Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Encyclopedia
Marjory Stoneman Douglas (April 7, 1890 – May 14, 1998) was an American journalist
, writer
, feminist, and environmentalist
known for her staunch defense of the Everglades
against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald
, Douglas became a freelance writer, producing over a hundred short stories
that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass
(1947), which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp; its impact has been compared to that of Rachel Carson
's influential book Silent Spring
(1962). Her books, stories, and journalism career brought her influence in Miami, which she used to advance her causes.
Even as a young woman Douglas was outspoken and politically conscious of many issues that included women's suffrage
and civil rights
. She was called upon to take a central role in the protection of the Everglades when she was 79 years old. For the remaining 29 years of her life she was "a relentless reporter and fearless crusader" for the natural preservation and restoration of the nature of South Florida. Her tireless efforts earned her several variations of the nickname "Grande Dame of the Everglades" as well as the hostility of agricultural and business interests looking to benefit from land development in Florida. Numerous awards were given to her, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom
, and she was inducted into several halls of fame.
Douglas lived until age 108, working until nearly the end of her life for Everglades restoration. Upon her death, an obituary in The Independent
in London
stated, "In the history of the American environmental movement, there have been few more remarkable figures than Marjory Stoneman Douglas."
, the only child of Frank Bryant Stoneman (1857–1941) and Lillian Trefethen (1859–1912), a concert violinist. One of her earliest memories was her father reading to her The Song of Hiawatha
, at which she burst into sobs upon hearing that the tree had to give its life in order to provide Hiawatha the wood for a canoe. She was an early and voracious reader. Her first book was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
, which she kept well into adulthood until "some fiend in human form must have borrowed it and not brought it back". She visited Florida when she was four years old, and her most vivid memory of the trip was picking an orange from a tree at the Tampa Bay Hotel. From there she and her parents embarked on a cruise from Tampa
to Havana
.
When she was six years old, Marjory's parents separated. Her father endured a series of failed entrepreneurial ventures and the instability caused her mother to move them abruptly to the Trefethen family house in Taunton, Massachusetts
. She lived there with her mother, aunt, and grandparents who did not get along well and consistently spoke ill of her father, to her dismay. Her mother, whom Marjory characterized as "high strung", was committed to a mental sanitarium
in Providence
several times. Her parents' separation and the contentious life with her mother's family caused her to suffer from night terror
s. She credited her tenuous upbringing with making her "a skeptic and a dissenter" for the rest of her life.
As a youth, Marjory found solace in reading, and eventually she began to write. At sixteen years old she contributed to the most popular children's publication of the day, St. Nicholas Magazine
—also the first publisher of 20th century writers F. Scott Fitzgerald
, Rachel Carson
, and William Faulkner
—with a puzzle titled "Double Headings and Curtailings". In 1907, she was awarded a prize from the Boston Herald
for a story titled "An Early Morning Paddle", about a boy who watches a sunrise from a canoe. However, as her mother's mental health deteriorated, Marjory took on more responsibilities, eventually managing some of the family finances and gaining a maturity imposed upon her by circumstance.
in English in 1912. She found particular gifts in a class on elocution
, and joined the first suffrage club with six of her classmates. She was elected as "Class Orator" at Wellesley, but was unable to fulfill the office since she was already involved in other activities. During her senior year while visiting home, her mother showed her a lump on her breast. Marjory arranged the surgery to have it removed. After the graduation ceremony, her aunt informed her it had metastasized, and within months her mother was dead. The family left making the funeral arrangements up to Marjory.
After drifting with college friends through a few jobs for which she did not feel she was well-suited, Marjory Stoneman met Kenneth Douglas in 1914. She was so impressed with his manners and surprised at the attention he showed her that she married him within three months. He portrayed himself as a newspaper editor, and was 30 years her senior, but the marriage quickly failed when it became apparent he was a con artist. The true extent of his duplicity Marjory did not entirely reveal, despite her honesty in all other manners. Marjory may have unwittingly married Douglas while he was already married to another woman. While he spent six months in jail for passing a bad check
, she remained faithful to him. However, his scheme to scam her absent father out of money worked in Marjory's favor when it attracted Frank Stoneman's attention. Marjory's uncle persuaded her to move to Miami and for the marriage to end. In the fall of 1915, Marjory Stoneman Douglas left New England to be reunited with her father, whom she had not seen since her parents' separation when she was six years old.
. Stoneman passionately opposed the governor of Florida, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, and his attempts to drain the Everglades. He infuriated Broward so much that when Stoneman won an election for circuit judge
, Governor Broward refused to validate the election, so Stoneman was referred to as "Judge" for the rest of his life without performing the duties of one.
She joined the staff of the newspaper in 1915, originally as a society columnist writing about tea parties and society events, but news was so slow she later admitted to making up some of her stories: "Somebody would say, 'Who's that Mrs. T.Y. Washrag you've got in your column?' And I would say, 'Oh, you know, I don't think she's been here very long'". When her father went on vacation less than a year after her appearance in Miami, he left her the responsibility of the editorial
page. She developed a rivalry with an editor at The Miami Metropolis whose greater familiarity with the history of Miami gave her cause to make fun of Douglas in writing. Her father scolded her to check her facts better.
Douglas was given an assignment in 1916 to write a story on the first woman to join the US Naval Reserve from Miami. When the woman did not show up for the interview, Douglas found herself joining the Navy as a Yeoman (F)
first class. It did not suit her; she disliked rising early and her superiors did not appreciate her correcting their grammar as a typist, so she requested a discharge and joined the American Red Cross
, where she was stationed in Paris
. She witnessed the tumultuous celebrations on the Rue de Rivoli when the Armistice was signed, and she cared for war refugee
s; seeing them displaced and in a state of shock, she wrote, "helped me understand the plight of refugees in Miami sixty years later".
Following the war, Douglas took on duties as assistant editor at The Miami Herald. She gained some renown through her daily column entitled "The Galley", and had enough influence through the newspaper that she became somewhat of a local celebrity. She amassed a devoted readership and attempted to begin each column with a poem. "The Galley" was topical and went in any direction Douglas chose. She promoted responsible urban planning when Miami saw a population boom
of 100,000 people in a decade. She wrote supporting women's suffrage, civil rights
, and better sanitation while opposing Prohibition
and foreign trade tariffs.
Some of the stories she wrote spoke of the wealth of the region being in its "inevitable development", and she supplemented her income with $100 a week from writing copy advertisements that praised the development of South Florida, something she would reconsider later in her life. She wrote a ballad
in the 1920s lamenting the death of a 22-year-old vagrant
who was beaten to death in a labor camp
, titled "Martin Tabert of North Dakota
is Walking Florida Now". It was printed in The Miami Herald, and read aloud during a session of the Florida Legislature
, which passed a law banning convict leasing
, in large part due to her writing. "I think that's the single most important thing I was ever able to accomplish as a result of something I've written", she wrote in her autobiography.
magazine Black Mask for $600 ($ in 2010). Forty of her stories were published in The Saturday Evening Post
; one titled "Story of a Homely Woman" was reprinted in 1937 in the Post's best short stories compilation. Recurring motifs in her fiction were their settings in South Florida, the Caribbean, or Europe during World War I. Her protagonists were often independent, quirky women or youthful underdogs who encountered social or natural injustices. The people and animals of the Everglades served as subjects for some of her earliest writings. "Plumes", originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1930, was based on the murder of Guy Bradley
, an Audubon Society game warden, by poacher
s. "Wings" was a nonfiction story, also first appearing in the Post in 1931, that addressed the slaughter of Everglades wading birds for their feathers. Her story "Peculiar Treasure of a King" was a second-place finalist in the O. Henry Award
competition in 1928.
During the 1930s, Douglas was commissioned to write a pamphlet
supporting a botanical garden
called "An argument for the establishment of a tropical botanical garden in South Florida." Its success caused her to be in demand at garden clubs where she delivered speeches throughout the area, then to serve on the board to support the Fairchild Garden
. She called the garden "one of the greatest achievements for the entire area".
Douglas became involved with the Miami Theater, and wrote some one-act plays that were fashionable in the 1930s. One, entitled "The Gallows Gate", was about an argument between a mother and father regarding the character of their son who is sentenced to hang. She got the idea from her father, who had witnessed hangings when he lived in the West and was unnerved by the creaking sound of the rope bearing the weight of the hanging body. The play won a state competition, and eventually $500 in a national competition after it was written into three acts.
Douglas served as the book review editor of The Miami Herald from 1942 to 1949, and as editor for the University of Miami
Press from 1960 to 1963. She released her first novel, entitled Road to the Sun, in 1952. She wrote four novels, and several non-fiction books on regional topics including Florida birdwatching
and David Fairchild
, the entomologist
turned biologist
who imagined a botanical park in Miami. Her autobiography
entitled Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Voice of the River was written with John Rothchild in 1987. She had been working on a book about W. H. Hudson for years, traveling to Argentina and England several times. It was incomplete when she died in 1998.
by writing about the Miami River
. Unimpressed with it, she called the Miami River about "an inch long", but in researching it became more interested in the Everglades and persuaded the publisher instead to allow her to write about them. She spent five years researching what little scientific knowledge was recorded about the ecology and history of the Everglades and South Florida. Douglas spent time with geologist Garald Parker
, who discovered that all of South Florida's fresh water source was the Biscayne Aquifer
, and it was filled by the Everglades. Parker confirmed the name of the book that has since become the nickname for the Everglades when Douglas, trying to capture the essence of the Everglades, asked if she could safely call the fresh water flowing from Lake Okeechobee a river of grass.
