Everything about Marjory Stoneman Douglas totally explained
Marjory Stoneman Douglas (
April 7 1890 –
May 14 1998) was an American
journalist,
writer and
environmentalist known for her staunch defense of the
Florida Everglades against draining and development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for
The Miami Herald, Douglas became a
freelance writer, producing over a hundred
short stories that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book (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 the influential 1962 book
Silent Spring. Her books, stories, and journalism career brought her influence in Miami, which she used to advance her causes.
Even as a young woman Douglas was outspoken and politically conscious of many issues that included
women's suffrage and
civil rights. She was called upon to take a central role in the protection of the Everglades when she was 78 years old. For the remaining 30 years of her life she was "a relentless reporter and fearless crusader" for the natural preservation and restoration of the nature 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. Numerous awards were given to her, including the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she was inducted into several halls of fame.
Douglas lived until age 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."
Early life
Marjory Stoneman was born on
April 7,
1890, in
Minneapolis, Minnesota, the only child of
Frank Bryant Stoneman and Lillian Trefethen, a concert violinist. One of her earliest memories was her father reading to her
The Song of Hiawatha, at which she burst into sobs upon hearing that the tree had to give its life in order to provide Hiawatha the wood for a canoe. She was an early and voracious reader. Her first book was
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which she kept well into adulthood until "some fiend in human form must have borrowed it and not brought it back". From there she and her parents embarked on a cruise from
Tampa to
Havana.
When she was six years old, her parents separated and she was raised in
Taunton, Massachusetts with her mother, aunt, and grandmother. Her mother, whom Douglas characterized as "high strung", was committed to a
mental sanitarium in
Providence several times. Her parents' separation and the contentious life with her mother's family caused her to suffer from
night terrors. Douglas credited her tenuous upbringing with making her "a skeptic and a dissenter" for the rest of her life. As her mother's mental health deteriorated, she took on more responsibilities, eventually managing some of the family finances and gaining a maturity imposed upon her by circumstance.
Education and marriage
She left for college in 1908, despite feeling that her mother then began to die. Her aunt and grandmother noticed it too, but recognized that she needed to leave in order to begin her own life. Douglas was a good student without having to study too much. She attended
Wellesley College, graduating with a
BA in English in 1912. She found particular gifts in a class on
elocution, and joined the first suffrage club with six of her classmates. She was elected as "Class Orator" at Wellesley, but was unable to fulfill the office since she was already involved in other activities. During her senior year while visiting home, her mother showed her a lump on her breast. Douglas arranged the surgery to have it removed. After the graduation ceremony, her aunt informed her it had metastasized, and within months her mother was dead. Douglas was depended upon to make the funeral arrangements.
After drifting with college friends through a few jobs she didn't feel she was well-suited for, she met Kenneth Douglas in 1914 and was so impressed with his manners and surprised at the attention he showed her that she married him within three months. He was a newspaper editor 30 years her senior, and the marriage failed. He spent six months in jail for
passing a bad check, and then tried to
scam her absent father out of money. She reflected later that her marriage also didn't work due to her independent nature, and her participation in causes such as
women's suffrage and environmental issues. She moved to Miami in the fall of 1915 to be reunited with her father, whom she hadn't seen since her parents' separation when she was six years old.
Writing career
The Miami Herald
Douglas arrived in South Florida when less than 5,000 people lived in Miami, the streets were made of white dust, 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. Stoneman was passionately against 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, Governor 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.
She joined the staff of the newspaper in 1915, originally 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: "Somebody would say, 'Who's that Mrs. T.Y. Washrag you've got in your column?' And I'd say, 'Oh, you know, I don't think she's been here very long'". She was given an assignment in 1916 to write a story on the first woman to join the
US Naval Reserve from Miami. When the woman didn't show up for the interview, Douglas found herself joining the Navy as a
yeoman first class. She didn't like it very much, so she requested a discharge and joined the
American Red Cross, where she was stationed in
Paris, France and had the occasion to witness the crowds celebrating on the
Rue de Rivoli when the Armistice was signed. She also cared for war
refugees, and seeing them displaced and in a state of shock, she wrote, "helped me understand the plight of refugees in Miami sixty years later".
