Edward D. Melillo – Please do no cite or copy without author’s permission

“From Bone Valley to ‘Far Places’: A Global Environmental History of the 1919 Phosphate Miners’ Strike in Mulberry, Florida”

Edward Melillo, Amherst College

Introduction

In her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, writer Zora Neale Hurston vividly

depicted the miners of Polk County, Florida, their “sweating black bodies, muscled like gods…. They go down in the phosphate mines and bring up the wet dust of the bones of pre-historic monsters, to make rich land in far places, so that people can eat.”1 Hurston’s

narrative suspended readers between the immediacy of sinew and bone and the remoteness of the “far places” that reconstituted their soils with fertilizer from Florida’s phosphorus-rich fossil deposits. Among the sites where Hurston gathered folklore for the

Works Projects Administration (WPA) in the late 1930s was the town of Mulberry,

thirty-two miles (52 km) east of Tampa in Polk County. This railroad outpost in Florida’s

“Bone Valley” region—a zone where phosphate-laden skeletons accumulated millions of

years ago when much of the area was beneath the ocean—has long been a place where the gritty labors of a southern community converged with the demands of distant environments.2

This article chronicles a 1919 strike during which 3,000 black and white miners

from the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers targeted seventeen of

1 Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (1942; New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 147. 2 On May 6, 1935, United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the WPA by Executive Order #7034. In 1939, the federal government renamed the agency the Work Projects Administration. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA employed over 8.5 million Americans. The agency came to an end on June 30, 1943 as a result of worker shortages during the Second World War. For more on the WPA, see Federal Works Agency, Final Report on the WPA Program, 1935-1943 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946); and Nick Taylor, American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA, When FDR put the Nation to Work (New York: Bantam Books, 2009).

1 Edward D. Melillo – Please do no cite or copy without author’s permission

Mulberry’s phosphate-mining companies. Workers demanded a doubling of their hourly

wage to thirty-seven-cents and a two-hour reduction of their workday to eight hours.

After a turbulent, eight-month struggle, they won both concessions. The Mulberry

phosphate workers’ strike was particularly significant because it occurred during the

“First Red Scare” (1919-1921), a period of United States history notorious for

widespread labor suppression and pervasive racial violence. The strike is a little-known,

yet pivotal, instance of successful multiracial unionism in the New South during a hostile

era.3

The 1919 Phosphate Miners’ Strike in Mulberry, Florida is also notable for what

it reveals about the elaborate circuitry of the global nutrient trade. The rapid expansion of

phosphorus mining in the early twentieth century reflected this element’s crucial role in

food production. Along with nitrogen and potassium, phosphorus comprises the trio of

macronutrients required for crop growth. Phosphorus is volatile, but it remains stable

when bound to four oxygen molecules in the tetrahedral arrangement of the compound

3- phosphate (PO4 ). Its slow biogeochemical cycle, which can take tens of millions of

years, means that phosphorus is scarce in the biosphere. Indeed, many of earth’s biomes

have been significantly shaped by phosphorus availability. Unlike carbon, hydrogen,

oxygen, and nitrogen, phosphorus lacks a significant gaseous phase, thereby limiting its

atmospheric circulation. As a result, it must be mined from the Earth’s crust. All

organisms require phosphorus to sustain cellular vitality. Additionally, vertebrates need it

3 For details about the federal government’s interrelated anticommunism and racism during this period, see Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). On attempts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, to discredit the labor unrest and race riots of 1919 as the work of communists, see Regin Schmidt Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919-1943 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000).

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for tooth and bone formation. Because of its centrality to life on earth, biochemist and

science fiction writer Isaac Asimov referred to phosphorus as “life’s bottleneck,” a

crucial limiting nutrient for organism growth in terrestrial, marine, and freshwater

ecosystems.4

Government officials were well aware of the strategic position that the state’s

phosphate deposits occupied in agronomic and economic systems. As the strike wore on,

Florida’s congressional representatives, administrators at the U.S. Department of

Agriculture (USDA), and company executives expressed grave concerns about the toll

this labor stoppage was taking on both domestic agriculture and national fertilizer exports.

Evidence of these bureaucratic anxieties attests to the global reach of Florida’s phosphorus industry and the power of phosphate miners to shape transnational

commercial and environmental networks.5

In addition to exploring these linkages, this article responds to clarion calls for

increased attention to past and ongoing human interactions with the landscapes of the

southeastern United States. In 2009, historian Paul Sutter pointed out, “American

environmental history had grown up in the West, and it had spent some time in New

England and the Midwest as well, but it had rarely ventured below the Mason-Dixon

4 Phosphorus is a fundamental component of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA), the energy-carrying coenzyme adenosine triphosphate (ATP), and the phospholipids in cell membranes. Approximately twenty percent of the human skeleton is comprised of calcium phosphate (Ca (H2PO4)2). K. Ashley, D. Cordell, and D. Mavinic, “A brief history of phosphorus: From the philosopher’s stone to nutrient recovery and reuse,” Chemosphere 84 (August 2011): 7373-46. Isaac Asimov, Asimov on Chemistry (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1975), 160. Asimov was building on the insights of U.S. oceanographer Alfred C. Redfield who first described the atomic ratio of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus found in phytoplankton throughout the earth’s deep oceans. Alfred C. Redfield, “On the Proportions of Organic Derivations in Sea Water and Their Relation to the Composition of Plankton,” in James Johnstone Memorial Volume, ed. Richard J. Daniel (Liverpool, UK: University Press of Liverpool, 1934), 176-92. 5 Daniel L. Childers, Jessica Corman, Mark Edwards, and James J. Elser, “Sustainability Challenges of Phosphorus and Food: Solutions from Closing the Human Phospohrus Cycle,” BioScience 61 (February 2011): 117-24.