The Everglades: River of Grass
was published in 1947 and sold out of its first printing a month after being released. The first line of the book, "There are no other Everglades in the world", has been called the "most famous passage ever written about the Everglades", and the statement welcomes visitors to the Everglades National Park
website. Douglas characterized the Everglades as ecosystems surrounding a river worthy of protecting, that was inescapably connected to the people and cultures of South Florida. She outlined its imminent disappearance in the last chapter titled "The Eleventh Hour":
The Everglades: River of Grass galvanized people to protect the Everglades and is compared to Rachel Carson
's 1962 exposé of the harmful effects of DDT
, Silent Spring
, as both books are "groundbreaking calls to action that made citizens and politicians take notice". Its impact is still relevant as it is claimed to be a major reason Florida receives so many tourists, and "remains the definitive reference on the plight of the Florida Everglades". It has gone through numerous editions, selling 500,000 copies since its original publication. The Christian Science Monitor wrote of it in 1997, "Today her book is not only a classic of environmental literature, it also reads like a blueprint for what conservationists are hailing as the most extensive environmental restoration project ever undertaken anywhere in the world". The downside to the book's impact, according to one writer addressing restoration of the Everglades, is that her metaphor
is so prevailingly dominant that it is inaccurate in describing the complex web of ecosystems within the Everglades: "River of Grass" describes one. David McCally wrote that despite Douglas' "appreciation of the complexity of the environmental system" she described, popular conception of the Everglades shared by people who have not read the book overshadows her detailed explanations.
's wife, and two other women to Tallahassee
to speak in support of women's right to vote. Douglas was not impressed with the reception the group got from the Florida Legislature. She wrote about her experience later: "All four of us spoke to a joint committee wearing our best hats. Talking to them was like talking to graven images. They never paid attention to us at all." Douglas was able to vote for the first time after she returned from Europe in 1920.
Using her influence at The Miami Herald, Douglas wrote columns about poverty: "You can have the most beautiful city in the world as appearance goes, the streets may be clean and shining, the avenues broad and tree lined, the public buildings dignified, adequate and well kept ... but if you have a weak or inadequate health department, or a public opinion lax on the subject, all the splendors of your city will have not value." In 1948 Douglas served on the Coconut Grove Slum Clearance Committee, with a friend of hers named Elizabeth Virrick, who was horrified to learn that no running water or sewer
s were connected to the racially segregated
part of Coconut Grove. They helped pass a law requiring all homes in Miami to have toilets and bathtubs. In the two years it took them to get the referendum
passed, they worked to set up a loan operation for the black residents of Coconut Grove, who borrowed the money interest-free to pay for the plumbing work. Douglas noted that all of the money loaned was repaid.
and dedicated to the idea of making a national park in the Everglades. By the 1960s, the Everglades were in imminent danger of disappearing forever due to gross mismanagement in the name of progress, and real estate and agricultural development. Encouraged to get involved by the leaders of environmental groups, in 1969—at the age of 79—Douglas founded Friends of the Everglades
to protest the construction of a jetport in the Big Cypress
portion of the Everglades. She justified her involvement saying, "It is a woman's business to be interested in the environment. It's an extended form of housekeeping." She toured the state giving "hundreds of ringing denunciations" of the airport project, and increased membership of Friends of the Everglades to 3,000 within three years. She ran the public information operation full time from her home and encountered hostility from the jetport's developers and backers, who called her a "damn butterfly chaser". President Richard Nixon
, however, scrapped funding for the project due to the efforts of many Everglades watchdog groups.
Douglas continued her activism and focused her efforts on restoring the Everglades
after declaring that "Conservation is now a dead word...You can't conserve what you haven't got." Her criticism was directed at two entities she considered were doing the most damage to the Everglades. A coalition of sugarcane
growers, named Big Sugar, she accused of polluting Lake Okeechobee
by pumping water tainted with chemicals, human waste, and garbage back into the lake, which served as the fresh water source for the Miami metropolitan area
. She compared Florida sugarcane agriculture to sugarcane grown in the West Indies, that she claimed was more environmentally sound, had a longer harvest cycle less harmful to soil nutrients, and was less expensive for consumers due to the higher sugar content.
Besides Big Sugar, Douglas spoke about the damage the Army Corps of Engineers was doing to the Everglades by diverting the natural flow of water. The Corps was responsible for constructing more than 1400 miles (2,253.1 km) of canals to divert water away from the Everglades after 1947. When the Central & South Florida Project (C&SF), run by former members of the Corps of Engineers, was proposed to assist the Everglades, Douglas initially gave it her approval, as it promised to deliver much-needed water to the shrinking Everglades. But in application, the project instead diverted more water away from the Everglades, changed water schedules to meet sugarcane farmers' irrigation needs, and flat-out refused to release water to Everglades National Park, until much of the land was unrecognizable. "What a liar I turned out to be!" remarked Douglas, then suggested the motivation behind all the digging and diversion in saying, "Their mommies obviously never let them play with mud pies, so now they take it out on us by playing with cement". Douglas was giving a speech addressing the harmful practices of the Army Corps of Engineers when the colonel
in attendance dropped his pen on the floor. As he was stooping to pick it up, Douglas stopped her speech and said to him, "Colonel! You can crawl under that table and hide, but you can't get away from me!"
In 1973, Douglas attended a meeting addressing conservation of the Everglades in Everglades City
, and was observed by John Rothchild:
Douglas was not well-received by some audiences. She opposed the drainage of a suburb in Dade County
named East Everglades. After the county approved building permits in the Everglades, the land flooded as it had for centuries. When homeowners demanded the Army Corps of Engineers drain their neighborhoods, she was the only opposing voice. At the hearing in 1983, she was booed, jeered, and shouted at by the audience of residents. "Can't you boo any louder than that?" she chided, eventually making them laugh. "Look. I'm an old lady. I've been here since eight o'clock. It's now eleven. I've got all night, and I'm used to the heat", she told them. Later, she wrote, "They're all good souls—they just shouldn't be out there." Dade County commissioners eventually decided not to drain.
Florida Governor Lawton Chiles
explained her impact, saying, "Marjory was the first voice to really wake a lot of us up to what we were doing to our quality of life. She was not just a pioneer of the environmental movement, she was a prophet, calling out to us to save the environment for our children and our grandchildren."
chapter organized in the South in the 1950s. She lent her support to the Equal Rights Amendment
, speaking to the legislature in Tallahassee urging them to ratify it. In the 1980s Douglas lent her support to the Florida Rural Legal Services, a group that worked to protect migrant farm workers who were centered around Belle Glade
, and who were primarily employed by the sugarcane industry. She wrote to Governor Bob Graham
in 1985 to encourage him to assess the conditions the migrant workers endured. The same year, Douglas approached the Dade County School Board and insisted that the Biscayne Nature Center, which had been housed in hot dog stands, needed a building of its own. The center received a portable building until 1991 when the Florida Department of Education endowed $1.8 million for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center in Crandon Park
.
throughout her life, and forbade any religious ceremony at her memorial. Douglas tied her agnosticism to her unanswered prayers when her mother was dying. However, she credited the motivation for her support of women's suffrage
to her Quaker
paternal grandparents whose dedication to the abolition of slavery she admired, and proudly claimed Levi Coffin
, an organizer of the Underground Railroad
, was her great-great-uncle. She wrote that his wife was a friend of Harriet Beecher Stowe
, and had provided Stowe with the story of Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin
fleeing slavery because Douglas' great-great-aunt took care of Eliza and her infant after their escape. Frank Stoneman grew up in a Quaker colony, and Douglas maintained he kept touches of his upbringing throughout his life, even after converting to Episcopalianism. Writer Jack Davis and neighbor Helen Muir suggest this Quaker influence was behind Douglas' use of "Friends" in naming the organizations Friends of the Everglades and Friends of the University of Miami Library.
s. Douglas suggested she had had "blank periods" before, starting during her marriage, but they were brief. She connected these lapses to her mother's insanity. She eventually quit the newspaper, but after her father's death in 1941 she suffered a third and final breakdown, when her neighbors found her roaming the neighborhood one night screaming. She admitted she had a "father complex
", explaining it by saying, "(h)aving been brought up without him and then coming back and finding him so sympathetic had a powerful effect".
Despite Douglas' demure appearance—she stood at 5 in 2 in (1.57 m) and weighed 100 pounds (45.4 kg), and was always immaculately dressed in pearls, a floppy straw hat and gloves—she had an uncanny ability to get her point across. She was known for speaking in perfect, precise paragraphs, and was respected for her dedication and knowledge of her subjects; even her critics admitted her authority on the Everglades. Jeff Klinkenberg, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times
who interviewed and wrote several stories about Douglas, wrote of her, "She had a tongue like a switchblade
and the moral authority to embarrass bureaucrats and politicians and make things happen." Douglas was known for haughtily dismissing reporters who had not read her books and asked uninformed questions.
She enjoyed drinking Scotch
and sherry
; as one friend remembered her, "She would come up and have a sherry, and then I would walk her home, and then she'd walk me back, and we would have another sherry. What fun she was." Douglas never learned to drive and never owned a car. Her house also had no air conditioning
, electric stove, or dishwasher.
