Page:Hold the Fort! (Scheips 1971) low resolution.pdf/39

NUMBER 9

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!"

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?" 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: