Born on Staten Island, New York on September 17, 1873, Raymond Robins was reared by relatives in Ohio, Kentucky, and Florida, before striking out on his own in his teens to work as a miner and farmhand through the South and West. In 1896 he secured a degree in law from Columbian (now George Washington) University, and established a legal practice in San Francisco. From 1897 to 1900 he was in Alaska, prospecting for gold, campaigning for organized government and law enforcement, and serving as a licensed Congregational minister. While in the Klondike, he achieved financial independence.
Upon returning from Alaska in 1900, Robins settled in Chicago and turned his attention to political reform and to social work in the overcrowded slums of the seventeenth ward, where he lived for the greater part of the next fourteen years. Here he experienced the anarchist alarm following the assassination of President William McKinley, recollections of which Robins dictated in September, 1914. Here too he was a staff member of Chicago Commons, was superintendent of the Chicago Municipal Lodging House from 1902 to 1906, was made head resident of Northwestern University Settlement in 1903, and was appointed to the Chicago Board of Education in 1906. In June, 1905, he married Margaret Dreier who, along with her sister Mary, was active in the woman's suffrage and women's trade union movements. Mrs. Robins served as president of the National Women's Trade Union League from 1907 to 1922, and during the 1928 presidential campaign accepted the chairmanship of the Division of Industrial Women of the Republican Party.
In national politics Robins had been a Bryan Democrat in 1896, and occasional letters from Daniel Kiefer in the early 1900's indicate Robins' interest in the Single Tax proposals of Henry George. By 1912 Robins had become a Progressive and was active in such organizations as the Initiative and Referendum League of Illinois, the National Referendum League, and the 1912 campaign of Theodore Roosevelt. Robins became chairman of the Illinois State Central Committee of the Progressive Party in the fall of 1913, and in the following year made his only personal bid for elective public office, when, with the personal endorsement of Roosevelt and with Harold Ickes as his campaign manager, he ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate on the Progressive ticket.
Robins was a popular lecturer on social and religious topics under the auspices of the Men and Religion Forward Movement and the Young Men's Christian Association. On behalf of the former group, Robins and Fred B. Smith went on a world tour in 1913. He served as chairman of the Progressive National Convention in 1916 and in the ensuing campaign he supported the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes.
Upon the recommendation of Roosevelt and others, President Wilson in June, 1917, appointed Robins a member of the American Red Cross Mission to Russia, where Robins spent most of the following year. There he observed the revolution and the development of the Soviet regime, and knew personally Vladimir Ilyich (Nikolai) Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Grigori Chicherin, and others among the new Bolshevik leaders. Returning to the United States favoring recognition of the Soviet government and economic cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, Robins agitated for these measures in lectures, addresses, and correspondence throughout the 1920's.
During the 1920's and early 1930's Robins was also an enthusiast for the outlawry of war by international agreement, although he opposed the League of Nations, World Court, and Kellogg-Briand Pact. In the outlawry-of-war movement he was most closely associated with Salmon O. Levinson of Chicago. Both men were also deeply immersed in national Republican politics, and Robins served on the executive committee of the National Republican Committee from 1920 to 1924. In the latter year he vigorously opposed Robert M. La Follette and his adoption of the term “Progressive” for his third-party effort. Until the middle 1920's Robins pinned great hopes for progressive Republicanism on Hiram W. Johnson, and later he centered his ambitions on William E. Borah, but neither could achieve the presidential nomination. Instead Robins campaigned faithfully for the Republican nominees, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, and was a behind-the-scenes associate, adviser, and correspondent of all of these Presidents during their campaigns and terms of office. During the 1920's Robins retained an active interest in Chicago politics, and was one of the backers of William E. Dever, a reform candidate elected as mayor. Between 1927 and 1933 Robins also espoused the Prohibition cause, on which he corresponded and worked with the “dry” factions of both Republican and Democratic parties.
After recovery from an attack of amnesia in the fall of 1932, Robins decided to revisit Russia from April to July, 1933. There he was received by Stalin and other high-ranking Soviet officials and was favorably impressed by the material progress made in Russia since the revolution. Upon his return to America, Robins presented arguments favoring recognition of the Soviet Union to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and made a radio address on Russia for the National Broadcasting Company on July 26, 1933.
Throughout his life Robins held a deep affection for a Florida plantation he had known as a boy and had purchased after his return from Alaska, Chinsegut Hill near Brooksville. In 1932, after suffering losses in the Depression, he deeded the farmlands to the United States government to be operated by the Department of Agriculture as a wildlife preserve and agricultural experiment station. However he continued to take an active part in the management of the land and after his Russian trip, he retired to Chinsegut. There he devoted his energies to the development of the agriculture station. In September, 1935, while pruning a tree there, he fell and suffered permanent paralysis from spinal injury. Most of his remaining years he spent quietly on his estate, compelled by his disability to be only an interested observer of men and events. Mary Dreier Robins died on February 21, 1945 and Raymond Robins on September 26, 1954.
