Morgan, Arthur E. (1878–1975)

U.S. engineer, college president, community reformer

Arthur E. Morgan was a dynamic, opinionated, and moralistic advocate for small communities, which he believed to be the foundation of American civilization. He was the first president of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a public works project initiated during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Morgan founded towns and intentional communities, wrote prolifically, and started a small organization called Community Service, Inc., that is still based at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Morgan served, briefly and controversially, as president.

Morgan was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1878, and raised in northern Minnesota. He had only three years of high school and dropped out of college in 1900, after two attempts in Colorado where he is also thought to have worked as a ranch hand, miner, typesetter, and beekeeper. He returned to Minnesota and began to learn engineering by working with his father, and by 1910, he owned his own company and was developing a national reputation as a flood control engineer.

After a historic and devastating flood in Dayton, Ohio, in 1913, in which 300 people had died, he was appointed chief engineer for a new dam project. His unorthodox flood control solutions included dry reservoirs behind dams that served as public parks and even model workers' settlements. He showed skill, creativity, and determination. His earthen dry dams, a new concept in the United States, were developed after he had collected and analyzed data on floods in Europe and the United States.

His second wife, Lucy Morgan, whom he married in 1911, was a Quaker and ardent reformer herself, believing in “a proper diet and efficient, moral living” (Talbert 1987, p. 28). His leadership of the Dayton project included worker communities, schooling for children and new immigrants, workers' insurance schemes, recreational programs, and town meetings.

After the successful completion of that project, Morgan turned his attention to social reform, beginning with education. Supported by various Dayton business leaders, he founded the Moraine Park School in 1917. Like the famous educator John Dewey, Morgan believed education should not be separated from real-life experience. Moraine Park stressed student self-governance and participation in teaching, and growing national recognition led to Morgan's being asked to write for the Atlantic Monthly about his views on education. He wrote for the magazine regularly for the next two decades.

In 1920, he joined the board of trustees of Antioch College, a small college that was in dire financial straits. Morgan devised a plan for saving the college and over-hauling its educational program. He became its president in 1921 and was given a free hand to reinvent the college. Lucy Morgan wrote that they planned to “[dedicate] our lives to embodying our dreams at Antioch College” (Morgan 1928, p. 100).

His efforts, which included removing almost all the existing faculty and administrators, were successful: enrollment quadrupled within a year, and the “Antioch Plan” got widespread attention from writers and educators. But Morgan was dissatisfied. He aimed at more than mere educational reform and saw his efforts at Antioch as the beginning of the moral regeneration of America.

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