Grandmother of the Glades

Jack Davis: I read River of Grass for the first time lying on my back in a tent in the Everglades.

Joanne Freeman: That’s Jack Davis, a Professor of History at the University of Florida. The book he’s talking about is a landmark history of the Everglades. It was written in 1947 by a woman named Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

Jack Davis: It was, as far as I’m concerned, the ideal place to read it. It was the wintertime, which is one of the best times to be in the Everglades, because the bird life is so conspicuous and so alive. What I’m seeing outside my tent as I’m hiking around the Everglades are the very things that she was writing about in this book.

Joanne Freeman: For most Americans, Marjory Stoneman Douglas is the name of the Parkland high school where there was a tragic shooting in 2018, but Douglas was a remarkable woman whose writing and activism changed how Floridians and Americans saw their natural environment. I caught up recently with Jack to learn more about Douglas, who moved to Florida from New York in 1915 when she was 25 years old. She was fleeing a bad marriage and hoping to get a job at her father’s newspaper, the same one that would eventually become the Miami Herald. I started our conversation by asking Jack was Florida was like when Douglas arrived there in 1915.

Jack Davis: Florida was, Miami specifically, the population was around 11,000 permanent residents. It was already starting to become a tourist attraction or tourist city, because the railroad by that time was running all the way down the East Coast. It was not a terribly attractive place, physically, and in terms of the architecture and the layout of the city, was not appealing to her. When she stepped off the train, she immediately felt at home. It was because of the natural environment, particularly, as she referred to it, the white light of South Florida. In the 1920s it went through an urban land boom, and during the land boom era of Florida, which was really equivalent to the Gold Rush of the West. Miami continued to grow. It continued to evolve, as she did. She became very much a part of the community, as a newspaper writer and then a story-writer for fiction stories for story magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. Most of her stories, some 50 of them, were set in the South Florida region. She wrote about Florida, and South Florida in particular, throughout the 20th century, as it was growing leaps and bounds and changing on some levels socially and politically.

Joanne Freeman: She gets there in that changing environment and she’s working as a newspaper columnist for the Herald, her father’s paper. What did that experience do to contribute to what she accomplished later in her life?

Jack Davis: Here’s the interesting thing about writing that column, which she did for some three years in the 1920s. She was expected, even by her father, the editor, who was very progressive when it came to women’s rights and equality, but he expected her to write book reviews and poetry and maybe speak about women’s issues on occasion, but not to get into politics. Marjory Stoneman Douglas had her own mind. She’s very much an independent woman. She wrote about any damn thing she wanted to. When she was writing that column, she read a lot. She read widely. She read science texts. She read political tracts. She read biographies. She read the classics, which is something she did the rest of her life. Then she wrote about these things. She learned to, I think with that column, really to articulate her ideas quite clearly.

Joanne Freeman: Now I gather that part of what came from that newspaper work was I guess a push towards her interest in environmental activism. Is that the case?

Jack Davis: That is indeed the case, yes. She wrote on a wide range of subjects. She wrote on censorship. She wrote on prohibition, which she was adamantly opposed to. She wrote on woman’s suffrage. Actually before she was writing that column, she wrote on woman’s suffrage in the newspaper. She wrote on male and female relationships. She wrote on the environment too. She would not have regarded herself as an environmentalist, and certainly not someone of John Muir stature, but she could write beautifully. When she was writing the column, one of her biggest fans was a man by the name of Ernest Coe, who wanted to create a National Park in the Everglades. He came to her and asked her to join his campaign, to be their publicity person, to write about the Everglades and the idea of this National Park in national publications and also of course in the Miami Herald. That got her looking at the Everglades in a new way.

Joanne Freeman: Now in 1947 Douglas published The Everglades: River of Grass, and in your work you’ve described that as the green bible of Florida’s environmentalists. What was she hoping to accomplish when she wrote that book?

Jack Davis: I think that changed as she started writing it. She initially thought she was just going to write this history of the Everglades. It was part of the Rivers of America series. She was supposed to write about the Miami River, but the Miami River was, as she always said, only in short and not worthy enough of a book in itself, and so the book ended up being an environmental history of the Everglades. Ultimately she wanted to bring attention to the plight of the Everglades. The Everglades had been under pressure from development since the late 19th century. Even before then, there had been plans to drain the Everglades and turn it into productive farmlands. Some of that had happened. Agriculture had moved in. Cities were growing larger and expanding into the Everglades. She really wanted to bring an end to that. She recognized when she was researching her book, something that probably only one other person did, and that was a scientist she consulted with, that the Everglades was this very large system, interconnected system, that ranged from Orlando all the way down to Florida Bay at the tip of the peninsula. She called it a solar-powered system, and that she was the person who recognized that the Everglades is not this miasmic swamp, but indeed a river, a flowing river. That’s where the name River of Grass comes from. The water flows through not just sawgrass, but through various kinds of natural landscapes.