Returning after the
War, she took over the duties as assistant editor at
The Miami Herald. She gained some renown through her daily column entitled "The Galley", and had enough influence through the newspaper that she became somewhat of a local celebrity. Some of the stories she wrote spoke of the wealth of the region being in its "inevitable development", and she supplemented her income with $100 a week from writing copy advertisements that praised the development of South Florida, something she'd reconsider later in her life. However, she wrote editorials promoting responsible urban planning when Miami saw a population boom of 100,000 people in a decade. Douglas also wrote passionate stories supporting women's suffrage and
civil rights while at the
Herald. She wrote a
ballad in the 1920s lamenting the death of a 16-year-old
vagrant who was beaten to death in a
labor camp, titled "Martin Tabert of
North Dakota is Walking Florida Now". The ballad was printed in
The Miami Herald, and read aloud during a session of the Florida legislature that passed a law making the beating of vagrants illegal, in large part due to her writing.
Freelance writer
After quitting the newspaper in 1923, Douglas worked as a freelance writer. From 1920 to 1990, Douglas published 109 fiction articles and stories. One of her first stories was sold to the
pulp fiction magazine
Black Mask for $600. Her story "Peculiar Treasure of a King" was a second-place finalist in the
O. Henry Award competition in 1928. Forty of her stories were published in
The Saturday Evening Post; one titled "Story of a Homely Woman" was reprinted in 1937 in the
Post's best short stories compilation.
Douglas became involved with the
Miami Theater, and wrote some one-act plays that were fashionable in the 1930s. One, entitled "The Gallows Gate", was about an argument between a mother and father regarding the character of their son who is sentenced to hang. She got the idea from her father, who had witnessed hangings when he lived in the West and was unnerved by the creaking sound of the rope bearing the weight of the hanging body. The play won a state competition, and eventually $500 in a national competition after it was written into three acts.
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, entitled
Road to the Sun, in 1952. She wrote four novels, and several non-fiction books on regional topics including Florida
birdwatching and
David Fairchild, the
entomologist turned
biologist who imagined a botanical park in Miami. Her
autobiography entitled
Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Voice of the River was written with John Rothchild in 1987. She had been working on a book about
W. H. Hudson for years, traveling to Argentina and England several times. It was incomplete when she died in 1998.
The Everglades: River of Grass
Early in the 1940s she 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", and the statement welcomes visitors to the
Everglades National Park website. Douglas characterized the Everglades as an ecosystem of rivers worthy of protecting, and outlined its imminent disappearance in the last chapter titled "The Eleventh Hour":
Cattlemen's grass fires roared uncontrolled. Cane-field fires spread crackling and hissing in the saw grass in vast waves and pillars and billowing mountains of heavy, cream-colored, purple-shadowed smoke. Training planes flying over the Glades dropped bombs or cigarette butts, and the fires exploded in the hearts of the drying hammocks and raced on before every wind leaving only blackness ... There was no water in the canals with which to fight [thefires] ... The sweet water the rock had held was gone or had shrunk far down into its strange holes and cleavages.
It has gone through numerous editions, selling 500,000 copies since its original publication. It galvanized people to protect the Everglades and is compared to
Rachel Carson's 1962 exposé of the harmful effects of
DDT,
Silent Spring, as both books are "groundbreaking calls to action that made citizens and politicians take notice". Its impact is still relevant as it's claimed to be a major reason Florida receives so many tourists, and "remains the definitive reference on the plight of the Florida Everglades". The
Christian Science Monitor wrote of it in 1997, "Today her book isn't 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 downside to the book's impact, according to one writer addressing restoration of the Everglades, is that her
metaphor is so prevailingly dominant that it's inaccurate in describing the complex web of ecosystems within the Everglades: "River of Grass" describes one. David McCally wrote that despite Douglas' "appreciation of the complexity of the environmental system" she described, popular conception of the Everglades shared by people who have not read the book overshadows her detailed explanations.
Activism
In 1916 she traveled with Mary Baird Bryan,
William Jennings Bryan's wife, and two other women to
Tallahassee to speak in support of women's right to vote, an experience about which she wrote: "All four of us spoke to a joint committee wearing our best hats. Talking to them was like talking to
graven images. They never paid attention to us at all."
Everglades work
Douglas began her interest in the Everglades in the 1920s when she joined the board of the Everglades Tropical National Park Committee, a group led by
Ernest F. Coe and dedicated to the idea of making a national park in the Everglades. By the 1960s, the Everglades were in imminent danger of disappearing forever due to gross mismanagement in the name of progress, land development, and agricultural development. Encouraged to get involved by the leaders of environmental groups, in 1968 (at the age of 78) Douglas founded Friends of the Everglades to protest the construction of a
jetport in the
Big Cypress portion of the Everglades. She justified her involvement saying, "It is a woman's business to be interested in the environment. It's an extended form of housekeeping." and increased membership of Friends of the Everglades to 3,000 within three years. She ran the public information operation full time from her home and encountered hostility from the jetport's developers and backers, who called her a "damn butterfly chaser". She compared Florida sugarcane agriculture to sugarcane grown in the
West Indies, that she claimed was more environmentally sound, had a longer harvest cycle less harmful to soil nutrients, and was less expensive for consumers due to the higher sugar content. She was labeled as "the
anti-Christ" Douglas was giving a speech addressing the harmful practices of the Army Corps of Engineers when the
colonel in attendance dropped his pen on the floor. As he was stooping to pick it up, Douglas stopped her speech and said to him, "Colonel! You can crawl under that table and hide, but you can't get away from me!"
