On the Importance of Environmental
Claims-Making: The Role of James O. Wright
in Promoting the Drainage of Florida’s Everglades
in the Early Twentieth Century
Christopher F. Meindl,* Derek H. Alderman,** and Peter Waylen***
*Department of History & Geography, Georgia College & State University
**Department of Geography, East Carolina University
***Department of Geography, University of Florida
Responding to recent calls to analyze the authoritative role of scientists in producing environmental knowledge,
this article conceptualizes applied scientists as “environmental claims-makers” who play an influential role in shaping how the public perceives and interacts with the environment. Analyzing the knowledge claims of scientists, particularly applied scientists, requires a consideration of both cognitive and interpretive claims-making activities. The
concept of environmental claims-making is used in analyzing the historical geography of one of North America’s
most famous wetland landscapes—the Florida Everglades. Specifically, we examine the role played by engineer
James O. Wright in making scientific claims about the Everglades and its climate and how he (and others) used
these claims to promote reclamation of this wetland during the early twentieth century. Our study critiques Wright’s
claims-making activities, evaluating the quality of environmental knowledge he constructed, the social and economic context within which his knowledge claims were interpreted and appropriated, the lasting impact that these
claims had on settlement patterns, and the hazards of future scientific/engineering claims. Wright made fundamental errors in calculating how much water would need to be removed from the landscape in order to make it agriculturally productive. At the same time, Florida politicians and the South Florida real-estate industry used both
Wright’s work and his status as a scientist to represent the Everglades to prospective land buyers as an agricultural
paradise. Flaws in Wright’s drainage plan become clear only after thousands of people purchased land in South Florida that remained subject to periodic flooding. Experts were utilized in an effort to reclaim the Everglades, but the
complexity of the Everglades ecosystem and the chronic lack of funds doomed the project until the 1950s. It took
more than half a century of research and the technical and financial resources of the federal government to finally
convert significant chunks of this vast wetland into productive farmland. Key Words: applied science, environmental
claims-making, Florida Everglades, hydroclimatology.
T
he Florida Everglades serve as a lightning rod for
much of the discussion regarding environmental
restoration (Culotta 1995; Walker and Solecki
2001). Scientists and policy-makers alike are under heavy
pressure to carefully consider and reconsider virtually
every step they take in the U.S. $8 billion attempt to
restore parts of this wetland ecosystem to some semblance
of its predrainage condition (Gunderson 2001; Kiker,
Milon, and Hodges 2001). Some of this pressure is a
result of the fact that if state and federal governments
spend $8 billion on an environmental restoration project
and fail, it may be a long time before people allow their
government to attempt similar projects elsewhere. Additional pressure comes, no doubt, from the burden of history and the fact that early-twentieth-century decisionmakers pursued Everglades reclamation before they knew
(or could know) the consequences of their actions. As
much as we have learned about the Everglades over the
past century, today’s scientists and policy-makers are
painfully aware that there is still much they do not know
or understand about this ecosystem.
Given that current restoration efforts seek to correct
and compensate for reclamation attempts that began almost a century ago, it is worthwhile to revisit the historically important but flawed claim that Florida’s Everglades could be successfully drained and developed (see
Table 1 for an outline of events related to the history of
this claim).1 While reclamation involved many social
actors and groups, engineers played an important role as
scientific experts and advisers to government and development interests. Not only did they assert and seek to
demonstrate that drainage of the Everglades was feasible,
but their assumed intellectual authority helped legitimize
the project socially and politically. We conceptualize these
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92(4), 2002, pp. 682–701
© 2002 by Association of American Geographers
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.
Role of James O. Wright in Promoting the Drainage of Florida’s Everglades
Table 1. Critical Events in the Early Development
of the Everglades
1845
1847
1850
1881
1896
1902
1905
1906
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
1926
1928
1931
1938
1947
Florida attains statehood
Buckingham Smith reports on the Everglades
Swamp Land Act grants wetlands to Florida
Hamilton Disston begins work in Florida
Disston venture in Florida ends; Railroad reaches Miami
USDA establishes Bureau of Drainage Investigations
Napoleon Broward becomes Governor of Florida; James
Wright joins USDA
Broward begins Everglades reclamation; Wright begins
data collection in glades
Richard Bolles buys a half million acres in the Everglades
Wright completes preliminary report (abstract) and State
of Florida makes copies available to the public; Real
estate companies start selling land in the Everglades
Wright becomes Florida’s Chief Drainage Engineer
Wright’s original report is published in Senate
Document 89
Congressional investigation regarding the Everglades;
Wright resigns
First settlers arrive in the Everglades
Hurricane and associated flooding kills over 200 in the
Everglades
Hurricane and associated flooding kills over 1800 in the
Everglades
Everglades Drainage District goes bankrupt; Reclamation
work stalls
Hoover Dike is completed around Lake Okeechobee
Widespread flooding in South Florida provokes more
comprehensive reclamation by the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers
engineers and other applied scientists as “environmental
claims-makers.” Their knowledge claims significantly
shaped the way people understood the physical geography of the Everglades, especially the perceived risks (or
downplaying of such risks) in modifying these wetlands
for human use. Claims-making activity refers not only to
the process of offering specific technical evaluations or
assessments of nature, but also to the conversion of those
technical ideas into social facts that become accepted and
put to use in the public arena. This article examines the
role played by early-twentieth-century engineer James O.
Wright in making scientific claims about the Everglades
and its climate, and how he (and others) used these
claims to promote reclamation of South Florida’s wetlands.
A mid-level drainage engineer in the United States
Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Drainage Investigations, Wright is an underanalyzed figure in the historical geography of the Everglades and American wetlands
in general. As Myers (1998, 1) illustrates in examining
the role of one intellectual in shaping colonial spaces in
Africa, there is great utility in carrying out a “contextu-
683
alized biography” that examines the actions and words
of influential people in relation to the larger landscape
changes they help create. By focusing attention on
Wright, we illustrate that an environmental claims-maker
does not necessarily have to be an expert of great talent
or high status within their field. In this respect, Wright
prompts us to consider how even the most average of
scientists can influence (and be influenced by) publicpolicy demands. His scientific claims and subsequent report, while controversial in their time and certainly at
present, played an influential role not just in shaping
scientific and political thought about the Everglades, but
also in serving as a promotional platform for the realestate community directing much of the development in
this fragile ecosystem (Meindl 2000). Not until thousands of people had purchased land in the Everglades (or
just “glades”) did it become clear that Wright had seriously underestimated the task (not to mention the desirability) of draining this wetland system.
This article is intended to be an integrative examination of the Everglades. Head (2000) notes the importance of bringing human- and physical-geography lines
of inquiry together when analyzing environmental change.
With this in mind, the three authors of this article represent the subfields of environmental historical geography,
cultural geography, and hydroclimatology, respectively.
Our study critiques Wright’s claims-making activities,
evaluating the quality of environmental knowledge he
constructed, the social and economic context within
which his knowledge claims were interpreted and appropriated, the lasting impact that these claims had on settlement patterns, and the hazards of future scientific/
engineering claims. The social importance of Wright’s
work—or of any scientific claim, for that matter—is a
product of empirical results as presented, interpreted,
and used in a particular political, economic, and geographical context (Kirsch 2000). In Wright’s case, for
example, his work on the feasibility of reclaiming the
Everglades was initiated and embraced in an era when
conservation of natural resources meant converting what
appeared to be “worthless” landscapes into productive
ones (Hays 1959).
In addition to shedding light on the historical geography of the Everglades, we seek to understand more generally the social construction of environmental knowledge by scientists, particularly applied scientists. In an
article recently published in this journal, Demeritt
(2001, 309) calls for “a more reflexive understanding of
science as a situated and ongoing social practice.” According to Demeritt, a reflexive understanding of science
is not about disregarding scientific results out of hand as
mere cultural constructions or representations. Rather, it
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Meindl, Alderman, and Waylen
is about understanding the social processes by which scientists produce knowledge about the world. Demeritt
(1996, 485) also asserts that while geographers recognize
the socially constructed nature of scientific knowledge,
they have tended to treat science as a “monolithic enterprise.” Consequently, there has been a shortage of empirical studies that examine the specific, knowledge-creating
practices of scientists. The historical case of James
Wright illustrates the importance of recognizing that scientific knowledge and its social power are constructed
through a process of claims-making. Using the words
“claim” and “claims-maker” allows us to focus on questions that transcend the Everglades: How and where
does environmental knowledge originate? Who owns
and manages the production and consumption of ideas
about nature? What economic and political interests are
served (and not served) by certain knowledge constructs?
And—of great importance to geographers—how do scientific representations of the world play a role in reshaping
landscapes in profound and sometimes detrimental ways?
