On May 19, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the appointment of Arthur Morgan (1879-1975), a water-control engineer and college president from Ohio as the chairman of the newly created Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). With the eyes of the nation focused on the reform and recovery promised by the New Deal, Morgan remained in the national spotlight for much of the 1930s in this thoughtful biography Aaron D. Purcell re-assesses Morgan's long life and career and provides the first detailed account of his post-TVA activities. As Purcell demonstrates, Morgan embraced an alternative types of Progressive Era reform that was rooted in nineteenth-century socialism, an overlooked strain in American political thought. Purcell Pinpoints Morgan's reading of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward while a teenager as a watershed moment in the development of his vision for building modern American society. He recounts Morgan's early successes as an engineer budding Progressive-leader, and educational reformer his presidency of Antioch College, and his revolutionary but contentious tenure at the TVA After his dismissal from the TVA Morgan eventually published over a dozen books, including a biography of Bellamy, while supporting community-building efforts across the globe, Morgan retained many of his late-nineteenth century beliefs, including eugenics, as part of his societal vision. His authoritarian administrative style and moral rigidity limited his ability of attract large numbers to his community-based vision. By presenting Morgan's life and career within the context of the larger social and cultural events of his day, this revealing biographical study offers new insight into the achievements and motivations of an important but historically neglected American reformer. Book jacket.

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In this age of large cities, mass culture, and ever more massive events, people must struggle against an overwhelming crowd of their own creations to maintain human integrity. In this manual for human survival, Arthur E. Morgan offers a solution: peaceful existence in the small, primary community where, more easily than anywhere else, people can find a way to live well. Ultimately striving to show that the small community is the lifeblood of civilization, this volume examines the political organization, membership, economics, health, and ethics characteristics of small communities.Like Rousseau before him, Morgan observes that we have less control over our affairs than in the past. In increasing our control of the natural environment, human beings have built a social environment so out of scale that it becomes nearly impossible for people to maintain balance. The struggle now is less with the natural order than with the social order, and preserving human integrity against the plethora of our own creations is the core problem.The need to rediscover elementary forms of human existence has been accelerated by the efficiencies of centralized control and mass persuasion. In the face of this, small communities or intimate groups become the primary pattern in which human beings must live if the good life is to be a realistic goal. The timely nature of this volume has grown as the electronic displaces the mechanical as a moral rival to human community.

Since Antioch's reorganization in the early 1920s the event has been heralded as a wonder of academic innovation and generally credited to the work of one man, Arthur Morgan. This book examines the politics of educational innovation as represented by that reorganization. Connected Thoughts draws on a large number of sources to redefine Antioch College's reorganization. In doing this the author links the event to the numerous institutions, organizations and individuals who helped define the event, showing that the reorganization was neither a remarkable educational innovation not the work of one man, but rather required the efforts of a number of individuals whose work was in many ways in harmony with both the traditions of the institution and the larger educational community. This is an illuminating study of institutional renewal and reorganization.