Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas is best known for her fight to save the Florida Everglades from development and draining. She was always outspoken about political issues, and people listened to her.
Marjory was born on April 7, 1890, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was the only child of Frank Stoneman and Lillian Trefethen, who was a concert violinist. One of Marjory’s earliest memories was of sitting in her father’s lap while he read to her from Song of Hiawatha. She remembered bursting into tears because the tree had to give up its life to provide Hiawatha with materials for his canoe.
She started reading at a young age and read constantly. Her first book was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She kept it for many years until, as she said, “Some fiend in human form must have borrowed it and not brought it back.”
Marjory took her first trip to Florida when she was four. She and her parents went on a cruise from Tampa to Havana. She remembers picking an orange from a tree at the Tampa Bay Hotel where they stayed before the cruise.
When Marjory was six years old, her parents separated. She and her mother moved to Taunton, Massachusetts, where they lived with her grandparents and her aunt. Her mother’s family was bitter about the split with Marjory’s father, which made it hard for her. She described her mother as high-strung. Mrs. Stoneman was very nervous and very close to Marjory. She was hospitalized for nerve problems several times while Marjory was growing up. As she grew older, Marjory took on more responsibility in the family. Eventually she was managing some of the family’s finances.
Picking oranges.
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Marjory had lots of friends in high school, but she never dated. She wrote, “In ninth grade, we had cotillion dances. That’s when I began to experience the awful ordeal of being a wallflower. I was fat, my hair was greasy, I wore glasses, I giggled, I was completely self-conscious with boys, and I wondered why none of them wanted to dance with me.”
Marjory always enjoyed learning and already liked to write when she was in high school. She loved reading and doing research. Then graduation drew near. “I wanted to go to a good college,” she remembered, “and my mind was set on Wellesley. Wellesley was the nearest good college in those days and I chose it even though my good friends were going elsewhere.” One reason she wanted to go there was that it was a women’s college.
Her family didn’t have much money, but they always expected Marjory to go to college. Aunt Fanny paid many of her college expenses, having saved the money she made from giving music lessons for years.
Douglas knew it would be hard for her mother to be separated from her, but she also realized that it was important for her to get away. She quickly made many friends. Douglas majored in English composition. Since she had done so well in all her high school English courses, she was put in an advanced English class. Some of her writing was published in the college literary magazine, which made her feel like a real writer.
She enjoyed her class in elocution, which involved learning to pronounce words correctly. The professor helped the students to get rid of their various accents, insisting that they articulate their words in a specific way. In later years when she was making many speeches Douglas was very grateful she had taken this course.
When Douglas went home for Christmas during her junior year of college, her mother showed her a large lump in her breast. She had to have surgery to remove the cancer. Douglas was with her mother for her entire hospital stay. She spent spring vacation at home with her mother as she recuperated.
Wellesley College.
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During her senior year, Douglas was very involved in school activities. She was named editor of the college yearbook, her first job in publishing. She played Friar Tuck in the senior play, which was Sherwood Forest. She was also thrilled to be elected class orator, but she couldn’t accept because students were only allowed to participate in two major activities.
Friar Tuck, second from left.
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Douglas still didn’t know what she wanted to do after graduation. Her grandmother wanted her to become a teacher so she could make a living, but she hated the idea.
Douglas’s aunt and cousin came to her graduation, which made her very happy. However, after the ceremony, they told her they had some bad news. Her mother was dying of cancer of the spine. She was in great pain. A few hours after graduation, Douglas was at her mother’s bedside.
When her mother died, Douglas made all the funeral arrangements and took care of all the details. Strangely, her mother’s sister, Aunt Alice, who had come for the funeral, died while she was there. It was a sad summer.
A green heron in the Everglades.
Douglas and two friends signed up for a training program in Boston that would teach them to train salesgirls in department stores. After the training, she got a job in a department store in St. Louis where her best friend, Carolyn Percy, was teaching. She stayed for a year. When Percy moved back with her family, Douglas found a job in a department store in Newark, New Jersey. She didn’t like Newark, and she didn’t like the job.
About that time, she met Kenneth Douglas, the editor of a newspaper. He was about 30 years older than she was, but he began asking her out. She was so shocked to have a man pay so much attention to her that she married him after three months.
Things went well for a while, but then Kenneth was sentenced to six months in prison for forging a check. He told her he’d been framed and she stuck with him, visiting every Sunday.
After Kenneth had been out of prison for a while, without a job, her uncle visited her and explained that Kenneth had tried to get money from her father in Florida. Uncle Ned told Douglas that if she stayed with Kenneth, she would be implicated in the illegal things he was doing.
Douglas believed her uncle. He then told her that her father wanted her to come live with him and his new wife in Florida. He sent her money for the trip. Kenneth didn’t seem upset when she told him she was leaving.
She was excited as the train took her closer and closer to Florida. She was a little nervous, though, since she hadn’t seen her dad since she was six. She needn’t have worried. He greeted her with a kiss, saying, “Hello, sweetheart.” Her new stepmother, Lilla, welcomed her with a big hug and became her best friend.