Conceptual Framework:
A Claims-Making Approach
Geographers are increasingly interested in evaluating
the quality of environmental knowledge and the processes and politics that underlie its production and consumption within society (e.g., Taylor and Buttel 1992;
Demeritt 1994, 1996, 1998, 2001; Murdoch and Clark
1994; Castree 1995; Eden 1998; Mackenzie 2000). With
this interest has come a critical appraisal of scientists and
their often-unquestioned authority in defining environmental issues for the public, sometimes to the exclusion
of lay or nonscientific perspectives. As Benton and Short
(1999, 148–49) observe: “In our modern society, knowledge and truth have been understood to belong to the
domain of science . . . Scientific knowledge has become
absolute and authoritative; science has been presented as
objective, morally neutral, and detached from social
concerns.” In reality, as Castree (2001, 9) notes, “[T]here
is no easy way to separate objective observations from
social biases and political interests,” no matter how “rigorous and scientific one’s investigations of the natural
might be.” Science, according to Williams (2000, 503),
“operates as a collective human enterprise” that is influenced by “paradigmatic blinders,” “institutional parameters,” and “social negotiations and cultural conventions.”
The socially negotiated and constructed nature of
knowledge is especially apparent in applied science, such
as when scientists are commissioned to assist government officials and regulatory agencies in making deci-
sions. Although the term “regulatory science” is employed most often in referring to the use of science in
formulating policy, Salter (1988) uses the phrase “mandated science” to emphasize how policy considerations
can initiate and condition the construction of scientific
knowledge. In a regulatory or mandated scientific setting, government and industry become heavily involved
in the production and certification of knowledge. According to Jasanoff (1990, 78), “Science carried out in
non-academic settings may be subordinated to institutional pressures that critically influence researchers’ attitudes to issues of proof and evidence. These orientations
in turn affect the packaging and presentation of scientific results.”
As Eden (1998) observes, recent work on environmental knowledge questions the assumption that flows
of information from science to policy and society are
one-way and uncontaminated. Instead, environmental
knowledge goes through a process of mutual negotiation
and reconstruction, as scientists and policy-makers interact with each other. Although these interactions are perhaps most visible when we examine the work of applied
scientists, policy demands can inform and shape the research practices of those involved in upstream or hard
science, as Demeritt (2001) found when he examined
attempts to model global warming.
Despite (or because) applied scientists are deeply involved in public-policy issues and challenge the divide
often drawn between science and politics, conventional
academic wisdom has ascribed them with a lower status
than their counterparts in hard or basic research science.
Yet applied science has played a central role in the interpretation, representation, and transformation of the
natural environment. As Colten contends (1998, 199),
“Throughout the twentieth century, engineers, in conjunction with construction crews, arguably did more to
reshape the physical form of the United States than did
any other single group.” Swyngedouw (1999, 457) explores the strong relationship between water engineering
and the project of remaking and modernizing the geography of Spain in the early twentieth century. He refers to
water engineers as “producers of socionature.” “Socionature” is a concept that recognizes the hybrid character
of the social and the natural, a perspective that runs
counter to traditional studies of water landscapes, which
have tended to separate the two into independent objects of study. Engineers, whether in the United States or
Spain, are powerful mediators between the social and
natural because of their assumed legitimacy as “holders
of scientific knowledge” and “their privileged position
as a politically elite corps within the state apparatus”
(Swyngedouw 1999, 460). Lowney and Best (1998, 93–94)
Role of James O. Wright in Promoting the Drainage of Florida’s Everglades
discuss the social influence of applied scientists on public
policy, suggesting that they function as important
“claims-makers”:
In complex societies, the authority to interpret particular
aspects of reality—the “ownership” of these topics—often
resides in experts, those acknowledged to have special
knowledge and interpretive skills. In particular . . . scientists
claim to offer the most authoritative interpretations of the
natural world and, although scientific constructions can
be challenged . . . scientific claims usually receive respectful hearings. Although scientists leave the realm of “pure”
science when they offer applications of their knowledge
in hopes of shaping social policy, their social standing as
experts ensures that their recommendations are taken
seriously. Thus alliances between scientists and the state
form the basis for much of twentieth century public policy.
. . . Scientists and other experts have become important
policy claims-makers . . . identifying problems and offering
solutions.
The notion of claims-making is a useful way of conceptualizing the influence that applied scientists wield in
constructing and disseminating environmental knowledge. Aronson (1984) and Hannigan (1995), among others
(e.g., McMullan and Eyles 1999; Driedger and Eyles
2001) suggest that the production of all scientific knowledge is a process of articulating, defending, and negotiating claims on how reality should be interpreted and represented. Claims to knowledge are not simply factual
assertions but are, Demeritt (1996, 485) points out, “claims
to power,” contests over “what will count for real knowledge and whose voices will be heard in struggles to define
it.” A claims-making approach recognizes the power of
language within environmental practice and politics.
Recent literature has established the importance of examining how people talk about and represent the environment (Dryzek 1997; Cantrill and Oravec 1996; Harré,
Brockmeier, and Mühlhäusler 1999). According to Benton and Short (1999, 2), descriptions and explanations
of the world are part of “environmental discourses” that
“pattern thought, beliefs and practices, and allow us to
understand why human-environmental relationships
take the forms that they do.” As Golinski (1998, 104) argues, scientific language does not simply reflect or record
reality but “works to persuade its audiences that they can
read through it to apprehend nature.” In speaking for nature, the knowledge claims of applied scientists are particularly persuasive, contributing to the discourse of public science (Stocking and Holstein 1993). In the realm of
public science, scientific claims are often appropriated
and used by corporations, mass media, governments, and
other special interests to augment their own representations of the environment.
685
Scientists engage in claims-making in at least two ways
(Aronson 1984). First, scientists make “cognitive claims”
when they seek to describe the nature of reality within
their research findings. Cognitive claims-making involves the creation and certification of scientific “facts”
or data and the presentation of those findings to a larger
scientific or professional community. Although cognitive claims-making may appear to be simply a technical
process, we cannot forget that the very methods and instruments we choose to use are an outcome of social and
historical relations among scientists (Latour and Woolgar 1979). Moreover, as advocates of actor-network theory might suggest, scientists construct their knowledge
claims by tying together a wide range of heterogeneous
actors, including nonhuman ones such as machines,
data, and even nature itself (Zehr 1994).
Second, scientists also make “interpretive claims,”
seeking to establish the broader relevance of research
findings to policy-makers, experts in other fields, and the
public. According to Aronson (1984, 14), applied scientists frequently engage in interpretive claims-making
activities, such as interpreting “research findings in the
light of administratively defined objectives and contingencies.” Prediction—particularly the evaluating of risks—is
an important and often controversial aspect of making
interpretive scientific claims (Jasanoff 1990; McMullan
and Eyles 1999). The conventional science community
has tended to de-emphasize the importance of interpretive claims as real scientific knowledge, dismissing them
as a matter of public relations or even sensationalism. As
Aronson (12) points out, however, interpretive claims
represent important scientific work because they “legitimate science as socially necessary . . . and such legitimation is essential to the existence of organized science.”
Moreover, the public often relies upon the interpretive
claims of applied scientists to define or frame social problems and solutions for them, particularly those in the
often technical and unfamiliar realm of environmental
science.
Asserting that science involves the making and promoting of claims does not deny the hard work and integrity that frequently goes into scientific research. Rather,
a claims-making perspective focuses on how scientific assertions are articulated, interpreted, and used as viable
and authoritative representations of the world. We employ what Williams (1998, 493) calls a “revised constructionist” perspective on environmental problems.
Our critique of environmental knowledge does not deny
the existence of a physical world independent of constructions and interpretations. Yet we do not embrace
the “realist” tendency of seeing scientists as simply discoverers of what is real. We recognize, as Williams (1998,
686
Meindl, Alderman, and Waylen
476) argues, that “[O]ur knowledge of [the world] . . . is
always mediated, indirect, and pragmatically motivated.”
Such an approach does not necessarily “lead to a relativizing perspective where no claim of reality is thought
to be better than any other” (Williams 1998, 489). Indeed, as we illustrate later in this article, inaccurate yet
influential constructions of knowledge can have negative environmental consequences.
Analyzing the knowledge claims of scientists, particularly applied scientists, requires a consideration of both
cognitive and interpretive claims-making activities. This
idea is echoed in the work of Lowney and Best (1998,
95), who contend that claims made by applied scientists
consist of two elements: (1) research findings that serve
as the scientific foundation for a claim; and (2) “contextualized interpretations,” or the incorporation of scientific “facts” within a framework of cultural values and
social action. In our view, a critical analysis of claimsmaking examines, on the one hand, the scientific methods,
assumptions, and data that go into articulating a specific
claim and, on the other hand, how that claim is used by
applied scientists and other social actors to promote and
shape public policy. Scholars such as Hilgartner and Bosk
(1988) and Ungar (1992) have recognized the importance of the latter element, asserting that claims-making
activities cannot be studied outside the context of the
“public arenas” within which they emerge and operate.
