Hold the Fort!/Grog, Sex, and the People's Party
Grog, Sex, and the People's Party
At the same time that the Republicans were giving their Democratic opponents the "what-for" to the tune of "Hold the Fort," the Prohibitionists, whose roots went back to the colonial period, were trying to dry up the country to the same tune. In so doing they perhaps sought to confuse the opposition—if they were not themselves confused—by singing two anonymously published versions of the same song. One was entitled "Hold the Fort for Prohibition" and the other "Storm the Fort for Prohibition," the latter probably inspired by a Knights of Labor version of Bliss's song. In the first of these the third verse and chorus urged:
By the God who freedom gave us,
With immortal souls!
Crush the foe who dare enslave us—
Forward to the polls!
"Hold the fort for prohibition!"
Freedom signals still;
Answer back to her petition,
"By our vote we will!"[111]
In the other version the last verse and chorus exhorted:
Face the grog-shops' bold defiance,
Never fear or quail.
Coward foes will soon surrender;
Voters! do not fail.
Storm the fort for Prohibition
Captives signal still,
Answer back to their petition,
"By our votes we will."[112]
Also seeking to influence affairs as the nineteenth century advanced were the militant ladies of the woman's-rights movement, who particularly urged woman suffrage but who also pressed temperance and other radical ideas upon reluctant male politicians, some of whom professed to fear that the vote would unsex womanhood. Or so it was said during the 1890 debates over the admission of Wyoming, which had had woman suffrage since 1869.[113] Under the circumstances, the ladies turned to song to keep their spirits up and to plead their case. One song, sung to the tune of "Hold the Fort" and variously called "Columbia's Daughters" and "Hark! The Sound of Myriad Voices," appears in at least three different collections of suffrage songs and under the title "Columbia's Daughters" in a record album of several years ago.[114] The first verse and the chorus of this song, which was written for the first annual meeting of the National Woman Suffrage Association of Massachusetts, are enough to give its flavor:
Rising in their might;
'Tis the daughters of Columbia
Pleading for the right.
Wave the signal still;
Brother, we must share your freedom,
Help us, and we will.[115]
There are at least two other woman-suffrage songs to the tune of "Hold the Fort." One of these has the not very original title "Our Suffrage Song," while the other has the equally unoriginal title "Hold the Fort!"[116]
Of all the reform movements in the United States in the late nineteenth century none was more remarkable than the Populist movement that spawned the People's Party. This grew, primarily, out of severe agrarian discontent that first manifested itself organizationally in alliances of farmers who united against the railroads, bankers, manufacturers, and merchants. By 1890 much of the strength of the movement lay in the great wheat-growing sections of Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota. The party itself disintegrated after a few years because it lost its leading issue of free silver to the Democrats and suffered from racism, xenophobia, and a largely rhetorical support of labor.
Among the more colorful and effective Populist leaders was Mary Elizabeth (some called her Mary Ellen or Mary Yellin') Lease, who once urged an audience of Kansas farmers to "raise less corn and more hell." Populists marched and, crying a plague on both major parties, sang "Good-bye, My Party, Good-bye" to the tune of "Good-bye, My Lover, Good-bye." They also sang "Toilers Unite," "Where Will the Farmer Be?"[117] and, at least in Nebraska, "Man the Pumps." The last, by Mrs. J. T. Kellie, was a cleverly rhymed song of thirteen verses and a chorus set to the tune of "Hold the Fort." Consider the first and ninth verses and the chorus:
They observed at last
The G.O.P. with spoils o'er laden
Now was sinking fast.
Howe in terror cries;
"We're exhausted, hands are blistered,"
Banker crew replies.
Keep stiff upper lip;
We can no more enslave labor
If we lose the ship.[118]