This Women's History Month, we celebrate the legacy of writer and activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a woman who fought for women's suffrage and worked tirelessly to protect the Everglades. She published many articles supporting the down-trodden of the world.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas (April 7, 1890 – May 14, 1998) was an American journalist, author, women's suffrage advocate, and conservationist 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, she became a freelance writer, producing over one 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, enabling her to advance her causes
Marjory's parents separated when she was six. 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.
As a young woman, Douglas was outspoken and politically conscious of the women's suffrage and civil rights movements.
She was a straight-A student at Wellesley College, graduating with a BA in English in 1912.
Marjory 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 matters. Douglas was married to Marjory while already married to another woman. While he spent six months in jail for passing a bad check, she remained faithful to him. 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 end the marriage. 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.
Douglas arrived in South Florida when fewer than 5,000 people lived in Miami 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 Herald. Frank 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, 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.
Douglas joined the newspaper's staff in 1915. She began 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. In WW I she joined the American Red Cross, which stationed her in Paris. She witnessed the tumultuous celebrations on the Rue de Rivoli when the Armistice was signed and cared for war refugees; seeing them displaced and in a state of shock, she wrote, "helped me understand the plight of refugees in Miami sixty years later".
After the war, Douglas served as assistant editor at The Miami Herald. She gained some renown for her daily column, "The Galley", becoming something of a local celebrity. 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.
In the early 1920s she wrote "Martin Tabert of North Dakota is Walking Florida Now", a ballad lamenting the death of a 22-year-old vagrant who was beaten to death in a labor camp. 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.
After quitting the newspaper in 1923, Douglas worked as a freelance writer. From 1920 to 1990, Douglas published 109 fiction articles and stories.
During the 1930s, she 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 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, Road to the Sun, in 1952. She wrote four novels, and several nonfiction books on regional topics including Florida birdwatching and David Fairchild, a biologist who imagined a botanical park in Miami. Her autobiography, Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Voice of the River, was written with John Rothchild in 1987.
Early in the 1940s, Douglas was approached by a publisher to contribute to the Rivers of America Series by writing about the Miami River. Unimpressed with it, she called the Miami River about "an inch long”, but in researching it she became more interested in the Everglades and persuaded the publisher to allow her to write about the Everglades instead. She spent five years researching what little was known about the ecology and history of the Everglades and South Florida. Douglas spent time with geologist Garald Parker, who discovered that South Florida's sole freshwater 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 Everglades' essence, 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 in a month. 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".
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 breakdowns.
In 1986 the National Parks Conservation Association established the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award, which "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, when she was 103, President Bill Clinton awarded Douglas the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor granted by the United States of America. The citation for the medal read,
Douglas donated her medal to Wellesley College. Most of the others she received she stored at her home.
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 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.
Douglas lived to 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."
Two South Florida public schools are named in her honor: Broward County Public Schools' Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (opened in 1990, the year of her 100th birthday) and Miami-Dade County Public Schools' Marjory Stoneman Douglas Elementary School.
SOURCE: Wikipedia
On February 14, 2018, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was the scene of a deadly mass shooting perpetrated by a 19-year-old former student of the school, in which 17 people were murdered and 17 others injured. On June 14, 2024, the building where the shooting took place was demolished.
Among the high school students who survived that shooting, some became political advocates of stricter gun control laws and supporters of various political candidates.
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