The term “public arena” recognizes how claims-making
is inherently politicized. Public attention is a scarce resource, and any number of environmental claims may be
competing for dominance at one time (Hilgartner and
Bosk 1988; Driedger and Eyles 2001). One scientific
claim may have greater influence over another if it supports the interests of powerful political and economic
actors or “sponsors,” or if it runs parallel with prevailing
ideological visions within society. By analyzing the political and ideological context of scientific claims, we
acknowledge the obvious importance of larger social
processes and institutions in reconfiguring natural environments (Robbins 1998). A “public arena” perspective
is also sensitive to the interactions and convergence of
interests between a claims-maker and other social actors
in government, media, and business circles. According
to Demeritt (1996, 500), geographers have been reluctant until recently to talk about the social relations “in
and about” science. He argues that the realization that
scientific knowledge is embodied and mediated “makes it
no less useful for understanding and living in our world.”
Indeed, recognizing that science is a social enterprise
helps us view scientific experts, their knowledge claims,
and the consequences of those claims in a more critical
and evaluative light.
Objectives
We organize the remainder of our article into four
broad objectives and sections. First, recognizing the importance of the public arena within which environmental claims emerge, we review the political, social, and
geographic context within which James Wright conducted his survey of the Florida Everglades. At the same
time, however, we do not want to de-emphasize the importance of Wright as an environmental and scientific
agent. Consequently, we devote attention to providing
a synopsis of his personal and scientific background and a
summary of his report on the feasibility of draining the
Florida Everglades.
Second, we evaluate some of the “cognitive claims”
that Wright constructed about the physical geography of
the Everglades and how best to “reclaim” or remake the
glades for human use and exploitation. We pose the following questions about the scientific methods and assumptions used by Wright in his report. First, was Wright’s
precipitation data sufficient to draw conclusions about
the feasibility of the proposed drainage project? Second,
in light of the flooding that occurred in the Everglades
after the proposed canals were completed, did Wright
make proper use of the precipitation data available?
Rather than engage in an exhaustive analysis of Wright’s
work, our goal is to examine these two critical scientific
issues associated with Wright’s widely publicized report.
Third, we examine Wright’s “interpretive claimsmaking activities,” or how he promoted his scientific
claims in the public-policy arena. Although his work was
popular among people interested in promoting the potential economic value of the Everglades, Wright drew
criticism and controversy both inside and outside the
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), thus
illustrating how the authority and legitimacy of environmental claims-making can be challenged. We will also
show how actors in the South Florida real-estate community used both Wright and his work to represent the
Everglades to prospective land buyers as an agricultural
paradise. Many Everglades boosters claimed that Wright
was a leading authority on drainage, and they encouraged others to accept his conclusions at face value.
Finally, we assess the role of Wright’s contemporaries
in their efforts to drain the Everglades. Wright resigned
as Florida’s chief drainage engineer in 1912, and although
his immediate successors appeared to have achieved
modest success in draining portions of the glades, precipitation data suggest that such success may have been
more apparent than real: Miami (and, presumably, most
of South Florida) received less than average rainfall from
1913 through 1918 (see Meindl 2000). Furthermore, even
Role of James O. Wright in Promoting the Drainage of Florida’s Everglades
today’s scientists are still learning about all of the biophysical complexities of the Everglades system (Gunderson 2001). Even though Wright’s inaccurate engineering
claims appeared to have been corrected, widespread
flooding throughout South Florida during the late 1940s
convinced subsequent authorities that flood control and
water management in this region are far more complex
tasks than mere drainage.
Setting: The Larger Political and
Ideological Context
Florida attained statehood in 1845, and despite substantial military activity against Seminole Indians in the
southern part of the state between 1835 and 1842 (Mahon
1967), South Florida—especially the interior—remained
terra incognita for most people throughout the nineteenth century. Wetlands covered more than half the
state (Dahl 1990) and even more of South Florida. Accordingly, state officials begged the federal government
to study the glades and determine the practicability of reclaiming southern Florida’s swamps. In 1847, the federal
government authorized Buckingham Smith to prepare
such a report, which he submitted a year later (see U.S.
Senate 1911). In his report, Smith combined personal
observations of the territory with testimony from military officers who operated in the glades during the Seminole War. He could not think of a solitary inducement to
offer any prospective settler except that the area rested
“entirely below the region of frost,” an inaccurate claim
highlighted by later boosters (Smith, quoted in U.S.
Senate 1911, 53). Yet Smith provided a hint of the
power and influence that James Wright and subsequent
engineers would have in later years when he suggested
that “he who causes two sheaves of wheat to grow where
only one grew before, better deserves the thanks of his
race than the author, the legislator, or the victorious
general” (U.S. Senate 1911, 53). It is hard to overstate
the idea in the heads of upper-class white males during
the nineteenth century that land must be made to produce tangible products for people to be of any value. In
any event, Smith concluded that the glades could and
should be drained by digging canals across South Florida.
In 1850, Congress tried to help by passing the Swamp
Land Act, which granted to Florida and other states all of
the swamp and overflowed lands within their borders
(Vileisis 1997). The act stipulated that proceeds from
the sale of these lands were to be used only for the construction of levees and drains needed to reclaim these
wetlands. Florida created an Internal Improvement Fund
to sell wetlands and spend the revenue on drainage, but
687
due to a lack of interest in the region, there remained
little cash with which to carry out Buckingham Smith’s
recommendation (Blake 1980).
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the
state of Florida granted land (frequently wetlands) to
corporations in exchange for railroad construction. As
Carter (1974, 58) points out, “[H]alf the nation was a
newly opened frontier made up of states vying to attract
people and money; in bidding for Florida’s share, state officials knew that the only major negotiable assets at their
command were the public lands, and these they gave
away recklessly.” Less than half of the 564 railroads chartered ever laid track (Vance 1985). Moreover, the limited railroad construction between 1850 and 1865 suffered heavy damage during the Civil War. Florida then
engaged in a protracted legal battle to maintain possession of its remaining wetlands in the face of war debts it
could not repay.
Philadelphia businessman Hamilton Disston singlehandedly rescued the state in 1881 by purchasing four
million acres of swampland in central and southern
Florida for $1 million (Dovell 1947). Disston and his
engineers soon realized that they must lower Lake
Okeechobee if they wanted to reclaim wetlands immediately south of the big lake (Figure 1). Accordingly, they
dug several canals, including a thirteen-mile ditch from
the southern edge of the lake into the glades that was
later used as the beginning of one of Wright’s canals. The
nationwide panic of 1893 dealt a crippling blow to this
enterprise, and after a tremendous storm in September
1894 flooded almost all of South Florida, some farmers
on the edge of the Everglades complained that Disston’s
canals were responsible for the flood damage. Swamped
with financial difficulties, Disston died in 1896, ending
his company’s reclamation efforts in South Florida.
In essence, although a few nineteenth-century entrepreneurs considered draining and developing the Everglades, none of those schemes amounted to anything
(Moses 1947; Hanna and Hanna 1948). Therefore, when
census takers canvassed Florida in 1890, they found less
than 2,400 people on the Florida mainland south of
Lake Okeechobee, and most of these were scattered in
tiny hamlets along the coast. Indeed, South Florida—
dominated by the Everglades—remained a wetland wilderness until the Florida East Coast Railroad reached
Miami in 1896.
Wetlands posed several problems for nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century Americans. For one thing, it
was thought that wetlands produced foul air that caused
malaria, a common disease of the time (Thompson 1969).
Even after it was discovered that certain species of mosquitoes transmitted malaria, wetlands remained frightening
688
Meindl, Alderman, and Waylen
Figure 1. Map of South Florida and the historic Everglades.
environments because they were home to the insects
that spread the disease. Furthermore, inasmuch as many
people used to earn their living as farmers, wetlands were
a nuisance because they not only precluded the planting
of traditional crops, but served as a home for birds that
consumed crops produced on adjacent uplands. Of course,
for people traveling mostly by horse and buggy or even
automobile on crude roads, wetlands were a significant
hindrance in terms of transportation (Winsor 1987). As
a result of these problems, Mitsch and Gosselink (1993,
31) note, “[F]rom the middle of the nineteenth century
to the middle of the twentieth century, the United
States went through a period in which wetland removal
was not questioned. Indeed, it was considered the proper
thing to do.”
The early 1900s were the heart of the Progressive Era,
a time when government at all levels abandoned laissezfaire policies for greater involvement in social and economic issues. For example, most early-twentieth-century
Progressives believed that the nation could (and should)
make better use of its natural resources (Hays 1959).
