Macon, Georgia, lies a little too far south of Atlanta to be a suburb, and yet a little too close to be a full city in its own right. It enjoyed a brief prosperity during the cotton days before the Civil War, and the perpetual poverty since then has preserved its handful of antebellum homes clustered on a hilltop overlooking the downtown area.
Across the tiny Ocmulgee River from downtown Macon, a poor district sprawls along the river. Small wooden houses with rickety old porches lie interspersed with cement-block houses sealed with air conditioners plugged into their windows. The small communities cluster around convenience stores that offer the coolest reprieve of any spot in the blistering and seemingly eternal summer of Georgia. The poverty of Macon has an anonymous and hard-to-identify quality—neither urban nor rural, not completely black but certainly not completely white; not hopeless, yet with no apparent remedy.
On the poor side of town, on the plateau overlooking the river, a scattering of what appear to be small, wooded hills crop up out of the ground. These artificial hills turn out to be a series of temple mounds put together in a configuration much like those of Cahokia and other Mississippian sites, even though Macon, Georgia, lies a long way from the Mississippi River.
Archaeologists found something unique here that distinguishes the Ocmulgee site at Macon from other Mississippian sites. One of the structures that looks as if it could be a truncated pyramid or a small temple mound turned out to be a large room built into the earth and covered with wood, thatch, and dirt. The upper part of the structure suffered severe damage from an ancient fire, but that same fire helped to preserve the lower part of the building. From that base, modern archaeologists have been able to reconstruct the entire structure.
To reach the room, one must walk though a long, low entry tunnel. After walking only a few feet, the visitor experiences a marked change between the outside and the inside. One moves from the bright Georgia sun into near darkness, from the loud birds, chirping insects and other distracting noises into absolute silence muffled by layers of mud and earth, from the searing hot summer air to cool, refreshing shade.
It takes a few moments for the body and eyes to adjust to the new surroundings, but gradually the features of the circular room emerge. In the middle, the clear markings of a large hearth remain as evidence of the ancient council fire that provided light for the activity of the subterranean chamber. A circular platform follows virtually the entire circumference of the room, and on the platform one clearly sees the impression of a series of forty-seven seats. The focal point of the room faces directly across from the entrance, in the most brightly illuminated spot in the great room. Rising up from the platform, a clearly visible eagle emerges with a large, almost square body. Its head has an oversized forked eye, shaped like an upside-down V, a particular motif found on birds and even humans in the late Mississippian sites and artifacts.
This ancient room has stood on this site for at least a thousand years, and it is now reconstructed to the form that it had in about the year 1000. The room obviously served as a meeting room for the community. It may have hosted a combination of religious and secular meetings as well as various ceremonies through the year or in the life cycles of community members.
In the southwestern United States, many such rooms are still visible in the Anasazi ruins. There again, we find a proliferation of small, circular underground chambers or kivas. Like the earth lodge at Ocmulgee, these kivas frequently have platform benches on the sides, and focus on a central, recessed hearth.
The kivas provided one of the most distinctive architectural characteristics of Anasazi ruins. They form the central meeting place of the ancient people who lived there. The number of kivas indicates that many different small groups met in them. Whether organized around kinship, gender, religion, or some other principle, the number of kivas built over thousands of years shows the abiding importance of the activities within them.
Whether we are looking at the earthen lodges of the Mandan on the Missouri River in North Dakota, at the longhouses of the Iroquois confederacy, at the plank houses of the Northwest coast, or the earth lodge on the Ocmulgee River in Macon, Georgia, we see the importance of meeting houses for the natives across the North American continent. Natives in almost all parts of North America built structures for community gatherings. Even the Inuit of the Arctic built a large communal igloo where they held their winter ceremonies.
Throughout North America, the native people organized themselves into a great variety of lodges and small, locally based organizations that cut through kinship. Frequently these organizations were restricted to men, but some were for women only, and some included both males and females. Some of the groups, such as those of the Great Plains, served as warriors’ societies for the protection of the group; others, like those in the Southwest, served ceremonial and sacred purposes associated with the continued health and well-being of the community.