She was attached to several men after her divorce, counting one of them as the reason she enlisted in the Red Cross, as he had already gone to France as a soldier. However, she said she did not believe in extramarital sex
and would not have dishonored her father by being promiscuous. She told Klinkenberg in 1992, frankly, that she had not had sex since her divorce, saying "I wasn't a wild woman". However, she was fond of saying she used the emotion and energy instead on her work. "People don't seem to realize that the energy that goes into sex, all the emotion that surrounds it, can be well employed in other ways", she wrote in her autobiography.
) named its headquarters in Tallahassee after her in 1980, which she considered a dubious honor. She told a friend she would have rather seen the Everglades restored than her name on a building. During her polite acceptance speech, she railed against Ronald Reagan
and the then-Secretary of the Interior James Watt
for their lackluster approach to environmental conservation. The National Parks Conservation Association
established the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award in 1986, that "honor(s) individuals who often must go to great lengths to advocate and fight for the protection of the National Park System". Despite blindness and diminished hearing, Douglas continued to be active into her second century, and was honored with a visit from Queen Elizabeth II, to whom Douglas gave a signed copy of The Everglades: River of Grass in 1991. Instead of gifts and celebrations, Douglas asked that trees be planted on her birthday, resulting in over 100,000 planted trees across the state and a bald cypress on the lawn of the governor's mansion. The South Florida Water Management District
began removing exotic plants that had taken hold in the Everglades when Douglas turned 102.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton
awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom
, the highest honor given to a civilian. The citation for the medal read, "Marjory Stoneman Douglas personifies passionate commitment. Her crusade to preserve and restore the Everglades has enhanced our Nation's respect for our precious environment, reminding all of us of nature's delicate balance. Grateful Americans honor the 'Grandmother of the Glades' by following her splendid example in safeguarding America's beauty and splendor for generations to come." Douglas donated her medal to Wellesley College. Most of the others she received she stored on the floor of her home.
Douglas was inducted into the National Wildlife Federation
Hall of Fame in 1999, and the National Women's Hall of Fame
in 2000. John Rothchild declared her a feminist
before the word existed, but not entirely. Upon hearing that she was to be inducted, she questioned, "Why should they have a Women's Hall of Fame, as I heard they wanted to put me in the other day? Why not a Citizen's Hall of Fame?" Douglas was included in a tribute to pioneering women when television character Lisa Simpson
made a papier-mâché bust of her with Georgia O'Keeffe
and Susan B. Anthony
in an early episode
of The Simpsons
.
Some of Douglas' stories were collected by University of Florida
professor Kevin McCarthy in two edited collections: Nine Florida Stories in 1990 and A River In Flood in 1998. McCarthy wrote that he collected Douglas' short stories because most people in the 1990s were well aware of her fame as an environmentalist, but many did not know about her career as a freelance writer. "Probably no other person has been as important to the environmental well-being of Florida than this little lady from Coconut Grove", McCarthy wrote in the introduction of A River in Flood.
eulogized her in The Miami Herald, writing that The Everglades: River of Grass was "monumental", and praised her passion and her resolve; even when politicians finally found value in the Everglades and visited her for a photo opportunity, she still provoked them to do more and do it faster.
The National Wildlife Federation described her as "a passionate, articulate, and tireless voice for the environment". Chairman of the Florida Audubon Society Ed Davison remembered her, saying, "She kept a clear vision of the way things ought to be, and she didn't give a lot of credibility to excuses about why they're not like that. She would give these wonderful, curmudgeonly speeches to which there was no response. You can't holler back to grandmotherly scolding. All you can do is shuffle your feet and say, 'Yes, Ma'am.'" She was aware of it; she was reported saying, "People can't be rude to me, this poor little old woman. But I can be rude to them, poor darlings, and nobody can stop me." Her ashes were scattered over the 1300000 acres (5,260.9 km²) of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness Area in Everglades National Park
.
In 2000, a Naples, Florida
-based composer named Steve Heitzeg wrote a 15-minute orchestra piece to be performed by the Naples Philharmonic entitled Voice of the Everglades (Epitaph for Marjory Stoneman Douglas). Heitzeg explained his motivation for the piece, saying, "She was outspoken, she was direct, she had the energy and belief to make the world a better place." Two South Florida public schools are named in her honor: Broward County Public Schools
' Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School
and Miami-Dade County Public Schools
' Marjory Stoneman Douglas Elementary School.
. After Douglas' death, Friends of the Everglades proposed making the house part of an education center about Douglas and her life, but neighbors protested, citing issues with parking, traffic, and an influx of visitors to the quiet neighborhood. The house, which had an exterior floodwater line from the 1926 Miami Hurricane
and some damage from an infestation of bees, had fallen further into disrepair. For a while, the idea of moving the house to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables
, which Douglas helped to develop and where there is a life size bronze statue to commemorate her efforts, was considered. The State of Florida owns Douglas' house and in April 2007 placed it in the care of the Florida Park Service, a division of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection
. Restoration of the floors and counters took place in the following months. Water service was reconnected to the house and the electrical system was updated for safety purposes. All work was approved by the Department of Historic Resources. A park ranger was placed as a resident in the Douglas house to help maintain the structure and property.
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
, writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
, feminist, and environmentalist
Environmentalist
An environmentalist broadly supports the goals of the environmental movement, "a political and ethical movement that seeks to improve and protect the quality of the natural environment through changes to environmentally harmful human activities"...
known for her staunch defense of the Everglades
Everglades
The Everglades are subtropical wetlands in the southern portion of the U.S. state of Florida, comprising the southern half of a large watershed. The system begins near Orlando with the Kissimmee River, which discharges into the vast but shallow Lake Okeechobee...
against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald
The Miami Herald
The Miami Herald is a daily newspaper owned by The McClatchy Company headquartered on Biscayne Bay in the Omni district of Downtown Miami, Florida, United States...
, Douglas became a freelance writer, producing over a hundred short stories
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass
The Everglades: River of Grass
The Everglades: River of Grass is a non-fiction book written by Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 1947. Published the same year as the formal opening of Everglades National Park, the book was a call to attention about the degrading quality of life in the Everglades and continues to remain an influential...
(1947), which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp; its impact has been compared to that of Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson
Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist and conservationist whose writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement....
's influential book Silent Spring
Silent Spring
Silent Spring is a book written by Rachel Carson and published by Houghton Mifflin on 27 September 1962. The book is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement....
(1962). Her books, stories, and journalism career brought her influence in Miami, which she used to advance her causes.
Even as a young woman Douglas was outspoken and politically conscious of many issues that included women's suffrage
Women's suffrage
Women's suffrage or woman suffrage is the right of women to vote and to run for office. The expression is also used for the economic and political reform movement aimed at extending these rights to women and without any restrictions or qualifications such as property ownership, payment of tax, or...
and civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
. She was called upon to take a central role in the protection of the Everglades when she was 79 years old. For the remaining 29 years of her life she was "a relentless reporter and fearless crusader" for the natural preservation and restoration of the nature of South Florida. Her tireless efforts earned her several variations of the nickname "Grande Dame of the Everglades" as well as the hostility of agricultural and business interests looking to benefit from land development in Florida. Numerous awards were given to her, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom
Presidential Medal of Freedom
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is an award bestowed by the President of the United States and is—along with thecomparable Congressional Gold Medal bestowed by an act of U.S. Congress—the highest civilian award in the United States...
, and she was inducted into several halls of fame.
Douglas lived until age 108, working until nearly the end of her life for Everglades restoration. Upon her death, an obituary in The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
stated, "In the history of the American environmental movement, there have been few more remarkable figures than Marjory Stoneman Douglas."
Early life
Marjory Stoneman was born on April 7, 1890, in Minneapolis, MinnesotaMinneapolis, Minnesota
Minneapolis , nicknamed "City of Lakes" and the "Mill City," is the county seat of Hennepin County, the largest city in the U.S. state of Minnesota, and the 48th largest in the United States...
, the only child of Frank Bryant Stoneman (1857–1941) and Lillian Trefethen (1859–1912), a concert violinist. One of her earliest memories was her father reading to her The Song of Hiawatha
The Song of Hiawatha
The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem, in trochaic tetrameter, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, featuring an Indian hero and loosely based on legends and ethnography of the Ojibwe and other Native American peoples contained in Algic Researches and additional writings of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft...
, at which she burst into sobs upon hearing that the tree had to give its life in order to provide Hiawatha the wood for a canoe. She was an early and voracious reader. Her first book was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures...
, which she kept well into adulthood until "some fiend in human form must have borrowed it and not brought it back". She visited Florida when she was four years old, and her most vivid memory of the trip was picking an orange from a tree at the Tampa Bay Hotel. From there she and her parents embarked on a cruise from Tampa
Tâmpa
Tâmpa may refer to several villages in Romania:* Tâmpa, a village in Băcia Commune, Hunedoara County* Tâmpa, a village in Miercurea Nirajului, Mureş County* Tâmpa, a mountain in Braşov city...
to Havana
Havana
Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...
.
When she was six years old, Marjory's parents separated. Her father endured a series of failed entrepreneurial ventures and the instability caused her mother to move them abruptly to the Trefethen family house in Taunton, Massachusetts
Taunton, Massachusetts
Taunton is a city in Bristol County, Massachusetts, United States. It is the seat of Bristol County and the hub of the Greater Taunton Area. The city is located south of Boston, east of Providence, north of Fall River and west of Plymouth. The City of Taunton is situated on the Taunton River...