Charles MacDonald (1908, 256), former president of the
American Society of Civil Engineers, echoed Buckingham Smith in his annual address for 1908: “If it can be
proved that two blades of grass can be grown where one
has heretofore been found to be the limit, it is certain
that the sources of power in Nature have been scientifically utilized, and the general wealth of the country
correspondingly increased.” Converting the apparently
“useless” Everglades into productive, tax-generating farmland was a Progressive dream. In South Florida, F. A.
Hendry made the case for reclaiming the Everglades in
1906: “Old Dame Nature has been fixing up this trick for
ages. She never does it all, but always leaves something
for man to do. It is here [in the Everglades that] she
temptingly invites man to roll up his sleeves and pitch
in” (quoted in Hendry 1906, 7). Imbued with the Progressive spirit, Congress passed the Newlands Reclamation Act in 1902, legislation that funded irrigation
projects designed to make arid lands throughout the
West agriculturally productive (Rowley 1996). At the
same time, drainage organizations around the country
lobbied for a similar national drainage service to help reclaim wetlands (Vileisis 1997). The hoped-for drainage
service never materialized, but Congress did create a
Bureau of Drainage Investigations within the USDA’s
Office of Experiment Stations in 1902.
Meanwhile, in Florida, gubernatorial candidate Napoleon B. Broward developed Everglades reclamation as
an issue during the 1904 campaign in an attempt to put
political distance between himself and other candidates.
Broward won the election, but as Brooks (1988, 42) suggests, “[I]n allowing the land [Everglades] question to
dominate his speaking, Broward was faced with all the
rhetorical liabilities surrounding the issue.” Serving as
his own publicist, engineer, and construction superintendent, Governor Broward launched Everglades reclamation in July 1906 (Knetsch 1991). That same year,
Broward asked the USDA for technical assistance.
The USDA instructed James Wright to determine the
feasibility of draining the Everglades; if this was possible,
Wright was to suggest the most practical means for such
a project. As Broward’s dredges laboriously attempted to
cut canals across the South Florida landscape, Wright
deployed survey crews into the glades during the winters
of 1906–1907 and 1907–1908 to collect data upon which
to base his report. By late December 1908, just before the
end of Broward’s term as governor, two dredges had managed to cut just six miles of canals each and had drained
little land. Making matters worse, the state did not have
enough money to continue the reclamation effort. In a
desperate attempt to generate the cash needed to continue digging canals, Broward sold real-estate developer
Role of James O. Wright in Promoting the Drainage of Florida’s Everglades
Richard J. Bolles a half-million acres of Everglades
swampland for $1 million. “This sale,” observes McCally
(1999, 94), “irrevocably committed the State of Florida
to a specific drainage project even before the first engineering study regarding its feasibility appeared.” A handful of other real-estate firms quickly followed suit, buying
South Florida swampland and accepting Broward’s
pledge that the state would soon drain the Everglades
(Randolph 1917). Just after the sale to Bolles, the Miami
News-Record (1908, 2) noted that “[F]or the past two
years most strenuous endeavors have been made to dispose of the Everglade lands, and the result has been, so
far as can be ascertained, that less than two hundred
acres have been sold to actual settlers, while land corporations have secured control of about two million acres.”
From 1910 to 1930, the Everglades became littered
with the dreams and even bodies of those who accepted
the Progressive ideal of making this wetland into an agricultural paradise (Meindl 2000). Drainage work did not
prevent a series of floods during the early 1920s, and
killer hurricanes in 1926 and in 1928 claimed the lives of
at least 2,000 people in the region. It is tempting to excuse politicians, promoters, and engineers associated
with initial attempts to drain and settle Florida’s Everglades. After all, Frederick Jackson Turner (1894) had
recently declared an end to the American frontier, Progressives insisted that scientists could help people make
better use of apparently “worthless” land, and few could
have foreseen the human suffering and environmental
problems that eventually occurred in the region. Or
could they? What data were available to those who first
tried to implement Everglades drainage schemes, and did
they interpret these data correctly? This is an important
issue, because misinterpretation of such information can
(and did) lead to erroneous beliefs regarding the settlement potential of places like the Everglades.
James Oliver Wright
David McCally (1999) argues that three principal
groups of actors dominated the Progressive Era drainage
effort in Florida: the state’s progressive politicians, USDA
engineers, and holders of large amounts of Everglades
land. Although all three greatly influenced the reshaping
of South Florida’s landscape, we contend that the engineering community—especially James Wright—was of
paramount importance. Even before completing his report, Wright spoke glowingly about the development
potential of the glades, and this provided Broward with
what he needed to sell large chunks of wetlands to developers (who subsequently peddled them to smaller inves-
689
tors and settlers). So who was this influential applied scientist, James Wright?
In spite of the role he played in promoting Everglades
drainage and development during the early twentieth
century, Wright remains a somewhat mysterious character. There is, however, important fragmentary evidence
of his background in the Encyclopedia of American Biography (Anonymous 1935). Unfortunately, Wright died just
a few years before publication of this volume, and the author of Wright’s biographical sketch penned a very flattering (if not entirely accurate) review of Wright’s professional accomplishments. According to this source,
Wright was born in North Carolina in 1850 and attended nearby Guilford College. It is not clear if he graduated; there is no record of his major academic interests
or courses of study. Wright then moved to Indiana where
he attended school, taught, and became a principal.
Wright eventually became the city engineer for Lafayette, Indiana (probably in the early 1880s) and it was
here—according to his biographer—that he gained significant engineering knowledge and experience. He later
worked for five years as an engineer for the city of Chicago, and then for almost a decade with the Louisiana
State Engineering Department. Although Wright’s biographer (Anonymous 1935, 100) claims that “the Federal
Government sent for him [in 1905] to become the drainage expert in the department of Agriculture,” it is clear
that Wright was only a middle-level engineer in the relatively new Bureau of Drainage Investigations. Wright’s
supervisor at the USDA, Charles G. Elliott, claimed in
testimony before Congress in 1912 that he hired Wright
because of his age and experience; Elliott noted that he
already had several young engineers without experience
under his direction (U.S. House of Representatives
1912, 1027). If anybody deserved to be labeled a drainage
expert, it was Elliott, who was a member of the American
Society of Civil Engineers and who wrote multiple editions of at least two books on the subject during his
career (Elliott 1912b, 1919). In any event, Wright is to
be credited with completing the first inventory of wetlands in the United States (Wright 1907), a work he finished just as he became involved in the Everglades.
The Wright Report(s)
Wright began to prepare his report on the feasibility
of reclaiming the Everglades in mid-1908. In early 1909,
before he completed his full report, he prepared an abstract or abbreviated version of his report that USDA
Secretary James Wilson allowed to be sent to the Florida
legislature—which promptly produced several thousand
copies for public consumption (McCally 1999). This
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Meindl, Alderman, and Waylen
preliminary report bubbled with optimism regarding the
feasibility of drainage and ultimate prospects for the
Everglades, and it fanned the flames of land speculation
in South Florida. Wright completed his full report in
May 1909, and it was approaching publication later that
summer when an interested real-estate man visited the
USDA and challenged some of the conclusions in Wright’s
abbreviated report. Overwhelmed with work up to this
point, Wright’s supervisor Elliott now took a much closer
look at his subordinate’s work (U.S. House of Representatives 1912, 523). He found enough errors in the report
to delay its publication, and in January 1910, he authorized the production of a form letter as a way of responding to the heavy volume of inquiries regarding the Everglades. Although this letter agreed that draining the
Everglades was “entirely feasible,” it added that “undoubtedly much time will yet be required before any considerable areas will be habitable or fitted for cultivation”
and that “the value of the lands when drained is still
largely problematical” (U.S. House of Representatives,
140–41). This was not what the real-estate community
wanted to hear, and within weeks they had convinced
Wilson to halt distribution of the form letter (Dovell 1947).
Meanwhile, Elliott prepared a revised edition of
Wright’s full report that included many more qualified
and cautionary statements, as well as much less exuberance, and attempted to have it published as Wright’s
report. The differing versions of the report became the
object of so much controversy within and outside the
USDA that Wilson ultimately cancelled their publication. Yet demand for information regarding the Everglades intensified. Prodrainage U.S. Senator Duncan U.
Fletcher (from Florida) convinced Congress to print a
compilation of documents and reports on the Everglades.
Printed in August 1911 as United States Senate Document
89, this collection of materials includes (among other
items) Wright’s original and unrevised report from 1909.
Duplicating its earlier attempt to promote land sales in
the glades, the state of Florida ordered thousands of
copies for distribution to the public—in essence, adding
the federal government’s prestige to the optimistic appraisal of Everglades reclamation (McCally 1999).