3 Edward D. Melillo – Please do no cite or copy without author’s permission

Line.”6 Expanding the scope of southern environmental history is a vital task, yet this

endeavor should also aim to illuminate nationwide and global connections experienced—

and shaped—by the peoples and environments of the U.S. South.

This article situates Mulberry’s phosphorus industry and its workers within the

varied and rich landscapes of southern history, but it also connects them to the broader

webs of the worldwide fertilizer trade. It contends that the phosphorus cycle, like other

biogeochemical cycles, has a transnational social history that must be illuminated if we

are to fully assess the human dimensions of seemingly natural processes.7

Striking Phosphates

Until the 1880s, Mulberry was quiet railroad town located along one of Central Florida’s

logging routes. In 1881, while surveying for a cross-state canal, Captain J. Francis

LeBaron of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers discovered phosphate pebbles in the Peace

River. Subsequent excavations confirmed the ubiquity of phosphate ore deposits, and the

area rapidly grew into a hub of fertilizer production, eventually becoming one of the

world’s most important phosphate sources. The phosphate beds of Bone Valley are

among the richest and most accessible anywhere on earth. Formed approximately ten

million years ago from the fossils of prehistoric terrestrial and marine creatures, these

6 Paul S. Sutter, “No More the Backward Region: Southern Environmental History Comes of Age,” in Environmental History of the American South: A Reader, ed. Paul S. Sutter and Christopher Manganiello (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 1. For exceptions to this tendency, see Kathryn Newfront, Blue Ridge Commons: Environmental Activism and Forest History in Western North Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Claire Strom, Making Catfish Bait out of Government Boys: The Fight against Cattle Ticks and the Transformation of the Yeoman South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009); and Donald E. Davis, ed., Southern United States: An Environmental History (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2006). 7 For more on the social histories of nutrient cycles, see Melillo, “The First Green Revolution.” John Emsley’s history of phosphorus, The Thirteenth Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), does not mention the social history of the global phosphorus cycle.

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deposits cover much of peninsular Florida. They occur in two forms: concretions known as pebble phosphates, which are spread throughout sand and clay, and hard-rock phosphates, a more pure variety of the ore.8

U.S. phosphate mining got its start near Charleston, South Carolina in the 1860s

and flourished there for several decades. However, following LeBaron’s discovery,

Central Florida soon became the undisputed epicenter of phosphate extraction and

processing. Florida’s labor costs were lower, its phosphate deposits were more extensive and closer to the surface, and the concentrations of phosphate in its rock formations were higher than elsewhere.9

Boomtown fortunes financed rapid growth. By 1895, Florida was home to 400

rock-phosphate mining companies. As these businesses consolidated, their managers

began hiring workers from the farthest regions of the state and beyond.10 These new

recruitment patterns shifted the racial composition of the state’s mining communities. As

historian Jacqueline Jones noted, “Pioneer Florida phosphate companies had relied on

indigenous white labor, but these ‘crackers,’ accustomed to an ‘indolent life,’ were in the

words of one observer, ‘most independent in their views, and as most of them own a

homestead and cattle of their own, they liked a holiday after a week’s work.’”11 Tens of

thousands of black laborers migrated to Polk County at the turn of the century, drawn by

8 Walter E. Pittman, “The Florida Phosphate Industry: The First 100 Years,” Fertilizer Research 25 (November 1990): 193-96. 9 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 108-109; and Tom W. Shick and Don H. Doyle, “The South Carolina Phosphate Boom and the Stillbirth of the New South, 1867-1920,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 86 (January 1985): 1-31. 10 Gene Burnett, Florida’s Past: People and Events That Shaped the State, 3 vols. (Sarasota: Pineapple Press, 1991), 3:34; and James F. Tucker and United States Bureau of Labor, The Phosphate Industry of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1893), 39. 11 Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America’s Underclass from the Civil War to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 128.

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job prospects in the region’s cypress mills, orange groves, phosphate mines, and

turpentine camps.

During the postbellum period, turpentine—a solvent made from distilled pine

resin—was Florida’s third most valuable commodity.12 By the turn of the century, the

state’s phosphate exports surpassed turpentine in annual worth. In 1910, Florida produced

nearly 79 percent of the nation’s phosphate, and the state’s mining companies employed

more than 62 percent of the workers in the U.S. phosphorus fertilizer industry.13

Conditions in the mining regions were bleak. Describing Polk County in the

1930s, Hurston related, “How often had I heard ‘Polk County Blues.’ ‘You don’t know

Polk County lak ah do. Anybody been dere, tell you de same thing, too.’”14 Polk

County’s phosphate camps consisted of squalid wooden shacks, clustered haphazardly

along muddy streets. Dancehalls, speakeasies, and brothels offered a measure of relief

from backbreaking, ten- to twelve-hour days of phosphate excavation at a daily average

wage of $2.50.15 Sanitation was meager, malaria was common, and debt peonage and convict labor were widespread. In the late 1890s, state investigators who visited one of

Central Florida’s phosphate mines reported, “We found a system of cruelty and

inhumanity practiced at this camp, that it would be hard to realize unless it could be seen

12 On the history of black workers in the turpentine industry, see Michael David Tegeder, “Prisoners of the Pines: Debt Peonage in the Southern Turpentine Industry,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 1996); Jeffrey A. Drobney, “Where Palm and Pine Are Blowing: Convict Labor in the North Florida Turpentine Industry, 1877-1923,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 72 (April 1994): 411-434; and Jerrell H. Shofner, “Forced Labor in the Florida Forests, 1880-1950,” Journal of Forest History 25 (January 1981): 14-25. 13 Statistics are from U.S. Bureau of the Census, The Thirteenth Census of the United States taken in the year 1910 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913), 547. 14 Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935; New York: Perennial Library, 1990), 59. For more on this passage, see Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 65-66. Details on blues traditions among Florida’s itinerant black workers in the phosphate mines, sawmills, and turpentine camps, can be found it Ruth A. Banes, David A. Bealmear, and Kent Raster, “Florida Bound Blues,” Popular Music and Society 12 (July 2008): 43-58. 15 James A. Fisher, “The History of Mulberry, Florida,” (M.A. thesis, Wake Forest University, 1972), 93.