. She lived there with her mother, aunt, and grandparents who did not get along well and consistently spoke ill of her father, to her dismay. Her mother, whom Marjory characterized as "high strung", was committed to a mental sanitarium
Psychiatric hospital
Psychiatric hospitals, also known as mental hospitals, are hospitals specializing in the treatment of serious mental disorders. Psychiatric hospitals vary widely in their size and grading. Some hospitals may specialise only in short-term or outpatient therapy for low-risk patients...
in Providence
Providence, Rhode Island
Providence is the capital and most populous city of Rhode Island and was one of the first cities established in the United States. Located in Providence County, it is the third largest city in the New England region...
several times. Her parents' separation and the contentious life with her mother's family caused her to suffer from night terror
Night terror
A night terror, also known as a sleep terror, incubus attack, or pavor nocturnus, is a parasomnia disorder that predominantly affects children, causing feelings of terror or dread, typically occur in the first few hours of sleep during stage 3 or 4 NREM sleep...
s. She credited her tenuous upbringing with making her "a skeptic and a dissenter" for the rest of her life.
As a youth, Marjory found solace in reading, and eventually she began to write. At sixteen years old she contributed to the most popular children's publication of the day, St. Nicholas Magazine
St. Nicholas Magazine
St. Nicholas Magazine was a popular children's magazine, founded by Scribner's in 1873. The first editor was Mary Mapes Dodge, who continued her association with the magazine until her death in 1905. Dodge published work by the country's best writers, including Louisa May Alcott, Francis Hodgson...
—also the first publisher of 20th century writers F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
, Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson
Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist and conservationist whose writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement....
, and William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
—with a puzzle titled "Double Headings and Curtailings". In 1907, she was awarded a prize from the Boston Herald
Boston Herald
The Boston Herald is a daily newspaper that serves Boston, Massachusetts, United States, and its surrounding area. It was started in 1846 and is one of the oldest daily newspapers in the United States...
for a story titled "An Early Morning Paddle", about a boy who watches a sunrise from a canoe. However, as her mother's mental health deteriorated, Marjory took on more responsibilities, eventually managing some of the family finances and gaining a maturity imposed upon her by circumstance.
Education and marriage
Marjory left for college in 1908, despite having grave misgivings about her mother's mental state. Her aunt and grandmother shared her concerns, but recognized that she needed to leave in order to begin her own life. She was a good student without having to study too much. She attended Wellesley College, graduating with a BABachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in English in 1912. She found particular gifts in a class on elocution
Elocution
Elocution is the study of formal speaking in pronunciation, grammar, style, and tone.-History:In Western classical rhetoric, elocution was one of the five core disciplines of pronunciation, which was the art of delivering speeches. Orators were trained not only on proper diction, but on the proper...
, and joined the first suffrage club with six of her classmates. She was elected as "Class Orator" at Wellesley, but was unable to fulfill the office since she was already involved in other activities. During her senior year while visiting home, her mother showed her a lump on her breast. Marjory arranged the surgery to have it removed. After the graduation ceremony, her aunt informed her it had metastasized, and within months her mother was dead. The family left making the funeral arrangements up to Marjory.
After drifting with college friends through a few jobs for which she did not feel she was well-suited, Marjory Stoneman met Kenneth Douglas in 1914. She was so impressed with his manners and surprised at the attention he showed her that she married him within three months. He portrayed himself as a newspaper editor, and was 30 years her senior, but the marriage quickly failed when it became apparent he was a con artist. The true extent of his duplicity Marjory did not entirely reveal, despite her honesty in all other manners. Marjory may have unwittingly married Douglas while he was already married to another woman. While he spent six months in jail for passing a bad check
Fraud
In criminal law, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and also a civil law violation...
, she remained faithful to him. However, his scheme to scam her absent father out of money worked in Marjory's favor when it attracted Frank Stoneman's attention. Marjory's uncle persuaded her to move to Miami and for the marriage to end. In the fall of 1915, Marjory Stoneman Douglas left New England to be reunited with her father, whom she had not seen since her parents' separation when she was six years old.
The Miami Herald
Douglas arrived in South Florida when fewer than 5,000 people were recorded on the census in Miami, the streets were made of white dust, and it was "no more than a glorified railroad terminal". Her father, Frank Stoneman, was the first publisher of the paper that later became The Miami HeraldThe Miami Herald
The Miami Herald is a daily newspaper owned by The McClatchy Company headquartered on Biscayne Bay in the Omni district of Downtown Miami, Florida, United States...
. Stoneman passionately opposed the governor of Florida, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, and his attempts to drain the Everglades. He infuriated Broward so much that when Stoneman won an election for circuit judge
United States federal judge
In the United States, the title of federal judge usually means a judge appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate in accordance with Article II of the United States Constitution....
, Governor Broward refused to validate the election, so Stoneman was referred to as "Judge" for the rest of his life without performing the duties of one.
She joined the staff of the newspaper in 1915, originally as a society columnist writing about tea parties and society events, but news was so slow she later admitted to making up some of her stories: "Somebody would say, 'Who's that Mrs. T.Y. Washrag you've got in your column?' And I would say, 'Oh, you know, I don't think she's been here very long'". When her father went on vacation less than a year after her appearance in Miami, he left her the responsibility of the editorial
Editorial
An opinion piece is an article, published in a newspaper or magazine, that mainly reflects the author's opinion about the subject. Opinion pieces are featured in many periodicals.-Editorials:...
page. She developed a rivalry with an editor at The Miami Metropolis whose greater familiarity with the history of Miami gave her cause to make fun of Douglas in writing. Her father scolded her to check her facts better.
Douglas was given an assignment in 1916 to write a story on the first woman to join the US Naval Reserve from Miami. When the woman did not show up for the interview, Douglas found herself joining the Navy as a Yeoman (F)
Yeoman (F)
Yeoman was a rank in the U.S. Naval Reserve in World War I. The first Yeoman was Loretta Perfectus Walsh. At the time, the women were popularly referred to as "yeomanettes" or even "yeowomen", although the official designation was Yeoman ....
first class. It did not suit her; she disliked rising early and her superiors did not appreciate her correcting their grammar as a typist, so she requested a discharge and joined the American Red Cross
American Red Cross
The American Red Cross , also known as the American National Red Cross, is a volunteer-led, humanitarian organization that provides emergency assistance, disaster relief and education inside the United States. It is the designated U.S...
, where she was stationed in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. She witnessed the tumultuous celebrations on the Rue de Rivoli when the Armistice was signed, and she cared for war refugee
Refugee
A refugee is a person who outside her country of origin or habitual residence because she has suffered persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or because she is a member of a persecuted 'social group'. Such a person may be referred to as an 'asylum seeker' until...
s; seeing them displaced and in a state of shock, she wrote, "helped me understand the plight of refugees in Miami sixty years later".
Following the war, Douglas took on duties as assistant editor at The Miami Herald. She gained some renown through her daily column entitled "The Galley", and had enough influence through the newspaper that she became somewhat of a local celebrity. She amassed a devoted readership and attempted to begin each column with a poem. "The Galley" was topical and went in any direction Douglas chose. She promoted responsible urban planning when Miami saw a population boom
Florida land boom of the 1920s
The Florida land boom of the 1920s was Florida's first real estate bubble, which burst in 1925, leaving behind entire new cities and the remains of failed development projects such as Aladdin City in south Miami-Dade County and Isola di Lolando in north Biscayne Bay...
of 100,000 people in a decade. She wrote supporting women's suffrage, civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
, and better sanitation while opposing Prohibition
Prohibition in the United States
Prohibition in the United States was a national ban on the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol, in place from 1920 to 1933. The ban was mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and the Volstead Act set down the rules for enforcing the ban, as well as defining which...
and foreign trade tariffs.
Some of the stories she wrote spoke of the wealth of the region being in its "inevitable development", and she supplemented her income with $100 a week from writing copy advertisements that praised the development of South Florida, something she would reconsider later in her life. She wrote a ballad
Ballad
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...
in the 1920s lamenting the death of a 22-year-old vagrant
Vagrancy (people)
A vagrant is a person in poverty, who wanders from place to place without a home or regular employment or income.-Definition:A vagrant is "a person without a settled home or regular work who wanders from place to place and lives by begging;" vagrancy is the condition of such persons.-History:In...
who was beaten to death in a labor camp
Labor camp
A labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons...
, titled "Martin Tabert of North Dakota
North Dakota
North Dakota is a state located in the Midwestern region of the United States of America, along the Canadian border. The state is bordered by Canada to the north, Minnesota to the east, South Dakota to the south and Montana to the west. North Dakota is the 19th-largest state by area in the U.S....
is Walking Florida Now". It was printed in The Miami Herald, and read aloud during a session of the Florida Legislature
Florida Legislature
The Florida State Legislature is the term often used to refer to the two houses that act as the state legislature of the U.S. state of Florida. The Florida Constitution states that "The legislative power of the state shall be vested in a legislature of the State of Florida," composed of a Senate...
, which passed a law banning convict leasing
Convict lease
Convict leasing was a system of penal labor practiced in the Southern United States, beginning with the emancipation of slaves at the end of the American Civil War in 1865, peaking around 1880, and ending in the last state, Alabama, in 1928....
, in large part due to her writing. "I think that's the single most important thing I was ever able to accomplish as a result of something I've written", she wrote in her autobiography.