In Europe, voluntary organizations such as the Masons resembled the Indian lodges in some respects, but the European groups usually had a decidedly hierarchical organization. The European organizations often modeled themselves on a military or aristocratic sequence of ranks and offices with elaborate titles.
In twentieth-century America, civic organizations and men’s lodges acquired a reputation as primarily social institutions often associated with rowdiness, excessive drinking, and escape from familial duties. This twentieth-century denigration of the lodge tradition obscures the much more serious purposes and origins of these groups, which often had a direct involvement with the American struggle for independence and with the effort to shape a unique American identity separate from that of the disparate nations of origin of the settlers.
Describing the Americans of the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that in “no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America.” In addition to the ones directly connected with government, “a vast number of others are formed and maintained by the agency of private individuals.”
De Tocqueville had no ready explanation for this odd American trait, but at places in his writing he seems to hint at it. In general he despised the Indians of North America, but he admired some of their qualities as free citizens in their own land. He wrote that “Indians, although they are ignorant and poor, are equal and free.” He even recognized their influence on Americans when many “Americans of the West are born in the woods, and they mix the ideas and customs of savage life with the civilization of their fathers.”
During the struggle for independence, colonists organized themselves in ways that frequently imitated the councils and groups of the Indians. One of the earliest groups organized by the rebellious colonists to pursue independence was the Tammany Society, named for the chief of the Lenni-Lenape (Delaware) who greeted William Penn when he arrived on October 27, 1682, to found the colony of Pennsylvania. Whether or not Chief Tammany appeared on that particular day under a fabled elm tree, he did sign two important treaties with Penn in June of the following year and a decade later, in June 1692. Chief Tammany entered history as one of those Indians, like Squanto and Powhatan, who helped the European colonists to survive in the North American environment for which their European cities had not prepared them.
During the eighteenth century, after Chief Tammany died, he became the hero of many dubious tales and apocryphal histories as well as the reputed utterer of more words of wisdom than he ever could have imparted. He became a great judge and lawgiver of colonial mythology. One story even claims that he once went to Mexico to meet with Manco Capac, the ruler of the Incas in Peru. At this meeting point, halfway between Pennsylvania and Peru, Chief Tammany gave Manco Capac advice on how to organize Inca society. Colonial legends falsely credited Tammany as the originator of many of the Indian gifts such as corn, beans, tobacco, the crabapple, and even the canoe (Werner).
With so many different stories and so much false information about Chief Tammany, it becomes difficult to sort out the actual details of his life. One tradition claims that Chief Tammany lived for a while near Scranton, Pennsylvania, and another maintains that he built his primary wigwam in New Jersey on the site where Princeton University later arose (Myers). After a long and productive life, legend says that Chief Tammany had accomplished everything that he could do. He then wrapped himself in his blanket and set himself on fire.
In addition to being a great lawgiver, Chief Tammany acquired an intimate connection in the colonial mind with nature and eventually with the month of May and the opening of spring and the fishing season. The first day of May became his special day, and colonists combined the European tradition of the maypole with Indian traditions and created an amalgamated day of Indian-European frivolity and merriment to welcome spring. In some states they celebrated his day a little later, on the twelfth of May rather than the first.
As relations between the colonists and Britain became increasingly hostile in the late eighteenth century, the frivolous celebrations around the memory of Chief Tammany assumed a more serious note. Tammany became increasingly associated with the rights of the American colonists. The colonists themselves took on the identity of Americans, a term previously applied to the Indians, while the colonists had called themselves by the name of their country of origin.
Loyalist groups had already formed organizations named for the patron saints of their original homelands. Englishmen formed the St. George Society. The Scots organized into the St. Andrew Society, while the Welsh venerated St. David, and the Irish honored St. Patrick. To show their strictly American identity, colonists adopted Saint Tammany as their patron. Tammany offered a strictly American symbol around which all colonists could unite, no matter what their original European heritage.
