Arthur Ernest Morgan

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.

File:Arthur E. Morgan 1921.jpg

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[http://www.fairhopeorganicschool.com 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.Arthur Morgan Remembered by Ernest Morgan, p. 16, published by Community Service, Inc., Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1991 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).The Struggle for the American Curriculum by H. Kliebard, p. 168, published by Rutledge, 1955 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.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

Until around the 1930s, Morgan was a member of the Unitarian Church.Arthur Morgan Remembered, p. 39; see also p. 89 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.The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto, chap. 18 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.[https://web.archive.org/web/20080423002331/http://www.communitysolution.org/about.html 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.Arthur Morgan Remembered, pp. 82–83, 95–97, 103–108 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.Morgan, A. E. (1971). Dams and Other Disasters: A Century of the Army Corps of Engineers in Civil Works (Boston: Sargent).Morgan, A. E. (1974). Making of the TVA (Buffalo: Prometheus).

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.

Along with J.J. Tigert, Morgan served as a member of the Indian University Education Commission set up in 1948 with S. Radhakrishnan as a chair and Zakir Husain as a member. The commission studied Land-Grant colleges in agricultural education in the United States.{{cite book|author=Goldsmith, Arthur A.|title=Building Agricultural Institutions: Transferring The Land-grant Model To India And Nigeria|publisher=Routledge|year=2019}} He travelled across India in 1948 as part of the commission and also supported a community education initiative in Kerala called Mitraniketan begun by K. Viswanathan in 1965.{{Cite journal|last=Purcell|first=Aaron D.|date=2003-03-01|title=Collaboration and the Small Community: Arthur Morgan and the Mitraniketan Project in Kerala 1|url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1111/1540-6563.00034|journal=The Historian|language=en|volume=65|issue=3|pages=643–664|doi=10.1111/1540-6563.00034|s2cid=143843373|issn=0018-2370|url-access=subscription}}

File:Arthur Ernest Morgan 1938.jpg, 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.Miller, Timothy. The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth Century America. Volume I: 1900-1960. Syracuse University Press: 1998. 162-165.

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.Miller 163

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.Hicks, George L. Experimental Americans: Celo and Utopian Community in the Twentieth Century. University of Illinois Press: 2001.Lockyer, Joshua. Seeing Like a Commons: Eighty Years of Intentional Community Building and Commons Stewardship in Celo, North Carolina. Lexington Press: 2021. Today, Celo is home to 40 families who live on its {{convert|1000|acre|km2|0}}.[http://directory.ic.org/186/Celo_Community Website of Intentional Communities, A Project of the FIC]{{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130706105832/http://directory.ic.org/186/Celo_Community |date=2013-07-06 }}.

In the 1940s, Morgan went on to found two organizations for the promotion of community, Community Service Inc. (CSI) in 1940, and in 1949 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.Miller 163-164; Morgan, Griscom. (1988). Guidebook for Intentional Communities. Yellow Springs, OH 45387: Community Service, Inc.

{{POV section|date=August 2021}}

From an early age, Morgan believed in the innate inferiority of certain races. In particular, he held the view that those of Asian and African descent were "the most unfit of all" peoples. To illustrate this point, Morgan once wrote that, "The extreme and universal immorality of the negro is a bigger blight on the country than people realize."Grant, Nancy. TVA and Black Americans, Temple University Press 1990, p. 38.

In addition to his belief in white supremacy, Morgan was also a leading proponent of eugenics and what he termed "euthenics". As such, he spoke widely of the need to both extinguish undesirable genetic traits seen among peoples of poor genetic stock and eliminate cultural traits seen among "uncivilized" peoples.{{cite journal | url=https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.jhered.a105005 | doi=10.1093/oxfordjournals.jhered.a105005 | title=Quality of Population as Necessary for National Defense | date=1941 | last1=Morgan | first1=Arthur E. | journal=Journal of Heredity | volume=32 | issue=3 | pages=109–112 | url-access=subscription }} With these views, Morgan became a leader in the eugenics movement, serving as a charter member and honorary president of the American Eugenics Society.{{Cite book |title=Engineering Earth |date=2011 |isbn=978-90-481-9919-8 |editor-last=Brunn |editor-first=Stanley D. |chapter=When a New Deal is Actually an Old Deal: The Role of TVA in Engineering a Racialized Jim Crow Landscape |doi=10.1007/978-90-481-9920-4 |chapter-url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286095938}} Adolf Hitler cited the American eugenics movement as an inspiration for what became known as the Holocaust.

Morgan's views on race greatly informed his actions as head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, leading him to exclude Black Americans from employment and housing opportunities offered to whites by the "New Deal" program. As a result, all-white towns such as Norris, Tennessee, came to characterize his vision for "model" communities. When sued by the NAACP for denying Black Americans equal access to jobs and housing, Morgan pushed back, claiming that "Blacks had to create their own opportunities." To this day, Norris Tennessee remains almost exclusively white, as documented in James W. Loewen's book "Sundown Towns."

Despite investigations demonstrating that Morgan's TVA had deliberately excluded Black Americans from the "New Deal" gains enjoyed by whites, Morgan remained defiant and unrepentant until his death in 1975. In his memoir of his TVA years, he denied any responsibility for the program's negative effects, claiming that there was nothing else he could do but to honor the attitudes of a racist, majority white America.Morgan, Arthur E. The Making of the TVA. MW Books, 1974.

{{ref list}}

• {{cite journal | author=Bernstein, Mark | title=Arthur Ernest Morgan | journal=American History |date=October 2005 | volume=40 | issue=4 | pages=48–76 }}
• Wilson, Edwin H. (1995). The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto (in English). {{ISBN|0-931779-05-7}}, [http://www.americanhumanist.org/humanism/ available online] (information on Morgan's religion in the [http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/edwin_wilson/manifesto/ch18.html final chapter])

• Barde, Robert E. "Arthur E. Morgan, First Chairman of TVA" Tennessee Historical Quarterly 30#3 (1971), pp. 299-314 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/42623246 online]
• Leuchtenburg, William E. "Roosevelt, Norris and the ‘Seven Little TVAs.’" Journal of Politics 14#3 (1952), pp. 418–41. [https://doi.org/10.2307/2126212 online]

• {{cite book|ref=McCraw|last=McCraw|first=Thomas K.|title=Morgan vs. Lilienthal:The Feud within the TVA|publisher=Loyola University Press|year=1970|oclc=65751}}
• {{cite book|ref=Purcell|last=Purcell|first=Aaron D.|title=Arthur Morgan: A Progressive Vision for American Reform|publisher=The University of Tennessee Press|year=2014|oclc=949947450}}
• {{cite book|ref=Talbert|last=Talbert|first=Roy Jr.|title=FDR's Utopian: Arthur Morgan of the TVA|publisher=University of Mississippi Press|year=1987|isbn=0-87805-301-8}}

{{commons category|Arthur E. Morgan}}

• [https://web.archive.org/web/20051126122429/http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/morgan.html Arthur E. Morgan, Human Engineer and College President]
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20090814152101/http://antiochcollege.org/ Antioch College]
• [http://www.arthurmorganschool.org Arthur Morgan School]
• [http://www.communitysolution.org/aboutus/ourfounderaem/ Community Service, Inc.]

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