Editor’s Note: Leslie Kemp Poole pens Lessons from the Marjories, a column meditating on the legacies of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Marjorie Harris Carr, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

I call people a ‘Marjorie’ to mean a leader, a forward-thinking leader.

Kenneth “buddy” Mackay

We lost a great Florida statesman last year: Kenneth “Buddy” MacKay, 91, who served as member of the state House and Senate, as a three-term member of the U.S. Congress, lieutenant governor, and, finally, and briefly, governor. He was a true “Marjorie” who deeply loved the state and its natural beauty. And he had personal connections to the Three Marjories that this publication regularly lauds.

“I call people a ‘Marjorie’ to mean a leader, a forward-thinking leader,” he said with his soft Southern drawl during a 2011 chat at his Ocklawaha home. “Fearless. Very, very well informed. Highly persuasive. Energetic. So to me, it’s a compliment.” 

Born during the Great Depression to a family enduring financial troubles—his father had taken over the family’s Ocala lumber business—MacKay grew up loving the outdoors, especially fishing and hunting. In his 2010 autobiography How Florida Happened: The Political Education of Buddy MacKay, he said his “love of unspoiled, ‘undeveloped’ woods, fields, lakes, and streams goes all the way back to those times. I know how beautiful Florida was and could still be. It saddens me to see people mindlessly destroy this beauty in the name of ‘development.’”

MacKay and I discussed how women influenced Florida’s environmental movement. He had a lot to say.

Florida’s growth from 1880-1940 was the “Epic of Exploitation,” dominated by wealthy businessmen with power in state politics: Ed Ball, Henry Flagler, and Henry Plant. Their philosophy of state resources was to “Use it up and move on,” MacKay said. The ensuing struggle in the 20th century would be pushing the state to an Epic of Sustainability, the latter championed by women such as author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Rawlings, who lived in the rural hamlet of Cross Creek north of Ocala, knew MacKay’s parents and his wife’s relatives. And MacKay was deeply familiar with her love of the landscape.

Rawlings understood the earth, he said, quoting from the final chapter of her book Cross Creek: 

“It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending…”

Rawlings “really cared about sustainability,” MacKay said, noting that she wrote about a community where many residents lived on the edge. “I see her as a person who was the forerunner in a lot of this.” For Florida to enter an Epic of Sustainability, women would be key.

“Generally speaking, I think the leadership of women tends to be more in the areas where sustainability is an issue,” he said. “I think those are roles that came about historically. The men were concerned about economics,” while women were forced into responsibilities as family sustainers—roles that would expand into the community and environmental activism.

MacKay’s close encounters with another Marjorie—Marjorie Harris Carr—came soon after he announced his candidacy for the Florida House of Representatives in 1968. He was familiar with Carr and her brewing grassroots battle to stop the Cross Florida Barge Canal that would cut a waterway through the state, heavily damaging the Ocklawaha River. His district included Alachua County, which was politically opposed to the federal project, and Marion County which supported it in hopes of economic gains. The campaign enlightened him to both sides of the issue and the state’s need to balance development with the environment. In the process, he became a Carr admirer and canal opponent.

The project was halted by Pres. Richard Nixon’s order in 1971, a huge victory for Carr and her group, the Florida Defenders of the Environment (FDE), who argued that it would be a disaster for water resources, wildlife, forests, and would never provide the economic benefits promised by promoters. Fearful that succeeding presidents might revive the canal, which was partially dug, Carr wanted Congress to formally deauthorize it. And MacKay was the man she believed could accomplish this: he was newly elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from a district that included the unfinished part of the canal. 

MacKay recalled in his autobiography: “Since I was in my first term, I literally had no responsibilities other than to vote and take care of my constituents’ problems. As environmental activist Marjorie Carr pointedly reminded me, this meant that I could devote considerable time to the Barge Canal. After gathering the facts, I became absolutely convinced that Marjorie Carr was right.” Carr was a tough constituent, he admitted to me. “She didn’t request. She demanded.”

