Everglades National Park is unique in America’s National Park System in many ways, not least because it is a wetland and did not, when it was proposed in the late 1920s, feature the typical scenic attractions of most units of the system.

Wet, flat, hot, buggy, home to snakes and alligators, and difficult to access, it could not be as tourist friendly as many parks, and recreational opportunities would be limited – about the only way to experience it deeply would be by boat. In From Swamp to Wetland, a most descriptive title, environmental historian Chris Wilhelm explains how the uniqueness of the Glades made it an unusual candidate for national park status because it was considered a swamp, and swamps were wasteland that needed conversion to usefulness for the human population.  They should be drained for agriculture or leased for minerals, oil exploration, or real estate development. The wetness had to go.

That a large portion of the Everglades achieved national park status and became “useful” in many important ways is the story Wilhelm tells in this excellent book.

Wilhelm begins by explaining the historical significance of the Everglades story. Most national parks before the Everglades featured what historian Alfred Runte calls “monumental” scenery, grand vistas of mountains or other “sublime” landscapes. The Everglades did not have this. Flat though it seemed to most, it featured a diversity of ecosystems, many unique in the United States. It had marine ecosystems and was habitat to a vast array of organisms from fish and marine mammals to orchids and magnificent wading birds like roseate spoonbills, wood storks, and 13 species of ibis and herons. The place was a biological wonderland.

Its marvels were, however, threatened from every side. Real estate and agricultural development interests hatched many schemes to drain the swamp. Wildlife, especially plume birds and alligators, were being pushed toward extermination by hunting and habitat destruction. The flow of water from north to south was being reduced by various projects, the very wetness that created the Everglades at risk.

Something had to be done or the Everglades would be destroyed, but making it a national park seemed an unlikely prospect.

Changes in understanding of nature and a growing awareness of what was at risk made the park possible, according to Wilhelm, but the process was long and tortuous. Biocentric and ecological perceptions of nature were emerging and new rationales for national parks were being proposed by National Park Service biologists and other park advocates. The conventional rationales for creating national parks, like economic benefits and recreation, were important to the Everglades creation story, but the rationales involving the values of wetlands were a big and historic part of it.

The fight for Everglades National Park began in 1928 and stretched until the park boundaries were finalized in 1958. Milestones along the way included Congressional passage of a bill authorizing the park in 1934, which would only be established when Florida had acquired all the land to be included in it and transferred it to the federal government. That was achieved, after a long political struggle, and in 1947 the “nucleus park” was created by the federal government; it was to be expanded to reach goals earlier agreed upon by the state and the National Park Service. The expansion and definition of final boundaries took another contentious 11 years, a contest that Wilhelm describes in detail.

As the story unfolds, Wilhelm explains the roles of key players in the long battle for the park. First was Ernest Coe, a New England nurseryman who moved to Miami in 1925 hoping to participate in the land boom underway there but which busted soon after he arrived. He found that he loved the Everglades and vowed to protect them.

Wilhelm calls Coe a “proto-environmentalist” because from the beginning of his advocacy for the national park in 1928 he used ecological and biocentric arguments for protection as well as the usual economic, aesthetic, and recreational rationales then the basis for most national park advocacy. Coe’s campaign for the national park faced more complications than was usual: the nature of the park challenged traditions of the National Park System; he had to change perceptions of the place from useless swamp to valuable wetland; he was proposing a park to protect charismatic wildlife, but also flora; he needed to convince the community and the National Park Service that tropicality was worthy of protection and make the case the Everglades were a unique tropical landscape; and he had to make the case that a park defined by its water met national park standards. To do all this he needed to educate, publicize, and lobby. He founded the Everglades National Park Association to do this work, an organization he led for many years.

Coe was remarkably successful with his advocacy, convincing powerful people in Florida, the national conservation community, and the National Park Service, that a national park in the Everglades should be established. He was not averse to making the case to Florida politicians and residents that the park would be good for the economy. As his campaign unfolded, George Wright, a Park Service wildlife biologist, was campaigning for more emphasis on wildlife conservation in national parks, arguing that tourism was damaging wildlife and that parks ought to be established and managed with habitats and ranges of species considered alongside visitor services.

Wright and his colleague’s work strengthened and informed Coe’s advocacy. As interest in the park idea grew, the Park Service sent leaders to investigate, and they affirmed Coe’s biological and ecological rationales for the park. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and William Wharton of the National Parks Association, whose leader Robert Sterling Yard didn’t think the park a good idea, were dispatched to determine if the Everglades were up to national park standards, and found beauty and sublimity there, inspired mostly by the wildlife they observed. Yard was a wilderness advocate and, won over to the park proposal by the report of his colleagues, was part of the successful effort to protect wilderness there. Bills to authorize the park were introduced in Congress, and after several years of political battle, the park was authorized in 1934. Wilhelm writes, “The ENP’s wilderness was not only the first congressionally mandated wilderness area, it was the nation’s first biocentric wilderness and challenged prevailing ideas about wilderness as roadlessness.”

The authorization was only the beginning of the struggle for the park, as Wilhelm reveals in depth. Money had to be raised and land acquired, and while Coe was a master publicist and lobbyist, he was an inadequate manager of the funding phase of the park campaign. From 1937 to 1941 the effort stalled, but it was revived by Florida Gov. Spessard Holland who, if Coe had embodied an “interwar proto-environmentalism,” embodied “a new Sunbelt environmentalism.”

