Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807832967
- eISBN:
- 9781469600390
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9780807832967.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
This chapter explores how and why New York City's Tammany Society appropriated the tradition of the Republic's middling classes. Mimicking Native Americans, these new republicans played at being ...
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This chapter explores how and why New York City's Tammany Society appropriated the tradition of the Republic's middling classes. Mimicking Native Americans, these new republicans played at being braves and sachems in public and often political settings. They did so at great affairs of state and on patriotic holidays. However, these performances were belied by their condemnation of Native Americans as savage and inhuman. Why would elite and middling men play the surrogate, the counterfeit Indian? Why, at the very time that Washington's administration had launched an all-out military assault along the western frontier, would European Americans make such festive masquerades central to their new sense of national identity?Less
This chapter explores how and why New York City's Tammany Society appropriated the tradition of the Republic's middling classes. Mimicking Native Americans, these new republicans played at being braves and sachems in public and often political settings. They did so at great affairs of state and on patriotic holidays. However, these performances were belied by their condemnation of Native Americans as savage and inhuman. Why would elite and middling men play the surrogate, the counterfeit Indian? Why, at the very time that Washington's administration had launched an all-out military assault along the western frontier, would European Americans make such festive masquerades central to their new sense of national identity?