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";s:4:"text";s:28654:"American Experience. The idea that this new generation—the Panama Canal generation—that they were gonna be able to do massive drainage down in the Everglades, that it could be done, that the technology was there, all that was missing was money and willpower and some political finesse. And the idea was a new kind of biological park, a Galapagos of America. Although the visiting committee recommended Coe's proposal to Congress with enthusiasm, it wasn't until 1934—following the election of longtime south Florida fan Franklin Roosevelt—that the Everglades park figured prominently in the nation's plans. American Museum of Natural History, Library Gail Hollander, Geographer: Disston was trying all these ventures, little towns that he was planning and bringing people in to live, selling land, and sugar as a capitalist. American Experience: The Swamp. By the Twenties, some of these farms had gotten quite big and had dozens, or even hundreds, of employees. Michael Grunwald, Journalist: Hurricanes have been a part of Florida history from the start, but in the past, there really hadn’t been a lot of people living in harm’s way. Sugar is also the subject of intensive debates over tariffs, and protectionism, and so there are many Americans who want to produce sugar within the United States. In total, the project was slated to cost nearly $25 million—twelve times what the state had spent on drainage so far. And as planting season approached, a familiar sight returned to the narrow, rutted roads that led to the farms of the upper Glades: thousands of migrant laborers, the vast majority of them black. Teddy Roosevelt was very excited about reclamation. And she asked him one day, “Can I get away with calling the Everglades a river of grass?” He said, “Yes!”. “Some men believe the Everglades should be drained,” mocked one newspaper, “while others urge the annexation of the moon.”. That makes it amazingly biodiverse. But Broward was a man on a mission. Coe had taken Douglas on numerous field trips to the Everglades over the years, and had convinced her the massive wetland was a treasure to be preserved. Some people lived in tents. So too were many of the women’s club members whose conservation efforts stretched all the way back to the creation of Royal Palm State Park—which had been donated as the nucleus of the National Park and was commemorated that day as "a gift to the nation.". But he put his shoulder to the wheel and enlightened people about it, preaching the gospel of the Everglades wherever he went. The influx of cash found its way into pockets all over town. Now, Douglas warned, the vast wetland was dying. Instead of building your camp where it was the best place to grow crops or to hunt for the game in that area, it was, “Okay, let’s build our camp close to the highway because we know tourists are gonna travel that highway so we can open up a little shop and start selling our souvenirs. He was deeply enchanted with Florida. The Swamp. Miami Herald Archives columnist Marjory Stoneman Douglas was visiting Massachusetts when the storm hit. The boom busted because it was a bubble. It is a river of grass. Andrew Frank, Historian: Without treaty, without agreement, the Seminoles try to fight to keep sovereignty over their land and try to maintain some semblance of control over what seems to be a rapidly changing environment both politically and ecologically. “Ugly death," one cleanup worker recalled, "was simply everywhere.”. The dramatic story of humanity’s attempts to conquer the Florida Everglades, one of nature’s most mysterious and unique ecosystems. Narrator: On January 3rd, 1905, the state of Florida swore in its 19th governor: a burly, rough-hewn native son with the unlikely name of Napoleon Bonaparte Broward. A Film Posse, Inc. Production For American Experience. The image of the sun and sand and beaches is what they used to lure the tourists in and what they’d lure retirees in. Her chickee had no walls. Parker’s discovering the ecology of the Everglades, but he’s a scientist, and so he’s writing up his findings in this arcane language of the scientist. Ucla Film & Television Archive Sherman Grinberg Film Library Watch Preview. He also promised to drain 12 million acres—one third of the state's landmass—in exchange for half the land his dredges successfully reclaimed. Narrator: Throughout the 1930’s—as the Depression crippled much of the nation and drought decimated crops across the Southern Plains—people flocked to the upper Everglades, to work the fields in the shadow of the massive dike rising along the shore of Lake Okeechobee. And she’s seeing the wildlife disappearing in some places. Maggy Hurchalla, Local Historian: Marjory was a wonderful writer who was able to listen to hydrologists, listen to biologists, listen to people who understood the system and to translate that into the magic of the sunrises and the sunsets. Newsreel Narrator: In Florida, at Everglades City, President Truman dedicates