the influence on the founders of the Fed of: (i) the assumption, which was to prove unfounded, that the gold standard would continue to prevail, and (ii) the then widely held (and now discredited) real bills doctrine, which advocated restricting central bank credit to the discounting of commercial paper.

In Chapter 3, Meltzer covers the establishment of the Fed and its first decade of operations, a period when, as he shows, key issues such as the respective roles and powers of the Board and the (regional) Federal Reserve Banks were far from settled.