Through the American Revolution, the celebration of Tammany Day continued each year on the first of May. Even when George Washington bivouacked his troops at Valley Forge, they observed the end of the harsh winter with a celebration of Tammany’s Day on May 1, 1778. The enlisted men raised maypoles, dressed a sergeant in Indian costume to play the role of Chief Tammany, and the whole army celebrated their American identity, their survival through the harsh winter, and their determination to continue fighting the British.
Soldiers and common men sang songs to Tammany, and poets composed long odes in his honor. The playwright Ann Julia Hatton wrote a play Tammany; or, the Indian Chief, which became the hit of the New York stage in 1795.
In honor of Tammany, the revolutionary Sons of Liberty took him as their “patron saint,” and by 1772 they had changed the name of their organization to the Society of King Tammany. Revolutionary societies from Georgia to Massachusetts sprang up as the Society of Saint Tammany, the Society of Chief Tammany, the Society of King Tammany, or even the simple Society of Tammany in New York.
While the nomenclature varied from one colony to another and even from one community to another, all the Tammany societies followed an Indian, particularly an Iroquoian, model of organization. They formed thirteen tribes to represent the thirteen colonies, and each tribe had its own totem. The eagle represented New York, the otter New Hampshire, the panther Massachusetts, the beaver Rhode Island, the bear Connecticut, the tortoise New Jersey, the rattlesnake Pennsylvania, the tiger Delaware, the fox Maryland, the deer Virginia, the buffalo North Carolina, the raccoon South Carolina, and the wolf Georgia (Myers).
A Grand Sachem presided over thirteen other sachems, who led the general members, called “braves.” Other titles represented other Indian offices, and they acknowledged the President of the United States as the Great Grand Sachem over them all. Just as the Iroquois considered themselves united by the “chain of friendship,” the Sons of Tammany formed a “chain of union” that championed the principles of fraternal union and patriotic nationalism (Mushkat).
They called their meeting house a “wigwam,” and they filled it with Indian paraphernalia including bows, arrows, and calumets, the sacred tobacco pipes. The society in New York collected Indian artifacts and created the first museum of American Indian works at its earlier wigwam on Broad Street from 1790 to 1798.
After the American Revolution, the Tammany societies became the first veterans’ organization of men who had fought in the war. In support of the newly formed American government, they again changed their name, to the Constitutional Sons of St. Tammany. They formed centers of strong patriotic fervor committed to spreading the spark of revolution to other countries, and to fighting monarchy and tyranny in every guise. They ardently supported the French Revolution.
The members of the Tammany societies came from the strengthening middle and skilled working classes of urban and rural America. They were craftsmen: upholsterers, paperhangers, carpenters, small merchants, and farmers. Most of them fought in the Revolutionary War as common soldiers, not as officers. They were men without sophisticated polish and education, but they were devoted to liberty and freedom. The Tammany Society gave them a patriotic focus, but it also provided them with a social organization. The Tammany Society functioned as a political party, a social club, and a trade union.
The Sons of Tammany worked hard to maintain their Indian— and thus their American—identification. Although at times this verged on the farcical, it had a serious and frequently important aspect, particularly in negotiations with the Indian nations. During the Revolution, they often entertained American Indian visitors and delegations as a way of maintaining good relations with the Indians tribes while the colonies fought the British. As early as May 1776, the Tammany Society of Philadelphia hosted a visiting Iroquois delegation that had come to inquire about the plans of the colonies for a war with England. During the negotiations, the visiting Iroquois lodged on the second floor of Independence Hall.
After the Revolution, George Washington faced the difficult task of winning back the friendship and allegiance of several defeated Indian nations who had sided with the British against the colonists. When he invited Alexander McGillivray and the other Creek chiefs to New York to negotiate a new treaty in 1790, Washington asked the Tammany Society to host the chiefs and to build informal and formal ties with them. This started a new tradition of the Tammany societies serving as the urban hosts for visiting Indian delegations, particularly for ones conducting peace negotiations with the United States government.
