1st Native American vice president made history, but isn’t well known
California Sen. Kamala Harris will make history as the first woman of color to serve as vice president, but a Native American lawmaker was elected to the office in the 1920s, only to fall into obscurity in part because of his views on Indigenous issues.
Charles Curtis, a member of the Kaw Nation who grew up in Kansas, became Herbert Hoover’s vice president in the 1928 presidential election, the first and only Native American to hold the nation’s second-highest office.
His tenure was marked with controversy that grew over the years because of his support for legislation to force Native people to assimilate into mainstream American society and leave traditional ways behind, views he would later credit to his maternal grandmother.
Curtis’ views were shared by a number of Native American intellectuals, academics and professionals of the day as a mechanism to survive and thrive in society, said one historian.
“The feeling in those days was, if you were going to be successful, you had to be an assimilationist,” said Dakota Sioux historian Jeanne Eder Rhodes. “Pushing for Indians to join white society took the battles from the prairie and plains to the courts.”
During his years in the U.S. House, Curtis, a Republican, served on the Committee on Indian Affairs, where he drafted the “Curtis Act” in 1898. This act overturned treaty rights, allotted tribal land to individuals without obtaining permission from the tribes, abolished tribal courts and gave the Secretary of the Interior the power to lease out mineral rights on tribal lands.
This and another law he pushed furthered the goals of the Dawes Act, which many historians and tribes point to as a disastrous policy of the late 19th and early 20th century.
Curtis was born in North Topeka, Kansas, to Orren Curtis, who had British heritage and mother Ellen Pappan, who was of mixed Kaw, Osage and FrenchCanadian heritage. He was also the great-great-grandson of White Plume, a Kaw chief who encountered and aided the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804.
At the time of Curtis’ birth, the Kaw, or Kanza, still controlled a portion of their ancestral lands in northeastern Kansas, but were removed to Indian Territory, now known as Oklahoma, in 1873. It would be another year before the Kansas Territory gained statehood.
Curtis’s first languages were French and Kansa, although he lived with his paternal grandparents after his mother’s death in 1863 as his father grew unstable after two subsequent marriages and divorces and legal troubles.
The young Curtis was comfortable with both reservation and town life, and his biography seems to indicate the boy went back and forth between his grandparents.
Curtis earned a law degree and in 1881, hung out his shingle. Already welloff due to allotment land inherited from his mother, Curtis entered the real estate market.
But he also plunged into politics and won election as Shawnee County Attorney in 1884. That was also the first time Curtis flipped his loyalties, turning on the liquor interests who had supported his bid for office and enforcing Kansas’ prohibition laws by closing down the county’s saloons.
When Curtis ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1891, William Allen White, editor of the Emporia Gazette, wrote that the young Kaw man seemed to be a born politician.
Curtis won on the Republican ticket in an upset victory and became the fourth Indigenous person to be elected to the House in American history. (The first was John Floyd, a member of the Powhatan Tribe from Virginia, who served in Congress from 1817 to 1828 and later became governor of Virginia).
It’s also worth noting that Native Americans were not considered American citizens until Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924.
Curtis was comfortable being labeled “the Indian” in Congress and served on the Committee on Indian Affairs. He drafted and pushed legislation to continue the goal of Sen. Henry Dawes, a Massachusetts Republican and author of the Dawes Act, which broke up many reservations and settled acreage on individual Indians and their families. Curtis believed firmly in assimilation and worked to finish Dawes’ work with the Curtis Act.
In 1889, Curtis reenrolled himself and his three children in the Kaw Nation. He drafted and championed the Curtis Act in1898, which, according to the Kaw Nation’s website, had damaging consequences.
Curtis told a historian in 1932 that he was not happy with the final version of the bill.
A subsequent bill, the Kaw Allotment Act of 1902 ended the legal existence of the tribe and allocated about 400 acres of former reservation land to each of 249 individual tribal members. The Kaw would not reorganize as a tribal nation until 1959.
Curtis and his three children were given title to about 1,600 acres of Kaw land.
Rhodes said this was part of the movement by some Native people to “push Indians to go white.” But almost as soon as the Dawes Act and the Curtis acts were implemented, disastrous consequences for tribes become evident.
“They found almost immediately that Dawes didn’t work,” said Rhodes, one of the first Native people and the first Native woman to obtain a Ph.D. in American history.
Curtis went on to become one of just five Indigenous people, all men, to be elected to the U.S. Senate, where he rose through the ranks to become Senate whip. Curtis led the floor debate to enact the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Later, he became Senate Majority Leader.
Curtis had presidential aspirations and announced his candidacy in 1927 after Calvin Coolidge said he would not run for reelection. But Curtis was thwarted when, due to resistance from the farm states over some of Curtis’ actions as the “Food Czar” during World War I, Herbert Hoover was chosen as the Republican candidate.
Curtis was instead tapped as Hoover’s running mate and was elected vice president in the 1928 election.
The running mates were never close and became less so after the election due to lingering bitterness over the party nomination fight. Hoover and Curtis had as little to do with each other as possible during their term in office.
Curtis’s demeanor as vice president was also markedly different from his time in the House and Senate. He was fond of noting his rise from “Kaw teepee to the Capitol,” decorated his office with Native art and posed for pictures wearing Indian headdresses. Curtis also reportedly became pompous and complained that he should be occupying the Oval Office, not Hoover.
The vice president’s stock declined even more after the 1929 stock market crash which led to the Great Depression.
Curtis became embroiled in a dispute with Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of former President Theodore Roosevelt, over protocol. Curtis, by then a widower, felt his sister Dolly, who served as Curtis’ official hostess, should be in front of Longworth and her husband, House Speaker Nicholas Longworth.
The resultant publicity in a time of soup lines, the wrenching human toll of the1930s-era Dust Bowl and the toss-off remark that “good times are just around the corner” all contributed to the demise of the Hoover presidency.
In the 1959 book, “Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression,” author Harris Gaylord Warren wrote that the statement was wrongly attributed to Hoover, which he wrote became a “lethal political boomerang.”
Other missteps, including an incident with World War I veterans who marched to Washington seeking early pensions only to be fended off by Curtis calling in armed forces, sealed his political career, and he lost the vice-presidential nomination in 1932. Curtis remained in Washington until his death in 1936.
Rhodes said of the Kaw boy from Kansas who raced to the vice presidency: “Nobody remembers him.”
Debra Krol covers issues related to Indigenous communities in Arizona and the intermountain West. Reach the reporter at debra.krol@AZCentral.com or at 602-444-8490. Follow her on Twitter at @debkrol.
Coverage of Indigenous issues at the intersection of climate, culture and commerce is supported by the Catena Foundation and the Water Funder Initiative.