Washington Post with a good profile of Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Posted by
prayformojo (aka mayhem)
Mar 22 '18, 11:26
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But long before she was dubbed “Empress of the Everglades,” Douglas was an advocate who, like the students who would come after her, cared little about how someone of her age and stature was supposed to act. At 25, she got a job at the Miami Herald, the newspaper her father founded. As a young woman in 1915, she was expected to write about parties, gossip and subjects as diverse as “flowers and sunsets and tree planting,” wrote her biographer, Jack E. Davis.
On her third day, she did a story about the women’s suffrage movement.
“She wrote whatever the hell she wanted to write about,” Davis said. That turned out to be: ranting against the KKK, shaming her readers for not knowing that Florida was still running a slavery-like convict-leasing program and demanding the creation of a public welfare office for the protection of children.
She once suggested that the members of the state legislature should be awarded a prize “for their earnest and efficient work in not passing all the bills that were brought to them to pass.” (Sound familiar?) She called the two-party political system “an old-fashioned, noisy, illogical unnecessary nuisance.” That was what she learned in 1917, when she took a train to Tallahassee to persuade lawmakers to allow women to vote. She later compared the experience to talking to “dead mackerel.”
They never paid attention to us at all. They weren’t even listening,” she recalled in her autobiography, “Voice of the River.” “This was my first taste of the politics of north Florida.”
And there, too, was another parallel between Douglas and the students who demanded change from lawmakers just hours after their classmates became targets of an AR-15. She wasn’t politically active because she enjoyed politics; she believed that the circumstances demanded her participation.
That’s what happened when she was in her 70s, more than 20 years after she published her famous book, “The Everglades: River of Grass.” She was set up for a comfortable retirement: She had a house to herself, a reputation as a beloved writer, a steady supply of Desmond & Duff, her favorite scotch.
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