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and heard direct.”16

The work was dangerous and demeaning. Miners spent sweltering days knee-deep

in water, dynamiting barrel-sized slabs of white rock from the walls of the pit mines.

Errant explosions regularly killed or maimed laborers. Mounted armed guards patrolled

mining camp perimeters to ensure that workers did not depart for more lucrative

opportunities, and payment often took the form of scrip, redeemable only at company-run

commissaries.17

Attempting to improve their lot, many black miners joined their white colleagues

in the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, formerly the Western

Federation of Miners (WFM). During earlier decades, the WFM had risen to prominence

as the radical labor organization responsible for a string of hard-rock mining strikes

throughout the U.S. West. The group’s secretary-treasurer, William “Big Bill” Haywood,

was adamant that work stoppages were among the only options available to laborers who

toiled in these harsh, brutally run operations. As he contended, “There was no means of

escaping from the gigantic force that was relentlessly crushing all of them beneath its

cruel heel. The people of these dreadful mining camps were in a fever of revolt. There

was no method of appeal; the strike was their only weapon.”18 By the late 1800s,

Florida’s miners had acquired a similar outlook to that of their western counterparts.

In April 1919, a coalition of 3,000 white and black union members struck against

16 Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928 (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1996), 191. For more on debt peonage in Polk County’s phosphate mines, see Richard A. Fifer, “A Case of Peonage,” Polk County Historical Quarterly 33 (October 2006): 1 and 3. On convict leasing, see “Vivien M. L. Miller, “Reinventing the Penitentiary: Punishment in Florida, 1868-1923,” American Nineteenth Century History 1 (Spring 2000): 82-106. 17 Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 60. 18 Bill Haywood, as quoted in Melvyn Dubovsky, Hard Work: The Making of Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 45.

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seventeen Mulberry-area phosphate companies. The workers’ terms included a 37-cent-

per-hour minimum wage and an eight-hour day. These demands amounted to a twofold

increase in the average wage rates of land-pebble miners and a two- to four-hour reduction in the length of the workday for laborers. Such ultimatums followed the recommendations set by the National War Labor Board (NWLB), a United States federal agency created by President Woodrow Wilson in 1918 to arbitrate and mediate labor disputes.19

When managers at the International Agricultural Corporation at Prairie, the

Phosphate Mining Company at Nichols, and the Palmetto Phosphate Company at Tiger

Bay did not meet these terms, 1,800 mine workers walked off the job. On April 27, the

Vice President of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (more

familiarly referred to as the Mine Mill union) addressed 500 black and white strikers who paraded through downtown Mulberry in a show of solidarity. As he told them, their

claims were solidly based on the federal government’s conclusions about workplace

standards:

We are standing for principle of right, and I want it understood that principle does not stand for destruction of property nor unreasonable demands; the National War Labor Board has made certain recommendations and we are going to see that we are treated squarely if it takes five days or five years. All you men stay away from the mines. Get out and get jobs someplace else. Don’t permit a man to carry a gun and we will select the pickets this afternoon and if a scab or a man comes on your picket to take up the work, it is your duty to send him away in the direction you want him to go.20

By early May, nearly 1,200 more workers from fourteen other regional phosphate-mining

19 Letter from mediator J.W. Bridwell to Assistant Secretary of Labor H.L. Kerwin (June 20, 1919). RG 280 Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) Case Files 170-443, Box 106: Mulberry. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Maryland. The NWLB only lasted from 29 March 1918 to 12 August 1919. 20 V. Urquhart, Lakeland Star, 27 April 1919.

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firms joined their fellow strikers. According to union representatives, forty percent of

these workers were black and sixty percent were white.21 The Brotherhood of

Locomotive Engineers and Firemen joined the striking miners and refused to move phosphate the mines. This meant that transit between the phosphate beds and Florida’s coastal ports ground to a halt.22

Managers of the seventeen mining companies refused to negotiate with the workers. Company spokesman Peter O. Knight of the Tampa-based law firm Knight,

Thompson, and Turner issued a terse statement that read, “The men blew the whistles that stopped their work and we have accepted their challenge as to who is to run our plants, the operators or the men. When the men are ready to return to work, and at our terms, they will find the work there.”23 In an attempt to delegitimize the workers’ claims to a

fair wage and a ethical reduction to the workday, Knight denied the union’s claim of

government sanction: “I want to correct an impression that may spread from statements

issued by committees at the mines. They sign themselves ‘War Labor Board Committee.’

They have no connection with the war labor board, which itself has no jurisdiction and no

authority.”24

By July, officials at the U.S. Department of Labor’s Division of Conciliation

began expressing apprehensions about the prolonged duration of the strike and sent

21 These companies were: American Cyanamid Company, Brewster; Lakeland Phosphate Company, Lakeland; The Phosphate Mining Company, Nichols; Swift & Company, Agricola; Florida Phosphate Mining Company, Bartow; Coronet Phosphate Company, Pembroke; Coronet Phosphate Company, Plant City; Palmetto Phosphate Company, Tiger Bay; Charleston Mining and Manufacturing Company, Ft. Meade; Armour Fertilizer Works, Bartow; International Agricultural Corporation, Mulberry; American Agricultural Chemical Company, Pierce; The Florida Phosphate Mining Company, Mulberry; and the Prairie Pebble Phosphate Company, Mulberry. For the list of companies see Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville), 1 May 1919. 22 Tampa Tribune, 29 April 1919. 23 Tampa Tribune, 28 April 1919. 24 Ibid.