In the early decades of American independence, the Tammany societies played key roles in organizing public celebrations and parades in honor of the new American republic. They sponsored the celebration of the ratification of the Constitution by the states, and in time their efforts for national commemorations focused on the annual twin celebrations of St. Tammany’s Day in May and the Fourth of July. They always wore Indian dress and danced in the Indian style just as they had done during the Boston Tea Party and at similar acts of early rebellion against George III. Those who did not wear full Indian regalia pinned the tail of a buck deer to their hats because Chief Tammany had supposedly used the deer as his personal totem.
The more staid upper class never approved of these public spectacles of patriotism. One writer in The American Citizen and General Advertiser of July 6, 1809, complained bitterly about such displays; “Instead of commemorating the birth of the nation with that manliness and dignity which the occasion calls for and inspires, we see them with pain and disgust daubing their faces with paint, crowding their heavy heads with feathers; making savages in appearance more savage; representing, as they term it, the genius of the nation in the person of someone who has no genius….”
The Tammany societies stood in contrast to the higher-class membership of the Masons and the Society of Cincinnati of the same time. The Society of Cincinnati limited itself to officers of the Revolutionary War, and still today it admits only descendants of officers of that war. In selecting the name Cincinnati, they emphasized their ties to the Old World and to the Roman tradition of the fifth-century general Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who always fought for the patrician interests against the plebeians. As an elite organization of lettered men, they maintained close ties with the French officers who had fought with them in the American Revolution, and when the French Revolution came, they sided with the aristocracy against the French masses (Mushkat).
The Society of Cincinnati limited membership to inheritance through firstborn sons only. This rule of primogeniture would provide only the firstborn of the firstborn with the right to wear the society’s insignia. After ardent resistance from George Washington, who feared that this might create an incipient American aristocracy of the officer class, the society dropped its primogeniture rule (Myers).
The middle- and working-class people following Chief Tammany contrasted decisively with the elite aristocrats following the Roman general and dictator Cincinnatus. The two groups offered competing versions of what American patriots wanted to create in their newly independent nation. In the days before the firm formation of political parties, organizations such as the Society of the Cincinnati represented the aristocratic or federalist interests, while the Tammany Society represented the Democratic Republicans.
With renewed British aggression against the United States in 1812, many of the Indian nations sided with Britain against the fledgling American government. This break between the United States and the Indians caused a permanent change in the Tammany societies. In anger at the Indians who had deserted them, they stripped the society of all Indian regalia and dropped the Indian titles. They broke the bonds of friendship that had bound them to the Indian nations. The War of 1812 ended America’s initial glorification of the Indians, who were transformed from the Noble Savage and Champion of Liberty to the bloodthirsty savage of the forest, waiting to scalp American men and abduct their women and children. The change in perception of Indians from nobles to savages coincided with the start of the great trek westward and the opening of the plains and Pacific areas to settlers.
After the War of 1812, the New York Society of Tammany resurrected a few of its original Indian trappings and titles, but the close identification between the society and the Indians had been permanently severed. The members even sold the Tammany Museum collection of Indian artifacts. By the end of the nineteenth century P. T. Barnum had bought the American Indian collection that the Tammany society had owned, and he incorporated it into his “Greatest Show on Earth.”
In the nineteenth century the United States became a more serious nation, and much of the revolutionary ardor of the eighteenth century slipped away as the prosperous middle class sought a return to the traditional European activities of earning money, and to the values and religion that supported this quest. The Deism of the previous century lost favor as Americans of all classes embraced powerful fundamentalist movements. Most of the societies drifted into obscurity and disbanded as the members joined overtly political organizations and parties.
Mockery of religion and the honoring of a secular saint such as St. Tammany, a man renowned for his pagan life-style, retreated from the front parlor to the back room. Andrew Jackson was the last President of the United States to bear the title Great Grand Sachem of the Society of Tammany. The organization’s ties to the revolutionary tradition and to the highest organs of American government grew steadily weaker and more frayed.
