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Marjory Stoneman Douglas (April 7, 1890 – May 14, 1998) was an American journalist, author, women's suffrage advocate, and conservationist known for her staunch defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald, she became a freelance writer, producing over a hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass (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 Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring (1962). Her books, stories, and journalism career brought her influence in Miami, enabling her to advance her causes.
As a young woman, Douglas was outspoken and politically conscious of the women's suffrage and civil rights movements. She was called upon to take a central role in the protection of the Everglades when she was 79 years old. For the remaining 29 years of her life she was "a relentless reporter and fearless crusader" for the natural preservation and restoration of South Florida.[1] Her tireless efforts earned her several variations of the nickname "Grande Dame of the Everglades"[2] as well as the hostility of agricultural and business interests looking to benefit from land development in Florida. She received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was inducted into several halls of fame.
Douglas lived to 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."[3]
As a young woman, Douglas was outspoken and politically conscious of the women's suffrage and civil rights movements. She was called upon to take a central role in the protection of the Everglades when she was 79 years old. For the remaining 29 years of her life she was "a relentless reporter and fearless crusader" for the natural preservation and restoration of South Florida.[1] Her tireless efforts earned her several variations of the nickname "Grande Dame of the Everglades"[2] as well as the hostility of agricultural and business interests looking to benefit from land development in Florida. She received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was inducted into several halls of fame.
Douglas lived to 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."[3]
Marjory Stoneman Douglas - Wikipedia
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Thanks Maj Marty Hogan for letting us know that April 7 is the anniversary of the birth of American journalist, author, women's suffrage advocate, and conservationist known for her staunch defense of the Everglades Marjory Stoneman Douglas
She was first local woman to enlist in the U.S. Navy reserves during World War I, as Marjory Douglas enlisted herself.
It is bitterly ironic that Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida was the most recent mass shooting school incident last month.
Rest in peace Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the high named in her honor become a peaceful place of learning very soon.
Image: Marjory Stoneman Douglas Queen of the Everglades
Background from
"On this date in 1890, a couple in Minneapolis, Frank and Lillian Stoneman, prepared for the arrival of their first and only child. The baby arrived the following day, a girl they named Marjory.
It wasn’t an entirely happy home. Lillian, a talented concert pianist, struggled with mental illness. After the couple split when Marjory was 6, the little girl went with her mother to New England to live with maternal relatives who had a habit of bad-mouthing the child’s father.
Although Marjory had been close to her dad, she wouldn’t see him again until she was 25. Her mother was in and out of mental institutions, and Marjory stayed close to home, attending Wellesley College while her father moved to Florida, attended law school, and launched a newspaper that would become the Miami Herald.
Shortly after Marjory graduated from college in 1912, her mother died of breast cancer. Majory later married a man named Kenneth Douglas, a charming fellow 30 years her senior -- who turned out to be a con man (he was still married to someone else) and an alcoholic. When the marriage ran its course in less than a year, Marjory went to Florida, where she reestablished a relationship with Frank Stoneman, who promptly hired his daughter to work at his paper. Frank, meanwhile, had been making waves by penning editorials taking issue with plans hatched by a previous governor, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, to drain the Everglades.
In time, Frank Stoneman’s daughter would make this cause her own, and make a much bigger name for herself in environmental protection and other progressive causes.
* * *
In 1915, when Marjory Stoneman Douglas arrived in South Florida to be reunited with her father, Miami was in the process of transforming itself from a sleepy frontier village to a boom town. In that decade, the population of Dade County went from just under 12,000 people to nearly 43,000. The great Florida migration had begun.
Finding suitable land for all those people in that swampy paradise was a challenge. Civic leaders weren’t always up to the test. A 1.6-mile stream called Wagner Creek was dredged and a portion of it renamed Seybold Canal. A century later, it’s the most toxic waterway in Florida. It was in this environment that Gov. Broward took aim at the Everglades themselves.
A former soldier of fortune and riverboat captain, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward had served as sheriff of Jacksonville before setting his sights on the governor’s mansion. He ran for office in 1904 on a series of campaign promises that included puncturing the natural barriers that protected the Everglades from the ocean and constructing canals that would let its water drain out to the sea. Few people recognized this scheme as the lunacy it was, but among the small coterie of critics were Miami newspaper publisher Frank Stoneman and his daughter.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas began as a society reporter, but was never content simply to cover garden parties and women’s club luncheons. Once, when she was stood up by an interviewee who was supposedly the first local woman to enlist in the U.S. Navy reserves during World War I, Douglas enlisted herself.
Military service wasn’t a natural fit: Marjory wasn’t an earlier riser, and her superior officers chafed at her habit of correcting their grammar. She requested, and was granted, a transfer of sorts -- to the American Red Cross -- and shipped out to Europe.