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mediator J.W. Bridwell to Mulberry. Bridwell and his team were unable to negotiate a settlement and found the predominately white business community of Polk County’s towns generally hostile towards the multiracial union. He feared that the situation would metamorphose into “not only a general [uprising] but perhaps a race riot. These Florida crackers are game when aroused.”25 His concerns were not unfounded.

Reminders of the lynching tree

In early August, the phosphate mining companies began recruiting black strikebreaking

replacement workers in Georgia and transporting these men by rail to Polk County,

Florida. They then conveyed these laborers to Mulberry in automobile convoys. In one

case, 300 laborers left Georgia aboard trains bound for Florida’s phosphate operations.

Along the way, nearly 200 deserted, having heard that they were heading for a hotly

contested picket line. Of the remaining 109, only 50 agreed to travel to the mines under

the armed escort of sheriff’s deputies. As Polk County’s Haines City Herald noted, “We

venture to say that the expense of bringing these fifty negroes from Georgia to Florida

would go a long way toward paying the increase in wages asked for by the miners.”26

This figurative price acquired more corporal dimensions when a group of striking miners

ambushed the cavalcade of strikebreakers on the edge of Bartow, eight miles (13 km) to

the east of Mulberry, killing a miner from Georgia and wounding Deputy Sheriff Gordon

Zebendon, a phosphate company guard.27

Eleven days later, on August 19, four white company guards from the Prairie

Pebble Mine drove by the black neighborhood of Mulberry and indiscriminately

25 RG 280 FMCS Case Files 170-443, Box 106: Mulberry. NARA, College Park, Maryland. 26 Haines City Herald, 9 August 1919. 27 Tampa Tribune, 8 August 1919.

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peppered the houses with twenty-five rounds from high-powered rifles. The outcome was

tragic:

The two-year-old child of William Wheeler, a negro, was shot through the heart, the bullet also wounding Lula King, a negro woman who was holding the baby in her arms as she sat on her front porch. The bullet, apparently from a high-power rifle, passed through the woman’s breast, but it could not be learned whether the wound would prove fatal. Sam Benzley, a negro [and former mine worker], who was walking along the railroad track close to the town, received a buckshot in his chest, but it is thought he will recover.28

Sheriff John Logan and his deputies soon apprehended the four company guards and

jailed them in Bartow.29

Such acts of racialized domestic terror were all-too common in the United States

during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1919, the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) published Thirty Years of Lynching in the

United States, 1889-1918, which provided a state-by-state chronological list of the “toll of the mob.”30

Lynching—or public murders in which vigilantes claim to kill in the name of

popular justice or some higher moral authority—left a nationwide landscape of “Lynch

Trees” from which the victims of such gruesome incidents hung.31 Mulberry was no

exception. Under the auspices of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA),

researchers from the Federal Writers’ Project recorded the following account of lynching

history in the early 1940s:

28 Kissimmee Valley Gazette, 22 August 1919. Also see Bradford County Telegraph, 22 August 1919. 29 Tampa Tribune, 19 August 1919; and Florida Times-Union, 19 August 1919. 30 NAACP, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918 (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1919) 31 On the history of lynching in the United States, see Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Modern Library, 2003).

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A legend of a different kind, fraught with realistic dread, was the renewal of life years ago in a mulberry tree, which is said to have taken place in the town of Mulberry. Negroes there say the place received its name from this particular tree. It was the custom of lynch mobs, the story goes, to hang the victims from this tree and then riddle their bodies with bullets. This gunfire finally killed the tree. For many years it stood bare and apparently dead, until one spring it again sprouted leaves. The news spread rapidly among Negroes, who saw in it an omen of more lynchings, and many of them fled to other sections. In 1938, the hollow and battered trunk still supported a live bough, but further lynchings had not yet occurred.32

Although the terror of the August 19, 1919 incident left Mulberry’s black community reeling, the interracial picket lines at the mines remained intact through the summer.

Effects of the strike

In a letter dated September 4, 1919, officials from the USDA wrote to U.S. Secretary of

Labor William B. Wilson to warn that “unless [the] strike in [the] Florida Pebble region

is brought to a conclusion immediately [there well be] serious consequences to crop

production east of the Mississippi.”33 During the inter-war years, Florida was—far and away—the largest U.S. source of phosphate rock, followed at great distance by South

Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and several Western States. In 1918, Florida produced 83 percent of the nation’s phosphate rock. The following year, as the United States Bureau of Mines reported, Florida experienced a thirty-three percent reduction in the quantity of phosphate rock mined. The bureau claimed that this decrease was the direct result of the

Mulberry strike. Florida also reduced its stocks on hand by approximately fifty percent

32 Federal Writers’ Project, Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (U.S. History Publishers, 1946), 132-133. 33 Memo from USDA Secretary to Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson, September 4, 1919. RG 280 FMCS Case Files 170-443, Box 106: Mulberry. NARA, College Park, Maryland.

