Arthur Ernest Morgan

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For other persons named Arthur Morgan, see Arthur Morgan (disambiguation).

Arthur Ernest Morgan (1878–1975) 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 Morgan at Antioch College, circa 1921.

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 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 The Association for the Advancement of Progressive Education, later renamed in 1931 as Progressive Education Association (PEA).^[2] Morgan was asked to become president of Antioch College to turn it around after a low point in the college's finances. He reorganized the educational program to include Cooperative_education.

Until around the 1930's, Morgan was a member of the Unitarian Church.^[3] 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.^[4] 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 1940's, 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.^[5]

Morgan was the author of more than twenty books.

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.

[edit] References

^ Arthur Morgan Remembered by Ernest Morgan, p. 16, published by Community Service, Inc., Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1991
^ The Struggle for the American Curriculum by H. Kliebard, p. 168, published by Rutledge, 1955
^ Arthur Morgan Remembered, p. 39; see also p. 89
^ The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto, chap. 18
^ Arthur Morgan Remembered, pp. 82-83, 95-97, 103-108

Bernstein, Mark (October 2005). "Arthur Ernest Morgan" (in English). American History 40 (4): 48-76. ISSN 1076-8866.
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)