Kamala Harris is breaking barriers with her election to the Vice Presidency, however, she was not the first person of color to achieve that office.
Obscured along the decades, Charles Curtis, a United States Senator who was a one-eighth Native American member of the Kaw Nation of Kansas, was elected to serve as Vice President with President Herbert Hoover 92 years ago. They had been political rivals for the Republican nomination for the top spot, and when Hoover won the nomination, political fortunes moved Curtis to the second spot, even though they did not get on with each other and represented different wings of the party. They were elected in 1928.
Using the slogan “from Kaw tepee to Capitol,” Curtis celebrated his rise from a childhood Kaw reservation, speaking Kansa before speaking English, to the center of white America’s political establishment. Beginning in the 1880s, Curtis worked his way up the political ladder, always emphasizing and celebrating his heritage.
“I had my bows and arrows,” Curtis was reported as saying in his biography on the United States Senate page, which also mentions that he rode “Indian ponies bareback” and won a reputation as a “good and fearless rider.” He frequently posed for photographs with members of Native American delegations in classic regalia who traveled to the nation’s capital.
As the only Native American in Congress in 1898, he drafted a law, An Act for the Protection of the People of the Indian Territory, known as the Curtis Act, which according to a Wichita State University professor in a piece for NPR’s All Things Considered “gave away Indian mining rights and dissolved whole tribes — including his own. The irony, of course, is that the Native American who rose higher than any other nearly destroyed Native America. He said the law was his greatest achievement.” It did the opposite, overturning treaty rights by abolishing tribal courts and giving the federal government control over mineral leases on Native lands.
After being elected to the second highest office in the land, Curtis came to the end of his political career when he and Hoover were emphatically voted out of office by a landslide election in favor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Nance Garner in 1932.
He spent his remaining years in Washington, puttering away with politics, always “one-eighth Kaw Indian and a one-hundred per cent Republican” as he liked to tell audiences. He died in 1936.
The United States Senate, home to a certain other more recent mixed-race Vice President-Elect, has two webpages about Curtis and his role in Senate history.
The Library’s Biography in Context database has several interesting articles available on Curtis as well. Use of a Seattle Public Library card and PIN is required.
In 1928 a biography of Curtis, which came out during his Vice Presidential campaign, From Kaw Teepee to Capitol; the Life Story of Charles Curtis, Indian, Who Has Risen to High Estate by Don C. Seitz is available in full text through The Hathitrust Digital Library.
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