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from 1918 to 1919.34

The strike’s consequences reverberated throughout the U.S. fertilizer industry. As

an advertisement for the Anderson Phosphate and Oil Company of South Carolina

announced in December 1919, “Fertilizers will probably be scarce next spring. There was

a labor strike in the phosphate rock mines in Florida last April... A great many of the

miners had left that field for work elsewhere, and they have gone back to work very

slowly.”35 Another trade journal noted, “The year 1919 was one of uncertain and usually

inadequate supply and widely fluctuating but generally high prices of fertilizers both in

the United States and abroad… This is attributed to shortage of labor and

transportation.”36 Phosphate rock shipped from the U.S. amounted to a mere 378,731

long tons in 1919, compared to one million long tons the following year.37

Farmers in northern Europe were among the foreign consumers who felt the effects of the Mulberry strike most noticeably. As Germany’s Secretary of Agriculture noted in 1920, “An especially great obstacle to agricultural production is the dire lack of fertilizers containing phosphoric acid. In the fertilizer year 1919-20, German farmers obtained only 139,000 tons of phosphoric acid-only one-fifth of the prewar period…

German farms will need at least 500,000 tons of phosphoric acid annually.”38 The editors

of the American Fertilizer Hand Book referenced the Mulberry strike when they

34 R.W. Stone, “Phosphate Rock” in Mineral Resources of the United States 1919, Part 2—Nonmetals (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922), 211-12. 35 Keowee Courier (Walhalla, South Carolina), 10 December 1919. 36 Frank Moore Colby, ed., New International Yearbook: A Compendium of the World’s Progress for the Year 1919 (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1920), 233-34. 37 “Phosphate Production Sets New High Record,” Commercial Fertilizer 21 (June 1921): 92. Long tons are British tons, equivalent to 2,240 pounds. 38 Dr. Huber, “Food Conditions and Agricultural Production, by. Dr. Huber, Secretary of State in the National Administration of Food and Agriculture, Munich, Translated by E. M. Fogel, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 92 (November 1920), 136.

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discussed how, during 1919, “a bullish [export] situation was brought about by new labor

troubles in the Florida phosphate fields.” That year, Germans paid 30,000 marks for

every ton of U.S. phosphate, which had cost them only 50 marks per ton before the war.39

This unprecedented price increase was due, in large part, to the rampant inflation that

accompanied Germany’s loss in the First World War and the 132 billion gold marks

(US$33 billion) of reparations payments that it owed its victorious opponents under the

terms of the Treaty of Versailles.40 However, commercial agents were unambiguous that

the low output of phosphate from the U.S. and the high prices of the fertilizer in northern

Europe during 1919 could be attributed to the labor and railroad stoppages in Florida.41

Across the Atlantic, the Mulberry strike began to produce the results that the

union had desired. After a protracted struggle that lasted until December, the striking

miners won both of their key demands. By December 3, most of the phosphate companies had capitulated to a one hundred percent wage increase and the reduction of the workday by two to four hours.42 Even so, the handful of retrospective analyses that have

chronicled this crucial labor stoppage generally deemed it a failure.

Among the few scholars to analyze the strike was military historian Arch Fredric

Blakey who devoted a chapter to it in his 1973 book The Florida Phosphate Industry.

Unfortunately Blakey’s research left a trail of misinterpretations about the immediate

effects and the long-term legacy of Mulberry’s 1919 labor protest. On the one hand, he

mentioned, “R.B. Lowett, president of the Florida State Federation of Labor, delivered an

39 “Fertilizer Materials Statistics,” in The American Fertilizer Hand Book (Philadelphia: Ware Bros. Co., 1920), 21. 40 Sally Marks, “The Myths of Reparations,” Central European History 11 (September 1978): 236. 41 “Phosphate Profiteering Charged,” Drug & Chemical Markets 5, no. 51 (August 27, 1919): 9. 42 Lakeland Star, 3 December 1919. Also see Jan Voogd, Race Riots & Resistance: The Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 75.

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address claiming that the newspapers were pro-management.” Blakey also noted that

Governor Sidney Catts had told the striking miners, “I am for you because the newspapers do not give you a fair deal. I know what it is to be hounded by unfair newspapers. We sent out boys across the sea to fight for democracy, when we have a newspaper autocracy and czardom right here at home.” Despite these caveats, Blakey depended on local and regional newspapers for forty-one of his forty-six chapter endnotes.

Relying on Blakey’s flawed research, a number of historians have uncritically concluded that the strike was “broken,” ending in complete failure for the phosphate miners.43

The spectre of Bolshevism haunting the Sunshine State

Contemporary opponents of the strike also had a stake in portraying Mulberry’s miners as

misguided actors who played bit parts on the wrong side of history. In 1919, Florida

Governor Catts called the Mine Mill labor organizers “white carpet bag officers” who

“inflamed…the minds of negroes” with dangerous ideas.44 In June, phosphate company

spokesman Peter O. Knight was adamant in his attempts to link the strikers to un-

American activities:

To hear some of the flannel-mouthed, pin-headed, brainless, anarchistic, bolsheviki labor agitators talk about questions of this kind, you would think we were living in Russia Instead of the United States. But you can bet on the

43 The quotes are from Arch Frederic Blakey, The Florida Phosphate Industry: A History of the Development and Use of a Vital Mineral (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 66 and 70. For examples of historians who relied on Blakey’s account for their conclusions about the strike, see R. Steven Griffin, “Workers of the Sunshine State Unite!: The Florida Socialist Party during the Progressive Era, 1900-1920,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 86 (Winter 2008): 353; Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life, 60; and Raymond L. Driver, Bone Valley Comes to Life (Tampa: Raymond L. Driver Publisher, 1992), 96. For an early critique of Blakey’s approach, see Christopher S. Duckworth, “Review of ‘The Florida Phosphate Industry: A History of the Development and Use of a Vital Mineral’ by Arch Fredric Blakey,” The Business History Review 49 (Summer 1975): 275-77. 44 Sidney Catts, as quoted in Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations: 1912-1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 115.