Holland “understood how the park’s economic values were derived from the Glades’ biological values and hence embraced the case for environmental preservation.” Wilhelm explains how Holland supported the park and the challenges that came at this stage from opponents of the park on the grounds that oil and mineral values were being sacrificed. Holland would be a strong Everglades National Park advocate when he moved on to Congress. Oil exploration forced the National Park Service and Gov. Holland to move decisively, and since funding land acquisition was lagging, a wildlife refuge was created in the contested area as a stopgap measure.

Holland was succeeded in the governor’s office by Millard Caldwell who, in 1945, brought Miami Herald editor John Pennekamp into the fray. Pennekamp’s involvement “was not necessarily born out of his strong love for the Everglades or deep concern for nature.” He was ordered by his boss, John S. Knight, the paper’s owner, to join the park effort. Wilhelm explains how this happened.

Around 1945, Holland sat next to Knight on an airplane flight from Washington, D.C., to Florida and convinced Knight to support the park’s creation. Knight called Pennekamp into his office the next day and Pennekamp “was told to put The Herald’s full support behind it and give as much of his personal time as possible.”

Pennekamp became Gov. Caldwell’s point person on the park, and he proved much more collaborative, pragmatic, and adept politically than Coe had been. Still, the effort to acquire land by donation and raise the money necessary to buy it lagged. A breakthrough came when Pennekamp proposed that since Florida was “flush with cash” as its economy boomed at the end of World War II, it might step into the funding breach.

“Pennkamp suggested something that had seemed impossible during the Great Depression and World War II: the state of Florida could simply appropriate money to buy park lands.”

Gov. Caldwell, to the surprise of many, supported the idea, and with Pennekamp’s lobbying and Caldwell’s approval, the legislature approved $2 million for acquisition of private lands in the Everglades. “In an astonishing turn of events, Florida’s state government quickly and without debate appropriated these funds and essentially created the park. Buoyed by a vibrant economy, lawmakers invested in future growth through the ENP’s creation.”

Following approval of the appropriation, negotiations between the state and National Park Service regarding minimal boundaries and state mineral rights were resolved, and, after a decade of political maneuvering, wrangling, and frustration, “On June 20, 1947, Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug officially created Everglades National Park.”

Wilhelm does a thorough and masterful job of describing all the politics, the agreements, and disagreements, that led to this historic moment.

The park was created, but “[T]he boundary of this 'nucleus' park encompassed 1,228,488 acres, but only 451,841 of those acres were actually owned by the federal government and included in the park. This temporary boundary would serve as a nucleus for expansion.”

The political fights were not over and would be engaged for the next 11 years. A strong and organized effort to stymie park expansion was mounted, principally by large landowners. Daniel A. McDougal, Ivar, and Mary Axelson led a landowner campaign that “saw the park as a threat to their own short-term and immediate profits.”

Wilhelm recounts how the struggle centered around issues of mineral rights and oil drilling. On the one side were those fighting for park expansion, arguing that boundaries established to protect biological and ecological values of the park by acquiring critical wildlife habitat should achieved, seeking not only to protect the Everglades and its biota, but “to further encourage Americans to appreciate and respect the inherent values of all life.”

On the other side was the landowner opposition, led by the McDougal–Axelson family’s view of nature. “The family subscribed to a capitalist frontier ethos where nature needed to be ‘improved’ by human actions and converted into capital. They believed government and other social institutions existed to facilitate the exploitation, not to protect lands for the broader public or for future generations.” A small amount of oil was found on the contested lands – not enough for commercial exploitation but enough to buttress the anti-expansion arguments -- and the landowners exacted some concessions on mineral rights and oil royalties, but on June 23, 1958, “both the House and the Senate approved the ENP boundaries on voice votes without debate. On February 25, 1959, the State of Florida and the federal government completed the deed exchanges for the recently approved boundaries.”

From Swamp to Wetland is about creation of Everglades National Park, but Wilhelm appends two short chapters about issues of managing this unique park to this day, especially the challenges of assuring water flow essential to its flourishing. The issue of sustaining the sheet flow of water into the southern Everglades, the “River of Grass” as Marjorie Stoneman Douglas called it in her classic book of that subtitle, is one of the critical challenges even today.

In his treatment of the creation story, Wilhelm places this park story in historical context and highlights its historic importance. This was a park dedicated to biological and ecological preservation, and this required adjustment of Park Service tradition and policy. It also required reframing public and political perception of the value of a swamp and redefinition of such a wet place as an ecologically valuable wetland worthy of national park status, thus Wilhelm’s apt title.

He writes that the park was “perhaps the strongest expression of a new environmental view of nature that first emerged in the 1930s before becoming widely adopted in the 1960s.” While he describes its role but does not highlight the National Park Service in the story, he reveals how agency biologists and advocates of reform like George Wright and Daniel Beard impacted its thinking about what a national park might be. Wilhelm also documents how park advocacy groups like the National Parks Association adapted to new thinking about national park standards, and how wilderness initially became a consideration in park-making. The Everglades National Park creation saga played a significant role in many ways in national park history.

This book, flawed somewhat by many minor but annoying errors that should have been caught by a good proofreader, deserves a place on the shelf of anyone interested in the history of America’s national parks. In particular it joins Douglas’ The Everglades: River of Grass (1947) and Jack E. Davis’ An Everglades Province” Marjorie Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century (2009) as must-reads for anyone interested in the history of Everglades National Park.