Arthur Ernest Morgan (1878 - 1975)

Born 20 Jun 1878 in Hamilton County Ohio

Died 16 Nov 1975 at age 97 in Xenia Ohio

Biography

Arthur Ernest Morgan (June 20, 1878 – November 16, 1975) was a civil engineer, U.S. administrator, and educator. He was the design engineer for the Miami Conservancy District flood control system and oversaw construction. He served as the president of Antioch College between 1920 and 1936. He was also the first chairman of Tennessee Valley Authority from 1933 until 1938 in which he used the concepts proven in his earlier work with the Miami Conservancy District.

Arthur E. Morgan was born near Cincinnati, Ohio but his family soon moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota. After graduating from high school, he spent the next several years doing outdoors work in Colorado. During this time he learned that there was a dearth of practical understanding of hydraulic engineering. He returned home and took up practice with his father, learning about hydraulic engineering by apprenticeship. By 1910 he had founded his own firm and become an associate member of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

After the disastrous Great Dayton, Ohio Flood in 1913, Morgan proposed a system of dry earthen dams to control the river systems above Dayton. His concepts were challenged because of his lack of formal engineering training, but eventually his plans were adopted and constructed, and the subsequent years proved the effectiveness of his concepts. Because of this success, he was chosen in 1933 to design and deploy the Tennessee Valley system of dams for flood control and electrification.

Always interested in progressive education, he sent his son Ernest to Marietta Johnson's Organic School in Fairhope, Alabama, a pioneering progressive boarding school. Morgan's first effort in education was to found the Moraine Park School, an experimental progressive school in Dayton, in 1917.[1] In 1921, Morgan became the first president of The Association for the Advancement of Progressive Education, later renamed in 1931 as Progressive Education Association (PEA).[2] In 1919, Morgan accepted the presidency of Antioch College to turn it around after a low point in the college's finances. Morgan replaced the existing board of trustees, which had been dominated by quarrelsome local ministers, with prominent businessmen such as Charles Kettering, who had also backed Morgan's efforts at the Moraine Park School. Between 1921 and 1933, board members and their friends donated more than $2 million to Antioch. Kettering alone donated $500,000. Morgan reorganized the educational program to include cooperative education and involved faculty in industrial research. The faculty, most personally chosen by Morgan, included not only academics but also architects, engineers, chemists, advertising executives, and government bureaucrats.[3]

Until around the 1930s, Morgan was a member of the Unitarian Church.[4] In his later life, Morgan was a Humanist Quaker, a member of the Society of Friends in Yellow Springs, Ohio, as was his son Ernest.[5] After his departure from the TVA in 1938, Arthur Morgan was active in Quaker war relief efforts in Mexico and Finland. Among other accomplishments in the 1940s, he founded a non-profit organization to promote small communities (Community Service, Inc.), helped to set up a system of rural universities in India, and fought to protect Native American (Seneca) land from the flooding by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.[6] Morgan was the author of more than twenty books. Two in the water field demonstrated his environmental orientation and his criticism of the Army Corps.[7]

In 1962 Morgan's daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, with the help of his son Ernest, founded a progressive private school with humanist, Quaker, and Montessori influences, naming it the Arthur Morgan School.

Dismissed as TVA Chairman by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Morgan testifies before a committee of the United States Congress in 1938. Morgan was a leading community organizer in the postwar period. He was deeply committed to community and greatly interested in community settlements. Heavily influenced by Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Morgan gained a reputation as a Utopian dreamer. This interest in community living, coupled with Morgan’s belief in small towns and family life as the most virtuous form of living, led Morgan to participate in several projects that fostered rural community life.[8]

As chairman of the TVA, he not only directed the building of dams and provided power; he promoted community living as well. Morgan advanced a wide variety of cooperative enterprises and cottage industries and created a number of planned towns that followed the English garden city model.[9]

In 1937, Morgan founded Celo Community, a land trust in the mountains of Western North Carolina. The community, which still exists today, is a self-governed land trust. Although Celo does not require members to accept any particular religious creed or ideology, it is built on cooperation between members and care for the natural environment.[10] Today, Celo is home to 40 families who live on its 1,000 acres (4 km2).[11]