15 Edward D. Melillo – Please do no cite or copy without author’s permission

common sense and patriotism of the ordinary American, and this damnfoolishness will not continue indefinitely. Right will always prevail in this country.45

Remarks such as these tapped into widespread fears among elites that communist revolution would sweep the globe in the wake of Russia’s 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Bolshevism on Trial, a right-wing propaganda film directed by Harley Knoles and released by the Mayflower Photoplay Company in 1919, featured a fictional scenario in which socialists use “Paradise Island” off the Florida coast to establish a utopian colony based on “happiness and plenty.” In the end, U.S. Marines restore capitalist order to the atoll, replacing a red flag with Old Glory.46

Reality diverged significantly from such fictional portrayals. During 1919, the

U.S. experienced 3,600 strikes, which involved over 4 million workers.47 Many of these

labor actions, such as the Seattle General Strike and the National Steel Strike, merged

practical workplace demands with larger goals of economic justice. As labor historian

David Montgomery put it, “Even though the American situation [in 1919 and 1920] was

not revolutionary, bold visions of social change and strikes for a few more pennies per

hour fed on each other.”48

The 1919 Mulberry phosphate miner’s strike was reminiscent of earlier, successful interracial labor alliances in the U.S. South. The 1892 New Orleans General

Strike, which lasted from November 8 to November 12, resulted in reduced hours and

45 Tampa Tribune, 29 June 1919; Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville), 29 June 1919. 46 The movie drew its inspiration from Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.’s book Comrades (1909). Dixon had achieved notoriety for his 1905 novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, which advocated the maintenance of racial segregation in the U.S. and served as the basis for D.W. Griffith’s infamous film, The Birth of a Nation. See Ann Hagedorn, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 175-87. 47 Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), 9. 48 David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 389.

16 Edward D. Melillo – Please do no cite or copy without author’s permission

higher pay for several thousand members of three racially integrated unions in the city.

As American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers declared, “With one fell

swoop the economic barrier of color was broken down.”49 At times, crossings of the color

line took more radical steps. During the 1904, 1908, and 1912 national elections,

Floridians cast the highest percentage of Socialist Party votes of any state in the U.S.

South.50

Florida phosphates during the inter-war years

Capital advanced in tandem with Labor’s strides. In the years following the First World

War and the 1919 Mulberry strike, Florida’s phosphate mines became further enmeshed

in an intricate web of foreign investments. In 1920, the British firm Andrew Weir & Co.

purchased 30,000 acres (12,141 hectares) of Florida real estate and established the

Loncala Phosphate Company, which boasted on-site facilities for crushing, drying, and storing hard-rock phosphate. Simultaneously, German, Austrian, French, and Belgian companies invested sizeable sums in Florida’s phosphate industry.51

Europe also provided a lucrative export market for the state’s phosphate. Fertilizer

companies shipped 42,000 metric tons of Florida hard-rock phosphate to European

markets in 1933. Five years later, Europeans imported 123,000 metric tons of the

commodity. Florida was among the key nodes in the circuitry of world phosphorus

49 Gompers, as quoted in Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States. Vol. 2: From the Founding of the American Federation of Labor to the Emergence of American Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1955), 203. 50 For more on Florida voting trends in the early 1900s, see George N. Green, “Florida Politics and Socialism at the Crossroads of the Progressive Era, 1912,” (M.A. thesis, Florida State University, 1962). 51 On Loncala Phosphate Company, see Mira Wilkins, New Foreign Enterprise in Florida (Miami: Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, 1980), 12; and Jesse W. Markham, The Fertilizer Industry (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1958), 51. For more on other foreign investors in the Florida’s phosphate industry, see Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States, 1914-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 709n42.

17 Edward D. Melillo – Please do no cite or copy without author’s permission

production. By the late 1930s, over ninety percent of global phosphate rock exports

reached consumers through an international cartel system that included companies with

operations in Florida, North Africa, and the Pacific Islands.52

Phosphorus supplies were a key strategic concern for U.S. policymakers during

the inter-war years. On May 20, 1938, at the tail end of the Dust Bowl, President Franklin

Delano Roosevelt addressed Congress about phosphorus conservation and the waning

productive capacity of U.S. soils:

As a result of the studies and tests of modern science it has come to be recognized that phosphorus is a necessary element in human, in animal and in plant nutrition. The phosphorus content of our land, following generations of cultivation, has greatly diminished. It needs replenishing. The necessity for wider use of phosphates and the conservation of our supplies of phosphates for future generations is, therefore, a matter of great public concern. We cannot place our agriculture upon a permanent basis unless we give it heed.53

As a wartime president, Roosevelt was, no doubt, aware of the numerous paradoxes

embedded in the human relationship to phosphorus. Despite its life-giving properties, phosphorus has also been essential to modern technologies of warfare. Its twentieth- century military applications are legion. Armies have employed phosphorus as an ingredient in artillery shells, grenades, firebombs, tracer bullets, smoke cartridges, and organophosphate chemical weapons, including VX gas, the most toxic nerve agent ever synthesized.54

Phosphorus also plays conflicting roles in the environment for less deadly, yet

still damaging, reasons. Although it is a crucial limiting factor for crop growth, an

52 Mirko Lamer, The World Fertilizer Economy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 190, 192. 53 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on Phosphates for Soil Fertility,” (May 20, 1938), The American Presidency Project, available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15643 54 John Emsley, The 13th Element: The Sordid Tale of Murder, Fire, and Phosphorus (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), esp. Chs. 7 and 8.

18 Edward D. Melillo – Please do no cite or copy without author’s permission

abundance of phosphorus can lead to the eutrophication of aquatic ecosystems.

