Douglas, Marjory Stoneman (1890–1998)

Marjory Stoneman Douglas dedicated decades of her 108-year life to various social and environmental causes. She is most often remembered as the Protector of the Everglades. As a columnist, a short story writer, a novelist, and a social and environmentalist activist, Douglas was a force to be reckoned with in Florida because of her ability to garner attention and support from the public and the media.

Douglas was born in Minneapolis on April 7, 1890. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1912 and moved to Miami in 1915 to join her father, Frank Bryant Stoneman, a founder of the Miami Herald. Douglas soon became a member of the Florida Equal Suffrage Association and joined a group of women who failed to convince Florida's legislature to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Desiring an altruistic way to assist the war effort in Europe during World War I, Douglas volunteered with the Red Cross. She was assigned to the civilian relief department in Paris. Douglas stayed on after the Armistice in order to help coordinate and publicize refugee relief efforts in the Balkans and other war-torn regions.

Following her return from Europe, Douglas began writing a column for the Miami Herald. She promoted women's rights and criticized Miami's housing boom. Two of her greatest achievements as a columnist included establishing the first charity not run by a church in Miami, which was a baby milk fund for the city's impoverished, and generating enough public outcry about the death of a young prisoner that the state legislature abolished the leasing and corporal punishment of convicts. Foreshadowing her work as an environmentalist, some of her columns included artful poems about the Everglades' subtle beauty in response to the descriptions of rapacious developers who characterized it as useless muck.

Douglas's championing of the Everglades continued when she became a professional short story writer. Between 1920 and 1943 she published more than 75 stories, mostly for the Saturday Evening Post. Douglas craftily used her enjoyable stories to explore progressive issues such as the New Woman, and to discuss the exploitation of nature by developers, as well as the role of duplicitous real estate agents in Florida's land boom. The unmistakable strength and independence of her often single female protagonists were as strong a model for female readers as any of Willa Cather's pioneering women.

Douglas was instrumental in the establishment of the Everglades National Park. A few weeks before the park's establishment in 1947, Douglas published Everglades: River of Grass, which was the first aesthetically pleasing text to describe how the Everglades are a complex and fragile ecosystem. The bestselling book catapulted her to fame, particularly in Florida, where she became the go-to person for queries about the Everglades. Following this success, Douglas used her fame for such issues as persuading Miami's water company to extend services to impoverished, mostly black neighborhoods and founding the first American Civil Liberties Union chapter south of the Mason-Dixon line, in 1955.

Decades later, as Douglas approached her 80s;she became the bonafide leader of the area's environmental movement when she founded the Friends of the [Page 474]Everglades in 1969. Even as a centegenerian, Douglas's public persona as the tiny but wily and energetic woman who wore the wide-brim hat, positioned her as a Davidesque figure who often triumphed over Goliath-like Big Sugar and other polluting industries in Florida. Douglas was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1993. She died on May 14, 1998.

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