a famous wilderness as a national park. And his Agriculture Department was especially excited about the drainage work that was going on in Florida, which they saw as potentially the greatest act of reclamation in American history. In the summer of 1926, heavy rains raised Lake Okeechobee to the edge of its dike. And it really is the most amazing test, not just of our science and of our planning and of our environmental knowledge, but it really is a moral test of whether we’re gonna be able to preserve a place for people alongside a unique creation of wilderness. Kirk Mitchell He envisioned the Everglades becoming a place in which the ambitious individual, the independent yeoman farmer, the Jeffersonian farmer could make a living for himself and his family. The history of the Florida Everglades and the efforts to reclaim, control and preserve the vast area once viewed as a wasteland. And James Wright was more than happy to give Broward the kind of answer he wanted as long as there were also private opportunities for him to have a little graft on the side. The Swamp. Douglas, however, was a journalist, she was a poet, she was a short story writer, and it dawns on her: this is not a stagnant swamp. Again, Elliot refused. Ben Greenberg, Director of Audience Engagement The boundaries Coe had drawn for the park reflected his expansive vision: more than two million acres were to be included, from fifteen miles above the Tamiami Trail to the Big Cypress Swamp to the coral reefs that dotted the Florida Keys. The move to preserve Paradise Key didn’t really gain traction until May Mann Jennings became the President of the Florida Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1914, and May was a person who got things done. Watch Preview. It was sacred. Casey Mahalik Four days later, the U.S. Thomas Van Lent, Civil Engineer: The ostensible purpose was to protect the communities around the lake, and it did that. Thomas Van Lent: VAN LENT: The water levels sank so low because the fresh water coming in off the Everglades was cut off. And so he’s generating this excitement about Florida and Florida land. Douglas Brinkley, Historian: Franklin Roosevelt was a very sick man in 1923. It’s Florida’s version of a Dust Bowl. Rollins College Archives “All night, all day, hurrying in to pick beans … chugging on to the muck.”. Five months after the hurricane, a visitor from Washington, DC arrived to inspect the damage—the newly-elected President of the United States, Herbert Hoover. But along with that is this tremendous uncontrolled growth, and it’s slapdash. So you had to have schemes to drain the swamp. And they knew that if they could get these congress people from outside of the state of Florida to see that big picture, then they could win their support. Marjory Stoneman Douglas consulted with Parker who was generous in taking her out to the Everglades on research trips with him to talk about what the Everglades really was biologically and hydrologically. And so this tropical agricultural Eden was proving to not be operating in the way that they hoped it would. So he was one of the first to actually start stream gauging. University of South Florida, Tampa Library An Illinois teacher searching for her new farm discovered “water, water everywhere.” “I have bought land by the acre, and I have bought land by the foot,” said one Iowa purchaser, “but, my God, I have never bought land by the gallon.”, When the news got out, the rush to settle the Everglades abruptly slowed to a crawl. When they were talking about making Florida a state there was one member of Congress who said, “Why on Earth would we want this place? “They didn’t come bringing money, they were coming to make some.”. Jack Davis, Historian: So you have all these competing interests in the Everglades and each wants the Everglades to work for them. By 1916, so many wilderness areas had been set aside across the country that the National Park Service was established to oversee them. He was smart, he was savvy, he had ambitions. “The people who were pouring in were broke,” Hurston wrote. The fact that Florida’s developing so quickly, there are a lot of capitalists that’ll say, “The National Park was a mistake”—That there was money to be had if we would’ve drained it. But it’s extremely flat. President Truman: We have permanently safeguarded an irreplaceable primitive area, the Everglades National Park. “To wait another 10 years would be to lose the whole project.”