Joanne Freeman: One of the amazing things that I found in reading about her is she’s an activist, she’s aggressive, she’s writing, she’s very much in the public. At the point when she’s doing this, there are not that many women following in her footsteps. What do you think gave her that kind of strength and persistence to put herself out there?

Jack Davis: I think she had the strength and persistence to be out in the public for a number of reasons. One is because she could speak very well in public. She was also very well informed. She knew what she was talking about. When she knew she had the knowledge at hand, she was never afraid of speaking about it. She was also a single woman. She was divorced, had some bad relationships with men, and very much committed to women’s rights. She was always confident in herself as an individual, but at the same time she recognized that being out there in the public, that she was a woman being out there in the public. She believed there was no, and she writes about this, even using this language, that there should be no separation in the spheres of men and women, particularly within the public.

Joanne Freeman: Even her work itself was a kind of activism.

Jack Davis: Her work itself was a form of activism. That’s what her newspaper column in the 1920s was. Let me give you just a quick line. This is evidence both of humor but also her commitment to a particular cause. She’s writing about, this is right after women have won suffrage, and she’s speaking in her column on male-female relationships. Quote, “Even the most ardent suffragists cannot deny that in gaining the ballot, women have lost their most priceless prerogative, that of blaming the men for the whole works.”

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Jack Davis: I just love that. On politics she wrote, “There are two sound arguments against politics. The first is that they keep so many men running who were obviously built to walk, and the second is that they are politics.”

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Jack Davis: She was able to build up this confidence in writing her column, writing on these stories, starting to write books, to speak in public. Again, as I said, she was always very well informed.

Joanne Freeman: Now Florida, and particularly Miami, changed a lot during the time that she lived there. I think she was 108 when she died. Is that correct?

Jack Davis: She died at 108, yes.

Joanne Freeman: Amazing. That’s a long span of time to spend in this place that she so personally engaged with. As it changed, did her relationship with it change or did her work change?

Jack Davis: Her relationship changed with Florida over her lifetime, during the time that she lived in the state, from 1915 to 1998. That’s a long span of time. Florida went through three growth spurts, major growth spurts, during her lifetime. She started out talking like a regionalist. Early on she would talk about the necessity to preserve, to conserve, to embrace a natural Florida, the native plants, for instance, the native landscape, but all of her words fell on deaf ears and Florida just went about developing itself in the way anybody wanted to develop it. By near the end of her life, she was no longer talking about conservation, she said, “Because we have nothing left to conserve, and now we have to restore it.” That was particularly true with the Everglades. By the end of her life, one half of the Everglades had been lost, mainly because of a comprehensive water management plan on the part of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Joanne Freeman: We’re obviously in the middle of a climate crisis. What do you think Marjory Stoneman Douglas would say were she around today about the situation, about what’s happening, about what is or isn’t being done? What do you think she would have to say to us?

Jack Davis: I’m pretty sure I know what she would say, because she was saying the same thing since the 1940s when she wrote that book. Sea level rise impact on Florida is obviously a reality in many forms. One of those forms is not that it’ll take real estate away. The first thing that’ll go is the infrastructure. A part of that infrastructure is the stormwater systems, but also the freshwater supplies. Back in the ’40s when she was writing that book, scientists learned that the Municipal Wells of what is now Miami-Dade County were fouling with salt because the seawater was entering into the Biscayne Aquifer, which is recharged by the Everglades. The reason why that was happening is because we were draining the Everglades and taking water out of the aquifer, freshwater out, and allowing saltwater to come in. That’s what’s happening today all over Florida in the Floridan Aquifer. She would’ve been stumping, calling for the protection of the aquifer. She would’ve been calling for the restoration of the living shoreline, the mangrove forest, which so much of the Everglades is, or was, the coastal marshes and the seagrass beds and the oyster beds. They are our best defenses in Florida against sea level rise and for protecting the Floridan Aquifer, that and conservation of course, conservation in the use of water.

Jack Davis: I was at a golf and country club this weekend, on Saturday. This is a golf course that has embraced a green approach to living and recreation. They have reduced their water consumption from 40 million gallons a year to under one million gallons. It was not painful. It has been an economic benefit for them. It’s something that everybody celebrates. Douglas would’ve been out there talking about these sort of solutions, which are easy and economically sensible.

Joanne Freeman: Jack Davis teaches history at the University of Florida. He’s the author of An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century, and The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea, which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for History.