She was an environmentalist, a suffragist, and called herself a “writing woman.” Marjory Stoneman Douglas was born April 7, 1890, in Minneapolis. Douglas graduated from Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1912, where she had been elected Class Orator. Wellesley, in fact, had a Department of Expression that Douglas believed “prepared me for all my later public speaking.”
Her mother, Florence Lillian Trefethen, but she went by Lillian, died of breast cancer after Marjory finished college. She was the one who made the funeral arrangements. She had been told her father was living in Florida at the time, her parents having separated when she was 6. In September 1915, after a brief and unsuccessful marriage to a man named Kenneth Douglas, she left Massachusetts and moved down to Florida to live with her father, Frank Bryant Stoneman.
Stoneman had started a paper in Miami, the “News Record” in 1906. He strongly opposed Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward’s eff orts to drain the Everglades. Marjory believed this is where her earliest love of the Everglades came from Stoneman and Frank Shutts reorganized the paper as the “Miami Herald” in 1910. Marjory started work at the “Herald” as the society editor. After a year, her father and step-mother took a month’s vacation and Marjory oversaw the editorial page in her father’s absence.
In 1916 Marjory Stoneman Douglas was enlisted by Mrs. William Jennings Bryan, along with Mrs. Frank Stranahan, founder of Fort Lauderdale, and the widows of two former Florida governors, to speak to the state legislature about ratifying the suffrage amendment.
“All four of us spoke to a joint committee, wearing our best hats.” She writes in her autobiography. “Talking to them was like talking to graven images. They never paid attention to us at all. They weren’t even listening.”
That same year Douglas was assigned a story for the “Herald” on the fi rst woman to enlist in the Naval Reserve in the state of Florida. She didn’t just get the story, she became a part of it as she, herself, enlisted. The Navy made her a yeoman first class. She convinced the commandant at Key West to help her put in for an official discharge in 1917. “The Navy was as glad to get rid of me as I was to leave,” she writes.
Douglas then joined the American Red Cross, Civilian Relief department. By the summer of 1918, she was on her way to an overseas assignment in France. She was gazing down the Rue de Rivoli when the peace treaty ending World War I was signed in June 1919. “…the guns went off from up and down the river…” and “everybody was kissing everybody,” she wrote. Douglas stayed on with the American Red Cross overseas, traveling from place to place and writing stories about the turning over of Red Cross clinics to local authorities.
Douglas returned to Miami in 1920. She returned to the “Herald” as an assistant editor making $30 a week. She also got her own column called “The Galley,” which she describes as “a string of short items, sayings, and musings on local and national affairs.” Douglas spent time with many friends after her return, including Ruth Bryan Owens, daughter of William Jennings Bryan, and Mrs. Bryan. Owens “lectured, ran the women’s clubs, and eventually ran for the legislature.” Ruth Bryan Owens was elected to the 71st Congress in 1928.
The idea for Everglades National Park started with landscape designer Ernest F. Coe, known as “The Father of the Everglades,” and Douglas supported it in print. A committee was formed which included botanist David Fairchild, writer and explorer John Oliver LaGorce of the “National Geographic,” and, of course, Douglas herself.
She writes: “The seasons of the Everglades are the mosquito season and the non-mosquito season. During the worst part of the mosquito season, people would move their cows up to Florida City where the cows wouldn’t be killed by the bugs.”
“People sent hives of bees down from Pensacola on flatboats to get the mangrove honey, but in the mosquito season, they’d take
the bees away so the mosquitoes wouldn’t kill them, either.”
In 1924 Douglas began to experience nervous fatigue. Eventually, her father called a doctor who said the “Herald” was too much pressure and she needed to get away from it. After returning from WWI she had contributed to other magazines.
In the summer of 1924, Douglas visited relatives in Massachusetts and the agent who had been selling her work, Robert Thomas Hardy. He recommended she write for the “Saturday Evening Post,” and she decided to freelance full time.
Douglas’ house in Coconut Grove was finished in the fall of 1926. The work had gone slowly as she had to pay the contractor based on the money she made selling her writing. The City of Miami designated it an historic site in 1995. From 1926 to 1941, Douglas continued writing magazine pieces, and for the local civic theater. In February of 1941, her father died. He and Shutts had sold the “Miami Herald” to the Knight family in 1939.
She took this time to get out of the newspaper business and write a novel, “The River of Grass,” about the Everglades. Her friend, publisher, and fellow novelist Hervey Allen had asked her to write about the Miami River, but she managed to change his mind.
She was referred to state hydrologist Garald Parker and worked with him through her three to four years of research. The book itself took four to fi ve years to complete but came out longer than the agreed-upon 120,000 words. Her publisher told her to cut 20,000. She wired back: “Cut 19,000. Refuse to cut another word. If you don’t agree, I withdraw the book from publication.”
“They say I’m pigheaded,” she cheerfully confessed.
“Pigheadedness covers a multitude of virtues as well as sins.”
“The River of Grass” was printed in November 1947 to great commercial success. It also coincided with the founding of the Everglades National Park. Douglas attended the ceremonies where President Harry Truman formally dedicated the park. Ernest Coe had wanted the park to encompass a much larger area and was upset with the result. He had to be convinced to attend the ceremony.
Douglas began lecturing in the 60s, and “The Rivers of America” series, of which her “The Everglades: River of Grass” was a part, was quite successful. She was also recruited to write a book for a series about regions of Florida. “Florida: The Long Frontier”was published in 1967.
Her next book project was a biography of ornithologist and naturalist W.H. Hudson. So, at the age of 77, sporting a black eye patch after cataract surgery, she traveled to Buenos Aires to begin research. She visited Hudson’s birthplace, then traveled to England to visit his old publishing house, J.M. Dent. She cut her travels short and returned to Miami when her eyes began to fail her completely. She turned over the rough draft to friend and editor Margaret Ewell.
In the late 60s, some 20 years after the publication of her seminal “The River of Grass,” Marjory Stoneman Douglas became an ardent environmentalist. The National Audubon Society in Miami got in a fi ght to stop a proposed oil refinery on the shores of lower Biscayne Bay. Immediately afterward, a jetport in the Everglades was suggested. Joe Browder, head of the National Audubon Society in Miami, showed up on Douglas’ doorstep to ask her to issue a “ringing denunciation” of the jetport. She said she felt those types of things were more effective if they came from an organization. Browder then asked her to start one.
The Friends of the Everglades’ first member was weather historian Michael Chenoweth. Douglas enlisted a treasurer, vice president, and secretary, and started giving speeches wherever they would let her. The jetport was stopped, “not necessarily through my efforts,” Douglas said, “but through the efforts of many people and the responsiveness of the Secretary of the Interior under President Nixon.”
In 1990, a high school in Parkland, Florida was named after her when it opened, for her 100th birthday. In 1993 President Bill Clinton awarded Douglas the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor granted by the United States of America. Marjory Stoneman Douglas was active in environmental conservation in Florida until her passing in 1998 at 108.
A year ago, I moved to southeast Florida from northern Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Besides arriving in a new part of the country in the middle of a pandemic, which presents its own set of challenges, I encountered a lot of new and different things to contend with in my adopted state.
