May Games and Noble Savages: The Native American in Early Celebrations of the Tammany Society

Abstract

This paper discusses the May Day celebrations of the “Sons of Saint Tammany,” an American holiday fraternity under the patronage of an historical Lenape (Delaware) Indian chieftain, which incorporated many Native American performative elements. Beginning in Philadelphia in the colonial period and quickly becoming a vehicle for republican sentiments, the Tammany idea spread to many other east coast cities. The May Day revels of the Society reached their heyday in the early years of the new nation (Federalist period). Two trends in the use of Native materials are identified, the “vaudevillian” and the more serious ethnographic. The latter led to incidents of what can be called “carnivalesque diplomacy,” with native American delegations to the U.S. capital. Dr Samuel Mitchill's elaborate mythopoetic oration for the New York chapter in 1795 is taken as an end point for the creative appropriation of Native American elements. New York's Tammany Society would eventually evolve into the famous political machine of the Democratic Party, leaving behind the original May Day idyll and Indian masquerade.