While Kamala Harris’ election as vice president is historic, she is not the first person of color to hold the position. The first was actually Charles Curtis, who took office almost a century ago.
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Curtis was a member of the Kaw Nation who served as Herbert Hoover’s vice president from 1929 to 1933, and he has a complicated historical legacy. Curtis supported women’s suffrage, child labor laws, and the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. At the same time, he promoted policies of assimilation that harmed many Native Americans. One of its most significant impacts on American politics is the Curtis Act of 1898, which weakened Indigenous governments and helped break down Indigenous reservations.
LISTEN NOW: The Complicated Political Legacy of VP Charles Curtis
Growing up in Kansas
Vice President Charles Curtis and President Herbert Hoover, 1929.
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Curtis was born in Topeka in 1860, a year before the Kansas Territory became the 34th state. Around the age of three, her mother died and her father joined the Union Army to fight in the civil war. He lived on several occasions with his non-Native paternal grandparents and Native maternal grandparents Louis and Julie Pappan Gonville, who lived on the Kaw reservation in Kansas. As a young boy he became known to win races as a horse jockey.
Around 1873, when Louis and Julie moved with the Kaw Nation to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, Curtis planned to accompany them. But his grandmother dissuaded him from joining them.
“Her grandmother just says, ‘You’re tied to more important things,” says Kent Blansett, professor of Native studies and history at the University of Kansas, descended from Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Shawnee and Potawatomi. of the Blanket, Panther and Smith families. Blansett notes that Curtis’ grandmother was not telling Curtis to turn away from her people, but to help her people by taking another path.
Curtis took his grandmother’s advice and stayed in Topeka, becoming a lawyer and politician. His Indigenous heritage, which white politicians and journalists often referred to derogatoryly, was common knowledge throughout his political career. In 1884 he won an elected seat as attorney for Shawnee County. Eight years later, he won a seat in the US House of Representatives as a Republican.
Curtis Law based on Dawes Law
It was in the House that Curtis introduced “a law for the protection of the people of Indian territory”, commonly known as the Curtis law of 1898. This law was based on the Dawes law of 1887, which introduced the policy of ” division. As part of this policy, the US government forcibly smashed Native American reservations – where lands and resources were shared by the community – into private property. Native people who could not afford to maintain their ‘lots’ left them lost, allowing white Americans to buy the land and settle in what was once a reserve.
The Curtis Act imposed powers on the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole nations (known to white Americans as the “Five Civilized Tribes”), which had been exempt from the Dawes Act. This allowed white Americans to take control of more of the territory of the Five Nations, setting the stage for the incorporation of Oklahoma into the United States as a state. The law also called for the dissolution of Indigenous governments, asserting the sovereignty of the US government over theirs.
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“The Curtis Act has caused irrevocable damage,” says Blansett. “Even years later, [Curtis] would do a radio show with famous Cherokee Will Rogers in the 1930s, and Will was booed for having Curtis. Because in Oklahoma, the Cherokees could not stand what the Curtis Act was doing [to the Cherokee nation]. “
So why did Curtis, one of the first Native Congressmen, sponsor the act in the first place? Colonization led him to believe “that assimilation and acculturation were inevitable for Aboriginal peoples,” says Blansett. “It’s a little impressed that our traditions were something that maybe could hold us back [from full citizenship], and that was a very popular sentiment back then “- although Blansett notes” it is not to excuse some of the things he did and / or didn’t do in this office. “
Vice presidency
After being chosen by the Republican Party for re-appointment at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, President Hoover and Vice President Charles Curtis posed at the White House on June 17, 1932.
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Curtis became a United States Senator and then, in 1929, the first person of color to serve as Vice President. He and President Herbert Hoover didn’t have a close relationship, and many Americans felt that Curtis didn’t really have a role in the White House. In any case, Curtis’ vice-presidency was overshadowed by Hoover’s disastrous response to the stock market crash and the Great Depression.
In the 1932 election, Hoover campaign slogans like “Play Safe with Hoover”, “We Are Turning the Corner” or “Don’t Change Now” did little to inspire public confidence in his administration; and Hoover and Curtis lost in a landslide against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Curtis continued to work in politics, becoming chairman of the Republican Senate campaign committee in 1935. He died the following year at the age of 76, leaving behind a complex political legacy.
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