MacKay was a Congressional novice but his voice was given political weight due to a tradition that “gives each member veto over local of federal projects in his home district,” he wrote. He got to work, visiting every Democrat and many Republicans in the 435-member Congress, explaining his “vehement” opposition to the canal.

And it worked, with a compromise. The canal was deauthorized from Palatka to the Gulf of Mexico but would exist where it was already dug from Palatka to Jacksonville. It soothed the egos of pro-canal representatives but essentially killed the barge waterway. Carr and FDE then turned up the heat to remove a dam built on the Ocklawaha River during canal construction.

Buddy McKay is the kind of person that makes you proud to live in a democracy, and to have been in public office

Senator bob graham

Clay Henderson, an environmental attorney and activist, remembers Carr “ringing my phone off the hook telling me I wasn’t doing enough to kill the Damn Dam.” He told MacKay, who responded: “Better get used to it. I’ve been taking those calls for years.”

After Carr’s death, MacKay chaired the commission that designated the undeveloped land once in the canal’s path to be the Marjorie Harris Carr Cross Florida Greenway, a popular 110-mile linear park with multiple trails.

Sadly, the dam still exists. But that’s another column.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas was another formidable woman that MacKay encountered in his political career. Douglas had long been involved in advocacy issues in south Florida. At age 79, she founded the Friends of the Everglades which regularly opposed development and projects that would pollute or destroy the unique ecosystem. MacKay wrote that Douglas, a respected author, would “nag, bully, scold, and ultimately persuade Florida’s leaders to stop the destruction of the Everglades.”

When MacKay, age 60, was running for lieutenant governor in 1990 with Lawton Chiles, the 67-year-old gubernatorial candidate, one of the constant criticisms was that they were too old to hold office. Douglas, then 100 and an unequalled environmental powerhouse, told the pair, “Well, I can take care of that!” and offered her endorsement. He believed that helped them win the election, especially since they promised to make Everglades restoration a priority.

But Douglas wasn’t as happy a short time later when Chiles and MacKay had to deal with a standing federal lawsuit claiming that the state wasn’t making sugar cane growers comply with water quality standards, leading to pollution of the Everglades. Surprisingly, Chiles agreed in court that the state wasn’t doing enough and proposed a settlement and cleanup plan with legislation named the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Act. However, Douglas didn’t like the terms of the deal and demanded her name be removed from it. 

It was. 

Despite this skirmish, MacKay, who was the administration’s environmental point person, was fond of Douglas and appreciated her passion and activism. “I had worked with her and really thought she was extraordinary. I think she’s had a huge impact on Florida.”

As did MacKay. When Chiles suddenly died in December 1998, MacKay served out the remaining 24 days of his term as governor, trying to create a smooth transition for his successor. One of his last acts was to pardon battered women who had killed their husbands before Florida law recognized their situation as a defense. Then, retired from politics but not public life, MacKay became Pres. Bill Clinton’s special envoy to the Americas where he traveled extensively and worked on trade and environmental issues. He taught law at the University of Florida, became a juvenile dependency mediator, and volunteered with a legal group to represent people who are “handicapped, homeless, mentally ill, or otherwise subject to discriminatory treatment.”

“Buddy McKay is the kind of person that makes you proud to live in a democracy, and to have been in public office,” said former Florida Governor Bob Graham a decade ago. “He set such a high standard that he influences those around him. [He] has lived and shaped much of Florida’s history during a period of great change, and demographic, economic and cultural growth.”

MacKay told me he was worried that Florida’s environmental future was a “pretty scary proposition.” He had witnessed succeeding governors gut environmental and growth management regulations, perhaps a move back to the Era of Exploitation. 

Whatever the long-term outcome, Buddy MacKay was an extraordinary politician during an era when the health of Florida’s environment was considered a vital public good. He was forward-thinking, fearless, well-informed, and highly persuasive—the very qualities that make him a Florida “Marjorie.” 

Let’s hope many more follow the Marjorie path that he forged.

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Cover photo: Lieutenant Governor “Buddy” MacKay, Jr. from the State Archives of Florida.