“From Bone Valley to 'Far Places': a Global Environmental History of The

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). 2 Edward D. Melillo – Please do no cite or copy without author’s permission 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. 4 Edward D. Melillo – Please

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