Douglas’s father was the editor of the newspaper that later became the Miami Herald. The society editor quit, so Mr. Stoneman gave Douglas the job. She was a little bored, reporting on parties, teas, and weddings. There wasn’t a lot of news in the little town, so she sometimes made up things. She said, “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!’”
It was about this time that Douglas first heard about the Everglades. The governor of Florida, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, was determined to drain this area of wetlands. Douglas’s father wrote many articles against the idea. The governor was so upset with him that when Stone-man was elected judge, Broward never validated the election. From that time on, though, people called Stoneman “Judge.”
When Stoneman went on a trip, he put Douglas in charge of the editorial page. She developed a rivalry with a reporter on the Miami Metropolis. The woman was more familiar with Miami history and sometimes made fun of the things Douglas wrote. Her father told her she needed to check her facts.
She was soon writing hard-hitting editorials on controversial subjects. She wrote about women’s rights, racial justice, and conservation. She wrote of the need to protect Florida’s natural resources from the rapid commercial development.
Red Cross poster.
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In 1916, during World War I, Douglas’s father assigned her to cover the first woman joining the US Naval Reserve from Miami. When the woman didn’t show up, she joined the reserve herself, in order to have a story! But she was bored, so she asked for a discharge and joined the American Red Cross. She was sent to Paris, where she cared for war refugees. She later said that seeing those people in a state of shock “helped me understand the plight of refugees in Miami sixty years later.”
For many years, the Everglades were considered a useless wamp that needed to be drained. However, the area is not a swamp at all, but a very shallow, ever-moving river filled with sawgrass. It plays an important role in Florida ‘sweather and climate. Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote,
Much of the rainfall on which Southern Florida depends comes from evaporation in the Everglades. The Everglades evaporate, the moisture goes up into the clouds, the clouds are blown to the north, and the rain comes down over the Kissimmee River and Lake Okeechobee. Lake Okeechobee, especially, is fed by these rains. When the lake gets filled, some of the excess drains down the Cahoosahatchee River into the Gulf of Mexico, or through the St. Lucie River and into the Atlantic Ocean. The rest of the excess, the most useful part, spills over the southern rim of the lake into the great arc of the Everglades.
After that happens, the water moves slowly but steadily southward. Douglas was right when she wrote that there was nowhere else in the world like the Everglades. It’s a unique ecosystem.
Great blue heron.
When Douglas returned home, she was promoted to assistant editor of the paper and began writing a daily column called “The Galley.” She became a local celebrity. She also wrote ad copy for extra money, and she wrote short stories in her spare time.
Douglas was concerned about the plight of the black people in the Miami area. Each city had a section called “Colored Town,” where the black residents lived. The Colored Town in Miami had no toilets and no running water. People got sick from the polluted water caused by sewage running into the well.
Douglas and some friends managed to get a law passed that every house had to have a toilet and a bathtub. They set up a loan program where black residents could borrow money to install plumbing. They didn’t have to pay interest, and she noted that every loan was paid back. She also set up a baby milk fund through the newspaper. People donated money to provide milk for young children.
In 1924 Douglas began suffering from nervous fatigue. She was under a lot of pressure at the newspaper and was having trouble sleeping. She finally had a nervous breakdown and had to take time off. She did a lot of writing while she was recovering and sold several of her short stories. That summer, she used the money she’d saved to go to Taunton to visit her grandmother and her aunt. She began selling stories to the Saturday Evening Post. She was making enough money selling her writing that she was able to quit the newspaper. She wrote many stories with a Florida setting, and some had conservation themes.
Douglas decided to move out of her father’s home. So at age 34, she built a house in nearby Coconut Grove. The house was finished in the fall of 1926. It mostly consisted of one big room, with a small kitchenette and a bedroom. It had no air conditioning, but it was built to take advantage of the breezes. She never had a stove; she cooked on a hot plate.
In the early 1940s, editor Harvey Allen asked Douglas to write a book on the Miami River for his Rivers of America series. She laughed, saying, “Harvey, you can’t write a book about the Miami River. It’s only about an inch long.” However, she talked him into letting her write a book on the Everglades instead. She said it took her four or five years to do all the research. She called it “an idea that would consume me for the rest of my life.”
The book, The Everglades: River of Grass, came out in 1947. Before its publication, people had thought of the Everglades as a useless swamp that needed to be drained. Douglas’s book showed them it was a valuable part of Florida’s environment that needed to be protected. The book begins, “There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they always have been one of the unique regions of the earth; remote, never wholly known. Nothing anywhere else is like them.”
The Everglades book had as much impact as Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, would have when it was published in 1962. Both books called attention to the environment and the need to protect and preserve it. Christian Science Monitor wrote of Douglas’s book 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 same year the book came out, President Harry S. Truman designated the Everglades a national park. Much of the credit is due to Douglas’s hard work.
When the book started making money, Douglas took her first trip out West. She and two friends went to New Orleans, San Antonio, El Paso, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. She visited her father’s sister, her aunt Stella, in Claremont, California. They visited the Grand Canyon on the way back.
