Charles Curtis
Charles Curtis was the 31st vice president of the United States from 1929 to 1933 under President Herbert Hoover. He was the Senate Majority Leader from 1924 to 1929. An enrolled member of the Kaw Nation born in the Kansas Territory, Curtis was the first Native American to serve in the United States Congress, where he served in the United States House of Representatives and Senate before becoming Senate Majority Leader. Curtis also was the first and only Native American and first multiracial person to serve as vice president.
Curtis believed that Native Americans could benefit from mainstream education and assimilation. He entered political life when he was 32 years old and won several terms from his district in Topeka, Kansas, beginning in 1892 as a Republican to the U.S. House of Representatives. There, he sponsored and helped pass the Curtis Act of 1898, which extended the Dawes Act to the Five Civilized Tribes of the Indian Territory. Despite Curtis being unhappy with the final version, implementation of the Act completed the ending of tribal land titles in the Indian Territory and prepared the larger territory to be admitted as the State of Oklahoma in 1907. The government tried to encourage Indians to accept individual citizenship and lands and to take up European-American culture.
Curtis was elected to the U.S. Senate first by the Kansas Legislature in 1906 and then by popular vote in 1914, 1920, and 1926. Curtis served one six-year term from 1907 to 1913, and then most of three terms from 1915 to 1929, when he was elected as vice president. He introduced the first version of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Senate in 1921; it was not approved for ratification until 1972. Curtis marshaled support to be elected as Republican Whip from 1915 to 1924 and then as Senate Majority Leader from 1924 to 1929. In those positions, he was instrumental in managing legislation and in accomplishing Republican national goals. His long popularity and connections in Kansas and federal politics helped make Curtis a strong leader in the Senate.
Curtis was nominated for vice president at the 1928 Republican National Convention, and became Herbert Hoover's running mate; the two won the 1928 United States presidential election in a landslide victory. In 1932, he became the first United States vice president to open the Olympic Games. However, when Curtis and Hoover ran together again later that year during the Great Depression, they lost when the public gave the Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Nance Garner a landslide victory. Curtis remains the highest-ranking Native American who ever served in the federal government. He is also the most recent officer of the executive branch to have been born in a territory, rather than a state or federal district.
Early life and education
Curtis was born on January 25, 1860, in North Topeka, Kansas Territory, a year before Kansas was admitted as a state. Curtis had three-eighths Native American ancestry and five-eighths European American ancestry. His mother, Ellen Papin, was Kaw, Osage, Potawatomi, and French. His father, Orren Curtis, was of English, Scots, and Welsh ancestry. On his mother's side, Curtis was a descendant of chief White Plume of the Kaw Nation and chief Pawhuska of the Osage.Curtis's first words as an infant were in French and Kansa, both languages that he learned from his mother. She died in 1863, when he was 3 years old, but he lived for some time thereafter with his maternal grandparents on the Kaw reservation and returned to them in later years. He learned to love racing horses and was later a highly successful jockey in prairie horse races.
After Curtis's mother died in 1863, his father remarried but soon divorced. While serving in the Union army during the Civil War, Orren Curtis was captured and imprisoned. During that period, the toddler Charles was cared for by his maternal grandparents. They also later helped him gain possession of his mother's land in North Topeka; under the Kaw matrilineal system, he inherited it from her. His father tried unsuccessfully to get control of that land. Orren Curtis married a third time and had a daughter, Theresa Permelia "Dolly" Curtis, who was born in 1866, after the end of the war.
On June 1, 1868, one hundred Cheyenne warriors invaded the Kaw Reservation. The Kaw men painted their faces, donned regalia, and rode out on horseback to confront the Cheyenne. The rival Indian warriors put on a display of superb horsemanship, accompanied with war cries and volleys of bullets and arrows. Terrified white settlers took refuge in nearby Council Grove. After about four hours, the Cheyenne retired with a few stolen horses and a peace offering of coffee and sugar from the Council Grove merchants. No one had been injured on either side. During the battle, Joe Jim, a Kaw interpreter, galloped to Topeka to seek assistance from the governor. Riding with Jim was the eight-year-old Charles Curtis, then nicknamed "Indian Charley."
Curtis re-enrolled in the Kaw Nation, which had been removed from Kansas to the Indian Territory when he was in his teens. Curtis was strongly influenced by both sets of grandparents. After living on the reservation with his maternal grandparents, M. Papin and Julie Gonville, he returned to the city of Topeka. There, he lived with his paternal grandparents while he attended Topeka High School. Both grandmothers encouraged his education.
Curtis read law in an established firm, where he worked part time. He was admitted to the bar in 1881 and began his practice in Topeka. He served as prosecuting attorney of Shawnee County, Kansas, from 1885 to 1889.