. In the fields, they often worked alongside Seminole people who likewise spent their lives on the move. Marjory Stoneman Douglas, VOICE: Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness, wider than the enormous visible round of the horizon, the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds, under the dazzling blue heights of space. Narrator: Broward meant to finish what Hamilton Disston had started. Michael Grunwald, Journalist: Dicky Bolles sent brochures around the country with fake quotes from the Department of Agriculture, announcing that the land was already drained, that this project couldn’t fail, with sort of true quotes from the state, announcing that the will of the state was behind it. It also made clear that the biggest problem was the potential for catastrophe that would kill thousands of people. Consumer Cellular We can remove the first video in the list to add this one. While steamboat operators, and fishermen, and people living in the coastal communities had very different ideas of how much water they wanted pushed through these canals. By the time Wright finished his study, in 1908, Broward was nearing the end of his term. What people like Simpson and others found in the Everglades as they came to study and appreciate them was a vastness and a solitude and a sense of smallness in comparison to the forces of nature that they found spiritually nourishing. Narrator: The event had been organized by Dicky Bolles, the land speculator who had purchased a half-million acres in the Everglades from Governor Broward. They understood the real value of the Everglades was really in its biodiversity and all of the plants and animals that it contained. They said, “We need to protect these farmers,” so they put up this dike to protect them from the lake. It was work. Throughout the 19-teens, earth was being moved all over the Everglades. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward was a force. Bullish on the prospects for agriculture in the region, Disston established an 1,800-acre sugar plantation—and generated impressive yields. Florida had been granted statehood in 1845. The Swamp. But the Governor had angles to work. Some people lived in ramshackle shacks. Andrew Frank, Historian: Sometimes they would do little performances of what you would call alligator wrestling. Sean Sbarbori Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library A lot of that area was designated for the indigenous people. It was possible. “I know it is doing the legs good,” he wrote his mother, “the muscles are better than ever before.”. Aboard the steamer was a wealthy, 33-year-old Philadelphian named Hamilton Disston, on his first visit to Florida. They immediately went salty. They are touched by it. The wind took it and blew it literally at a slant all the way to one side of the 400,000 acre lake and then the wind blew the other way and came right on up over the dike. And rather than let a book contract slip away, she began to mull over the possibility of using the Everglades for a book. But to many, that didn’t matter—the moral was the same: the swamp had claimed another victim. Paul Sutter, Historian: Drawing the line around the portion of the Everglades that gets protected as a national park, while a very powerful thing to do—a way of keeping out those forces of commerce and economic transformation—is also an act that just simply can’t accommodate for the dynamism of the system hydrologically and ecologically. One local newspaper predicted the project would give Florida "the most vigorous push forward on the road to progress that it has yet received." Season 31 Episode 1 | 1h 53m 13s | Video has closed captioning. In Miami, the rebuilding began almost immediately, fueled by millions in insurance settlements. But for the first time in America's long relationship with the Everglades, there was a dawning awareness of what that collapse would mean—not simply to the alligators and the wading birds, but to the millions of residents of South Florida. Narrator: The work was backbreaking. It was momentous. Season 31 Episode 1 | 1h 53m 13s | Video has closed captioning. Tourists ate it up. Watch Preview. This is the greatest concentration of sawgrass in world. VAN LENT: The water levels sank so low because the fresh water coming in off the Everglades was cut off. … identified 33 different species of birds, including a very large flock of black skimmers. Based in part on the book “The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise” by Michael Grunwald, “The Swamp” premieres on AMERICAN EXPERIENCE Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2019. Howard Sharp: he believed that it was essentially negligent homicide by the chief engineer because he could have let some of that water out of the lake earlier, but he didn’t wanna flood the downstream communities. Hurricanes have been a part of Florida history from the start, but in the past, there really hadn’t been a lot of people living in harm’s way. Since 1872, when Yellowstone had been made the world's first national park, the idea of preserving large swaths of nature for future generations had been steadily gaining traction. Producers Library, Archival Materials Courtesy of Now, Roosevelt and his conservationist friends hoped to create such a park in the Everglades. Disston's dredges, meanwhile, were busily carving drainage canals through the sawgrass marshes. American Experience. Over the previous two years, his dredges had dug only about 12 miles of canals and reclaimed fewer than 12,000 acres—hardly a dent in the massive wetland. Gaumont Pathé Archives, Archival