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June 2018

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas was a journalist, suffragette, and conservationist who received the Presidential Medal of Honor for her efforts to save the Everglades.  State Library and Archives of Florida.
Marjorie Stoneman Douglas was a journalist, suffragette, and conservationist who received the Presidential Medal of Honor for her efforts to save the Everglades. State Library and Archives of Florida.

Nothing can compare to the pain and agony felt by those who had family members and friends murdered or injured by a ruthless killer. Nonetheless, it is still sad that the name “Margory Stoneman Douglas” is now so tainted by association with this despicable act.

In 1958, my father was honored to join the staff of American Heritage, one of America’s most revered magazines, eventually becoming its Managing Editor and helping many historians strengthen their writing. One of my most treasured possessions is a handwritten letter sent to my father by John Dos Passos. The famous novelist and friend of Ernest Hemingway wrote several articles for American Heritage on Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, and Robert Morris, and my father was one of his editors.

Reprinted from the June 1958 issue of American Heritage.

In years since his defeat and death, most of the passion that surrounded Woodrow Wilson in life is spent. Nearly all his friends and contemporaries have left the scene, and a world resounding to fresh agonies catches only echoes of the crusade that failed and of the opportunity cast aside at the close of the “war to end wars.” But the figure of the crusader himself, the unlikely St. George in silk hat and pince-nez, the Presbyterian moralist wrestling with a backsliding world, remains ever interesting, a hero suited to Shakespearean tragedy, the center of an ever-mounting literature.

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