Arthur Morgan was born near
Cincinnati, Ohio, but his family soon moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota,
where he grew up. His father was an engineer, and his own interests
leaned in that direction. Very early in his life he seems to have had a
concern for social improvement for when he was just ten years old he was
publishing great quotations for human uplift on a regular basis in one
of the St. Cloud newspapers. In 1895, at the age of seventeen, he
experienced a vivid vision of an ideal community while walking home
through the woods. The Utopian dream of an ideal society was thereafter
to direct his steps for the rest of his life.
After graduating from high school
he left home, at the age of nineteen and spent the next three years
doing many kinds of outdoor work, mostly in Colorado, finding that there
was a real dearth of understanding of hydraulic engineering. Then he
returned home, reading and studying problems relating to hydraulics, and
began to practice engineering with his father, learning his profession
in the old-fashioned way, from the ground up, by apprenticeship. He
married and had three children, Ernest, Griscom and Frances, each of
whom would later have a distinguished career centered on some aspect of
human service.
At the age of 32, he founded his
own engineering company, and three years later, after a disastrous flood
had practically wiped out the city of Dayton, Ohio, he was called to
take full charge of the Miami River Flood Control Project, involving the
building of several huge dams. This work he did so well as to be set on
the road to worldwide engineering fame.
In 1919 Arthur Morgan was appointed to the Board of Antioch College, a
dying institution in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a moribund village some
eighteen miles from Dayton. He saw Antioch and Yellow Springs as a kind
of double opportunity to test out his higher educational ideas and his
concepts for community development. He was made President, and there
began a thrilling experiment in innovative higher education; an emphasis
was upon becoming a well rounded, whole man or woman dedicated to the
welfare of humanity.
In fifteen years Arthur Morgan
built up Antioch College to where it was ranked among the top three
colleges of the nation in a study by the Carnegie Corporation.
In 1933, Arthur Morgan was called
by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to initiate and head the vast
development project known as the Tennessee Valley Authority, at that
time the greatest effort at regional development of natural resources
and human beings ever attempted in the history of the world.
It was during this same period of
intense preoccupation with the TVA and its victories and disappointments
that he finished a lifelong work on a biography of the great Utopian of
the nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy, and discovered connections
between Utopian writings and actual ideal societies. This led to his
landmark volume entitled, Nowhere Was Somewhere.
Upon his return to Yellow Springs
in 1939, Arthur Morgan turned his thought and energy to the problem of
revitalizing America's small communities, the "Seedbed of
Society" and the garden in which human character is grown. It was a
return to an old love, for he had already built model villages in Ohio
and Tennessee and sparked a successful "intentional" community
in North Carolina. He had been the moving force transforming the village
of Yellow Springs from a moribund little hamlet to an exciting and
vibrant ideal community in which people wanted to live. He succeeded
beyond his own modest hopes, and Yellow Springs today is a monument to
his vision and idealism.
Abridged from an address delivered at the Community Church of New York (Unitarian Universalist) in 1975. By Donald Szantho Harrington, Minister Emeritus of the Community Church of New York
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