Upon her return to Miami after the war, she was given a daily column to write. With that platform, she emerged as a classic liberal, championing social justice and environmentalism, opposing racism and sexism, all while expressing a visionary and holistic approach to public policy that counted quality of life for all as an attainable civic goal.
“We want civilization for south Florida,” she wrote in 1922. “And when we say that, we do not mean electric lights and running hot and cold water. … We want a place where the individual can be as free as possible, where the life of the community is rich and full and beautiful, where all the people, unhandicapped by misery, can go forward together to those ends which man dimly guessed for himself. Because we are pioneers, we have dared to dream that south Florida can be that sort of place, if we all want it badly enough.”
If it seems as though she’s describing heaven more than Florida, so be it. Regardless, Florida wasn’t always tranquil, then or now, as Marjory Douglas and tens of thousands of other non-native Floridians learned in 1926 and again in 1928 when deadly hurricanes swept through the area. The 1928 storm killed an estimated 2,500 people.
In the mid-1920s, Majory had suffered what was then euphemistically called “mental exhaustion.” But she would not suffer her mother’s fate. Marjory transitioned from newspaper work to fiction writing. One of her early books, “Plumes,” combined her journalist’s attention to historical events with her passion for conservation: It relates a dramatized account of the 1905 murder of Guy Bradley, a game warden killed by poachers who slaughtered egrets for the plumage that adorned women’s hats.
In the early 1940s, Douglas was approached by a publisher doing a series about America’s rivers. She accepted the assignment, but talked the publisher out of a book on the Miami River and into a much more ambitious project. The resulting book, “The Everglades: River of Grass,” was published in 1947, the year the Everglades became a national park. The book itself was an instant classic and it helped stamp the Everglades on America’s collective conscience. It has one of the great opening lines in conservation writing, or any other kind of writing, in my opinion: “There are no other Everglades in the world.”
Marjory Stoneman Douglas remained active all her life, eventually earning a nickname, “Queen of the Everglades,” that was imprecise but well-deserved. In the introduction to her 1987 autobiography, which author John Rothchild helped her write, Rothchild sets the scene at a 1973 public hearing in Everglades City where Douglas had shown up to oppose the latest permit request by the Army Corps of Engineers:
"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 Scarlet 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 … 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 Corps of Engineers’ request was denied, Rothchild added, which “was no surprise to those of us who'd heard her speak.”
I can’t relate in this space all that she accomplished simply because she lived so long and did so much. Local civic leaders decided to honor her legacy by naming a high school after her, but they ended up doing so while she was alive -- for the simple reason that she was 100 years old at the time and in no sign of failing health. That was in 1990, and she lived another eight years."
Marjory Stoneman Douglas NHD Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vTtuFuG9oo
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. LTC Orlando Illi Lt Col Charlie Brown Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price CPT Jack Durish Capt Tom Brown MSG Andrew White SFC William Farrell SGT (Join to see) Sgt Albert Castro SSG David Andrews Sgt Randy Wilber Sgt John H. CPL Dave Hoover SGT Mark Halmrast SPC Margaret Higgins SrA Christopher Wright
She was first local woman to enlist in the U.S. Navy reserves during World War I, as Marjory Douglas enlisted herself.
It is bitterly ironic that Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida was the most recent mass shooting school incident last month.
Rest in peace Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the high named in her honor become a peaceful place of learning very soon.
Image: Marjory Stoneman Douglas Queen of the Everglades
Background from
"On this date in 1890, a couple in Minneapolis, Frank and Lillian Stoneman, prepared for the arrival of their first and only child. The baby arrived the following day, a girl they named Marjory.
It wasn’t an entirely happy home. Lillian, a talented concert pianist, struggled with mental illness. After the couple split when Marjory was 6, the little girl went with her mother to New England to live with maternal relatives who had a habit of bad-mouthing the child’s father.
Although Marjory had been close to her dad, she wouldn’t see him again until she was 25. Her mother was in and out of mental institutions, and Marjory stayed close to home, attending Wellesley College while her father moved to Florida, attended law school, and launched a newspaper that would become the Miami Herald.
Shortly after Marjory graduated from college in 1912, her mother died of breast cancer. Majory later married a man named Kenneth Douglas, a charming fellow 30 years her senior -- who turned out to be a con man (he was still married to someone else) and an alcoholic. When the marriage ran its course in less than a year, Marjory went to Florida, where she reestablished a relationship with Frank Stoneman, who promptly hired his daughter to work at his paper. Frank, meanwhile, had been making waves by penning editorials taking issue with plans hatched by a previous governor, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, to drain the Everglades.