Wright’s original report, as it appears in U.S. Senate
Document 89, is only forty pages long—including maps
and tables. He devotes several pages to a discussion of the
region’s natural history, early descriptions of the Everglades, and the history of state efforts to develop South
Florida swamplands. He summarizes the work of his survey crew, including discussion of topographic data and
soil characteristics. After concluding that the most important problem is preventing overflow from the southern
shore of Lake Okeechobee into the Everglades proper,
Wright discards the idea of building a dike around the
lake as too expensive. In the remaining fifteen pages of
his report, he proposes digging several canals from the
southern and eastern shores of the big lake to various
points along the southeast Florida coast. He engages in a
brief analysis of the region’s precipitation, evaporation,
and runoff and develops specifications for canal size as
well as estimates of cost. Wright assures his readers that
the soil will be fertile when drained, that drainage will not
alter the region’s climate, and that Lake Okeechobee will
provide irrigation water during the dry season. His (1909)
eighteen-page abstract (which was sent to the Florida legislature) contains most of the material in the last fifteen
pages of his full report plus some introductory material.
Wright believed reclaiming the Everglades was not
complicated. In 1912, he told congressional investigators
that the engineering problems were quite simple: digging
a handful of appropriately sized canals to drain excess
water was all there was to it (U.S. House of Representatives 1912, 137). However, despite the completion of
four canals from Lake Okeechobee to the coast by 1917,
the inadequacy of Wright’s plan soon became apparent:
thousands of people owned land in the Everglades that
remained subject to periodic flooding. Several aspects of
Wright’s report could be examined in detail, such as his
understanding and use of evapotranspiration and other
hydrological variables, his estimates of cost, the projected impact of wetland drainage upon the region’s
organic soils, or the role of aquatic plants which later
choked drainage canals. We are interested in answering
two basic questions regarding the “cognitive claims”
contained in Wright’s report. First, was Wright’s precipitation data sufficient to draw conclusions about the feasibility of the proposed drainage project? Second, in light
of the flooding that occurred in the Everglades after the
proposed canals were completed, did Wright make
proper use of the precipitation data available?
Cognitive Claims-Making: Evaluating Wright’s Scientific Methods. As established earlier in this article, a
critical analysis of scientific claims-makers and their role
in shaping environmental knowledge must evaluate the
data and methods they use in making their specific “cognitive” claims or assertions about nature. It is important
to note that statistical analysis of climate data has advanced significantly since the early twentieth century
and that Wright should not be criticized for failing to use
methodologies that were developed after his report. For
example, the Generalized Extreme Value Distribution
(GEV)—which is currently used to represent the risks of
extreme events, such as the annual maximum twentyfour-hour rainfall—was derived later in the twentieth
Role of James O. Wright in Promoting the Drainage of Florida’s Everglades
century by Hosking, Wallis and Wood (1985), who followed the pioneering work on probability distributions
of extreme values by Fisher and Tippett (1928) and Jenkinson (1955). Furthermore, relatively recent work on
partial duration series shows that the number of events
that exceed some specified level in a particular timeperiod (e.g., the number of rainstorms in a year which exceed some critical level of interest) tend to be Gaussiandistributed when the critical level is close to the mean of
the process, and they tend to become more Poisson as the
critical level is established at less commonly encountered
levels (Cramer and Leadbetter 1967). In the simplest
partial-duration-series models, the peak magnitudes of
rainfall in each event are modeled by an exponential
distribution, although rainfall is generally modeled by distributions with greater skewness (Wilks 1993). Finally,
although bimonthly precipitation totals (championed by
Wright) are not a commonly used climatological variable
today, three-month totals are frequently used as seasonal
totals. They are recommended, for instance, as an optimal time period of aggregation to be used in the search of
El Niño events in historic records (Caviedes 2001).
Skewed distributions, such as the lognormal or log-Pearson
Type three, are frequently employed to model these data.
Be that as it may, the concept of risk or probability
was well established at the beginning of the twentieth
century, particularly in the context of Gauss’s normal, or
“normal law of errors,” an application of which appeared
as early as the mid-nineteenth century (Quetelet 1846).
The normal law of errors could be fit to, interpolate between, and extrapolate beyond a collection of empirical
observations. Moreover, Central Limit Theorem, originally proposed in varying forms by De Moivre and Laplace
in the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries respectively, can be invoked as a theoretical basis for the use of
the Gaussian distribution to model annual precipitation
(Chow 1954). In the case of bimonthly rainfall totals,
particularly during drier months, this variable may become positively skewed and can be corrected by the use
of a logarithmic transformation of the original data, as
first proposed by Napier in the seventeenth century. It is
therefore feasible to assume that an experienced engineer such as Wright could have used both the Gaussian
and log-normal distributions.
At this point, it is important to comment upon the
work of Charles G. Elliott, the leader of the USDA’s
drainage investigations unit and Wright’s supervisor. Although little is known of Elliott, he apparently had several years of experience in drainage work, and he wrote
extensively upon the subject. Like many engineers of his
generation, Elliott believed in wetland drainage, even as
he acknowledged that the field was still in its intellectual
691
infancy. He appears to have been familiar with somewhat complicated mathematics, but he remained convinced that sound principals and formulas of modest refinement were adequate in making drainage computations
(Elliott 1903, 1912a). On one hand, Elliott makes clear
that drainage engineers needed to design systems capable
of dealing with intense falls of rain over a twenty-fourto-forty-eight-hour period. On the other hand, he believed that ditches capable of removing one-half inch of
water from the landscape in a twenty-four-hour period
were more than adequate (Elliott 1912a, 156). Furthermore, Elliott makes no mention of estimating the probability of critical rainfall events. After engaging in a
preliminary study of the Everglades in 1904, he opined
that small portions of the glades (near the coast) could
probably be successfully drained, but he called for more
study of the problem (U.S. Senate 1911). In summary,
Elliott’s writings suggest that early-twentieth-century
drainage engineering was a young, only partially developed field, and although engineers could probably solve
many drainage problems encountered, good judgment
was critical (Elliott 1903, 1912a, 1912b, 1919; U.S.
Senate 1911).
Meanwhile, in terms of Wright and his work, one of
the first problems Wright encountered was a lack of data.
South and even Central Florida had only recently been
settled at the time of Wright’s report; therefore, precipitation records for most stations in this part of the state
dated only from the late 1890s. Such a short period of
record might reveal an inaccurate picture of any region’s
precipitation, especially extreme events. In addition to
the brevity of the precipitation record, Wright was hampered by the absence of meteorological data for the Everglades proper. The abbreviated version of Wright’s report (1909) contains no tabulations of precipitation data,
but his complete report (U.S. Senate 1911, 146–47) has
tables for both Kissimmee and Jupiter displaying monthly
precipitation totals and the annual twenty-four-hour
maximum rainfall for each year between 1898 and 1906
(see Figure 1). There is no explanation for Wright’s apparent ignorance of rainfall records for Lemon City (now
part of Miami) from 1901 to 1906, or Fort Myers from
1898 to 1906. Both data sets are included in a report that
John T. Stewart, one of Wright’s subordinates, submitted
to Wright after engaging in fieldwork in South Florida in
1907 (Stewart 1907). Furthermore, archival sources suggest that similar data existed for Hypoluxo from 1900 onward. Daily precipitation records reaching back to 1897
for Miami, Fort Myers, and Jupiter and to 1900 for Hypoluxo can be obtained from the National Climate Data
Center in Asheville, North Carolina and from historic
publications (Stewart 1907; U.S. Senate 1911).
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Meindl, Alderman, and Waylen
In any event, Wright felt compelled to assume that
the records for Kissimmee (at the northern end of the
Everglades watershed) represented conditions throughout southern Florida. Was this the source of the failure of
Wright’s plan? Figure 2 graphically compares the mean
and confidence limits of three pertinent precipitation
variables (annual twenty-four-hour maximum, annual
total, and bimonthly total) at Kissimmee (vertical lines),
based on the data published in Wright’s report, to those
at four other stations (horizontal lines) available in South
Florida contemporary to the report. At each alternate
station, the sample mean (solid block) and its 95-percent
confidence bounds (horizontal lines) are shown for three
time periods: pre-report (including data up to 1906), period of initial colonization (data from 1907 to 1930), and
the entire period of record. The idea of confidence limits
would be unknown to Wright because William Gosset
did not begin his work on the statistical properties of
small samples and the t-distribution until 1906. Even
though Kissimmee is at the northern edge of the Everglades watershed, Figure 2 shows that its record characterizes, with varying degrees of success, the mean of the
precipitation variables at other stations surrounding
the Everglades, and that changes in sample mean charac-
teristics between the various time periods of interest are
small. In all but the case of Jupiter, means prior to 1906
and for the period 1907 to 1930 fall within the 95percent confidence bounds of the mean estimated from
the historic sample. Therefore, precipitation at Kissimmee appears to have been representative of all South
Florida, and the small sample size available up to 1906 is
at least reflective of the longer-term mean conditions.
