• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4241 0

the apparent approval of Roosevelt’s Forestry Service, Will offered his visions to the Florida Everglades Homebuilders Association, the Everglades Farming Association, and the South Florida Development League. Aiding Will’s boosterism was a legendary promoter of development in Florida: Napoleon Broward. A huge fan of Roosevelt’s, Broward was opposed to railroads, corporations, and Flagler’s populism. He claimed to be a Rooseveltian conservationist, but he favored only reclamation. And although he was a dedicated outdoorsman, he nevertheless led the campaign to drain the Everglades with considerable audacity. His conservationist rationale was that the wildlife could live around the newly drained Everglades communities. Broward thought of himself as standing up for the “little folks.” He believed that Flagler and other rich railroad men were “draining the people” from Florida, “instead of the swamp.” Roosevelt’s fingerprints aren’t found on any of the documents in this episode, but he clearly sided with Broward in the hope that south Florida could be made “fit for cultivation.”

A generation of Florida environmentalists never forgave Roosevelt for embracing the Gifford, Will, and Broward’s drainage scheme. They pointed out that Florida had plenty of land available for settlement without destroying the Everglades ecosystem. In The Swamp, Grunwald inventoried anti-drainage comments that became widespread in Florida: “a wildcat scheme,” “a sinful waste,” “nonsensical,” and so on. Roosevelt ignored such complaints, unconcerned that a big project (on the scale of the Panama Canal) in the Everglades might bankrupt the state, and that its effect on nature would be devastating. Because Broward was an ambitious reformer—opposed to child labor, opposed to the millinery industry, in favor of road expansion, and a committed educational activist—the Roosevelt administration approved of Florida’s building four canals in the Everglades. In 1908, the same year Roosevelt saved Mosquito Inlet, Tortugas Keys, Key West, Pine Island, Matlacha Pass, Palma Sola, and Island Bay Federal Bird Reservations in Florida, he named Napoleon Broward president of the National Drainage Congress.

Perhaps President Roosevelt supported the idea of draining the Everglades simply for reasons of political expediency. After all, Broward was a Rooseveltian reformer. The president had enough problems in the South without squaring off against Broward. And keep this in mind: even though Roosevelt approved twenty-four federal irrigation-drainage projects as president, not one was in Florida. After the Newlands Act of 1902, all his projects were in the West.77

Roosevelt, however, never approved a major project for draining the Everglades, and the plan never got off the ground. What’s curious about his implicit support of the idea, however, is that he simultaneously embraced the opposite logic with regard to the Panhandle and central Florida. There, Roosevelt created large national forests instead of approving drainage projects. Federal bird reservations were usually not more than five to 100 acres in area (there were exceptions, though) because they were confined to isolated islands and swamps. But the national forests sprawled over whole counties. On November 24, 1908, Roosevelt created the Ocala National Forest in central Florida. Pelican Island was only 55 acres; Ocala covered 607 square miles. It ran nearly from the Atlantic to the Gulf. According to Frank M. Chapman, who knew the area inside-out, the name “Ocala” came from the Timucuan Indians and meant “big hammock.” This region was where Chapman had cut his teeth as an ornithologist in the 1870s. The Ocala ecosystem was like a recharge battery for the entire Floridan aquifer. The new national forest contained more than 600 natural lakes and ponds. The management of Ocala National Forest was similar to that of the forests of the west, 78 but Roosevelt wanted the waterways to remain pristine, with no urban pollution.

Today Florida treasures the Ocala National Forest. Situated between Marineland on the Atlantic and