The New York Tammany Society continued as a strong but local political organization having merely nominal association with liberty, Indians, and revolution. Politicians of the Democratic Party became particularly powerful within the Society of Tammany and eventually took it over and ran a corrupt political administration from Tammany Hall. When the politician William Tweed became the Grand Sachem in 1868, the Society of Tammany had become a mere front for the corruption of the Tweed Ring, which siphoned off tens of millions of dollars before Harper’s Weekly magazine and the New York Times exposed them. The courts convicted “Boss” William Tweed and some of his cronies in 1873, and left the name of Tammany associated in the minds of most Americans with political corruption rather than with Native American liberty and independence.
The Tammany societies became the best known of the early Indian lodges organized by whites, but others arose as well. During the American Revolution, at the same time that some members of the Sons of Liberty formed the Tammany Society, more adamantly revolutionary members of the group formed the Improved Order of Red Men. Like the Tammany Society, the Red Men organized themselves into “tribes,” met in “wigwams” under a Grand Lodge, and reproduced or invented Indian rituals at their meetings around a campfire. Sachems presided at their initiation ceremonies.
Despite superficial similarities to the Tammany societies, the Red Men advocated a more radical and even more strongly American ideology. They maintained that the European settlers in America had learned democracy from the American Indian, and that they could improve that democratic strain by further emulating the Indians. They explained that the early settlers “never knew what real American liberty was, they having lived under kings all of their lives, and having no vote or voice in … their own government. Their first vision of real freedom was caught from the wild savages, who roamed the forest” (Johansen and Grinde). By changing the name from the Sons of Liberty to the Improved Order of Red Men, the fraternal members recognized the role of Indians in the development of American democracy.
Rather than adhering to traditional Christianity, the Red Men offered prayers to the “Great Spirit” whose light filled the forest (Carnes). The Red Men in their early years had a decisively anticapitalist ideology that called for their members to emulate the Native Americans, who held property in common (Carnes). They also favored the abolition of alcohol and advocated complete abstinence from strong drink for all of its members. Unlike other fraternal organizations, which met in taverns whenever practical, the Red Men eschewed meeting in places that served alcohol. As the nineteenth century progressed, the Red Men become more concerned with ritual and less with ideals. While the Tammany Society became a corrupt political machine, the Red Men became a men’s social and fraternal group.
The fraternal organizations based on Indian themes shared a common commitment to liberty and to the basic principles of democracy. This contrasted greatly with the fraternal organizations based on authoritarian patterns of learning from masters and blind obedience to those with more knowledge. Organizations such as the Odd Fellows had a strong overt strain of partriarchy that also appeared in the organization and rituals of the Masons, the Knights of the Golden Circle, the Knights of Pythias, and the Order of Good Templars.
Even the shrouded Knights of the Ku Klux Klan glorified the authoritarian social systems of the Old World in their medieval nomenclature, costumes, and ceremonies. The men who formed the first Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 borrowed apparel, ceremony, and insignias from the older Sons of Malta (Carnes).
By the second half of the nineteenth century, fraternal orders of all types had fallen on hard times. New civic groups for men sponsored community services such as hospitals and orphanages, and acted as booster clubs to support local businessmen. The men’s societies opened up to lower-middle-class and working-class men, but they had to fight newly emerging labor unions for the loyalty of these workingmen.
About the time that the Indian and classical fraternal orders reached a nadir, the Indian spirit found a rebirth in boys’ organizations. The impetus came from the artist Ernest Thompson Seton, who was born in 1860 in England but grew up in the Canadian backwoods between 1866 and 1870, and lived on the western prairie from 1882 to 1887. Seton wrote and illustrated books about the natural life of Canada’s backwoods and prairie. He published Mammals of Manitoba in 1886, followed by Birds of Manitoba in 1891.