Eutrophication occurs when nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer leaches into waterways

and stimulates the rapid growth of algae and surface plants, such as water hyacinth. As

this vegetation dies, the microorganisms responsible for its decomposition consumes

dissolved oxygen in the water. Eventually, this creates oxygen-depleted environments,

such as the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.55

An enigmatic element

The contradictory roles phosphorus would play in human relations with the biosphere

could hardly have been supposed by those who made the first scientific discoveries of

this chemical element. In 1669, Hamburg merchant and alchemist Hennig Brand—

described by Dutch philosopher Wilhelm Homberg as “a man little known, of low birth,

with a bizarre and mysterious nature in all he did”—accidentally isolated phosphorus by

heating evaporated urine residues and powdered charcoal.56 Yielding an effect that Brand

called kaltes feuer, or “cold fire,” the reaction produced a waxy condensed vapor that

glowed in the dark. This chemiluminescent property made the seemingly magical

substance a hit at European courts and a sought-after curiosity at travelling fairs.57

Further investigation proved that the glowing element offered more than a

sideshow novelty. Frankfurt chemist Johann Thomas Hensing discovered the human

55 On phosphorus and eutrophication, see James J. Elser, “Phosphorus: A Limiting Nutrient for Humanity?” Current Opinion in Biotechnology 23 (December 2012): 833-38; John P. Smol, Pollution of Lakes and Rivers: A Paleoenvironmental Perspective, 2nd ed. (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 180-228; and Elena Bennett and Steve R. Carpenter, “P Soup,” World Watch 15 (March/April 2002): 24-32. 56 Wilhelm Homberg, Mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences depuis 1666 jusqu'à 1699, 10 (1730): 57. 57 William Gleason, “An Introduction to Phosphorus: History, Production, and Application,” Journal of Minerals, Metals, and Materials 59 (June 2007): 18; and Mary Elvira Weeks, “The Discovery of the Elements. XXI. Supplementary Note on the Discovery of Phosphorus,” Journal of Chemical Education 10 (May 1933): 302. Brand’s name is sometimes spelled “Brandt.”

19 Edward D. Melillo – Please do no cite or copy without author’s permission

brain’s high phosphorus content in 1719. This revelation led the Dutch physiologist Jacob

Moleschott to proclaim in 1852, “Ohne Phosphor, kein Gedanke” (“Without Phosphorus,

there can be no Thought”).58

In addition, without phosphorus, there can be no agriculture. Phosphates are the salts of phosphoric acid. Because phosphate rocks have low solubility, they must be

chemically digested to yield viable crop fertilizer. British scientists Sir John Bennett

Lawes and Sir Joseph Henry Gilbert, the co-founders of the Rothamstead Research

Station in Hertfordshire, England, were key players in the development of phosphorus

fertilizer science. In 1842, Lawes invented a process for decomposing bones with sulfuric

acid to create the “superphosphates” that nineteenth-century British farmers applied to their fields. Gilbert, who had studied under nineteenth-century soil scientist Justus von

Liebig, supervised the station’s experimental work on this fertilizer.59

Liebig was among the century’s great promoters of phosphorus. As he noted in

his widely read Familiar Letters on Chemistry, “My recent researches into the constituent

ingredients of our cultivated fields have led me to the conclusion that, of all the elements

furnished to plants by the soil and ministering to their nourishment, the phosphate of lime,

or, rather, the phosphates generally, must be regarded as the most important.”60 Prior to

this scientific revolution in soil science, Europe’s farmers had already begun to

comprehend the efficacy of bone meal fertilizer for enhancing grain yields. In their search

for raw materials to supply this practice, peasants routinely scoured battlefields for bones,

58 Donald B. Tower, Hensing, 1719: An Account of the First Chemical Examination of the Brain and the Discovery of Phosphorus Therein (New York: Raven Press, 1983); and Jacob Moleschott, Für meine Freunde: Lebens-Erinnerungen (1894; Giessen, Germany: E. Roth, 1895), 207. 59 J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000), 23; and Wallace E. Huffman and Robert E. Evenson, Science for Agriculture: A Long-Term Perspective, 2nd ed. (Ames, Iowa: Blackwell, 2006), 18. 60 Justus von Liebig, Familiar Letters on Chemistry, and its Application to Physiology, Agriculture, and Commerce, ed. John Gardner (1843; New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1850), 52.

20 Edward D. Melillo – Please do no cite or copy without author’s permission

while merchants ransacked catacombs for skeletons.61

Striking matches

Other forms of the element also circulated throughout everyday life, and Mulberry’s

miners were not the only phosphorus workers to strike during the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries. In the summer of 1888, 1,400 women walked out on their

employers at Bryant and May’s match factory in East London to protest fourteen-hour

workdays, harsh punishments, poverty wages, and the health dangers of working with

white phosphorus. These perils included “phossy jaw,” a debilitating condition in which

the jawbone abscesses as a result of excessive phosphorus deposition. The Bryant and

May’s workers formed the largest union of female laborers Great Britain had ever seen.

At the conclusion of widely publicized pickets, mass meetings, and public campaigns by

the strikers, the Bryant and May’s management conceded to most of their demands. The

match-workers strike captured Europe’s public imagination, ruptured the myth of the

passive Victorian woman, and provided spirited inspiration for the Great Dock Strike of

1889.62

In many industries, workplace upheavals—such as strikes, slowdowns, or other

forms of labor protest—rupture business-as-usual, illuminating relations that otherwise

remain concealed. Environmental historians stand to gain useful insights from an

increased attentiveness to such interruptions of routines and intrusions on recurring

61 F.M.L. Thompson, “The Second Agricultural Revolution, 1815-1880,” The Economic History Review 21 (April 1968): 69. For a similar practice of bone scavenging, albeit gathering bison skeletons in the U.S. West, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991), 438n40. 62 The most comprehensive account of the strike is Louise Raw, Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in Labour History (New York: Continuum, 2009).