Wright understood that rainfall in South Florida is
not evenly distributed throughout the year: summer
and early fall typically receive more rainfall than winter
and spring. He also noticed that rainfall can be very heavy
for two consecutive months during the wet season. Accordingly, Wright drew many of his conclusions based on
an analysis of bimonthly totals of precipitation. It is here
that Wright made some serious mistakes. He identified
July and August 1905 as critical months, because 710
mm of rain fell at Kissimmee during this time period. He
argued that such a total is not likely to occur except at
rare intervals and that it would not be cost-effective to
base the size of drainage canals upon this amount (Wright
1909, 13). There is no evidence that he based this
conclusion upon any statistical analysis. Yet when using
Hazen’s (1914) formula and Wright’s data, this event has
Figure 2. Comparison of the sample mean and 95-percent confidence bounds of three precipitation variables at Kissimmee, as tabulated in
Wright’s report, and equivalent sample statistics at four other contemporary meteorological stations surrounding the Everglades during the
three historic periods studied.
Role of James O. Wright in Promoting the Drainage of Florida’s Everglades
an exceedence probability of 0.0092, a return period of
108 bimonthly periods, or once every nine years. Wright
prepared his report before Hazen developed his formula,
so he would not have been able to perform these calculations, but this does begin to demonstrate the magnitude
of the problem. Meanwhile, observing that the next
three largest bimonthly rainfall totals at Kissimmee were
between 457 and 584 mm, Wright suggested that digging
canals large enough to remove a two-month total of 610
mm provided a fair margin of safety. However, Wright’s
data for Jupiter indicate that rainfall exceeded 610 mm
in two consecutive months on three separate occasions
between 1898 and 1906.
Unfortunately, this was not Wright’s most serious
misuse of rainfall data. Despite the fact that Wright’s
precipitation tables include maximum daily rainfall for
each month at Kissimmee and Jupiter from 1898 through
1906, he ignores the fact that South Florida stations can
receive more than 200 mm of precipitation in a single
day. This is important, because Wright’s next step was to
develop an estimate of average daily rainfall by dividing
his assumed bimonthly maximum of 610 mm by sixtytwo (the number of days in July and August, when Wright’s
observed bimonthly maximum occurred). Thus Wright
assumed that he would need canals capable of removing
Figure 3. Observed annual frequencies of
the number of rainy events (upper diagrams)
and numbers of rainy days (lower diagrams)
at Fort Myers and Miami and the fitted normal probability distributions. Distributions
of these variables in each of the three historic
time-periods are identified separately.
693
just 10 mm of precipitation per day—in spite of the fact
that data for Jupiter indicate that the maximum twentyfour-hour rainfall total for one day in October 1904 was
264 mm. In addition, the 297 mm that fell at Fort Myers
in one twenty-four-hour period in June 1901 is a record
for that station that remained unbroken until 1994. The
U.S. Weather Bureau later established that the Everglades region would experience a twenty-four-hour rainfall of at least 100 mm virtually every year; that anywhere
from 225 to 275 mm of rain would fall during a twentyfour-hour period once every twenty-five years; and that
anywhere from 250 to 300 mm would fall during a
twenty-four-hour period once every half a century (Hershfield 1961).
Furthermore, the total number of days in a year experiencing excessive rain was perhaps as critical to
reclamation attempts. The probability distributions of
this variable are shown in the lower portions of Figure
3. Prior to 1907 at Fort Myers, there were at least
twenty-five such days per year, and eighteen at Miami.
Had the analysis been completed prior to 1907, it
would have revealed a 99-percent chance of at least
thirty days of “excessive” (greater than 10 mm) rainfall
per year at either station. Therefore, Wright had at his
disposal not only simple but—as it turns out—reliable
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Meindl, Alderman, and Waylen
estimates of the frequency and magnitude of significant rainfall events.
Interpretive Claims-Making: Wright and the Making of Public Policy. The reliability (or unreliability) of
empirical findings alone does not ensure that a scientific
claim will shape how the public views and hence modifies the physical environment. As suggested earlier, one
must examine how environmental claims are interpreted
within the prevailing social and ideological context and
transformed into public policy. As Bassett and Zueli
(2000, 69) observe, developers often use geographical
images and environmental narratives as “framing devices” for justifying certain styles of planning and intervention. In this section, we explore how Wright’s environmental narrative and his status as “engineer” and
“applied scientist” were used, by himself and others, to
represent the Everglades as a potential agricultural paradise. As the reader will also see, however, Wright’s role
of “environmental claims-maker” did not go uncontested, nor did it protect him from scientific counterclaims and questions about his work.
Given the problems associated with Wright’s report,
it is remarkable that it encouraged rather than deterred
attempts to drain and settle the Everglades. Yet Wright’s
preliminary report was not completed until late February
1909, and the state of Florida did not obtain this report
until March. By then, several corporations had accepted
Governor Broward’s pledge to drain the glades and had
purchased large blocks of land in the region. Almost immediately, these firms opened real-estate offices both in
and out of Florida in order to sell the cheaply acquired
swampland for profit. They produced reams of advertising material in an effort to attract buyers. All that was
necessary, it seemed, was to find an engineer who could
execute the reclamation project. Since Wright had been
assigned the task of investigating the feasibility of reclaiming the Everglades, and since he spoke favorably
about the region’s agricultural potential, large landowners in the region asked the state of Florida to hire Wright
to supervise the project. Florida did so in early 1910.
Even before Wright began the preparation of his report, voices of caution appeared, only to be overwhelmed
by the excitement associated with the prospect of settling one of the last remaining frontier regions in the
U.S. Frank Stoneman, editor of the Miami News-Record
and vociferous critic of the state’s early reclamation efforts in the Everglades, received a letter from Alfred
Newlander, a North Florida civil engineer, who expressed
interest in plans to drain the Everglades (Meindl 1998).
Stoneman published the letter two days later in the
Miami News-Record. Newlander (1906, 1) argued persua-
sively: “Statistics showing the rainfall in 24 hours are
often insufficient to give a safe estimate of the suddenness and danger of floods resulting from great storms.
Heavy rainfalls for a short time do far greater damage
than protracted storms of less violence.” The engineer
was doubtless referring to hurricanes and other storms
that frequently strike South Florida and are capable of
dumping over 200 mm of precipitation in a matter of
hours (Jordan 1984). Wright makes no mention of hurricanes or tropical storms in either his full or abbreviated
report. This is a curious omission, for South Florida
had experienced hurricanes in 1894, 1899, and in 1906
(Doehring, Duedall, and Williams 1994). In fact, the
storm of October 1906 claimed 164 lives in Miami
(Sugg, Pardue, and Carrodus 1971).
It seems clear that Wright maintained some flawed assumptions regarding precipitation in South Florida, and
that some people questioned both the feasibility and desirability of Wright’s drainage plan. Although Stoneman
initially welcomed Wright’s investigation of the glades,
he soon doubted Wright’s ability. After listening to a
speech by Wright in Miami in early 1908 (before Wright
had completed his investigation, let alone his report),
Stoneman warned his readers: “[I]t is to be feared that
Mr. Wright has mislead many of our citizens by an assumption of knowledge that he does not possess, and by
leaving out of his address many things he ought to have
said” (Stoneman 1908, 2). In this instance, the politics
of developing the Everglades was a debate over not only
scientific knowledge but also scientific ignorance. (According to Stocking and Holstein [1993], ignorance is
not simply the absence of knowledge but a claim in its
own right that can be used in advancing a perspective on
reality.) A year later, when a dredge arrived at Miami, a
skeptical Stoneman huffed: “[T]he hysterical enthusiasts
should at least leave a few words to express their wonder,
amazement, surprise, astonishment, admiration, gratification, pleasure, delight and thankfulness, when that
same dredge finishes its work and proves that its errand
here is a practicable one” (Stoneman 1909, 2).
Meanwhile, other social actors focused on the authority of Wright’s status as an applied scientist, using this
fact to legitimate their own environmental claims. Before 1910, the real-estate community pointed out that
Wright was an employee of the federal government. They
engaged in an attempt to give the project credibility unwarranted even by contemporary standards by making it
appear as if Everglades reclamation had the backing of
the United States government and its scientific and engineering communities. When Wright began his investigation of the Everglades in 1906, even Stoneman was
glad to see an agent of the federal government working
Role of James O. Wright in Promoting the Drainage of Florida’s Everglades
on the project. Indeed, he (1906, 1) probably echoed the
thoughts of many when he suggested that Wright and his
men in the field would make surveys of the region “so
thorough and comprehensive that they will forever set to
rest the mooted questions as to the feasibility and cost of
reclaiming that vast region.”
