Marjory Stoneman Douglas: “The Mother of the Everglades”
Marjory Stoneman Douglas fell in love with the Everglades after moving to Miami as a young woman in search of a new life. But it wasn’t love at first sight.
When she arrived in 1915, Florida was a vast rural state. The Everglades was a huge land and water mass – some said mess - that had been mismanaged and abused for decades. It is now considered one of the rarest ecosystems in the world. Within its 1.5 million acres of wetlands are sawgrass marshes, ponds, coastal mangroves, lakes and estuaries that are home to hundreds of rare bird and animal species, many endangered. Today this subtropical wilderness is a national park, world heritage site and international reserve – recognition of its rightful uniqueness.
It’s hard to believe the Everglades was once labeled “a worthless swamp,” by greedy developers who dreamt of dollar signs if they only could figure out ways to tame it. As Florida became more crowded and urbanized, city planners and other industries joined the competing interests that threatened to further destroy the Everglades. That all changed because of Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
Douglas’ book, The Everglades: River of Grass, released in November 1947 was based on five years of research. She documented the long, sad history of the collision between nature and attempts by humans conquer the Everglades. But it was her lyrical opening lines, capturing the beauty and fragility of the swampy grassland, that shifted popular opinion.
“There are no other Everglades in the world,” she wrote. “They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds under the dazzling blue heights of space.”
“They are unique also in simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose. The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass.”
For Floridians and the rest of the world, this was a new way of thinking about the Everglades and it coincided perfectly with the Everglades’ dedication as a national park that year. Despite its protected status, however, there was still a lot of work to do to restore and preserve the biodiversity of this enormous ecosystem. Douglas was 57 at the time, but she was just getting started. She would live until 108 spending much of the next half century crusading to save her beloved “river of grass.”
Born in Minnesota and raised in New England, Florida was a warm, sunny paradise to Douglas. By 25, she had weathered a less than happy childhood after her parents’ divorce left her estranged from her father. For four years, she had a brief respite from her struggles while at Wellesley College where she won writing and speech awards. But after graduation, she stumbled unwittingly into a disastrous marriage with Kenneth Douglas, thirty years older than her, who she later learned was also a bigamist and scam artist. Fortunately, the marriage was brief. But it left her adrift, recovering from her divorce with no clear plan for the future.
When her father, Frank Bryant Stoneman, editor of the Herald (now the Miami Herald), offered her a job at his fledgling newspaper, the obvious answer was ’yes.’ It was a chance to start over, embark on a career and reestablish a relationship with a parent she hadn’t seen since she was six years old.
Douglas began writing for the newspaper’s society pages, a common beat at the time for inexperienced women reporters. She eventually became the society page editor, but her natural curiosity led her to covering all kinds of stories. One assignment a few years after she began working at the newspaper took her on a detour from journalism.
On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany and entered World War I. Two days later, Douglas was sent to a recruiting station in Miami to cover the story of the first Florida woman to enlist in the Naval Reserve. When the woman failed to show up, Douglas spontaneously decided to enlist in her place. She served for 91 days as a chief yeoman according to her service card, resigning because she apparently wanted to be closer to the action.
Douglas sailed for Paris to work for the American Red Cross. When the war ended in September 1918, she stayed on in Europe and became a correspondent for the Herald. In writing about the aftermath of the conflict, she chronicled the displacement of refugees, an experience that “helped me understand the plight of refugees in Miami sixty years later,” she recalled in her autobiography.
In two years, she had added add war correspondent, military service, and Red Cross volunteer to her resume. Her father took note and cabled her to come home with a promotion to assistant editor and columnist.
When she returned to Miami in 1920, it was a place on the cusp of major growth – no longer a “frontier town,” as she once described it. From a population of 5000, the city was rapidly becoming a mecca of tourism and real estate development. Douglas and her father’s newspaper were there to witness the transformation, including the fight over the future of the Everglades.
