# Hold the Fort!/Union Hall and Picket Line

Union Hall and Picket Line
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 ​could be more useful for inspiriting an organization with a mission than a stirring, militant song that was well known, simple enough to be easily adapted, and could be sung by all? It is not surprising, therefore, that the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor changed both the title and the words of Bliss's song and, leaving its origin unmistakable, helped raise it to at least a modest folk status.
According to Philip S. Foner, "Storm the Fort, Ye Knights of Labor" became the Knights' most famous song and was widely translated and sung by workers of various nationalities. Foner puts it graphically and with eloquent sensitivity: "Out of the misery in America's coal mines and railroads, the oppression in the textile mills, the degradation of the men and women in the sweatshops rose the militant cry in English, German, Polish, Italian, French, Jewish, and other tongues":
Toiling millions now are waking, See them marching on; All the tyrants now are shaking, Ere their power is gone.
Storm the fort, Ye Knights of Labor, Battle for your cause; Equal rights for every neighbor, Down with tyrant laws!
Perhaps, as Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer suggest, this version found its way to England, where the Knights were established by 1884. The Knights also had assemblies in Australia and New Zealand, and there was "at least one" assembly in Ireland. It seems most likely, however, that the British labor movement adapted to its own uses the original version of the song after picking it up from the Salvation Army.
By 1 July 1886, at the height of their power, the Knights of Labor had 729,677 members, with 702,924 in good standing. The total fell to 548,239 the next year, and thereafter the decline was rapid. By 1893 there were only 74,635. This decline coincided with the rise of the national unions, which joined together in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Descriptions of the mid-Victorian luxury of the Knights' new headquarters in an old Philadelphia brownstone mansion created hostility in the membership and helped grease the skids. "'The General Executive Board has squandered the funds of the Order in a reckless purchase of a palace among capitalists and nabobs' was one of the mildest expressions of this hostile feeling." As an effective organization, the Knights of Labor died before the turn of the century, although the body ​was not buried until 1917, when John W. Hayes, the last master workman, retired what was left of the Knights' records and furnishings to a leaky shed in Washington, D.C.
Dissatisfaction with craft unionism and the conservative policies of the American Federation of Labor meanwhile led to the organization in 1905 of the Industrial Workers of the World, commonly called the IWW or the Wobblies. While accepting the Knights' idea of organizing all workers, including the unskilled, the Wobblies repudiated the middle class ideology of the Knights and looked toward "abolition of the wage system" and, therefore, of capitalism. Many among them dreamed of the organization of One Big Union (the OBU) to which all workers everywhere would belong. For their efforts they suffered brutal treatment at the hands of both mobs and officials who cared for neither individual nor constitutional rights.
Trouble, not surprisingly, led the Wobblies to song. Their most famous songwriter was a Swedish immigrant, who evidently was born Joel Emanuel Hagglund but who called himself Joseph Hillstrom and, later, just plain Joe Hill. While awaiting execution before a Utah firing squad in 1915 for a murder he may not have committed, he wired his friend Bill Haywood: "Goodbye, Bill. I die a true blue rebel. Don't waste time in mourning. Organize." After his death he became a legendary figure, a true folk hero of labor. "Casey Jones, the Union Scab," written in 1911, was the first of many songs that he wrote. "Joe Hill," for which Alfred Hayes wrote the words in 1925 and Earl Robinson later wrote the music, has become one of the most famous labor songs of the twentieth century. It was no accident that Hank Ghant of the United Auto Workers sang it in a last goodbye to Walter P. Reuther and his wife at the Reuther funeral in Detroit on 15 May 1970, and that a week later Joe Glazer sang it in Washington at the Reuther memorial service in the National Cathedral.