Accordingly, many Everglades real-estate companies
made a special effort to portray Wright as a leading
authority on wetland drainage. Although Wright’s title
while working for the federal government was “Supervising Drainage Engineer,” this was a mid-level position
within the USDA’s Office of Experiment Stations, Bureau of Drainage Investigations. Yet the Everglade Land
Sales Company shamelessly claimed that Wright was
one of the leading drainage authorities in the world and
that he was formerly “Supervising Drainage Engineer of
the United States Bureau of Reclamation” (Anonymous
1910, 16). One South Florida newspaper (Miami Metropolis 1910a, 1) went a bit further, claiming that Wright
was in charge of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Finally,
J. H. Whitney (1910, 5), of the Florida Everglades Land
Company, confidently asserted that Wright was “a drainage engineer with a national reputation and lifelong
experience in such work.” Having portrayed Wright as
an authority on drainage, land companies implied that
Wright’s comments regarding the glades were definitive.
Again, Whitney (1910, 5) proclaimed Wright’s credentials and standing in the scientific community: “[R]ecognizing that in his position as Supervising Engineer of the
Everglades Drainage, Major Wright can not afford to
give out an exaggerated statement, his valuation of the
land should be accepted as conclusive proof that the buyers
of Everglades, hold the most valuable assets obtainable,”
a cruel irony given Wright’s underestimation of the frequency of excessive rains.
Wright apparently reveled in the limelight, providing
newspapers, real-estate people, and others with a mountain of material to broadcast. For example, speaking before the State Banker’s Association in Pensacola, Florida
in May 1910, Wright expressed his belief in reclamation
projects everywhere. Indeed, he did not know of a single
instance in which a comprehensive drainage plan had
not made the reclaimed lands valuable (Miami Metropolis
1910b, 5). Wright’s comments filled the pages of pamphlets and other forms of Everglades promotional material. For instance, the Everglade Land Sales Company
quoted Wright’s response to one correspondent: “[T]here
are no engineering difficulties whatever in draining the
Everglades. The elevation of Lake Okeechobee is 21 feet
above sea level, and it is a well-established fact that if
sufficient canals are dug that water will run down hill”
(Wright, quoted in Anonymous 1910, 16). Two years
695
later, Wright continued to boast of the project’s ultimate
success. The front-page headline for the Miami Metropolis on 5 April 1912 blared: “Everglades will never overflow
again after this year is the belief of engineer Wright.” Inasmuch as Wright made similar comments before Congress
that same year (U.S. House 1912), it is unlikely that land
promoters bothered to misquote or use the engineer’s
comments out of context.
Wright supervised Everglades reclamation activities
until late 1912. During February of that year, the U.S.
House of Representatives launched a two-month-long
investigation into the Everglades drainage project, ostensibly because the USDA had spent over $11,000 in
an effort to produce a report on the project’s feasibility—
but had never published a report (U.S. House 1912). House
investigators eventually concluded that part of the
reason a report had never been published was that several of Wright’s peers at the USDA did not agree with
Wright’s drainage proposal (U.S. House 1912, 3). Indeed, it eventually became clear that Wright was probably not qualified to engage in such a project, and before
the end of 1912, he resigned as Florida’s chief drainage
engineer. Yet even as Wright began to fade from the
scene, he continued his campaign on behalf of the Everglades by writing a short book in which he reiterated the
virtues of wetland drainage in South Florida (Wright
1912).
Meanwhile, the House investigation may have tarnished Wright’s image, but Progressive ideals remained
dominant, and the struggle to reclaim the Everglades
continued. In 1913, the State of Florida attempted to
bolster confidence in the project by hiring three truly
nationally recognized engineers—Isham Randolph, Marshall Leighton, and Edmund Perkins—to study and comment on the reclamation effort. Initially known as the
Florida Everglades Engineering Commission, the trio
later simply became known as the Randolph Commission. Immediately recognizing Wright’s error in assuming that precipitation is distributed evenly throughout
any given month, the commission focused their attention on daily precipitation. They argued that complex
statistical procedures could be attempted, but that with
such a limited dataset, such computations would be of
little value. In their final report (U.S. Senate 1914), the
engineers repeatedly stated that the available data were
inadequate for the purposes of making precise calculations, but that reasonable estimates of precipitation and
run-off could be made. Not only did the Randolph Commission report express little doubt as to the feasibility
or desirability of reclaiming the Everglades, but Isham
Randolph became one of the project’s leading boosters
(Randolph 1917).
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Meindl, Alderman, and Waylen
The sad truth is that reclaiming the Everglades and
turning all of south central Florida into an agricultural
paradise was not just too complex for James Wright—it
was beyond the capacity of the entire engineering profession. Part of the problem, as the Randolph Commission
made clear, was that certain hydrological and other
physical geographic data were simply inadequate. Moreover, nobody understood the untold ecological damage
that such a project would create (Walker and Solecki
2001), nor did anybody have any idea how fast the
region’s organic soils would shrink and subside after drainage (Stephens 1984). Indeed, sections of drained land subsided enough to cause Wright’s canals to send water back
in the direction of Lake Okeechobee, rather than to the
Atlantic Ocean, as intended. Compounding matters was
the fact that the state of Florida never had enough
money to dig and adequately maintain the ditches early
engineers deemed necessary. In those places where drainage was adequate, muck fires broke out and burned the organic soil for weeks. Although a large portion of the
Everglades south of Lake Okeechobee eventually became agriculturally productive during the 1950s and
1960s, scientists are still struggling to learn all of the nuances of this complex wetland system (Kiker, Milon, and
Hodges 2001).
With such problems, it is a wonder that so many earlytwentieth-century people (engineers, politicians, and
the public) put such faith in the project. Very few people
seriously questioned American ingenuity and its ability
to conquer the Everglades. That leads us back to the idea
of claims-making. Wright’s scientific claims cannot be
studied outside the interpretive context of early-twentiethcentury Progressive values and actions. Many people of
the time simply followed the engineering profession—
assuming, as many engineers of the time did, that no
problems were technically insurmountable. Wright’s resignation created the opportunity for other influential
claims-makers to emerge. Wright was the initial catalyst
who laid down a scientific and promotional foundation
that helped build expectations regarding the Everglades,
and who attempted to fulfill such expectations. Politicians and land promoters alike were both influenced by
Wright and then joined in giving Wright even more
power to influence the thousands of people who eventually bought South Florida swampland.
The Impact of Wright’s Claims-Making Activity.
Claims made by scientists can set in motion important
environmental and social consequences. It is difficult to
assess the exact influence of Wright and early-twentiethcentury real-estate promotional literature in shaping
the socionatural construction of the Everglades. Surely
Stoneman was not alone in doubting Wright’s ability
and many of the advertising claims regarding the settlement potential of the glades. By early 1912, the New York
Times (1912, 3) appeared to side with Stoneman: “Nowhere does the purchaser who isn’t on his guard stand in
greater peril [as] when he acts on statements which are
false only because they are not the whole truth.” Writers
for the New York Times recognized that advertisers created false impressions of the glades by failing to report
important qualifying statements regarding the region’s
settlement potential. Yet Wright—and his South Florida
real-estate supporters—must have had an impact, because, by 1912, thousands of people had purchased land
throughout the Everglades (Heiney 1978; George 1989).
Moreover, Florida’s reclamation activities appeared to be
yielding tangible results. In April 1912, amid much fanfare, South Florida celebrated the opening of the North
New River Canal, which connected Lake Okeechobee
to the Atlantic Ocean at Fort Lauderdale. A year later,
workers completed the Miami canal connecting the lake
to the ocean at Miami.
Not until October 1913 did people begin to hack the
first settlement out of the Everglades saw-grass, five miles
south of Lake Okeechobee. One of the early pioneers,
John Newhouse (1952), claimed that throughout the
1910s, settling in the glades was too risky for most people
and that the bulk of new landowners stayed away. Those
who did venture into the Everglades soon discovered
that practically nothing in the promotional literature
was true (Meindl 2000). Another pioneer, Lawrence
Will (1968, 228), later recalled that “floods and freezes,
wild hogs and coons, muck fires, gnats and mosquitoes,
slow transportation and greedy New York buyers, all
these discouraged many.” After nearly a decade of promotion and pioneering, the glades remained thinly settled. The U.S. Census for 1920 reveals that fewer than
1,000 people actually lived in the Everglades, although
during the 1920s, South Florida and the Everglades
began to attract much more attention.
If settlers in the Everglades thought hard times were
behind them, they were sadly mistaken. Excessive rainfall during the summer and fall of 1920 forced Lawrence
Will’s father, Thomas E. Will (one of the glades’ earliest
promoters and settlers), out of his home south of Lake
Okeechobee—temporarily, he thought. Other settlers
remained. Pioneer R. H. Little (1938) recalled that so
much rain fell between late 1922 and early 1923 that one
could easily drive a boat out of the canal across the
flooded landscape. Many people became stranded in
the Everglades; some had used savings to purchase land
in the glades, and when floods ruined their crops, they were
left without the ability to earn the money they needed to
Role of James O. Wright in Promoting the Drainage of Florida’s Everglades
move. Little (1938, 113) later observed that “[W]e began
to realize that there was not much truth in statements,
that were made after each flood, that that would be the
last one.”