Frank Stoneman was a staunch advocate of preserving the Everglades. The paper’s editorials opposed Gov. Napoleon Broward’s efforts to drain the Everglades in the name of economic progress. In her own column, The Galley, Douglas championed women’s suffrage, a cause she had first embraced while at Wellesley; as well as civil rights and the environment-- long before these causes became powerful movements.
She often wrote about the Everglades, focusing on its natural beauty, geography, biology and wildlife, introducing many of her readers to a forgotten and overlooked side of this unique ecosystem. Her writing set the stage for her conservation positions on the Everglades that would become her personal crusade.
By 1923, however, the pressures of being a columnist and her other responsibilities at the paper led her to quit after suffering a nervous breakdown. She began a freelance fiction and nonfiction writing career that lasted for the rest of her life. Drawing on the fanbase she developed as the Herald’s columnist, she was able to make a comfortable living, writing more than 100 pieces for popular publications such as McCall’s and the Saturday Evening Post. Many of the subjects in her stories and articles were drawn from her life in south Florida and her ever-growing affection and concern for the Everglades.
Around 1928, she joined The Everglades Tropical National Association, a local committee of supporters lobbying to make the Everglades a national park. Never shy about expressing her opinions in print, now she was also buttonholing decision makers with great effect. Even after Congress approved the everglades as a park in 1934, it would take 13 more years of fundraising and debate before it would be officially dedicated in 1947.
In the 1950s, Douglas was a frequent critic of the US Army Corps of Engineers when they built an intricate system of canals, dams and levees. The multimillion-dollar project diverted freshwater from the Everglades to residents in nearby South Florida, providing a steady source of clean water that also prevented flooding. Good for people but bad for the Everglades. At the Corps’ public hearings, Douglas in one of her signature big hats and large glasses became a familiar speaker.
“She was fearless, it didn’t matter who she was talking to, with engineers, or governors or even presidents,” said former University of Florida professor Kevin McCarthy, who also was an editor of many of Douglas’ books. “When she spoke, she was well informed. She would readily berate legislators or policymakers for what she believed was wrong…She believed so strongly in protecting the environment that she was very effective.”
Douglas’ effectiveness would be put to the test again in 1968 when the state announced plans to build Everglades Jetport. Dubbed “the airport for tomorrow,” it was going to be five times the size of New York City’s Kennedy Airport with six runways large enough for the mega jets of its time, the Concorde and its American counterpart in development, the Boeing 2707. The plans included a one-thousand-foot-wide road and rail link connecting the west and east sides of the state as well as a link into downtown Miami. Glamorous and futuristic, the Jetport was touted as turning South Florida and Miami the coolest spot in the country.
There was only one problem—and it set off alarm bells off for Marjory Stoneman Douglas. The proposed location was six miles north of the Everglades and she was sure that construction of a manmade behemoth of this magnitude would destroy the Park and its inhabitants. Douglas was 79 years old but she had not lost any of her fire when she planned a high-profile campaign to block construction of the Jetport.
She formed Friends of Everglades (FOE), a grassroots organization still in existence today. The group rallied public support against the Jetport. Douglas stepped up her visits to government officials. A year later, the release of an environmental impact report confirmed that the plan would "…inexorably destroy the south Florida ecosystem and thus the Everglades National Park." Faced with the public outcry of groups like FOE and the scientific evidence of the impact report, the state shut down the project.
In the next three decades, Stoneman Douglas there were many more battles. In 1993 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor for her lifelong commitment to protect and conserve the Everglades. More accolades, and awards were bestowed by environmental organizations. When she died at age 108 on May 14, 1998, her ashes were scattered in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness area in the Everglades National Park.
A life force as big as her beloved “river of grass,” Douglas was once asked for advice on how to help save the Everglades:
“Speak up. Be a nuisance where it counts…. Do your part to inform and stimulate the public to join your action…. depressed, discouraged and disappointed at failure and the disheartening effects of ignorance, greed, corruption and bad politics –but never give up.”
© 2024 Alice Look
Executive Producer, Remarkable Women Stories