During World War I the Wobblies, although antimilitaristic, did not take an official stand against the war. They continued to strike, however, despite an opposite policy of the American Federation of Labor, and were accused of trying to hinder the war. This situation led to the indictment of 166 Wobblies, of whom 101 were finally tried in 1918 in a months-long trial in the Chicago federal district court, principally on charges of sabotage and conspiracy to obstruct the war. There were similar trials in Sacramento, California, and Wichita, Kansas. The Chicago trial was presided over by the famous judge and future baseball commissioner, ​Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was named after Kennesaw Mountain where his father, a Union surgeon, had lost a leg in June 1864 in the fighting that preceded the fall of Atlanta. Although individuals were before the bar, the trial was really a trial of the IWW, or, as Patrick Renshaw says, of "a philosophy." The 101 Wobblies tried in Chicago were all convicted and sentenced to prison, some for twenty years. One of them was Ralph Hosea Chaplin (the editor of Solidarity, the official Wobbly paper) , whose sentence was commuted in 1923. Among the others were the Englishman George Hardy; Harrison George, another writer; and William D. (Big Bill) Haywood, the secretary-treasurer of the IWW. Haywood subsequently jumped bail after unsuccessful appeals of the sentences and headed for Moscow, where he died in 1928. In addition to the prison sentences, the court imposed fines totaling over $2.5 million. The great trial of 1918 and the unsympathetic post-World War I years brought about the rapid decline of the IWW, which is barely alive today. In the 1930s, and afterward, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) would succeed in industrial unionism where the I W W had failed.
Of the Wobblies who went to prison following the trial of 1918, Ralph Chaplin was especially remarkable. An artist and a poet of no little ability, while in prison he wrote a number of poems which he published in 1922 as Bars and Shadows: The Prison Poems of Ralph Chaplin. Subsequently he differed with Harrison George and the Wobblies who pursued Communism, and afterward, in World War II, he edited the Labor Advocate, published by the Central Labor Council of Tacoma, Washington. With a grant from the Newberry Library in Chicago he later wrote—and in 1948 the University of Chicago Press published—his fascinating autobiography, Wobbly, the Rough and Tumble Story of an American Radical.
These two young Wobblies, Ralph Chaplin and Harrison George, added a brief chapter to the history of "Hold the Fort," finding Bliss's militant tune useful as they broke into troubled song in the days of their arrest and imprisonment. In October 1917, while in the Cook County jail pending trial and conviction, George wrote "Remember," which was sung to the tune of "Hold the Fort." The first and fourth verses and the chorus of this song evoke memories of an old radicalism:
We speak to you from jail today Two hundred union men, We're here because the bosses' laws Bring slavery again.
In Chicago's darkened dungeons For the O.B.U. Remember you're outside for us While we're in here for you.
We make a pledge—no tyrant might Can make us bend a knee, Come on you workers, organize and fight for Liberty.
Upton Sinclair, astonished by his arrest for attempting to read the United States Constitution while standing on private property with the permission of the owner during the IWW's Marine Transport Workers' strike at San Pedro in 1923, wrote a four-act play called Singing Jailbirds. In it he portrayed prisoners and their friends singing, among other songs, "Remember," adapting it to their own locale by substituting "California" for "Chicago." In a postcript Sinclair described his own arrest and contributed some historical notes on conditions in the country's jails and prisons. He also quoted a San Pedro police captain who, after the Wobblies were freed, was reported to have complained that "somebody has been making holy asses of us policemen."
While in Leavenworth Penitentiary, Chaplin wrote "All Hell Can't Stop Us!" but it was not published among his prison poems. This song also was to the tune of "Hold the Fort," and it appeared in the 1919 edition of "The Little Red Song Book," or, as the cover title has it, with typical Wobbly humor, I.W.W. Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent. The first verse and the chorus of "All Hell Can't Stop Us" indicate its no-nonsense character:
Now the final battle rages; Tyrants quake with fear. Rulers of the New Dark Ages Know THEIR end is near.
Scorn to take the crumbs they drop us; All is ours by right! Onward, men! All Hell can't stop us! Crush the Parasite!
A Sunday afternoon program arranged by the IWW "class war prisoners" in the Cook County jail in December 1917 opened with the IWW chorus singing a version of "Hold the Fort" and ended with it singing "The Red Flag." Doubtless, the version of "Hold the Fort" sung then was that of the British Transport Workers. As the "English ​Transport Workers' Strike Song," it appeared in the first (1909) edition and in the 1918, 1919, 1945, and 1964 editions of "The Little Red Song Book" and probably in other editions as well. In the 1964 edition there appears, following the song, the declaration that "the working class will never be free until it can blow the whistle for the parasites to go to work. . . ." The four verses and chorus of the song show a striking resemblance to the words that Bliss wrote in 1870:
We meet today in Freedom's cause And raise our voices high; We'll join our hands in union strong, To battle or to die.
Hold the fort for we are corning— Union men, be strong. Side by side we battle onward, Victory will come.