Freelance writer
After quitting the newspaper in 1923, Douglas worked as a freelance writer. From 1920 to 1990, Douglas published 109 fiction articles and stories. Her first story was sold to the pulp fictionPulp magazine
Pulp magazines , also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long...
magazine Black Mask for $600 ($ in 2010). Forty of her stories were published in The Saturday Evening Post
The Saturday Evening Post
The Saturday Evening Post is a bimonthly American magazine. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1969, and quarterly and then bimonthly from 1971.-History:...
; one titled "Story of a Homely Woman" was reprinted in 1937 in the Post's best short stories compilation. Recurring motifs in her fiction were their settings in South Florida, the Caribbean, or Europe during World War I. Her protagonists were often independent, quirky women or youthful underdogs who encountered social or natural injustices. The people and animals of the Everglades served as subjects for some of her earliest writings. "Plumes", originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1930, was based on the murder of Guy Bradley
Guy Bradley
Guy Morrell Bradley was an American game warden and deputy sheriff for Monroe County, Florida. Born in Chicago, Illinois, he relocated to Florida with his family when he was young...
, an Audubon Society game warden, by poacher
Poaching
Poaching is the illegal taking of wild plants or animals contrary to local and international conservation and wildlife management laws. Violations of hunting laws and regulations are normally punishable by law and, collectively, such violations are known as poaching.It may be illegal and in...
s. "Wings" was a nonfiction story, also first appearing in the Post in 1931, that addressed the slaughter of Everglades wading birds for their feathers. Her story "Peculiar Treasure of a King" was a second-place finalist in the O. Henry Award
O. Henry Award
The O. Henry Award is the only yearly award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American master of the form, O. Henry....
competition in 1928.
During the 1930s, Douglas was commissioned to write a pamphlet
Pamphlet
A pamphlet is an unbound booklet . It may consist of a single sheet of paper that is printed on both sides and folded in half, in thirds, or in fourths , or it may consist of a few pages that are folded in half and saddle stapled at the crease to make a simple book...
supporting a botanical garden
Botanical garden
A botanical garden The terms botanic and botanical, and garden or gardens are used more-or-less interchangeably, although the word botanic is generally reserved for the earlier, more traditional gardens. is a well-tended area displaying a wide range of plants labelled with their botanical names...
called "An argument for the establishment of a tropical botanical garden in South Florida." Its success caused her to be in demand at garden clubs where she delivered speeches throughout the area, then to serve on the board to support the Fairchild Garden
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden is a botanic garden, with extensive collections of rare tropical plants including palms, cycads, flowering trees and vines. It is located in metropolitan Miami, just south of Coral Gables, Florida, United States, surrounded at the south and west by Matheson...
. She called the garden "one of the greatest achievements for the entire area".
Douglas became involved with the Miami Theater, and wrote some one-act plays that were fashionable in the 1930s. One, entitled "The Gallows Gate", was about an argument between a mother and father regarding the character of their son who is sentenced to hang. She got the idea from her father, who had witnessed hangings when he lived in the West and was unnerved by the creaking sound of the rope bearing the weight of the hanging body. The play won a state competition, and eventually $500 in a national competition after it was written into three acts.
Douglas served as the book review editor of The Miami Herald from 1942 to 1949, and as editor for the University of Miami
University of Miami
The University of Miami is a private, non-sectarian university founded in 1925 with its main campus in Coral Gables, Florida, a medical campus in Miami city proper at Civic Center, and an oceanographic research facility on Virginia Key., the university currently enrolls 15,629 students in 12...
Press from 1960 to 1963. She released her first novel, entitled Road to the Sun, in 1952. She wrote four novels, and several non-fiction books on regional topics including Florida birdwatching
Birdwatching
Birdwatching or birding is the observation of birds as a recreational activity. It can be done with the naked eye, through a visual enhancement device like binoculars and telescopes, or by listening for bird sounds. Birding often involves a significant auditory component, as many bird species are...
and David Fairchild
David Fairchild
David Grandison Fairchild was an American botanist and plant explorer. Fairchild was responsible for the introduction of more than 200,000 exotic plants and varieties of established crops into the United States, including soybeans, pistachios, mangos, nectarines, dates, bamboos, and flowering...
, the entomologist
Entomology
Entomology is the scientific study of insects, a branch of arthropodology...
turned biologist
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
who imagined a botanical park in Miami. Her autobiography
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
entitled Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Voice of the River was written with John Rothchild in 1987. She had been working on a book about W. H. Hudson for years, traveling to Argentina and England several times. It was incomplete when she died in 1998.
The Everglades: River of Grass
Early in the 1940s Douglas was approached by a publisher to contribute to the Rivers of America SeriesRivers of America Series
The Rivers of America Series is a landmark series of books on American rivers, for the most part written by literary figures rather than historians. The series spanned three publishers and thirty-seven years.- History :...
by writing about the Miami River
Miami River (Florida)
The Miami River is a river in the United States state of Florida that drains out of the Everglades and runs through the Downtown and the city of Miami. The long river flows from the terminus of the Miami Canal at Miami International Airport to Biscayne Bay...
. Unimpressed with it, she called the Miami River about "an inch long", but in researching it became more interested in the Everglades and persuaded the publisher instead to allow her to write about them. She spent five years researching what little scientific knowledge was recorded about the ecology and history of the Everglades and South Florida. Douglas spent time with geologist Garald Parker
Garald G. Parker
Garald G. "Jerry" Parker, Sr. was a hydrologist and is known as the "Father of Florida groundwater hydrology." Parker also named the principal artesian aquifer the Floridan Aquifer.- Education :...
, who discovered that all of South Florida's fresh water source was the Biscayne Aquifer
Biscayne Aquifer
The Biscayne Aquifer, named after Biscayne Bay, is a surficial aquifer. It is a shallow layer of highly permeable limestone under a portion of South Florida...
, and it was filled by the Everglades. Parker confirmed the name of the book that has since become the nickname for the Everglades when Douglas, trying to capture the essence of the Everglades, asked if she could safely call the fresh water flowing from Lake Okeechobee a river of grass.
The Everglades: River of Grass
The Everglades: River of Grass
The Everglades: River of Grass is a non-fiction book written by Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 1947. Published the same year as the formal opening of Everglades National Park, the book was a call to attention about the degrading quality of life in the Everglades and continues to remain an influential...
was published in 1947 and sold out of its first printing a month after being released. The first line of the book, "There are no other Everglades in the world", has been called the "most famous passage ever written about the Everglades", and the statement welcomes visitors to the Everglades National Park
Everglades National Park
Everglades National Park is a national park in the U.S. state of Florida that protects the southern 25 percent of the original Everglades. It is the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States, and is visited on average by one million people each year. It is the third-largest...
website. Douglas characterized the Everglades as ecosystems surrounding a river worthy of protecting, that was inescapably connected to the people and cultures of South Florida. She outlined its imminent disappearance in the last chapter titled "The Eleventh Hour":
Cattlemen's grass fires roared uncontrolled. Cane-field fires spread crackling and hissing in the saw grass in vast waves and pillars and billowing mountains of heavy, cream-colored, purple-shadowed smoke. Training planes flying over the Glades dropped bombs or cigarette butts, and the fires exploded in the hearts of the drying hammocks and raced on before every wind leaving only blackness ... There was no water in the canals with which to fight [the fires] ... The sweet water the rock had held was gone or had shrunk far down into its strange holes and cleavages.
The Everglades: River of Grass galvanized people to protect the Everglades and is compared to Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson
Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist and conservationist whose writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement....
's 1962 exposé of the harmful effects of DDT
DDT
DDT is one of the most well-known synthetic insecticides. It is a chemical with a long, unique, and controversial history....
, Silent Spring
Silent Spring
Silent Spring is a book written by Rachel Carson and published by Houghton Mifflin on 27 September 1962. The book is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement....
, as both books are "groundbreaking calls to action that made citizens and politicians take notice". Its impact is still relevant as it is claimed to be a major reason Florida receives so many tourists, and "remains the definitive reference on the plight of the Florida Everglades". It has gone through numerous editions, selling 500,000 copies since its original publication. The Christian Science Monitor wrote of it in 1997, "Today her book is not only a classic of environmental literature, it also reads like a blueprint for what conservationists are hailing as the most extensive environmental restoration project ever undertaken anywhere in the world". The downside to the book's impact, according to one writer addressing restoration of the Everglades, is that her metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
is so prevailingly dominant that it is inaccurate in describing the complex web of ecosystems within the Everglades: "River of Grass" describes one. David McCally wrote that despite Douglas' "appreciation of the complexity of the environmental system" she described, popular conception of the Everglades shared by people who have not read the book overshadows her detailed explanations.
Activism
Women's suffrage was an early interest of Douglas', and although she tended to shy away from polemics in her early work at The Miami Herald, on her third day as a society columnist, she chose suffrage and began to focus on writing about women in leadership positions. In 1917 she traveled with Mary Baird Bryan, William Jennings BryanWilliam Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan was an American politician in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. He was a dominant force in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, standing three times as its candidate for President of the United States...
