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Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Marjory Stoneman Douglas (April 7, 1890 – May 14, 1998) was
an American journalist, writer, feminist, and environmentalist known for
her staunch defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and
reclaim land for development.
By the time she was fifty, Marjory Stoneman Douglas could look back with
satisfaction on a varied career that included working as a reporter, columnist,
and editor for the Miami Herald and success as a short-story writer. But
her most significant work began in the mid-1940s, when she agreed to write a
book on the Florida Everglades. The resulting volume, The Everglades: River
of Grass, became an instant best-seller following its publication in 1947.
More important, it called attention to the great ecological importance of this
vast expanse of water and wildlife and to the need for preserving it. Eventually
Douglas and her book provided the impetus for founding the Friends of the
Everglades, which became a major force in the campaign to protect the natural
integrity of the Everglades against a host of man-created abuses.
Rick Hirsch of the Miami Herald writes (16 Feb 2014):
Marjory
Stoneman Douglas’s name is emblazoned on parks and buildings for her
huge contribution to the conservation movement in the United States —
most specifically the Everglades.
Her work at the Miami Herald is
less known.
Each year, the Museum of the Everglades hosts the
Marjory Stoneman Douglas Festival to celebrate her life. About six
months ago, organizer Martha Hutcheson asked if the Miami Herald could
kick off the five-day gathering with an exploration of Marjory’s life as
a Herald reporter. I quickly agreed. I didn’t know what I was getting
myself into.
I had a layman’s knowledge of Marjory’s life. I read
Everglades: River of Grass as a student at Palmetto High. I met her when
I was a young reporter in the early 1980s. By then, she was the grand
dame of Everglades conservation, in her 90s (she died in 1998 at age
108). I knew that her father, Frank Stoneman, in 1903 founded the paper
that became the Miami Herald, and that Stoneman was the Herald’s editor
until 1937. I also knew Majory was a reporter for the paper.
I
discovered that Marjory’s Miami Herald years — 1915 to 1923 with a brief
interruption during World War I — formed a pivotal phase in her life. At
the Herald, Marjory honed her voice as a writer and first showed her
fearlessness as an activist. As a reporter, she wrote with confidence,
wit and edge — sometimes even sarcasm. She developed her interest in and
passion for conservation, women’s issues and civil rights.
She
also battled pressures and anxieties recognizable to many journalists
who know the day-after-day grind of the news business, from relentless
deadlines and workload to dealing with competing special interests.
These observatons emerge after delving deeply into the excellent
work of others. University of Florida history professor Jack E. Davis’
biography, An Everglades Providence, is probably the most authoritative
work on her life. Her 1987 autobiography with John Rothchild, Voice of
the River, provides personal perspective on her life and her Herald
years. And Herald research director Monika Leal helped me find numerous
examples of Marjory’s stories from the Herald — from society columns to
news coverage.
To understand Marjory’s life during her time at
the Herald, you need to know the turmoil that preceded it — and there
was plenty.
She was born in 1890 in Minneapolis. Frank Stoneman,
her father, was in real estate and banking. Her mother, Florence Lillian
Trefethen, was a musician. Stoneman had financial setbacks in Minnesota,
and in 1893 the family moved to Rhode Island, near Stoneman’s family. He
continued to struggle financially, and Lillian didn’t get along with
Stoneman’s mother. She also struggled emotionally, the first of several
battles with mental illness.
When Marjory was 5, her mother
packed their belongings and left Stoneman, taking Marjory with her to
her family home in Massachusetts. The Stonemans divorced a year later,
and Frank Stoneman headed to Florida.
Marjory and her mother were
close, but Marjory often served as caregiver to a woman who struggled
with health and emotional issues.
Marjory emerged a bright woman,
though self-conscious and socially awkward. In her autobiography, she
described an encounter at a high school dance: “A boy named Herndon
asked me to dance two dances, and for that I was pretty grateful. He was
kind of unattractive, so we made a good couple.’’
Even so, her
ability as a researcher and writer began to emerge in college at
Wellesley. She became editor of the college annual, and was elected
class orator. But she missed her mother, who continued to struggle with
physical and mental health issues. She developed breast cancer during
Marjory’s senior year, but Marjory wasn’t told until after her
graduation ceremony. Weeks later, Lillian died.
A transient phase
followed. Marjory moved to Boston to work in a department store, then to
St. Louis to live with a college friend. Soon the friend moved to New
York; Marjory followed, and got a job teaching department store sales
girls in Newark.
There, she met Kenneth Douglas, a reporter for
the Newark Evening News. Marjory was 24. Douglas, about 30 years older,
courted her relentlessly. They married April 18, 1914, about three
months after meeting.
Douglas soon became embroiled in scandal.
He had been married twice before under a different name and it remains
unclear if a divorce from his second wife was ever final. He was charged
with passing bad checks, and jailed.
Frank Stoneman, who had not
seen Marjory for 18 years, wired her money, and she boarded a train to
Miami.
“I left my marriage and all my past history in New England
without a single regret,’’ she said.
She was 25, AWOL from a
disastrous marriage, and still grieving the death of her mother. Miami
was 19, about 10,000 people, and rough around the edges.