Marriage and family
On November 27, 1884, Curtis married Annie Elizabeth Baird. They had three children: Permelia Jeannette Curtis, Henry "Harry" King Curtis, and Leona Virginia Curtis. He and his wife also provided a home in Topeka for his paternal sister Dolly Curtis before her marriage. His wife died in 1924.A widower when he was elected vice president in 1928, Curtis had his long-since-married sister, Dolly Curtis Gann, act as his official hostess for social events. She had lived with her husband, Edward Everett Gann, in Washington, D.C., since about 1903. He was a lawyer and once an assistant attorney general in the government. Attuned to social protocol, Dolly Gann insisted in 1929 on being treated officially as the second woman in government at social functions. The diplomatic corps voted to change a State Department protocol to acknowledge that while her brother was in office.
To date, Curtis is the last vice president to remain unmarried during his entire time in office. Alben W. Barkley, who served as vice president from 1949 to 1953, entered office as a widower but remarried while in office.
House of Representatives (1893–1907)
First elected as a Republican to the House of Representatives of the 53rd Congress, Curtis was re-elected for the following six terms. Naturally gregarious, he also made the effort to learn about his many constituents and treated them as personal friends.Curtis promoted cultural assimilation of Native Americans into the dominant white American society, most notably in the Curtis Act of 1898. In his hand-written autobiography, Curtis noted having been unhappy with the final version of the Curtis Act. This was due to the bill HR 8581 having gone through five revisions in committees in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, with little left of Curtis's original draft. He believed that the Five Civilized Tribes needed to make changes, and that the way ahead for Native Americans was through education and use of both their and the majority cultures. However, he also had hoped to give more support to Native American transitions, something which Congress was not prepared to extend.
In 1902, the Kaw Allotment Act disbanded the Kaw Nation as a legal entity and provided for the allotment of its communal land to members in a process similar to that experienced by other tribes. The act transferred 160 acres of former tribal land to the federal government. Other land that had been held in common was allocated to individual tribal members. Under the terms of the act, as enrolled tribal members, Curtis and his three children were allotted about 1,625 acres of Kaw land near Washunga in Oklahoma.
Curtis served several consecutive terms in the House from March 4, 1893, to January 28, 1907.
Senate (1907–1913, 1915–1929)
Curtis resigned from the House after he had been elected by the Kansas Legislature to the U.S. Senate seat that was left vacant by the resignation of Joseph R. Burton. Curtis served the remainder of his current term, which ended on March 4, 1907. At the same time, the legislature elected Curtis to the next full Senate term. From March 4, 1907, he served until March 3, 1913. In 1912, Democrats won control of the Kansas legislature and so Curtis was not re-elected.The 17th Amendment, providing for direct popular election of Senators, was adopted in 1913. In 1914, Curtis was elected to Kansas's other Senate seat by popular vote and was re-elected in 1920 and 1926. In total, he served from March 4, 1915, to March 3, 1929, when he resigned to become vice president.
File:Calvin Coolidge, Mrs. Coolidge and Senator Curtis.jpg|thumb|right|Senator Curtis with President Coolidge and First Lady Grace Coolidge on their way to the Capitol building on Inauguration Day, March 4, 1925
During his tenure in the Senate, Curtis was President pro tempore, Chairman of the Committee on Expenditures in the Department of the Interior, of the Committee on Indian Depredations, and of the Committee on Coast Defenses; and Chairman of the Republican Senate Conference. He also was elected for a decade as Senate Minority Whip and for four years as Senate Majority Leader after Republicans won control of the chamber. He had experience in all the senior leadership positions in the Senate and was highly respected for his ability to work with members on both sides of the aisle.
Curtis introduced the first version of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Senate in 1921. The amendment did not pass. In 1923, Curtis, together with his fellow Kansan Representative Daniel Read Anthony Jr., proposed the second version of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to each of their Houses, but it did not pass.
File:Senators Curtis & Lodge LCCN2016822441.jpg|thumb|left|Curtis served as deputy to then–Senate Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge, shown here in 1921, and would succeed him upon Lodge's death in 1924.
Curtis's leadership abilities were demonstrated by his election as Republican Whip from 1915 to 1924 and Majority Leader from 1925 to 1929. He was effective in collaboration and moving legislation forward in the Senate. Idaho Senator William Borah acclaimed Curtis as "a great reconciler, a walking political encyclopedia and one of the best political poker players in America." Time magazine featured him on the cover in December 1926 and reported that "it is in the party caucuses, in the committee rooms, in the cloakrooms that he patches up troubles, puts through legislation" as one of the two leading senators, the other being Reed Smoot.
Curtis was remembered for not making many speeches and was noted for keeping the "best card index of the state ever made." Curtis used a black notebook and later a card index to record all the people whom he met in office or while he was campaigning. He continually referred to it, which resulted in his being known for "his remarkable memory for faces and names:"
Curtis was celebrated as a "stand patter", the most regular of Republicans but also as a man who could always bargain with his party's progressives and with Senators from across the aisle.