Materials Courtesy of Narrator: On November 23rd, 1916, nearly a thousand people attended the opening ceremony of Royal Palm State Park, which Jennings dedicated “to the people of Florida and their children forever.” Only about a tenth of one percent of the Everglades ecosystem had been saved in the bargain. He went and inspected them as they were being built every month. Paul Sutter, Historian: People like Simpson begin to interpret the landscape to south Floridians in ways that becomes particularly powerful. "If we wait till these lands show commercial values," urged one of Roosevelt's allies, "we'll never get our park.". “The state owns several million acres of unreclaimed lands as fertile as any in the world,” he declared. And what he doesn’t tell people is that much of this land that is part of this lottery is still underwater. “I am going to Florida," Roosevelt told his doctor," to let nature take its course.”. In Florida, they are really trying to do both. Even though you may think you’ve drained the land, as Hamilton Disston thought he had, one big rainstorm comes along, or a hurricane comes along, and that dry land is suddenly swampland once again. Produced By Narrator: In 1947, an improbable best-seller redefined one of the most remote regions in America––a place long considered impenetrable and dangerous. University of Florida, George A. Smathers Libraries Narrator: Many of Roosevelt's happiest hours had been spent in the wilderness. In 1943, she decided to take a new tack, and write about the Everglades as an environment to be understood. You totally understand why that needs to be preserved. Eliot Kleinberg, Journalist: By the Twenties, some of these farms had gotten quite big and had dozens, or even hundreds, of employees. Water was a fact of life for anyone living in south Florida. University of South Carolina They know what they imagine the Everglades to be, and this fit what they thought the Everglades would be. They were driven there. He went and inspected them as they were being built every month. Jack Davis, Historian: The great foil in Florida is rain. And once again, the promise of control would fuel an unprecedented boom—intensifying agriculture, boosting tourism, increasing Florida's population by roughly a million every five years, and ratcheting up the already-fierce conflict over water. Narrator: The new canals around Fort Lauderdale made an instant impression. Like famed preservationist John Muir, Simpson believed nature should be left alone—and in 1912, he began churning out a steady stream of books and articles meant as a kind of wake-up call to South Florida. All together, the greater Everglades ecosystem covered 18,000 square miles—and water was its lifeblood. Watch Preview. (60 minutes) Can't find the episode you're looking for? But in the wilds of central Florida, he saw a spectacular business opportunity. Megan Lee People paid a fee, almost like going to the zoo. Michael Grunwald, Journalist: What people did not understand at the time was that building a road that bisected the sheet flow of the Everglades was an environmental disaster. Narrator: The rains fell hard throughout the month of August 1928. And so this tropical agricultural Eden was proving to not be operating in the way that they hoped it would. “We want immigration and capital,” Florida’s governor admitted, “come from whatever source it may.” Disston was sure he could deliver both—by turning the Everglades into dry land. Narrator: For conservationists, Everglades National Park was a triumph—and a bulwark against the often reckless development that had marked south Florida for the past half century. It is a Godforsaken swamp full of alligators and mosquitoes and nobody would want to emigrate there, even from hell.”. Narrator: But what captured attention across the country was the fires—seemingly unquenchable blazes that swept across the sawgrass prairies and burned up the precious peat and muck. American Woman Suffrage Association all together, the project, but actually it didn ’ t hunt anymore plants... Unpopular because everybody wanted water in different places rebuilt five times smashed into the was... T worry about it, and it ’ s showing the readers she ’ d to! Can have any kind of diced up the Everglades word about Everglades drainage water from wells great.. Because everybody wanted water in different places nature once and for all to an urban industrial... Simpson had been organized by Dicky Bolles, the Everglades identified 33 different species of birds, the! So almost a taking from the Caribbean s perfectly tuned to the environment around.. Each wants the Everglades held anything worth preserving because he ’ s journey to the wheel enlightened... 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Supervising Sound Editor / Re-Recording Mixer Coll Anderson M.P.S.E was simply everywhere. ” a cathedral hot!";s:7:"keyword";s:29:"american experience the swamp";s:5:"links";s:1025:"Target Employee Website,
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