Look my Comrades, see the union Banners waving high. Reinforcements now appearing Victory is nigh.
See our numbers still increasing; Hear the bugles blow. By our union we shall triumph Over every foe.
Fierce and long the battle rages, But we will not fear, Help will come whene'er it's needed, Cheer, my Comrades, cheer.
It is clear, of course, that there was a musical connection between revivalism and the labor movement, but it also is probably true that there was a more fundamental connection. In one view, at least, John Wesley—with whom revivalism began in England in 1743—gave to "the English urban proletariat a democratic religion and an effective emotional outlet." In turn, this "religious experience of mass emotion and collective action by working men contributed indirectly to the labor movement, although in its inception it had no economic program or application." Ellen McCulloch, of the British Transport and General Workers Union, seems to affirm this in saying that religious nonconformism influenced many local and national trade union leaders in Great Britain in the early days.
Certainly American revivalism as practiced by Moody was a departure from the forms of the established church, although one student of the subject claims that in Great Britain and Ireland Moody's revivalism had "little if any effect on the labor movement" because it had its "chief stronghold in the middle classes." The record is clear, however, that between 1873 and 1875 Moody took his message to "the poorer classes" in such great industrial cities as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast, Manchester, and London (where one of the revival centers was in Bow Road Hall in the poor and grimy East End).
With Moody, of course, was Sankey, and many a workingman in the great cities they visited must have heard "Hold the Fort." No doubt, the song's continued popularity induced the Salvation Army, organized by General William Booth in 1878, to use it and thereby to popularize it still further. Arthur Deakin, who became general secretary of the British Transport Workers, recalled that "in the early days of the dockers' struggles Ben Tillett and James Sexton 'borrowed' the song from our ​Salvation Army, and sometimes used it at strike meetings or on picket lines." If Deakin's memory served him well, the borrowed or, rather, adapted song could have been used by the dockers at least by 1889, the year of the first and most famous of the dock strikes that Tillett led. Very likely, then, it was the dockers who took the song into the Transport Workers; but a mystery remains as to who adapted it and when and by whom it was carried to the United States. It may have been brought in through the IWW's connections in Great Britain.
Here the story takes a curious turn. Although the modern labor version of "Hold the Fort" is known as a song of the British Transport Workers, and has been sung as such in union meetings in both the United States and Australia, the Transport Workers appear not to have sung it for a long time. Indeed, Ellen McCullough first heard it in the United States more than a decade ago. It was this experience that interested her in the song and led her, upon her return to England, to query Deakin about it on behalf of her friend Joe Glazer. As a consequence, Glazer observed that it "has obviously been lost in England," where the English sing it only "as something imported from the United States." In England, in fact, he once saw a song sheet curiously describing "Hold the Fort" as a "British Transport Workers Song (sung in the United States)." Evidently there has been no change in the music, for the union song "sounds the same as the old hymn."
Labor's modern version of "Hold the Fort" thus achieved a place among the labor songs of the United States and continued to be published and heard despite the mortal illness of the Wobblies. It is said that the song was popularized (or perhaps repopularized) during the Paterson silk strike in 1928. Its words and music appeared in the Rebel Song Book, which the Rand School Press published in 1935. About four years later several verses and the chorus came out in a songbook published by the Southeastern Regional Office of the Textile Workers Union of America. Parts of it also appeared in 1941 in a songbook of the United Auto Workers (UAW), and about the same time in various songbooks of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). All of the words were in the 1945 edition and, more recently, in the 1964 edition of "The Little Red Song Book" of the Wobblies, who would not give up. Sometime before Philip Murray's death in 1952, Tom Glazer recorded "Hold the Fort" for a CIO album of Favorite American Union Songs. The song was also recorded by the Almanac Singers in The Original "Talking Union"; by Gene and Francesca Raskin in We Work ​and Sing, an album of the ILGWU; and by the Union Boys in Songs for Victory.
Words from "Hold the Fort" appeared in a CIO songbook in 1954, in a songbook of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America about 1958, and, recently, in a song collection of the AFL–CIO that has gone through at least six printings. Official union publications have thus brought the old strike song into the present era of the merger of the two great labor organizations under the presidency of George Meany. In 1954 Barrie Stavis published the words and music of the chorus in his dramatic and biographical work on Joe Hill titled The Man Who Never Died, and in 1960 Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer published the entire song, words and music, together with historical notes, in their Songs of Work and Freedom. Here was a song, they indicated, that should be sung "with determination."
