Charles Curtis, American lawyer and politician, 31st Vice President of the United States (d. 1936)
Charles Curtis (January 25, 1860 – February 8, 1936) was an American attorney and Republican politician from Kansas who served as the 31st vice president of the United States from 1929 to 1933 under Herbert Hoover. He had served as the Senate Majority Leader from 1924 to 1929. In 1932, he became the only United States vice-president to inaugurate the Olympic games.
A member of the Kaw Nation born in the Kansas Territory, Curtis was the first person with any Native American ancestry or any other acknowledged non-European ancestry to reach either of the highest offices in the federal executive branch. He is the highest-ranking enrolled 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.
Based on his personal experience, Curtis believed that Indians 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 US 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 Indian Territory. As such, the Act ended their self-government and provided for allotment of communal land to individual households of tribal members after they had been registered on official rolls. The Act also limited their tribal courts and government. Any land not allotted was to be considered surplus by the US federal government, which then sold plots to non-Natives. Implementation of the Act completed the extinguishing of tribal land titles in Indian Territory. That prepared the larger territory to be admitted as the State of Oklahoma, which occurred in 1907. The government tried to encourage Indians to accept individual citizenship and lands and to take up European-American culture. By the late 19th century, it had set up boarding schools for Native children as another method of assimilation.
Curtis was elected to the US 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. His long popularity and connections in Kansas and federal politics helped make Curtis a strong leader in the Senate. He 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.
Curtis ran for vice president alongside Herbert Hoover for president in 1928. They won a landslide victory, but when they ran together again in 1932, during the Great Depression, they lost since the public gave the Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Nance Garner a landslide victory that year.