Then came the real disasters. Little remembered that
during July 1926, the water level in the canal in front of
his property was nearly up to the bank. A few days later,
heavy rains flooded the glades again. Then, on 18 September, a major hurricane crossed South Florida, killing
at least 243 people near the southern shore of Lake
Okeechobee and destroying houses and buildings throughout the Everglades and Florida’s more heavily populated
lower east coast (Sugg, Pardue, and Carrodus 1971). Two
years later, another killer hurricane stormed across South
Florida, this time claiming the lives of more than 1,800
people living on or near Lake Okeechobee’s southern
shore (Sugg, Pardue, and Carrodus 1971). Will (1961)
said that pioneers blamed the disaster on state drainage
officials; Florida’s chief drainage engineer (Fred C. Elliot) blamed God (Elliot 1929). Although the federal
government built a dike around most of Lake Okeechobee
during the 1930s, the Everglades Drainage District declared bankruptcy on New Year’s Day 1931, and as a consequence, no additional reclamation work of any significance was attempted until 1949 (DeGrove 1984). After
decades of promotion and settlement, most of the Everglades remained uninhabited.
Concluding Remarks
One way of understanding the environmental history
and geography of the Everglades is to confront the concept of environmental claims-making, and such a task
leads one to an examination of the activities of James O.
Wright. Looking closely at Wright not only advances
our understanding of past attempts to drain and develop
this Florida wetland, but also sheds light on the extent to
which applied scientists—particularly engineers—can
function as claims-makers, shaping the material and
discursive construction of the environment. As Wright
illustrates, fully understanding how environmental knowledge is constructed requires that we analyze the claimsmaking activities not just of “hard” or “basic” scientists
but also of applied scientists. In this article, we have tried
to critique the process of environmental claims-making,
evaluating the validity and quality of the claims themselves, the social and economic context within which
such claims are interpreted and appropriated, the lasting
impact of these claims on settlement patterns, and the
hazards of future scientific/engineering claims. As Lowney
and Best (1998, 110) contend, “One claimsmaker’s solu-
697
tion creates conditions that other claimsmakers construct as new problems.”
It would appear that although Wright and others may
not have had excessive precipitation data on which to
base drainage plans, the available records—limited as
they were—included figures from what would be among
the wettest and driest years for many decades. The problems associated with early-twentieth-century Everglades
reclamation cannot be attributed to either the inadequacy of the Kissimmee precipitation record in representing the entire Everglades or the absence of appropriate, contemporary statistical methodologies. Armed with
the title of “Supervising Drainage Engineer,” Wright and
his supporters helped fuel land speculation in the Everglades by insisting that virtually all of South Florida’s
wetlands could be quickly reclaimed and made agriculturally productive at low cost. Florida officials used
Wright’s reckless optimism to sell land in large blocks to
a few entrepreneurs, who in turn used Wright to sell
smaller units of swampland to thousands of people. When
these speculators, investors, and pioneers bought land all
over the glades, they created the need to drain all of
South Florida’s wetlands at once. Because Wright seriously misrepresented the amount of water to be removed
from the landscape, and because so many people already
owned land in the region, Florida simply hired more
esteemed engineers (the Randolph Commission) in an
effort to reclaim the Everglades. The Randolph Commission did admit that far more study of the region
would be necessary, but they never questioned the feasibility of draining the glades. The Progressive Era cult of
seeing engineers as important scientific experts continued unabated, even though Wright was no longer directly involved.
Of course, most people of the time assumed that wetlands would be more productive if converted to farms.
South Florida boosters cultivated claims-makers such as
Wright by adopting the Progressive Era view that scientists could make wetlands into productive farmlands.
When it became clear that Wright’s canals would not
adequately reclaim the glades, Florida officials assumed
that Everglades reclamation was a matter of hiring applied scientists capable of resolving technical problems.
Yet the fact that such reclamation efforts failed so miserably long after Wright’s departure from the scene suggests that nobody in the engineering profession during
the early twentieth century was prepared to tackle such a
complex problem. As Cosgrove (1990, 7) reminds us, “In
fact, engineering, praised for its practicality, could be as
speculative as any other sphere of human thought.” In
1927, Arthur Morgan (one-time employee of the USDA
and a colleague of Wright’s) was asked by the Dade
698
Meindl, Alderman, and Waylen
Drainage District (one of many smaller drainage districts
within the comprehensive Everglades Drainage District)
to comment on Florida’s reclamation project. Among
other things, he (1927, 3) observed that “[I]f money is
hard to secure, or if unusual terms must be offered [as was
the case in Florida, where the state had a hard time selling bonds to finance reclamation activities], it is almost
conclusive evidence that the development is unsound, or
that its management is bad.”
It took many more years to discover and solve the
series of technical problems associated with wetland reclamation in South Florida, but the financial burden of
having to drain all of the Everglades at the same time
proved even more problematic. Because the state of Florida could not demonstrate clear and consistent reclamation throughout the glades (flooding occurred in many
parts of the region well into the 1940s), it was never able
to convince capital markets to contribute the money
necessary to reclaim all of the Everglades. However, by
the late 1940s, Florida officials had convinced the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers to participate in Everglades
reclamation. Where Wright and others soon after him
failed, a half-century’s experience and the financial and
technical resources of the U.S. government were equal to
the task.
Although large portions of the Everglades were converted to farmland after World War II (Bottcher and
Izuno 1994), we have since discovered that natural wetland ecosystems provide a host of functions and services
for people, such as flood control, groundwater recharge,
water purification, and aesthetics, to name just a few. We
have also discovered that no amount of engineering skill
or environmental manipulation can replace some of the
critical functions and services that the Everglades used to
provide. Although the engineering community finally
achieved “success” in reclaiming parts of the glades, this
success came at the cost of substantial ecological problems both inside and out of Everglades National Park.
Environmentalists argue that the success of the region’s
farms has reduced water quality by introducing tons of
nutrients into what is left of the Everglades; species
diversity of both plants and animals has been reduced,
and several species are now threatened with extinction;
and muck fires and aerobic bacteria have consumed the
mostly-organic soil much faster than anybody near the
turn of the last century could have predicted. Had
Wright succeeded in the early 1910s, these ecological
problems would have made themselves manifest sooner
than they did. Yet thanks to the work of a different kind
of environmental claims-maker—Marjory Stoneman
Douglas—both Florida and the U.S. government are
committed to restoring parts of the Everglades to some
semblance of their predrainage condition (Culotta 1995;
Kiker, Milon, and Hodges 2001). Marjory, Frank Stoneman’s daughter, spent much of the second half of her
108-year life fighting to preserve the Everglades (Douglas 1947; Sobel 1991).
We have used this article to outline the general importance of analyzing the cognitive and interpretive environmental claims of applied scientists. However, the
reader should not interpret our critique of James Wright
as an indictment of all engineers, or even of all engineers
in the early twentieth century. Wright’s unflinching support of development interests in Florida certainly does
not mirror the relationship that all scientists have with
public policy. (Indeed, the claims-making activities of
applied scientists sometimes run counter to prevailing
policy.) Applied scientists, many of whom have produced environmental claims more credible and useful
than Wright’s, have long played an important and arguably necessary role in environmental change. However,
as we quickly learn from Wright’s story, applied scientists do not always represent the final or best word on
how the physical landscape should be interpreted, represented, and hence modified. Some readers will suggest
that Wright is a bad historical example of an applied scientist. Because Wright’s inaccurate and politically mediated claims are so apparent, however, we are provoked
to be more critical of the socially constructed nature of
all scientific representations of the world, even those in
which there appears to be no reason to question the
authority or legitimacy of the claim. According to Demeritt (1996, 499), “Social constructivism can change
how non-experts think about scientific claims and controversies. . . . it helps temper our tendency to either
worship or demonize science and technology.” The activities of Wright and his contemporaries convince us of
the dangers in blindly following a claims-maker who
would engage in substantial ecological manipulation;
for these claims can have ironic and unintended consequences that can lead to any number of social, economic, and political problems.
Note
1. It is important to note that early South Florida boosters not
only assumed that virtually all of the peninsula south of Lake
Okeechobee could be drained and developed, but further
assumed—as did most developers of the time—that such development would be sustained indefinitely. Indeed, an important part of the current Everglades restoration effort revolves around ensuring the sustainability of water supplies for
the region’s growing population (South Florida Water Management District 2002).
Role of James O. Wright in Promoting the Drainage of Florida’s Everglades
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Correspondence: Department of History and Geography, Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville, GA 31061, e-mail: cmeindl@
gcsu.edu (Meindl); Department of Geography, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858, e-mail: aldermand@mail.ecu.edu (Alderman); Department of Geography, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, e-mail: prwaylen@geog.ufl.edu (Waylen).