[On October
1st, 1890, Congress established California’s Yosemite National Park. So this
week I’ll AmericanStudy Yosemite and four other amazing National Parks, leading
up to a special weekend post on their counterparts, National Historic Sites.]
On the very
American story of the woman who helped save the Everglades.
In 2018, the
name Marjory Stoneman Douglas has likely and tragically become synonymous with
the Parkland,
Florida mass shooting in February at the high school named for her.
But while of course we can and should continue remembering the Douglas High
shooting (and celebrating the amazing
group of Parkland students who have turned that tragedy into an occasion
for activism), Marjory Stoneman Douglas deserves separate and full
commemoration as well. In a
108-year life that spanned nearly all of the 20th century (she
was born in April 1890 and passed away in May 1998), Marjory Stoneman
experienced a number of striking and very telling moments, including many by
the time she turned 25: from watching her mother,
concert violinist Florence Lillian Trefethen, get committed to a mental
hospital in Providence for being “high-strung” to attending
Wellesley College and helping form its first suffrage club; from a brief
marriage to charming con artist Kenneth Douglas (who was already married at the
time and subsequently attempted to defraud Marjory’s father) to a
groundbreaking 1915 divorce and move to Miami (then a small town of less
than 5000) to rejoin her father and join the staff of his decade-old
newspaper The Miami Herald.
For the next few
decades, Douglas (she continued to go by her married name for the rest of her
life) made quite a name for herself as a South Florida (and national) journalist
and literary figure. (After serving in both the navy and
the Red Cross during World War I.) Besides her work for the Herald, which included long stints
as Book Review Editor and Assistant Editor, she also worked extensively as a
freelance and creative writer; she published forty
stories in the Saturday Evening Post,
for example, and also wrote a number of one-act plays for the Miami Theater as
well as the foreword
to the WPA’s 1941 guide to Miami. Around that same time, however, Douglas
became involved with the cause that would define her second half-century of
life, and all of America, very fully. The publisher Farrar & Rinehart
approached her to write a book on the Miami River for their new Rivers of America
series; as she began her research Douglas found herself unimpressed by the
river but profoundly moved by the Everglades, and convinced F&R to let her research
and write a book on them instead. She spent five years researching and writing,
working closely with geologist
Garald Parker, and the result was The
Everglades: River of Grass (1947), a monumental achievement that sold
out its initial printing in a month and remains one of the most significant and
influential works of American naturalism.
River of Grass was just the beginning,
however (and not even that, as Douglas had been fighting for local
environmental causes for decades by that time). Over the next half-century,
Douglas would more than earn her nickname “Grande
Dame of Everglades,” waging continual war to protect and preserve the
wetlands from developers, politicians, corporations, sport hunters and
fishermen, and just about every other adversary one could imagine. Douglas
titled the last chapter of River
of Grass “The Eleventh Hour,”
warning that the region was on the brink of destruction; but in December of
that same year Everglades National
Park was dedicated, and thanks to those federal protections and Douglas’s
lifelong efforts, the area instead has become the largest tropical wilderness in
the US and the largest wilderness of any kind east of the Mississippi. No
individual can achieve such milestones single-handedly, of course; but at the
same time, American history reminds us time and again of the power a determined
and impressive individual can have to help shape the future. Marjory Stoneman
Douglas most definitely did so for the Everglades and South Florida—and having
had the good fortune to visit the Glades a few times as a kid (my maternal
grandparents had retired to South Florida), I can testify that she helped
preserve a truly unique and amazing American space.
Next Park
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?
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