When Douglas got back to Florida, she finished the novel she’d been working on and was able to sell it to a publisher. It didn’t sell nearly as well as the Everglades book. Next she wrote a book about a Quaker boy, a Miccosu-kee Indian boy, and an escaped slave. The book, Freedom River, sold fairly well. In the mid-1950s, the company that had published The Everglades: River of Grass asked Marjory to write a book on hurricanes. She traveled a lot, gathering information and interviewing people who had been through hurricanes, from Miami to Cuba to Jamaica. The book was published in 1958 and sold well. She continued writing and lecturing through the 1960s.
Both alligators and crocodiles live in the Everglades, but alligators are much more common. The two look similar, but there are several differences. Here’s how to m a ke a poster tha t will s how p eople th e differences.
Alligator in Florida.
When she was 78 years old, Douglas got involved with the Everglades again. First she helped fight a plan to put an oil refinery on Biscayne Bay. As soon as that idea was killed, someone came up with the idea of building a big airport in the Everglades. There was already a small landing strip for private planes, and it was stopping the flow of the water. The airport would cause much more damage.
To help with her fight, Douglas started an organization called Friends of the Everglades. She went around making speeches to any organization that would listen. The jetport idea was finally defeated. The Friends of the Everglades now has about 4,000 members.
Douglas was a tiny lady, five feet two inches tall and barely 100 pounds. She always wore a dress, pearls, a floppy straw hat, and gloves. She wrote, “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.” Another time she said, “I take advantage of everything I can— age, hair, disability—because my cause is just.”
When she was in her late 90s, Douglas wrote, “Since 1972, I’ve been going around making speeches on the Everglades all over the place. No matter how poor my eyes are I can still talk. I’ll talk about the Everglades at the drop of a hat…. Sometimes, I tell them more than they wanted to know.”
Marjory Stoneman Douglas examines a grass stalk in the Everglades, 1989.
© Kevin Fleming/CORBIS
Douglas was also concerned about the wildlife in the Everglades. She was an animal lover and always had cats at home. The Florida panther was in danger of extinction, so the government decided to catch all the panthers and put collars on them so they could trace where they were. Douglas hated that idea. She knew cats didn’t like collars. She was afraid the collars would get caught on tree limbs and the cats could be strangled. This was one fight she didn’t win.
Most of Douglas’s last 30 years were spent traveling around, speaking to groups about the Everglades. She once said, “The Everglades is a test—if we pass it, we may get to keep the planet.”
Florida panther.
Dover Publications, Inc.
The Florida panther now lives only in a small area of the state. Its range used to include parts of eight southeastern states. The area where the panthers now live includes Big Cypress National Preserve, Corkscrew Swamp, and the Everglades National Park.
The Florida panther is a large, tan cat with black markings on the tip of the tail, the ears, and around the nose. The adult is six to seven feet long. Adult panthers are loners. They don’t associate with other adult panthers except to mate. Females have one to three kittens at a time. Only about half of those kittens live until their first birthday, and half of those don’t live to be two year sold. The kittens only weigh a pound and are spotted, to help camouflage them. They stay with their mother for a year or two.
Life is dangerous for baby panthers. They can be eaten by alligators, wild pigs, or birds of prey. The adults eat meat, including birds, wild pigs, and white-tailed deer. The average life span for a panther that makes it to adulthood is 12 years. Some live to be 20.
Some panthers are killed by cars. You’re very unlikely to see a panther in the wild, as they are very shy. They usually travel at night.
An adult panther needs a large territory in which to hunt. Adult panthers are territorial and won’t share an area with another panther. At times, one panther kills another over territory. Loss of habitat is a big problem for the panthers. Much of Florida land has been made into farms, housing developments, and shopping centers. This leaves less land for the panther to roam.
Steps are being taken to cut down on deaths from automobiles. In many areas, chain-link fences prevent the panthers from crossing highways. One area plans to try a system that will detect a panther in the area and warn motorists. Others are trying to set aside more preserves for the animals.
A few years ago, fewer than 100 of the big cats remained in Florida. In 2009, scientists counted 113. The panther has been on the endangered animal list since 1973.
Marjory received many awards. In 1993, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This is the highest honor that can be given to a civilian. In 2000, she made the National Women’s Hall of Fame. When she heard she was being considered for that, she asked, “Why should they have a Women’s Hall of Fame? … Why not a Citizen’s Hall of Fame?” Some awards came after she died. The year after her death, she was inducted into the National Wildlife Federation Hall of Fame.
On May 14, 1998, Marjory Stoneman Douglas passed away at the age of 108. John Rothchild, who had helped her write her autobiography, said death was the only thing that could “shut her up,” but noted, “The silence is terrible.”
Douglas’s life shows what one person can accomplish if she puts her mind to it and doesn’t give up. She spent 50 years convincing people of the importance of saving the Everglades. She had greater influence in this area than anyone before or since.
President Bill Clinton.
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