In 1973, Douglas attended a meeting addressing conservation of the Everglades in
Everglades City, and was observed by John Rothchild:
Mrs. Douglas was half the size of her fellow speakers and she wore huge dark glasses, which along with the huge floppy hat made her look like Scarlett O'Hara as played by Igor Stravinsky. When she spoke, everybody stopped slapping mosquitoes and more or less came to order. She reminded us all of our responsibility to nature and I don't remember what else. Her voice had the sobering effect of a one-room schoolmarm's. The tone itself seemed to tame the rowdiest of the local stone crabbers, plus the developers, and the lawyers on both sides. I wonder if it didn't also intimidate the mosquitoes ... The request for a Corps of Engineers permit was eventually turned down. This was no surprise to those of us who'd heard her speak. Dade County commissioners eventually decided not to drain.
Florida Governor Lawton Chiles explained her impact, saying, "Marjory was the first voice to really wake a lot of us up to what we were doing to our quality of life. She wasn't just a pioneer of the environmental movement, she was a prophet, calling out to us to save the environment for our children and our grandchildren."
Personal life
Religious views
Although Douglas grew up in an Episcopalian household, she described herself as agnostic throughout her life, and forbade any religious ceremony at her memorial. Douglas tied her agnosticism to her unanswered prayers when her mother was dying. However, she credited the motivation for her support of women's suffrage to her Quaker paternal grandparents whose dedication to the abolition of slavery she admired, and proudly claimed Levi Coffin, an organizer of the Underground Railroad, was her great-great-uncle. She wrote that his wife was a friend of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and had provided Stowe with the story of Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin fleeing slavery because Douglas' great-great-aunt took care of Eliza and her infant after their escape. Frank Stoneman grew up in a Quaker colony, and Douglas maintained he kept touches of his upbringing throughout his life, even after converting to Episcopalianism. Writer Jack Davis and neighbor Helen Muir suggest this Quaker influence was behind Douglas' use of "Friends" in naming the organizations Friends of the Everglades and Friends of the University of Miami Library. 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 several nervous breakdowns. Douglas suggested she'd had "blank periods" before, starting during her marriage, but they were brief. She connected these lapses to her mother's insanity. She eventually quit the newspaper, but after her father's death in 1941 she suffered a third and final breakdown, when her neighbors found her roaming the neighborhood one night screaming. She admitted she'd a "father complex", explaining it by saying, "(h)aving been brought up without him and then coming back and finding him so sympathetic had a powerful effect".
Personal habits
Regardless of her dedication to the preservation of the Everglades, Douglas admitted the time she spent actually there was sporadic, driving there for occasional picnics. "To be a friend of the Everglades isn't necessarily to spend time wandering around out there ... It's too buggy, too wet, too generally inhospitable", she wrote. Instead, she understood that the health of the environment indicated the general well-being of humanity.
She enjoyed drinking Scotch and sherry; as one friend remembered her, "She would come up and have a sherry, and then I'd walk her home, and then she'd walk me back, and we'd have another sherry. What fun she was."
She was attached to several men after her divorce, counting one of them as the reason she enlisted in the Red Cross, as he'd already gone to France as a soldier. However, she said she didn't believe in extramarital sex and wouldn't have dishonored her father by being promiscuous. She told Klinkenberg in 1992, frankly, that she hadn't had sex since her divorce, saying "I wasn't a wild woman". However, she was fond of saying she used the emotion and energy instead on her work. "People don't seem to realize that the energy that goes into sex, all the emotion that surrounds it, can be well employed in other ways", she wrote in her autobiography.
Awards, death, and legacy
Honors
The National Parks Conservation Association established the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award in 1986, that "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 in 1991. In 1993, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given to a civilian. The citation for the medal read, "Marjory Stoneman Douglas personifies passionate commitment. Her crusade to preserve and restore the Everglades has enhanced our Nation's respect for our precious environment, reminding all of us of nature's delicate balance. Grateful Americans honor the 'Grandmother of the Glades' by following her splendid example in safeguarding America's beauty and splendor for generations to come." Douglas donated her medal to Wellesley College.