's wife, and two other women to Tallahassee
Tallahassee, Florida
Tallahassee is the capital of the U.S. state of Florida. It is the county seat and only incorporated municipality in Leon County, and is the 128th largest city in the United States. Tallahassee became the capital of Florida, then the Florida Territory, in 1824. In 2010, the population recorded by...
to speak in support of women's right to vote. Douglas was not impressed with the reception the group got from the Florida Legislature. She wrote about her experience later: "All four of us spoke to a joint committee wearing our best hats. Talking to them was like talking to graven images. They never paid attention to us at all." Douglas was able to vote for the first time after she returned from Europe in 1920.
Using her influence at The Miami Herald, Douglas wrote columns about poverty: "You can have the most beautiful city in the world as appearance goes, the streets may be clean and shining, the avenues broad and tree lined, the public buildings dignified, adequate and well kept ... but if you have a weak or inadequate health department, or a public opinion lax on the subject, all the splendors of your city will have not value." In 1948 Douglas served on the Coconut Grove Slum Clearance Committee, with a friend of hers named Elizabeth Virrick, who was horrified to learn that no running water or sewer
Sanitary sewer
A sanitary sewer is a separate underground carriage system specifically for transporting sewage from houses and commercial buildings to treatment or disposal. Sanitary sewers serving industrial areas also carry industrial wastewater...
s were connected to the racially segregated
Racial segregation
Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...
part of Coconut Grove. They helped pass a law requiring all homes in Miami to have toilets and bathtubs. In the two years it took them to get the referendum
Referendum
A referendum is a direct vote in which an entire electorate is asked to either accept or reject a particular proposal. This may result in the adoption of a new constitution, a constitutional amendment, a law, the recall of an elected official or simply a specific government policy. It is a form of...
passed, they worked to set up a loan operation for the black residents of Coconut Grove, who borrowed the money interest-free to pay for the plumbing work. Douglas noted that all of the money loaned was repaid.
Everglades work
Douglas became involved in the Everglades in the 1920s when she joined the board of the Everglades Tropical National Park Committee, a group led by Ernest F. CoeErnest F. Coe
Ernest "Tom" Coe was an American landscape designer who envisioned a national park dedicated to the preservation of the Everglades, culminating in the establishment of Everglades National Park. Coe was born and spent most of his life in Connecticut as a professional gardener, moving to Miami at...
and dedicated to the idea of making a national park in the Everglades. By the 1960s, the Everglades were in imminent danger of disappearing forever due to gross mismanagement in the name of progress, and real estate and agricultural development. Encouraged to get involved by the leaders of environmental groups, in 1969—at the age of 79—Douglas founded Friends of the Everglades
Friends of the Everglades
Friends of the Everglades is a conservationist and activist organization in the United States whose mission is to "preserve, protect, and restore the only Everglades in the world." The book Biosphere 2000: Protecting Our Global Environment refers to Friends of the Everglades as an organization that...
to protest the construction of a jetport in the Big Cypress
Environmental Impact of the Big Cypress Swamp Jetport
The "Environmental Impact of the Big Cypress Swamp Jetport", unofficially known as the "Leopold Report" or the "Leopold-Marshall Report", was a report authored by hydrologist Luna Leopold of the United States Geological Service for the Department of the Interior and officially released on September...
portion of the Everglades. She justified her involvement saying, "It is a woman's business to be interested in the environment. It's an extended form of housekeeping." She toured the state giving "hundreds of ringing denunciations" of the airport project, and increased membership of Friends of the Everglades to 3,000 within three years. She ran the public information operation full time from her home and encountered hostility from the jetport's developers and backers, who called her a "damn butterfly chaser". President Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
, however, scrapped funding for the project due to the efforts of many Everglades watchdog groups.
Douglas continued her activism and focused her efforts on restoring the Everglades
Restoration of the Everglades
The restoration of the Everglades is an ongoing effort to remedy damage inflicted on the environment of southern Florida during the 20th century. It is the most expensive and comprehensive environmental repair attempt in history. The degradation of the Everglades became an issue in the United...
after declaring that "Conservation is now a dead word...You can't conserve what you haven't got." Her criticism was directed at two entities she considered were doing the most damage to the Everglades. A coalition of sugarcane
Sugarcane
Sugarcane refers to any of six to 37 species of tall perennial grasses of the genus Saccharum . Native to the warm temperate to tropical regions of South Asia, they have stout, jointed, fibrous stalks that are rich in sugar, and measure two to six metres tall...
growers, named Big Sugar, she accused of polluting Lake Okeechobee
Lake Okeechobee
Lake Okeechobee , locally referred to as The Lake or The Big O, is the largest freshwater lake in the state of Florida. It is the seventh largest freshwater lake in the United States and the second largest freshwater lake contained entirely within the lower 48 states...
by pumping water tainted with chemicals, human waste, and garbage back into the lake, which served as the fresh water source for the Miami metropolitan area
South Florida metropolitan area
The South Florida metropolitan area, also known as the Miami metropolitan area, and designated the Miami–Fort Lauderdale–Pompano Beach, FL Metropolitan Statistical Area by the U.S...
. She compared Florida sugarcane agriculture to sugarcane grown in the West Indies, that she claimed was more environmentally sound, had a longer harvest cycle less harmful to soil nutrients, and was less expensive for consumers due to the higher sugar content.
Besides Big Sugar, Douglas spoke about the damage the Army Corps of Engineers was doing to the Everglades by diverting the natural flow of water. The Corps was responsible for constructing more than 1400 miles (2,253.1 km) of canals to divert water away from the Everglades after 1947. When the Central & South Florida Project (C&SF), run by former members of the Corps of Engineers, was proposed to assist the Everglades, Douglas initially gave it her approval, as it promised to deliver much-needed water to the shrinking Everglades. But in application, the project instead diverted more water away from the Everglades, changed water schedules to meet sugarcane farmers' irrigation needs, and flat-out refused to release water to Everglades National Park, until much of the land was unrecognizable. "What a liar I turned out to be!" remarked Douglas, then suggested the motivation behind all the digging and diversion in saying, "Their mommies obviously never let them play with mud pies, so now they take it out on us by playing with cement". Douglas was giving a speech addressing the harmful practices of the Army Corps of Engineers when the colonel
Colonel
Colonel , abbreviated Col or COL, is a military rank of a senior commissioned officer. It or a corresponding rank exists in most armies and in many air forces; the naval equivalent rank is generally "Captain". It is also used in some police forces and other paramilitary rank structures...
in attendance dropped his pen on the floor. As he was stooping to pick it up, Douglas stopped her speech and said to him, "Colonel! You can crawl under that table and hide, but you can't get away from me!"
In 1973, Douglas attended a meeting addressing conservation of the Everglades in Everglades City
Everglades, Florida
Everglades is a city in Collier County, Florida, United States. The population was 479 at the 2000 census. As of 2004, the population recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau is 513...
, and was observed by John Rothchild:
Mrs. Douglas was half the size of her fellow speakers and she wore huge dark glasses, which along with the huge floppy hat made her look like Scarlett O'HaraScarlett O'HaraScarlett O' Hara is the protagonist in Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind and in the later film of the same name...
as played by Igor StravinskyIgor StravinskyIgor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
. When she spoke, everybody stopped slapping mosquitoes and more or less came to order. She reminded us all of our responsibility to nature and I don't remember what else. Her voice had the sobering effect of a one-room schoolmarm's. The tone itself seemed to tame the rowdiest of the local stone crabbers, plus the developers, and the lawyers on both sides. I wonder if it didn't also intimidate the mosquitoes ... The request for a Corps of Engineers permit was eventually turned down. This was no surprise to those of us who'd heard her speak.
Douglas was not well-received by some audiences. She opposed the drainage of a suburb in Dade County
Miami-Dade County, Florida
Miami-Dade County is a county located in the southeastern part of the state of Florida. As of 2010 U.S. Census, the county had a population of 2,496,435, making it the most populous county in Florida and the eighth-most populous county in the United States...
named East Everglades. After the county approved building permits in the Everglades, the land flooded as it had for centuries. When homeowners demanded the Army Corps of Engineers drain their neighborhoods, she was the only opposing voice. At the hearing in 1983, she was booed, jeered, and shouted at by the audience of residents. "Can't you boo any louder than that?" she chided, eventually making them laugh. "Look. I'm an old lady. I've been here since eight o'clock. It's now eleven. I've got all night, and I'm used to the heat", she told them. Later, she wrote, "They're all good souls—they just shouldn't be out there." Dade County commissioners eventually decided not to drain.
Florida Governor Lawton Chiles
Lawton Chiles
Lawton Mainor Chiles, Jr. was an American politician from the US state of Florida. In a career spanning four decades, Chiles, a Democrat who never lost an election, served in the Florida House of Representatives , the Florida State Senate , the United States Senate , and as the 41st Governor of...
explained her impact, saying, "Marjory was the first voice to really wake a lot of us up to what we were doing to our quality of life. She was not just a pioneer of the environmental movement, she was a prophet, calling out to us to save the environment for our children and our grandchildren."
Other causes
Douglas also served as a charter member of the first American Civil Liberties UnionAmerican Civil Liberties Union
The American Civil Liberties Union is a U.S. non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." It works through litigation, legislation, and...
chapter organized in the South in the 1950s. She lent her support to the Equal Rights Amendment
Equal Rights Amendment
The Equal Rights Amendment was a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution. The ERA was originally written by Alice Paul and, in 1923, it was introduced in the Congress for the first time...
