RARE “1st Chairman TVA" Arthur Morgan Hand Signed TLS Dated 1951 For Sale

Up for sale "Antioch College" Arthur Morgan Hand Signed TLS Dated 1951. 

ES-6443E

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 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. 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). 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. Until

around the 1930s, Morgan was a member of the Unitarian Church. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Today, Celo is home to 40 families who live on

its 1,000 acres (4 km2). 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.