She was inducted into the National Wildlife Federation Hall of Fame in 1999, and the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2000. John Rothchild declared her a feminist before the word existed, but not entirely. Upon hearing that she was to be inducted, she questioned, "Why should they've a Women's Hall of Fame, as I heard they wanted to put me in the other day? Why not a Citizen's Hall of Fame?" Douglas received so many plaques and awards that she stored most of them on the floor of her home.
Remembrances
Marjory Stoneman Douglas died at the age of 108 on May 14, 1998. John Rothchild, who helped write her autobiography, said that her death was the only thing that could "shut her up" but added, "(t)he silence is terrible". Carl Hiaasen eulogized her in The Miami Herald, writing that The Everglades: River of Grass was "monumental", and praised her passion and her resolve; even when politicians finally found value in the Everglades and visited her for a photo opportunity, she still provoked them to do more and do it faster.
The National Wildlife Federation described her as "a passionate, articulate, and tireless voice for the environment". Chairman of the Florida Audubon Society Ed Davison remembered her, saying, "She kept a clear vision of the way things ought to be, and she didn't give a lot of credibility to excuses about why they're not like that. She would give these wonderful, curmudgeonly speeches to which there was no response. You can't holler back to grandmotherly scolding. All you can do is shuffle your feet and say, 'Yes, Ma'am.'" She was aware of it; she was reported saying, "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."
In 2000, a Naples, Florida-based composer named Steve Heitzeg wrote a 15-minute orchestra piece to be performed by the Naples Philharmonic entitled Voice of the Everglades (Epitaph for Marjory Stoneman Douglas). Heitzeg explained his motivation for the piece, saying, "She was outspoken, she was direct, she'd the energy and belief to make the world a better place." Two South Florida public schools are named in her honor: Broward County Public Schools' Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and Miami-Dade County Public Schools' Marjory Stoneman Douglas Elementary School.
Douglas home
Douglas' cottage, located in Coconut Grove at 3744–3754 Stewart Avenue, was built in 1924. She wrote all of her major books and stories in the cottage, and the City of Miami designated it an historic site in 1995, not only for its famous owner, but for its unique Masonry Vernacular architecture. After Douglas' death, Friends of the Everglades proposed making the house part of an education center about Douglas and her life, but neighbors protested, citing issues with parking, traffic, and an influx of visitors to the quiet neighborhood. The house, which had an exterior floodwater line from the 1926 Miami Hurricane and some damage from an infestation of bees, had fallen further into disrepair. For a while, the idea of moving the house to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, which Douglas helped to develop and where there's a life size bronze statue to commemorate her efforts, was considered. The State of Florida owns Douglas' house and in April 2007 placed it in the care of the Florida Park Service, a division of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Restoration of the floors and counters took place in the following months. Water service was reconnected to the house and the electrical system was updated for safety purposes. All work was approved by the Department of Historic Resources. A park ranger was placed as a resident in the Douglas house to help maintain the structure and property.
Notable works
Books
- . Rinehart, 1947.
- Road to the Sun. Rinehart, 1952.
- Freedom River Florida 1845. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953.
- Hurricane. Rinehart, 1958.
- Alligator crossing. John Day, 1959.
- The Key to Paris. Keys to the Cities Series. Lippincott, 1961.
- Florida the Long Frontier. Harper & Row, 1967.
- The Joys of Bird Watching in Florida. Hurricane House, 1969.
- Adventures in a Green World - the Story of David Fairchild and Barbour Lathrop. Field Research Projects. 1973.
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Voice of the River. with John Rothchild. Pineapple Press, Inc. 1987.
Short story collections
Nine Florida Stories by Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Ed. Kevin M. McCarthy. University of North Florida, 1990.
- "Pineland"
- "A Bird Dog in the Hand"
- "He Man"
- "Twenty Minutes Late for Dinner"
- "Plumes"
- "By Violence"
- "Bees in the Mango Bloom"
- "September-Remember"
- "The Road to the Horizon"
A River in Flood and Other Florida Stories by Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Ed. Kevin M. McCarthy. University Press of Florida, 1998.
- "At Home on the Marcel Waves"
- "Solid Mahogany"
- "Goodness Gracious, Agnes"
- "A River in Flood"
- "The Mayor of Flamingo"
- "Stepmother"
- "You Got to Go, But You Don't Have to Come Back"
- "High-Goal Man"
- "Wind Before Morning"
Further Information
Get more info on 'Marjory Stoneman Douglas'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://marjory_stoneman_douglas.totallyexplained.com">Marjory Stoneman Douglas Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