, speaking to the legislature in Tallahassee urging them to ratify it. In the 1980s Douglas lent her support to the Florida Rural Legal Services, a group that worked to protect migrant farm workers who were centered around Belle Glade
Belle Glade, Florida
Belle Glade is a city in Palm Beach County, Florida on the southeastern shore of Lake Okeechobee. The population was 14,906 at the 2000 census. According to the U.S Census estimates of 2007, the city had a population of 16,739....
, and who were primarily employed by the sugarcane industry. She wrote to Governor Bob Graham
Bob Graham
Daniel Robert "Bob" Graham is an American politician. He was the 38th Governor of Florida from 1979 to 1987 and a United States Senator from that state from 1987 to 2005...
in 1985 to encourage him to assess the conditions the migrant workers endured. The same year, Douglas approached the Dade County School Board and insisted that the Biscayne Nature Center, which had been housed in hot dog stands, needed a building of its own. The center received a portable building until 1991 when the Florida Department of Education endowed $1.8 million for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center in Crandon Park
Crandon Park
Crandon Park is a urban park in metropolitan Miami, occupying the northern part of Key Biscayne. It is connected to mainland Miami via the Rickenbacker Causeway.-History:...
.
Religious views
Although Douglas grew up in an Episcopalian household, she described herself as agnosticAgnosticism
Agnosticism is the view that the truth value of certain claims—especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, but also other religious and metaphysical claims—is unknown or unknowable....
throughout her life, and forbade any religious ceremony at her memorial. Douglas tied her agnosticism to her unanswered prayers when her mother was dying. However, she credited the motivation for her support of women's suffrage
Women's suffrage
Women's suffrage or woman suffrage is the right of women to vote and to run for office. The expression is also used for the economic and political reform movement aimed at extending these rights to women and without any restrictions or qualifications such as property ownership, payment of tax, or...
to her Quaker
Religious Society of Friends
The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...
paternal grandparents whose dedication to the abolition of slavery she admired, and proudly claimed Levi Coffin
Levi Coffin
Levi Coffin was an American Quaker, abolitionist, and businessman. Coffin was deeply involved in the Underground Railroad in Indiana and Ohio and his home is often called "Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad"...
, an organizer of the Underground Railroad
Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was an informal network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th-century black slaves in the United States to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause. The term is also applied to the abolitionists,...
, was her great-great-uncle. She wrote that his wife was a friend of Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a depiction of life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom...
, and had provided Stowe with the story of Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman....
fleeing slavery because Douglas' great-great-aunt took care of Eliza and her infant after their escape. Frank Stoneman grew up in a Quaker colony, and Douglas maintained he kept touches of his upbringing throughout his life, even after converting to Episcopalianism. Writer Jack Davis and neighbor Helen Muir suggest this Quaker influence was behind Douglas' use of "Friends" in naming the organizations Friends of the Everglades and Friends of the University of Miami Library.
Mental health
As a child, Douglas was very close with her mother after her parents' separation. She witnessed her mother's emotional unraveling that caused her to be institutionalized, and even long after her mother returned to live with her, she exhibited bizarre, child-like behaviors. Following her mother's death, her relocation to Miami, and her displeasure in working as the assistant editor at The Miami Herald, in the 1920s she suffered the first of three nervous breakdownNervous breakdown
Mental breakdown is a non-medical term used to describe an acute, time-limited phase of a specific disorder that presents primarily with features of depression or anxiety.-Definition:...
s. Douglas suggested she had had "blank periods" before, starting during her marriage, but they were brief. She connected these lapses to her mother's insanity. She eventually quit the newspaper, but after her father's death in 1941 she suffered a third and final breakdown, when her neighbors found her roaming the neighborhood one night screaming. She admitted she had a "father complex
Father complex
Father complex in psychology is a complex - a group of unconscious associations, or a strong unconscious impulses - which specifically pertains to the image or archetype of the father...
", explaining it by saying, "(h)aving been brought up without him and then coming back and finding him so sympathetic had a powerful effect".
Personal habits
Regardless of her dedication to the preservation of the Everglades, Douglas admitted the time she spent actually there was sporadic, driving there for occasional picnics. "To be a friend of the Everglades is not necessarily to spend time wandering around out there ... It's too buggy, too wet, too generally inhospitable", she wrote. Instead, she understood that the health of the environment indicated the general well-being of humanity.Despite Douglas' demure appearance—she stood at 5 in 2 in (1.57 m) and weighed 100 pounds (45.4 kg), and was always immaculately dressed in pearls, a floppy straw hat and gloves—she had an uncanny ability to get her point across. She was known for speaking in perfect, precise paragraphs, and was respected for her dedication and knowledge of her subjects; even her critics admitted her authority on the Everglades. Jeff Klinkenberg, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times
St. Petersburg Times
The St. Petersburg Times is a United States newspaper. It is one of two major publications serving the Tampa Bay Area, the other being The Tampa Tribune, which the Times tops in both circulation and readership. Based in St...
who interviewed and wrote several stories about Douglas, wrote of her, "She had a tongue like a switchblade
Switchblade
A switchblade is a type of knife with a folding or sliding blade contained in the handle which is opened automatically by a spring when a button, lever, or switch on the handle or bolster is activated A switchblade (also known as an automatic knife, pushbutton knife, switch, Sprenger, Springer,...
and the moral authority to embarrass bureaucrats and politicians and make things happen." Douglas was known for haughtily dismissing reporters who had not read her books and asked uninformed questions.
She enjoyed drinking Scotch
Scotch whisky
Scotch whisky is whisky made in Scotland.Scotch whisky is divided into five distinct categories: Single Malt Scotch Whisky, Single Grain Scotch Whisky, Blended Malt Scotch Whisky , Blended Grain Scotch Whisky, and Blended Scotch Whisky.All Scotch whisky must be aged in oak barrels for at least three...
and sherry
Sherry
Sherry is a fortified wine made from white grapes that are grown near the town of Jerez , Spain. In Spanish, it is called vino de Jerez....
; as one friend remembered her, "She would come up and have a sherry, and then I would walk her home, and then she'd walk me back, and we would have another sherry. What fun she was." Douglas never learned to drive and never owned a car. Her house also had no air conditioning
Air conditioning
An air conditioner is a home appliance, system, or mechanism designed to dehumidify and extract heat from an area. The cooling is done using a simple refrigeration cycle...
, electric stove, or dishwasher.
She was attached to several men after her divorce, counting one of them as the reason she enlisted in the Red Cross, as he had already gone to France as a soldier. However, she said she did not believe in extramarital sex
Extramarital sex
Extramarital sex occurs when a married person engages in sexual activity with someone other than his or her marriage partner.Where extramarital sexual relations breach a sexual norm it may also be referred to as adultery, fornication, philandery, or infidelity...
and would not have dishonored her father by being promiscuous. She told Klinkenberg in 1992, frankly, that she had not had sex since her divorce, saying "I wasn't a wild woman". However, she was fond of saying she used the emotion and energy instead on her work. "People don't seem to realize that the energy that goes into sex, all the emotion that surrounds it, can be well employed in other ways", she wrote in her autobiography.
Awards, death, and legacy
Honors
Douglas began accruing honors since her early days writing for The Miami Herald. In the 1980s, however, the awards became more prestigious, and her reactions to them mixed. The Florida Department of Natural Resources (now the Florida Department of Environmental ProtectionFlorida Department of Environmental Protection
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection is the Florida government agency charged with environmental protection.-History:...
) named its headquarters in Tallahassee after her in 1980, which she considered a dubious honor. She told a friend she would have rather seen the Everglades restored than her name on a building. During her polite acceptance speech, she railed against Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
and the then-Secretary of the Interior James Watt
James G. Watt
James Gaius Watt served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior for President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1983.-Early life and career:...
for their lackluster approach to environmental conservation. The National Parks Conservation Association
National Parks Conservation Association
The National Parks Conservation Association is the only independent, membership organization devoted exclusively to advocacy on behalf of the National Parks System...
established the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award in 1986, that "honor(s) individuals who often must go to great lengths to advocate and fight for the protection of the National Park System". Despite blindness and diminished hearing, Douglas continued to be active into her second century, and was honored with a visit from Queen Elizabeth II, to whom Douglas gave a signed copy of The Everglades: River of Grass in 1991. Instead of gifts and celebrations, Douglas asked that trees be planted on her birthday, resulting in over 100,000 planted trees across the state and a bald cypress on the lawn of the governor's mansion. The South Florida Water Management District
South Florida Water Management District
The South Florida Water Management District is a regional governmental agency supervised by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection , and is responsible for water quality, flood control, water supply and restoration of the environment in 16 counties in Central and Southern Florida...
began removing exotic plants that had taken hold in the Everglades when Douglas turned 102.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom
Presidential Medal of Freedom
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is an award bestowed by the President of the United States and is—along with thecomparable Congressional Gold Medal bestowed by an act of U.S. Congress—the highest civilian award in the United States...
, the highest honor given to a civilian. The citation for the medal read, "Marjory Stoneman Douglas personifies passionate commitment. Her crusade to preserve and restore the Everglades has enhanced our Nation's respect for our precious environment, reminding all of us of nature's delicate balance. Grateful Americans honor the 'Grandmother of the Glades' by following her splendid example in safeguarding America's beauty and splendor for generations to come." Douglas donated her medal to Wellesley College. Most of the others she received she stored on the floor of her home.
Douglas was inducted into the National Wildlife Federation
National Wildlife Federation
The National Wildlife Federation is the United States' largest private, nonprofit conservation education and advocacy organization, with over four million members and supporters, and 48 state and territorial affiliated organizations...
