Morgan, Arthur E. (1878–1975)

American engineer, college president, and social reformer

Arthur E. Morgan was a dynamic and controversial leader in flood control, rural development, and community planning, and he saw himself as an innovative social engineer. Widely known as a writer on education and social issues, he served as the first chairman 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., which is still based at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Morgan served as president during a contentious but financially successful decade. He is still considered by many an inspiring leader and moral reformer, but the story of his life also demonstrates the risks of imposing a moral vision on others.

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 to attend classes 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, constructing drainage and levee systems for flood controls and preparing plans for the reclamation of peat marshes. By 1910, he owned his own company and was developing a national reputation as a flood control engineer. Although in later life he complained of his health and attributed some of his difficulties to a physiological problem, a kind of brain damage, as a young man he was six foot two inches tall and strikingly vital.

In 1913, he was appointed chief engineer for a new dam project in Dayton, Ohio. Dayton had suffered a historic and devastating flood earlier in the year, in which three hundred people had died, and leading businessmen had raised $2 million to help fund a solution. Morgan set to work with characteristic determination. After extensive research collecting and analyzing data on floods in Europe and the United States, he offered a number of unorthodox flood control solutions, included creating “conservancy districts” and building large earthen “dry dams” (they look like huge Indian mounds) that served as reservoirs in case of emergency and as public parks the rest of the time.