Robert G. Allen
Robert Gray Allen was an American businessman and a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania.Early life and education
Allen was born in Winchester, Massachusetts on August 24, 1902. He moved to Minneapolis, in 1906. He was graduated from Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, in 1922 and later attended Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He moved to Greensburg, Pennsylvania in 1929 and was a salesman and sales manager for a valve and fittings manufacturing business until 1937.He was district administrator of the Works Progress Administration in 1935 and 1936.
Allen was elected as a Democrat to the Seventy-fifth and Seventy-sixth Congresses. He was not a candidate for renomination in 1940. He became president of the Duff-Norton Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh, from 1940 to 1943. He was commissioned a major in the Ordnance Corps of the United States Army in July 1942 and was promoted to lieutenant colonel in February 1943. He served until his discharge in January 1945.
After his time in Congress and the Army, he served in a variety of business positions:
He retired from business activities in 1962 and moved from Milwaukee, to Keene, Virginia, where he died.Allen married Katharine Hancock Wilson on January 17, 1925. Together, they had three children.
In 1948, Allen's daughter, Katharine "Kathy" Allen, married Warren A. Morton, an oilman in Casper who later served as Speaker of the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1979–1980 and was the unsuccessful Republican gubernatorial nominee in 1982. Katharine Morton recalls that though her father had been a New Deal supporter, he opposed U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937 and also ran afoul of United Mine Workers labor figure John L. Lewis.