Hall of Fame in 1999, and the National Women's Hall of Fame
National Women's Hall of Fame
The National Women's Hall of Fame is an American institution. It was created in 1969 by a group of people in Seneca Falls, New York, the location of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention...
in 2000. John Rothchild declared her a feminist
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
before the word existed, but not entirely. Upon hearing that she was to be inducted, she questioned, "Why should they have a Women's Hall of Fame, as I heard they wanted to put me in the other day? Why not a Citizen's Hall of Fame?" Douglas was included in a tribute to pioneering women when television character Lisa Simpson
Lisa Simpson
Lisa Marie Simpson is a fictional main character in the animated television series The Simpsons. She is the middle child of the Simpson family. Voiced by Yeardley Smith, Lisa first appeared on television in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" on April 19, 1987. Cartoonist Matt Groening...
made a papier-mâché bust of her with Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist.Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades before women had gained access to art training in America’s colleges and universities, and before any of its women artists...
and Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony
Susan Brownell Anthony was a prominent American civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the 19th century women's rights movement to introduce women's suffrage into the United States. She was co-founder of the first Women's Temperance Movement with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as President...
in an early episode
Bart vs. Thanksgiving
"Bart vs. Thanksgiving" is the seventh episode of The Simpsons second season. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on November 22, 1990. In the episode, Lisa makes a table centerpiece for the Thanksgiving dinner, which Bart destroys. After he is sent to his room by his...
of The Simpsons
The Simpsons
The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its family of the same name, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie...
.
Some of Douglas' stories were collected by University of Florida
University of Florida
The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...
professor Kevin McCarthy in two edited collections: Nine Florida Stories in 1990 and A River In Flood in 1998. McCarthy wrote that he collected Douglas' short stories because most people in the 1990s were well aware of her fame as an environmentalist, but many did not know about her career as a freelance writer. "Probably no other person has been as important to the environmental well-being of Florida than this little lady from Coconut Grove", McCarthy wrote in the introduction of A River in Flood.
Remembrances
Marjory Stoneman Douglas died at the age of 108 on May 14, 1998. John Rothchild, who helped write her autobiography, said that her death was the only thing that could "shut her up" but added, "(t)he silence is terrible". Carl HiaasenCarl Hiaasen
Carl Hiaasen is an American journalist, columnist and novelist.- Early years :Born in 1953 and raised in Plantation, Florida, of Norwegian heritage, Hiaasen was the first of four children and the son of a lawyer, Kermit Odel, and teacher, Patricia...
eulogized her in The Miami Herald, writing that The Everglades: River of Grass was "monumental", and praised her passion and her resolve; even when politicians finally found value in the Everglades and visited her for a photo opportunity, she still provoked them to do more and do it faster.
The National Wildlife Federation described her as "a passionate, articulate, and tireless voice for the environment". Chairman of the Florida Audubon Society Ed Davison remembered her, saying, "She kept a clear vision of the way things ought to be, and she didn't give a lot of credibility to excuses about why they're not like that. She would give these wonderful, curmudgeonly speeches to which there was no response. You can't holler back to grandmotherly scolding. All you can do is shuffle your feet and say, 'Yes, Ma'am.'" She was aware of it; she was reported saying, "People can't be rude to me, this poor little old woman. But I can be rude to them, poor darlings, and nobody can stop me." Her ashes were scattered over the 1300000 acres (5,260.9 km²) of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness Area in Everglades National Park
Everglades National Park
Everglades National Park is a national park in the U.S. state of Florida that protects the southern 25 percent of the original Everglades. It is the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States, and is visited on average by one million people each year. It is the third-largest...
.
In 2000, a Naples, Florida
Naples, Florida
Naples is a city in Collier County, Florida, United States. As of July 1, 2007, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated the city's population at 21,653. Naples is a principal city of the Naples–Marco Island Metropolitan Statistical Area, which had an estimated total population of 315,839 on July 1, 2007...
-based composer named Steve Heitzeg wrote a 15-minute orchestra piece to be performed by the Naples Philharmonic entitled Voice of the Everglades (Epitaph for Marjory Stoneman Douglas). Heitzeg explained his motivation for the piece, saying, "She was outspoken, she was direct, she had the energy and belief to make the world a better place." Two South Florida public schools are named in her honor: Broward County Public Schools
Broward County Public Schools
Broward County Public Schools, a public school district serving Broward County, Florida, is the nation's sixth largest public school system and the largest fully accredited district in the nation, with over 260,000 students in more than 260 schools and education centers...
' Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is located in Parkland, Florida. It is a part of the Broward County Public School district, and it is the only public high school in Parkland....
and Miami-Dade County Public Schools
Miami-Dade County Public Schools
Miami-Dade County Public Schools is a public school district serving Miami-Dade County, Florida. Founded in 1885, it is the largest school district in Florida and the Southeastern United States, and the fourth largest in the United States, with a student enrollment of 380,006 as of July 5, 2010...
' Marjory Stoneman Douglas Elementary School.
Douglas home
Douglas' cottage, located in Coconut Grove at 3744–3754 Stewart Avenue, was built in 1924. She wrote all of her major books and stories in the cottage, and the City of Miami designated it an historic site in 1995, not only for its famous owner, but for its unique Masonry Vernacular architectureVernacular architecture
Vernacular architecture is a term used to categorize methods of construction which use locally available resources and traditions to address local needs and circumstances. Vernacular architecture tends to evolve over time to reflect the environmental, cultural and historical context in which it...
. After Douglas' death, Friends of the Everglades proposed making the house part of an education center about Douglas and her life, but neighbors protested, citing issues with parking, traffic, and an influx of visitors to the quiet neighborhood. The house, which had an exterior floodwater line from the 1926 Miami Hurricane
1926 Miami Hurricane
The 1926 Miami hurricane was a Category 4 hurricane that devastated Miami in September 1926. The storm also caused significant damage in the Florida Panhandle, the U.S. state of Alabama, and the Bahamas...
and some damage from an infestation of bees, had fallen further into disrepair. For a while, the idea of moving the house to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables
Coral Gables, Florida
Coral Gables is a city in Miami-Dade County, Florida, southwest of Downtown Miami, in the United States. The city is home to the University of Miami....
, which Douglas helped to develop and where there is a life size bronze statue to commemorate her efforts, was considered. The State of Florida owns Douglas' house and in April 2007 placed it in the care of the Florida Park Service, a division of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection
Florida Department of Environmental Protection
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection is the Florida government agency charged with environmental protection.-History:...
. Restoration of the floors and counters took place in the following months. Water service was reconnected to the house and the electrical system was updated for safety purposes. All work was approved by the Department of Historic Resources. A park ranger was placed as a resident in the Douglas house to help maintain the structure and property.
Books
- The Everglades: River of GrassThe Everglades: River of GrassThe Everglades: River of Grass is a non-fiction book written by Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 1947. Published the same year as the formal opening of Everglades National Park, the book was a call to attention about the degrading quality of life in the Everglades and continues to remain an influential...
. Rinehart, 1947. - Road to the Sun. Rinehart, 1952.
- Freedom River Florida 1845. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953.
- Hurricane. Rinehart, 1958.
- Alligator crossing. John Day, 1959.
- The Key to Paris. Keys to the Cities Series. Lippincott, 1961.
- Florida the Long Frontier. Harper & Row, 1967.
- The Joys of Bird Watching in Florida. Hurricane House, 1969.
- Adventures in a Green World – the Story of David Fairchild and Barbour Lathrop. Field Research Projects. 1973.
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Voice of the River. with John Rothchild. Pineapple Press, Inc. 1987.
Short story collections
- Nine Florida Stories by Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Ed. Kevin M. McCarthy. University of North Florida, 1990.
- "Pineland"
- "A Bird Dog in the Hand"
- "He Man"
- "Twenty Minutes Late for Dinner"
- "Plumes"
- "By Violence"
- "Bees in the Mango Bloom"
- "September-Remember"
- "The Road to the Horizon"
- A River in Flood and Other Florida Stories by Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Ed. Kevin M. McCarthy. University Press of Florida, 1998.
- "At Home on the Marcel Waves"
- "Solid Mahogany"
- "Goodness Gracious, Agnes"
- "A River in Flood"
- "The Mayor of Flamingo"
- "Stepmother"
- "You Got to Go, But You Don't Have to Come Back"
- "High-Goal Man"
- "Wind Before Morning"
External links
- Series of audio interviews with Marjory Stoneman Douglas sponsored by Florida International University
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Writer and Conservationist Photographs, bibliography, timeline, essays and links to other resources. Prepared by University of Miami Special Collections.
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas Papers, University of Miami Finding Aid, University of Miami, Special Collections.
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas – detailed bibliography
- Everglades in the Time of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas A photo exhibit on Douglas, provided by the State Archives of Florida
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas's River of Progress: Modernism, Feminism, Regionalism, and Environmentalism in Her Early Writings A master's thesis from the University of Florida about Douglas' short stories
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas – Bibliography "Full Bibliography – articles, books, plays, and poetry by Ms. Douglas and articles and books about Ms. Douglas."
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas – Friends and Peers Friends and peers who help establish environmental and civic institutions
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas's Home Recent and historic pictures
- Friends of the Everglades The non-profit environmental organization founded by Marjory Stoneman Douglas
- Wellesley Person of the Week, December 11, 2000