21 Edward D. Melillo – Please do no cite or copy without author’s permission dynamics. Such incidents can demonstrate not only how humans experience “knowing nature through labor,” but also about how novel relationships between labor history and environmental history yield new understandings of work and nature.63

In January of 1923, just four years after the Mulberry labor action, a general strike in the Ruhr region of Germany to the east of the Rhine River exemplified such a revelation. That month, France and Belgium invaded the coal-rich region to punish the

Weimar Republic for its failure to maintain its post-war reparations payments. In response to the occupation, German workers struck and shut down the region’s heavy industries until the following autumn. The complete suspension of coal, coke, and steel production for several consecutive months led to a stunning—albeit temporary— transformation of the area’s environment. As one observer remarked, “The air was of the same quality as in nonindustrial regions. The leaves, which normally started to wither in early summer, stayed fresh and green until autumn.” Local harvests increased by half, potatoes matured larger than normal, and tree rings grew wider than during the years that preceded and followed. Although these fleetingly clear skies did not slow the development of German heavy industry, they did lead to some of the first comprehensive

63 For the concept of “knowing nature through labor,” see Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 3. Examples of recent research linking environmental history and labor history, see Edward D. Melillo, “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840-1930,” American Historical Review, 117 (October 2012), 1028-1060; Gregory Rosenthal, “Life and Labor in a Seabird Colony: Hawaiian Guano Workers, 1857-1870,” Environmental History 17 (October 2012): 744-82; Lissa K. Wadewitz, The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012); Thomas Miller Klubock, “The Nature of the Frontier: Forests and Peasant Uprisings in Southern Chile,” Social History 36 (May 2011): 121-42; Thomas D. Rogers, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Chad Montrie, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); Gunther Peck, “The Nature of Labor: Fault Lines and Common Ground in Environmental and Labor History,” Environmental History 11 (April 2006): 212-38; and John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).

22 Edward D. Melillo – Please do no cite or copy without author’s permission

air quality studies in Central Europe, setting precedents for later research that did

mobilize policymakers.64

Conclusion

As this article has attempted to show, a close examination of the 1919 Phosphate Miners’

Strike in Mulberry, Florida offers a window on social and ecological relations that

otherwise remain hidden. During the early decades of the twentieth century, black and

white working men and women in the U.S. South were neither devout egalitarians nor

unredeemable racists. Intersections of labor and race were diverse and complicated,

varying considerably with time and place. Even so, examples of interracial solidarity in

the face of powerful countervailing forces should not be ignored and provide tangible

examples of alliances that crossed boundaries.65

Likewise, human interactions with non-human nature have shown tremendous heterogeneity, ranging from profound care for the environments that sustain communities over the long term to severe exploitation of new commodity frontiers that enrich corporations in the short run. In the case of phosphorus, the inclination has been toward

the latter of these tendencies. In her stunning—and harrowing—ethnography of the

Pacific Island of Banaba, anthropologist Katerina Martina Teaiwa details how phosphate

mining by colonial powers reduced a thriving tropical island to an uninhabitable

moonscape.66

64 Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, “A Nature Fit for Industry: The Environmental History of the Ruhr Basin, 1840-1990,” Environmental History Review 18 (Spring, 1994): 41; and McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 85. 65 For an eloquent reflection on these matters, see Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878-1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 66 Katerina Martina Teaiwa, Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).

23 Edward D. Melillo – Please do no cite or copy without author’s permission

Similarly, Florida’s Bone Valley phosphate deposits are running out. As of 2011,

mining companies had extracted all the accessible ore within 282 square miles (730 km2)

of the Peace River Watershed deposit.67 For many of Central Florida’s residents, the

collapse of phosphate mining was an unanticipated occurrence. As 74-year-old Mulberry

City Mayor Carl M. “Kid” Ellis, told a reporter in 1987, “We were running 24 hours a day, seven days a week…I never once dreamed I would live to see this happen to the phosphate industry.”68

Humans are presently mobilizing over four times the phosphorus that natural

processes relocated among the earth’s systems before the advent of agriculture. As a

result, phosphorus deposits in the lithosphere are becoming increasingly scarce.69 The search continues for accessible sources of this key ingredient for food production; phosphate mines are in operation, or under development, in at least twenty-five countries.70 New social struggles and environmental changes will emerge in these sites.

Recounting the lives of black laborers who toiled in the phosphate mines of Polk County,

Florida in the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston reminded her readers, “The wheels of industry

must move, and if these men don’t do the work, who is going to do it?”71

67 Gabriel M. Filippelli, “Phosphate Rock Formation and Marine Phosphorus Geochemistry: The Deep Time Perspective,” Chemosphere 84 (August 2001): 764. 68 Marilyn Marks, “Reliance on phosphate has dug a deep hole for Mulberry,” St. Petersburg Times, 2 March 1987, 7A. 69 Vaclav Smil, “Phosphorus: Global Transfers,” in Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change, ed. Ian Douglas, 5 vols. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 3:536. For more on the industrial processes that alter the phosphorus cycle, see Gara Villalba, Yi Liu, Hans Schroder, and Robert U. Ayres, “Global Phosphorus Flows in the Industrial Economy From a Production Perspective,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 12 (August 2008): 557-69. 70 These include: Algeria, Angola, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, Israel, Kazakhstan, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Peru, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Syria, Tunisia, Togo, Uganda, the United States, and Zambia. See Stephen M. Jasinkski, “Phosphate Rock [Advance Release],” in 2011 Minerals Yearbook (Washington, D.C.: US Geological Survey, 2013), 56.10, Table 10. 71 Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 147.

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