Joe Glazer, with Cesar Chavez, singing at the 1967 Texas state convention of the AFL–CIO. (Photo by Bill Rich; courtesy of Joe Glazer, Washington, D.C.)
With the coming of respectability and even affluence to much of the labor force in the United States, workers do not sing as much as they used to. As Joe Glazer observed several years ago: "When six guys get killed ​on the job, you may get a song. But there's no song from a signed labor contract." With lumberjacks, Joe says, it is much the same; they used to sing about the hazards of rolling logs, but they now sometimes fly to work and worry whether their steaks are thick enough.
In recent years, many if not most of the new workers' songs have come out of the South where the labor unions have not been strong, or from the migratory workers in the Southwest and West who, several years ago, formed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, AFL–CIO, under Cesar Chavez. Under the leadership of Chavez the Farm Workers are carrying on the tradition of the Knights of Labor, the British dockers, the Wobblies, and the older AFL–CIO unions, all of whom have told in song of their struggles and hopes for a better life. Such are the songs used by the grape pickers in their successful strike against the growers of Delano, California. They were heard at Howard University, Washington, D.C., in July 1967 when Luis M. Valdez of the Farm Workers led his troupe—between the skits of El Teatro Campesino, the Farm Workers' propaganda theater—in songs that were "strongly reminiscent" of the strike songs of the troubled 1930s.
Probably the most dramatic use of song by and on behalf of the underprivileged in recent years has been in connection with interracial sit-ins and marches. No one who was present at the great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 can ever forget the moving experience of hearing the hopeful multitude sing "We Shall Overcome":
We shall overcome, we shall overcome, We shall overcome some day. Oh, oh, deep in my heart I do believe That we shall overcome some day.
This, like the labor version of "Hold the Fort," is based upon a religious song whose antecedents lie far in the undocumented past. In its present form it owes much to several persons, including Pete Seeger who learned the labor version, "We Will Overcome," from Zilphia Horton who had learned it in 1947 at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, from members of the CIO Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers Union. It had been adapted by these workers from an old church ​song, "I'll Be All Right Someday," during a strike in Charleston, South Carolina, in late 1945 and early 1946.
But what about "Hold the Fort," given the changing times? Even though it is still found in current union songbooks, does anyone really sing it anymore?
When the Rubber Workers struck the O'Sullivan Rubber Corporation in Winchester, Virginia, in 1956 in a latter-day battle of Winchester that dragged on for several years, there were at least some occasions when as many as a hundred strikers sang "Hold the Fort." In those years, as Joe Glazer wrote in 1959, it was "still current, very useful and a good rousing song." It was heard now and then at union summer schools and on picket lines, but it was not as popular as "We Shall Not Be Moved," "Roll the Union On," or Ralph Chaplin's great Wobbly song, "Solidarity Forever." In 1961 New Yorkers heard it in Washington Square when a noisy crowd of about 2,500 students grabbed and tore up copies of The Worker that were being distributed by the Labor and People's Committee for May Day. As the fur began to fly, according to a reporter who was there, "the chorus on the platform moved strongly into 'Hold the fort for we are coming; Side by side we battle onward.'" Soon, however, a counterpoint was heard in the crowd below: "We are poor little lambs who have lost our way, baaa, baaa, baaa."
Joe Glazer probably has done more than anyone else in his time to popularize the modern labor version of "Hold the Fort," for he has been singing it, together with other labor songs, since he was with the Textile Workers Union of America in the years 1944–1950, when he pioneered in modern group singing among union workers. A talented composer as well as a singer of labor songs, he has written about a dozen altogether, including "The Mill Was Made of Marble." He sang "Hold the Fort" for and with a group of Rubber Workers at the December 1967 convention of the AFL–CIO at Bal Harbour, Florida. Union members, Joe Glazer has observed, may not remember all the words but they always can and do sing the chorus.
"Hold the Fort" has a fixed place in the musical firmament. In the opinion of Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer, the surviving labor version is "much better" than the version of the old Knights of Labor and is one of only a handful of complete songs of its genre that have survived from the previous century. Its survival, perhaps the result of a kind of musical Darwinism, surely will please those who take satisfaction from the ​continua of history, for the modern labor version of the old song is as faithful to Bliss's gospel original as the original was—in its defensive posture—to historical fact.