Seton also worked to form boys’ clubs based on Indian models. After much discussion of the idea, he started the first group in 1902 with the backing of the Ladies’ Home Journal. His Woodcraft Indian societies used much of the terminology of the earlier men’s groups. A boy entered as a Brave, worked up to Warrior, and could eventually become a Sagamore. But Seton sought a more realistic approximation of Indian life than the fraternal orders had advocated. He strove to purify the Indian strains, to return to the original ideals behind these Indian names and titles.
He wanted the Woodcraft Indians to give boys a chance to learn self-reliance and to organize their own activities, albeit with adult supervision. For this purpose the boys organized into self-governing tribes, each with its own animal or plant totem as a group emblem.
Seton also wanted to minimize competitiveness among the boys by having them work to fulfill absolute standards rather than to vie with one another. For each achievement, such as running one hundred yards in twelve seconds, making a tepee or a bow and arrow, or tracking an animal, the boy earned a feather and a small “wampum badge” to be worn on a special sash. Seton derived this system of honor from the Plains Indians, who awarded coups for particularly brave deeds of young men. The boys never won the badges by having to defeat another boy or team; instead they won them only from their own efforts competing against themselves toward an absolute goal.
Through the Woodcraft Indian movement, Seton sought to build character through the virtues of honesty, thrift, and helpfulness. For Seton the ideal man was Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader. According to Seton, “Tecumseh was a great athlete, a great hunter, a great leader, clean, manly, strong, unsordid, courteous, fearless, kindly, gentle with his strength, dignified, silent and friendly, equipped for emergencies, and filled with a religion that consisted not of books and creeds or occasional observances, but of desire to help those that had need of help….” He was “the model of perfect manhood” (Rosenthal).
Seton attempted to export the Woodcraft Indian model to England, but despite having an interest in nature and outdoor activities for youths, Britons had little interest in the American Indians. A British officer and veteran of the Boer War, Lord Robert Stephenson Baden-Powell, took the basic framework of Seton’s idea, stripped away most of the Indian characteristics, and made a paramilitary organization called the Boy Scouts, which he created in 1908. In 1910 he and his sister Agnes organized a corresponding Girl Guides for females.
The Boy Scout model spread much faster than the Woodcraft Indian model, but in North America the two merged. Seton worked with the first Boy Scout groups in America, and they quickly absorbed many of the characteristics of the Woodcraft Indian movement. Seton’s handbook The Birch-bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians in time gave way to The Boy Scout Handbook, which reflects the same organization, ideals, symbols, and activities. This made the Scouts in North America more Indian in orientation, whereas the Scouts in Britain remained a paramilitary organization.
At about the same time that the Scouts began growing in America on Indian models, social fraternities grew in importance on American college campuses. Based on classical models, these organizations eschewed any Native American trappings in favor of Greek mottoes, Roman togas, and other classical trappings, down to Greek columns on the porches of their residence halls. Scouting, based on Indian models for middle-class children, as opposed to Greek fraternities, based on classical models for the educated upper class, reflected in the early twentieth century the rivalry between the Indian-style Tammany societies and the classical Society of Cincinnati in the eighteenth century.
In each of these historical episodes, Americans consciously modeled modern social institutions on those of the Indians. They saw in Indian society ideals and behaviors that all people should emulate. As America moved away from its rural heritage and into the industrial era, Americans became even more aware of the need for these Indian models for modern youth.
Whether these groups helped their members work for social or personal aims, over the past three centuries they have consistently played a major role in inventing American identity. They helped the American people discover who they were, and shaped the image of who they wanted to become. Through such groups, Indian values and ideas exerted an influence on middle-class urban and industrial America in the twentieth century in much the same way that they did on frontier and rural America in the eighteenth century. The Indians continued as a source of inspiration and social models for new generations of Americans.
The meeting chamber in Ocmulgee, Georgia, or a kiva in New Mexico still speaks to the American psyche. One feels a certain connection and sense of belonging in such a chamber. It represents a part of many things in our collective social life, from the town meeting to a Scout jamboree, from a nation’s quest for independence to a young child’s quest for adulthood.