In 1940, Morgan went on to found two organizations for the promotion of community, Community Service Inc. (CSI) and the Fellowship of Intentional Communities (FIC). CSI was created to advance family life and small towns, which Morgan saw as the necessary ingredients for a positive American future. The organization was founded on Morgan’s belief in the importance of small towns to the rapidly urbanizing nation. Small towns, he argued, provided places for people to experience respect, cooperation, and personal relationships. In the same year, Morgan founded the Fellowship of Intentional Communities, an organization that fostered relationships between communal settlements. The FIC cultivated communication and the exchange of products between communities, promoted communication between communal settlements and the outside world, and advocated for the formation of new intentional communities.[12]

Birth: Jun. 20, 1878 Hamilton County Ohio, USA Death: Nov. 16, 1975 Ohio, USA

Arthur was an engineer, educator, visionary, and said to be 'a mover of earth, a pourer or concrete, and a shaper of minds.'

He was the first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority serving from 1933 to 1938, and was instrumental in the construction of numerous dams. From 1920 until 1936, he was president of Antioch College.

He was married to Lucy Griscom, daughter of William Wade and Sarah Middleton Cooper Griscom, and they were parents of Arthur E. Jr., Griscom, and Frances Morgan.

The huge boulder at his gravesite came from a farm outside of Yellow Springs. Lucy died in 1972 and both their ashes were reinterred in June of 1976 at the entrance of Glen Helen, a nature preserve of Antioch College.

Family links: Spouse: Lucy Griscom Morgan (1877 - 1972)

Children: Arthur Ernest Morgan (1905 - 2000)* Frances Morgan Bolling (1914 - 2008)*

• Calculated relationship

Burial: Glen Helen Nature Preserve Yellow Springs Greene County Ohio, USA Plot: Only burials

Created by: Marian Presswood Record added: Nov 22, 2013 Find A Grave Memorial# 120698699

Sources

• Arthur Ernest Morgan

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Arthur Ernest Morgan

Arthur E. Morgan at Antioch College, about 1921. Chairman, Tennessee Valley Authority In office 18 May 1933 – 23 March 1938 President Franklin D. Roosevelt Succeeded by Harcourt A. Morgan President, Antioch College In office 1920–1936 Preceded by Wiliam M. Dawson (acting) Succeeded by Algo Henderson

Personal details Born June 20, 1878 Hamilton County, Ohio

Died November 16, 1975 (aged 97) Xenia, Ohio

Spouse(s) Urania T. Jones (d. 1905) Lucy Middleton Griscom (d. 1972)

References[edit] 1.Jump up ^ Arthur Morgan Remembered by Ernest Morgan, p. 16, published by Community Service, Inc., Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1991 2.Jump up ^ The Struggle for the American Curriculum by H. Kliebard, p. 168, published by Rutledge, 1955 3.Jump up ^ Grand Plans: Business Progressivism and Social Change in Ohio's Miami Valley by Judith Sealander, pp. 156–173, published by University Press of Kentucky, 1988 4.Jump up ^ Arthur Morgan Remembered, p. 39; see also p. 89 5.Jump up ^ The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto, chap. 18 6.Jump up ^ Arthur Morgan Remembered, pp. 82–83, 95–97, 103–108 7.Jump up ^ Morgan, A. E. (1971) Dams and Other Disasters: A Century of the Army Corps of Engineers in Civil Works (Boston: Sargent). Idem (1974) Making of the TVA (Buffalo: Prometheus). 8.Jump up ^ Miller, Timothy. The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth Century America. Volume I: 1900-1960. Syracuse University Press: 1998. 162-165. 9.Jump up ^ Miller 163 10.Jump up ^ Hicks, George L. Experimental Americans: Celo and Utopian Community in the Twentieth Century. University of Illinois Press: 2001. 11.Jump up ^ Website of Intentional Communities, A Project of the FIC. http://directory.ic.org/186/Celo_Community. 12.Jump up ^ Miller 163-164. Bernstein, Mark (October 2005). "Arthur Ernest Morgan". American History 40 (4): 48–76. Wilson, Edwin H. (1995). The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto (in English). ISBN 0-931779-05-7, available online at http://www.americanhumanist.org/humanism/ (information on Morgan's religion in the final chapter)

Further reading[edit] McCraw, Thomas K. (1970). Morgan vs. Lilienthal:The Feud within the TVA. Loyola University Press. OCLC 65751. Talbert, Roy, Jr. (1987). FDR's Utopian: Arthur Morgan of the TVA. University of Mississippi Press. ISBN 0-87805-301-8.

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