Who Was Marjory Stoneman Douglas?

Review by Bill Doughty

Regrettably, "Marjory Stoneman Douglas" High School will always be remembered the way "Sandyhook" and "Columbine" are remembered – places of learning devastated by murderous gunfire. Students at MSD High School, "the Eagles," are demonstrating resilience and redirecting their anger and grief toward positive change.


So who was Marjory Stoneman Douglas?

Seventy-one years ago Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998), newspaper journalist and freelance writer, wrote "The Everglades: River of Grass" (Pineapple Press, 1947).

The book is a fascinating history of "the great pointed paw of Florida," describing its nature, peoples, history of conquest, and challenges in the face of development and destruction of the Everglades.

Fellow writer John Hersey, author of "Hiroshima," called Stoneman Douglas's description of the Everglades "an unearthliness, a strong rhythm, a compactness of natural imagery that is dazzling, and, above all an organization and discipline that approaches poetic form."
Here's an example of her poetry in prose:

"The water moves. The saw grass, pale green to deep-brown ripeness, stands rigid. It is moved only in sluggish rollings by the vast push of the winds across it. Over its endless acres here and there the shadows of the dazzling clouds quicken and slide, purple-brown, plum-brown, mauve-brown, rust-brown, bronze. The bristling, blossoming tops do not bend easily like standing grain. They do not even in their own growth curve all one way but stand in edged clumps, curving against each other, all the massed curving blades making millions of fine arching lines that at a little distance merge to a huge expanse of brown wires or bristles or, farther beyond, to deep-piled plush. At the horizon they become velvet. The line they make is an edge of velvet against the infinite blue, the blue-and-white, the clear fine primrose yellow, the burning brass and crimson, the molten silver, the deepening hyacinth sky. The clear burning light of the sun pours daylong into the saw grass and is lost there, soaked up, never given back. Only the water flashes and glints. The grass yields nothing."

Science meets art in her writing, much like Rachel Carson, as Stoneman Douglas paints with her words.

Baby bald eagle in the Everglades. (National Park Service)

She describes the destruction of birds, killed out of greed for their feathers, their plumes. At sunset, like birds everywhere, birds of the Everglades would return "in their white thousands and tens of thousands, with the sounds of great stiff still banners ... rivers of birds pouring against the sunset back to the rookeries ... down to the right next in the clamor and squawking and curious yelping, and queer deep grunting of the fuzzy open-beaked hungry young."

"When the sun rose the ethereal whiteness of the plumed parent birds shone like frost against the blue, blue sky. They  were white in the nights under the moon, or to the torches and firepans of the men with clubs in canoes slipping along behind the lights. A few men with clubs or shotguns rising suddenly by those low rookeries could kill and scalp hundreds of birds in a night. By morning the bloody bodies would be drawing the buzzards and alligators. The great black Florida crows that shed the light like water from their feathers would clean out the dying young. Ants in long lines as fine as pepper would carry off the rotting pieces of their bones."

White egret (Photo courtesy National Park Service)

In "The Everglades: River of Grass" Stoneman Douglas takes us through millennia – Cretaceous, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene – to more recent history of the Age of Exploration and Conquest, through the Civil War and into the first half of the 20th century.
"History," she writes, "the recorded time of the earth and of man, is in itself something like a river."

So is childhood – or a journey through high school.

We learn about colorful characters in Florida's history, including Billy Bowlegs, King Carlos, Juan Ortiz, Juan Ponce de Leon, Hernando De Soto, Col. Zachary Taylor, Maj. Francis Dade, Andrew Jackson (who waged war against the indigenous people 200 years ago, 1817-1818), Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, and Osceola.

Osceola

Osceola would become a "patriot and warrior" hero who was to "epitomize for future history the highhanded injustice" of captivity, a symbol in the first half of the 1800s to  those, including Indians and escaped slaves, who fought for freedom and righteousness. A town, lake, county, many individuals, and even a species of snake were named after him. So were several U.S. Navy vessels, including a gunboat during the Civil War, harbor tug and seagoing tug #47, all called Osceola.

Stoneman Douglas brings the imagery of the sea into her writing, and she seems to have a special affinity to the tough and gritty sailors who ventured aboard wooden ships and into the unknown.

"These were not the men of the Mediterranean galleys, the long narrow ships that went mincingly on the tideless inner sea, from headland to known headland, by the banked oars of slaves. These were free men of that limitless, turbulent ocean, the men of the bucking, hardy cargo carriers, the round ships, broad of bow and beam, that thrashed forward only before the wind in their single, clumsy square sails. They came about only by a miracle and could hardly beat to windward at all. Many a ship and crew was blown far out into the unknown and disappeared under the unturning, savage, westgoing wind. Not that that mattered. There were men in every port eager to follow them. Their concern was not safety. Their concern was going out. Sailing. Finding out. Seeing. Never mind the coming back."

Seagoing tug USS Osceola

We see how early explorers, Spanish Catholic crusaders, and English traders fought over the "paw" of Florida and subjugation of the people there. 
The U.S. Navy, under USS Flirt and Fort Flirt, played an important role in Florida's early history, protecting against piracy and bootlegging and eventually in the Civil War fighting against "the accepted evil of slavery."
Admiral David Porter – and later his son David Dixon Porter – protected Florida, commercial trade and the United States on both sides of the peninsula.
Stoneman Douglas offers a meticulous description of the lives of the earliest residents of the Everglades, the indigenous "Indians": Calusa, Mayaimi, Tekesta, Talasi, Yochi, Tallahasee and others. Eventually they would be lumped together under a catch-all name: Seminole.

Calusa

By the mid 18th century the original people of the Everglades had disappeared. "Only the scattered Calusas were left, ranging throughout the area. It has been repeated often that after 1763 they left for Cuba en masse. I do not believe that there was ever a time when the Glades were empty of villages," Stoneman Douglas concludes.

"They had great courage. They came of people who had lived hard and savage lives and their children were not weakened," she writes.

The author was successful in convincing people to conserve and preserve much of the precious Everglades. In December 1947, the year her book was published, President Truman dedicated the Everglades National Park, helping people realize the life-giving value of the ecosystem – and the dangers of draining the water, leading to fires and rising salt water.

"Unless the people will act the fires will come again. Overdrainage will go on. The soil will shrink and burn and be wasted and destroyed in a continuing ruin. The salt will lie in wait. Yet the springs of fine water had flowed again. The balance still existed between the forces of life and of death. There is a balance in man also, one which has set against his greed and his inertia and his foolishness; his courage, his will, his ability slowly and painfully to learn, and to work together."

The Courage... the will... the "ability slowly and painfully to learn, and to work together."

Her legacy lives on.

The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School family – students, teachers and loved ones – are taking a stand on behalf of those who were killed by promoting common sense gun safety to prevent more tragedies. Their school's namesake channeled her passion toward positive change on behalf of something she deeply loved too, part of a resilient ecosystem that supports life.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas