Charles Curtis (January 25, 1860 – February 8, 1936) 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 citizen 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.
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 (also spelled Pappan), 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 60 miles (97 km) to Topeka to seek assistance from the governor. Riding with Jim was the eight-year-old Charles Curtis, then nicknamed "Indian Charley."
Curtis wanted to move with the Kaw Nation, which had been removed from Kansas to the Indian Territory in 1873, but his Kaw grandmother, M. Papin, encouraged him to return to Topeka to continue his education. Curtis was strongly influenced by both sets of grandparents.
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.
On November 27, 1884, Curtis married Annie Elizabeth Baird (1860–1924). They had three children: Permelia Jeannette Curtis (1886–1955), Henry "Harry" King Curtis (1890–1946), and Leona Virginia Curtis (1892–1965). 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 (March 1866 – January 30, 1953), act as his official hostess for social events. She had lived with her husband, Edward Everett Gann, in Washington, D.C., since their marriage in 1915. Edward Gann was a lawyer for the Interstate Commerce Commission (1910-1914), and special assistant to the US Attorney General (1914-1921), prosecuting railroads and war profiteers before going into private practice.
Attuned to social protocol, Curtis, a widower, insisted in 1929 that his sister be treated officially as the Second Lady at government functions. The diplomatic corps accommodated the request.
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 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 (0.6 km2) 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 (6.6 km2) of Kaw land near Washunga in Oklahoma.