[On March 3rd, 1849, Congress created a new federal government agency, the Department of the Interior. One of the department’s most significant focal points has become the National Park System, so this week I’ll celebrate Interior’s 175th birthday by AmericanStudying a handful of our great Parks, leading up to a post on National Historical Parks!]
On the
very American story of the woman who helped save the Everglades.
Since
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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