Yankee Doodle

Yankee Doodle   ©2016 David Keating - hat rack, WWII mess kit and dog tags, vintage voting poster, aluminum frame with scrollwork, magazine advertisements, mohair hat with feather, brass tacks, brass stencils, paint.

At the start of the Revolutionary War, the patriotic tune that we know as Yankee Doodle was actually a British troop song that mocked the American colonists:

Yankee Doodle went to town

A-riding on a pony,

Stuck a feather in his hat

And called it macaroni.

In mid-18th century England, macaronis were ‘wannabe’ aristocrats who adopted an Italian diet, an effeminate Continental style of dress, and other seemingly outlandish behaviors. The British wrote the lyric to denigrate Americans as country bumpkins and aspiring fops, but at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and again at the Battle of Saratoga, the Americans claimed the tune as their own and played it back to the retreating and surrendering British. The instant playback was a taunt to the redcoats in their underestimation of the colonists, even as it flaunted American self-deprecation. Behind the nonsense and whimsy was a steadfast commitment to the new citizenry and a willingness to fight for "inalienable rights" — even to the death.

Unfortunately, this commitment did not extend to the American Indian tribes the colonists were decimating and displacing, enslaved Africans (who in 1775 were already 20% of the American colonial population), indentured immigrants, or women. The United States is still struggling 250 years later with these foundational disenfranchisements.