Page:Hold the Fort! (Scheips 1971) low resolution.pdf/40

34  Remote though Nebraska of the 1890s was from Ghana of the 1950s, "Hold the Fort" managed to bridge the continents and the centuries to give its music and some of its words to the Ghanaian song of independence. Missionaries, it seems, had carried the original gospel song to Africa in the decade of its composition. Teddy Schwartz learned the African song from Joe Lamotey, a Ghanaian social worker at the New York Guild for the Jewish Blind, and translated it into English:

  Just as the political and other adaptations of "Hold the Fort" were a measure of its great popularity, so also was its adaptation to the songs of labor, which carried Bliss's old hymn into a period of labor history that saw the workingman achieve a new dignity in the land. It is not known when "Hold the Fort" became a labor song, but it is likely that in the United States a labor version appeared sometime during the troubled 1870s, probably during the middle or latter part of the decade. These were years of a great depression in which an army of unemployed battled the New York police; railroad strikes brought out federal troops and subsequently set some members of the military to writing dreary articles about the control of mobs; and the Knights of Labor organized (in 1878) their first general assembly.

The 1870s were a yeasty time in which men gave thought to bettering the earthly order of things, and followed thought by action. To some men, at least, it made more sense to be militant about wages and working conditions than about a religion that, in its emphasis upon another world, seemed to care little if at all about what happened to men in their own world of bitter struggle. In turning to the weapons at hand, what