Frank
Stoneman believed a single woman such as his daughter should support
herself. One day he called home to ask Marjory to fill in for the editor
of the society page, who had taken a leave to care for her ailing
mother.
In her autobiography, Majory wrote: “I was delighted to
be working on the Herald. It was as if everything else I had been doing
since college had been all wrong and suddenly I found what I was meant
to do — even if it was as simple as writing society blurbs in a small
city newspaper.’’
Douglas’s first piece was published Oct. 25,
1915. She interviewed the lone woman who traveled with the inaugural
Dixie Highway motorcade, from Chicago to Miami (in 13 days).
Douglas soon took on the job for good, and got a desk in the office, at
the corner of Miami Avenue near the bridge across the Miami River. In
1916, Stoneman took a one-month vacation and he gave Marjory control of
the editorial page. Marjory’s capacity for invention emerged. When
letters to the editor ran short, she sometimes used obvious and humorous
aliases and made up her own, she recalled.
After her father
returned, she was back at maintaining the society page. A bit bored, she
admitted: “There I was, writing about parties, wedding and notable
winter visitors to the leading hotel in an insignificant city.’’
On slow days, she would forgo a “stern adherence to hard fact.’’ Once,
she conjured up a tea dance hosted by “Mrs. J. Augustus Snuanpuh,”
included guests such as “Mrs. JK De Yellowplush” and described “a dainty
refreshment course of baked beans and bread pudding was served on the
back porch, decorated with brooms and mops, while in the center of the
table was placed a large bouquet of Dutch Cleaner.''
During these
years, she developed her environmental focus, directed in many ways by
her father. Since founding the paper, Frank Stoneman strongly opposed
efforts to dredge the Everglades.
Marjory got to know the movers
and shakers in town, including the wife of William Jennings Bryan, “a
devoted suffragette,’’ who recruited Marjory to travel to Tallahassee to
advocate for the right of women to vote. “All of us spoke to the joint
committee, wearing our best hats....Talking to them was like talking to
graven images. They never paid attention to us at all.’’
Soon,
Marjory’s social circle included other journalists — from the staff of
The Herald as well as the two competing newspapers in town. She met a
reporter at the Metropolis, and they became involved, but in the summer
of 1916, with World War I in Europe, he signed up for service and went
to France. “I took it hard,’’ she said in Voice of the River. “I’d a
broken marriage and before that my husband was in the penitentiary, and
here I was faced with another period of longing and waiting.’’
Not long after, Marjory was assigned to cover a story on the first woman
to enlist in the Navy from the state of Florida. The woman didn’t show
up at the recruiting station. But Marjory did.
“I called my
father at the paper and said: ‘Look, I got the story on the first woman
to enlist. It turned out to be me.’’’
She spent a year in the
Navy at the reserve headquarters in downtown Miami, and hated it. She
joined the American Red Cross and went to France in 1918.
When
she returned to the United States in 1920, Miami was booming.
Marjory was hired as assistant editor, worked on the editorial page and
wrote a column called “The Galley,’’ where she wrote about everything
from gardening and landscaping to the plight of women, living conditions
for blacks in Coconut Grove and forced labor of vagrants.
“Once
in a while, my column would make a difference to somebody,” she noted in
her autobiography. She published a poem about a boy named Martin Tabert,
who was beaten to death in a labor camp. Soon after, the Legislature
abolished beatings in camps.
She wrote about politics: “Now’s the
time for a good Ouiji board to come to the aid of the parties” she wrote
before the 1920 presidential election.
After Warren Harding’s
election that November, she covered his first visit to Florida, and with
an edge: “St. Augustine, Jan 22 — At 10 o’clock today, President-elect
Warren G. Harding stepped from his private car here to begin his first
real vacation since his election. Neither the eager crowds nor the
throng of newspaperman could take his mind from his paramount interest,
his game of golf.’’
She also began writing about the Everglades,
and advocated the creation of the national park.
All the while,
demands grew.
“The Herald was becoming a bigger and more
important paper. I spent three years as assistant editor, plus writing
my column every day. There was more pressure in this than I realized.’’
She occasionally clashed with her father, and there was friction
with the publisher of the Herald, Frank Shutts.
“Toward the end
of 1923, I’d begun to get tired. Every day I had to do stories, I had to
do the column....This led to my first real nervous breakdown....Maybe I
inherited some flaw that my mother had. Or maybe the trauma early in my
life, all the bitterness, had to have some longterm effect.’’
Marjory resigned and pursued a freelance career writing for magazines,
and then short stories and books. In 1947 — 24 years after leaving the
Herald — she published River of Grass.
But she always looked back
fondly at her early years at the Herald. As she wrote in a 1967 Tropic
Magazine story:
“The paper was the perfect vantage point from
which to view my new world….. it gave me time to learn.”
 When
artist Menden Hall saw Douglas on a television talk show, he was
"fascinated with her looks" and became determined to paint her. Several
years later, he simply showed up at her door unannounced, and so began
the series of sittings that led to this portrait
Any contributions will be
gratefully accepted
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