In time, Frank Stoneman’s daughter would make this cause her own, and make a much bigger name for herself in environmental protection and other progressive causes.
* * *
In 1915, when Marjory Stoneman Douglas arrived in South Florida to be reunited with her father, Miami was in the process of transforming itself from a sleepy frontier village to a boom town. In that decade, the population of Dade County went from just under 12,000 people to nearly 43,000. The great Florida migration had begun.
Finding suitable land for all those people in that swampy paradise was a challenge. Civic leaders weren’t always up to the test. A 1.6-mile stream called Wagner Creek was dredged and a portion of it renamed Seybold Canal. A century later, it’s the most toxic waterway in Florida. It was in this environment that Gov. Broward took aim at the Everglades themselves.
A former soldier of fortune and riverboat captain, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward had served as sheriff of Jacksonville before setting his sights on the governor’s mansion. He ran for office in 1904 on a series of campaign promises that included puncturing the natural barriers that protected the Everglades from the ocean and constructing canals that would let its water drain out to the sea. Few people recognized this scheme as the lunacy it was, but among the small coterie of critics were Miami newspaper publisher Frank Stoneman and his daughter.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas began as a society reporter, but was never content simply to cover garden parties and women’s club luncheons. Once, when she was stood up by an interviewee who was supposedly the first local woman to enlist in the U.S. Navy reserves during World War I, Douglas enlisted herself.
Military service wasn’t a natural fit: Marjory wasn’t an earlier riser, and her superior officers chafed at her habit of correcting their grammar. She requested, and was granted, a transfer of sorts -- to the American Red Cross -- and shipped out to Europe.
Upon her return to Miami after the war, she was given a daily column to write. With that platform, she emerged as a classic liberal, championing social justice and environmentalism, opposing racism and sexism, all while expressing a visionary and holistic approach to public policy that counted quality of life for all as an attainable civic goal.
“We want civilization for south Florida,” she wrote in 1922. “And when we say that, we do not mean electric lights and running hot and cold water. … We want a place where the individual can be as free as possible, where the life of the community is rich and full and beautiful, where all the people, unhandicapped by misery, can go forward together to those ends which man dimly guessed for himself. Because we are pioneers, we have dared to dream that south Florida can be that sort of place, if we all want it badly enough.”
If it seems as though she’s describing heaven more than Florida, so be it. Regardless, Florida wasn’t always tranquil, then or now, as Marjory Douglas and tens of thousands of other non-native Floridians learned in 1926 and again in 1928 when deadly hurricanes swept through the area. The 1928 storm killed an estimated 2,500 people.
In the mid-1920s, Majory had suffered what was then euphemistically called “mental exhaustion.” But she would not suffer her mother’s fate. Marjory transitioned from newspaper work to fiction writing. One of her early books, “Plumes,” combined her journalist’s attention to historical events with her passion for conservation: It relates a dramatized account of the 1905 murder of Guy Bradley, a game warden killed by poachers who slaughtered egrets for the plumage that adorned women’s hats.
In the early 1940s, Douglas was approached by a publisher doing a series about America’s rivers. She accepted the assignment, but talked the publisher out of a book on the Miami River and into a much more ambitious project. The resulting book, “The Everglades: River of Grass,” was published in 1947, the year the Everglades became a national park. The book itself was an instant classic and it helped stamp the Everglades on America’s collective conscience. It has one of the great opening lines in conservation writing, or any other kind of writing, in my opinion: “There are no other Everglades in the world.”
Marjory Stoneman Douglas remained active all her life, eventually earning a nickname, “Queen of the Everglades,” that was imprecise but well-deserved. In the introduction to her 1987 autobiography, which author John Rothchild helped her write, Rothchild sets the scene at a 1973 public hearing in Everglades City where Douglas had shown up to oppose the latest permit request by the Army Corps of Engineers:
"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 Scarlet 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 … 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 Corps of Engineers’ request was denied, Rothchild added, which “was no surprise to those of us who'd heard her speak.”
I can’t relate in this space all that she accomplished simply because she lived so long and did so much. Local civic leaders decided to honor her legacy by naming a high school after her, but they ended up doing so while she was alive -- for the simple reason that she was 100 years old at the time and in no sign of failing health. That was in 1990, and she lived another eight years."
Marjory Stoneman Douglas NHD Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vTtuFuG9oo
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. LTC Orlando Illi Lt Col Charlie Brown Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price CPT Jack Durish Capt Tom Brown MSG Andrew White SFC William Farrell SGT (Join to see) Sgt Albert Castro SSG David Andrews Sgt Randy Wilber Sgt John H. CPL Dave Hoover SGT Mark Halmrast SPC Margaret Higgins SrA Christopher Wright
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