Stephen Duggan was born in White Plains, New York in 1909 and spent most of his childhood in Greenwich, Connecticut where he enjoyed sailing on the Long Island Sound with his older brother Laurence. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard University and Columbia University where his father, Stephen Duggan, Sr., was dean of the Political Science Department and a director of the Council on Foreign Relations. At Columbia he met Beatrice Abbott, the granddaughter of Congregationalist theologian Lyman Abbott. Beatrice had attended Vassar College where she was given the nickname “Smokey.” They married in 1936 and had four children. Stephen graduated from Columbia Law School and began working at the Wall Street firm of Simpson, Thatcher and Bartlett where he became partner. His older brother Laurence Duggan worked for the State Department where he helped develop Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” toward Latin America. Smokey Duggan dedicated herself to non-profit organizations. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s she worked with the League of Composers, the Storm King School and the Public Education Association and in 1955 she was appointed as a New York Delegate to the White House Conference on Education. In 1958 she co-founded and became the director of National Young Audiences and during the early 1960s she was involved in the early preparations for the fight against the Con-Ed plant at Storm King.

In 1963-64 both Stephen and Smokey Duggan helped found the Scenic Hudson Preservations Conference – an organization whose mission was the prevention of Consolidated Edison’s plan for a pumped-storage power plant at Storm King Mountain. The 1965 Supreme Court Case established the precedent that individuals could sue on behalf of public interest for the preservation and beatification of the natural environment. The case was an important founding moment in the development of environmental law and Stephen Duggan himself is often credited as a pioneer of the concept of environmental interest law. The collection contains correspondence concerning Storm King with many influential figures including: Congressman Robert J. Barry, Senator Clifford P. Case, the Federal Power Commission, Senator Jacob J. Javits, the Lyndon Johnson administration, Senator Kenneth B. Keating, Senator Robert Kennedy, Thomas Lamont, Congressman Richard L. Ottinger, Dr. Nathan M. Pusey, Laurence S. Rockefeller, Alexander Saunders, Secretary of the Interior Stuart L. Udall as well as various Consolidated Edison officials. In 1970 Stephen and Smokey Duggan founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, a public interest law firm dedicated to the protection of natural resources. The organization would offer the professional help of scientists and lawyers to a number of disjointed and fledgling environmental campaigns. Stephen served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees from 1970 until 1980 where he directed the early development of the organization. Smokey Duggan was appointed as the NRDC’s representative to the nongovernmental organization of the United Nations. After the death of Smokey in 1996 and Stephen in 1998 their daughter-in-law Mary Vance Duggan began researching the history of their lives and involvement in the Storm King Case. Parts of this collection were the result of this inquiry. Around 2005 she completed a screenplay based Stephen and Smokey Duggan’s participation in the campaign against Consolidated Edison over Storm King Mountain.