Arthur E. Morgan Papers

Arthur Ernest Morgan (1878-1975) was the first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority engineering projects from 1933-1938. Morgan also led the Miami (Ohio) Conservancy District in a mammoth pioneer reconstruction program after the disastrous flood of 1913. He went on to become the President of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, serving from 1920-1936 while still working actively on engineering projects around the country. Morgan also was a writer well into his nineties and past the point of physical blindness. He is the author of: The Making of the TVA, Dams and Other Disasters: A Century of the Army Corps of Engineers in Civil Works, The Community of The Future and The Future of Community, and Nowhere was Somewhere: How History Makes Utopias and Utopias Make History.

In 1912 when Morgan was employed in the office of Drainage Investigations in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. House of Representatives opened hearings to investigate the USDA's involvement in promoting land sales in the Everglades. In 1909, a preliminary report on the feasibility of draining and reclaiming land in the Everglades had been prepared by USDA employee, James Wright, who concluded that the Everglades could be drained fairly easily and inexpensively. The facts and conclusions presented in the Wright report were extremely unsound, but the USDA officially approved the report anyhow. The land companies in Florida were able to use the USDA report as propaganda to spur real estate sales in South Florida. As part of the 1912 investigation Morgan analyzed the Wright report and testified before a Congressional committee that the report was seriously flawed and that the USDA had acted inappropriately in approving it. Morgan's expert testimony during the investigation refuted the claims that draining the Everglades would be easy, thereby causing the boom in land sales to slow down temporarily.

Source: Arthur E. Morgan, The Making of the TVA, (Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York, 1974), 49.