Charles Curtis rose from Kansas to Senate leader and vice president

He started as a boy who rode racehorses. He finished as the man who sat one heartbeat from the presidency, presiding over the United States Senate with the gavel in his hand. Between those two points lay forty years in Congress, one of the great cloakroom careers in American politics, and a legacy that Americans of different backgrounds still read in different ways.

Charles Curtis of Kansas was the first Vice President of the United States of acknowledged Native American ancestry, and one of several Vice Presidents who had first led their party in the Senate. He is also one of the more neglected figures in Republican history, which is a shame, because his story has everything: grit, ambition, achievement, and a record on Native American policy that you cannot praise without qualification. I am going to give you all of it, because a profile that only flatters is a eulogy and a profile that only scolds is a tantrum.

Born on the frontier

Curtis was born on January 25, 1860, in North Topeka, in what was then Kansas Territory. His mother, Ellen Pappan Curtis, was of Kaw (Kanza) descent, with Osage, Potawatomi and French ancestry in the family tree. His father, Orren Curtis, was white. After his mother died, young Charles lived for a time with his maternal grandparents on the Kaw reservation and spent part of his youth around horses, riding in races as a jockey. His grandmother, Julie Gonville, urged him to leave the reservation and get an education. That is the family version, and historians have repeated it; you can check the details in a good biography.

He did get the education. He read law, was admitted to the bar in 1881 and became a county attorney in Shawnee County, Kansas, whose seat is Topeka. As a prosecutor, he became known as a tough enforcer. That reputation, plus an easy way with people, carried him to the House of Representatives.

Congress: a long ladder

Here is the shape of the career.

1. U.S. House of Representatives, 1893 to 1907. He served from Kansas during the era of Speaker Thomas Reed and the Republican majorities of the 1890s. If you want to meet Reed, Czar Reed and the House rule that ended the disappearing quorum tells the story of his rules.
2. U.S. Senate, 1907 to 1913. He was chosen by the state legislature to fill a vacancy and then for a full term, and he served until 1913. In those days, senators were selected by state legislatures, and when Kansas politics turned against him he lost his seat in the legislature's vote.
3. U.S. Senate, 1915 to 1929. He returned after the 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, moved Senate elections to the voters. He won the first popular election in Kansas, in 1914, and served until he left to become Vice President.

There is a nice twist in that story, because it touches a debate conservatives still have. Curtis lost his seat in 1913 because a legislature chose someone else, and he won it back in 1914 because the voters chose him. Was the old system or the new one better? The Conservative Case Against the 17th Amendment, Weighed Honestly weighs the argument. I will say only that Curtis himself lived under both and managed to thrive under each.

Inside the Senate he rose through the leadership. He became the Republican whip, the person who counts votes and keeps the conference together. Then, after the death of Henry Cabot Lodge in November 1924, he became the Republican floor leader, serving as Majority Leader from 1925 until 1929. A Majority Leader from Kansas, with Native American ancestry, in an era when that was still extraordinary, was a major achievement. He did it the old-fashioned way: by knowing every member, remembering every favor and never forgetting a vote.

The Curtis Act of 1898

Now we reach the hard part, and I promise not to dodge it.

In 1898, Congress passed what is called the Curtis Act. It was an amendment to the earlier Dawes Act, and it extended the policy of allotment, dividing tribal land into individual parcels, to the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory (now eastern Oklahoma), which had been exempt. It also dissolved their tribal governments and courts as a prelude to Oklahoma statehood, which came in 1907.

The policy behind it was assimilation. Many reformers and politicians of the era believed that Native people would be best protected if they held private property, farmed individually and joined the general American society. Curtis, who had left the reservation himself and who prospered in white society, shared that view. The idea was that a family with its own deed would be safer from encroachment than a family living on communal land.

The results were bad. Allotment opened enormous tracts of Native land to non-Native buyers, and in many cases Native families lost their holdings through fraud, pressure or poverty. Tribal governments were disrupted. Historians have judged the allotment policy harshly, and the federal government itself began to reverse it with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. It is hard to find a serious scholar today who defends the Curtis Act as a success for the tribes involved.

To see why the results were so poor, look at the mechanism with a hypothetical. The Dawes Act of 1887 offered individual allotments to Native families, with 160 acres typical for the head of a family. Picture a tribe of 500 families. At 160 acres each, the allotments come to 500 times 160, which is 80,000 acres. If the reservation held 400,000 acres, then 320,000 acres were left over after the allotments and were declared "surplus," open to purchase by outsiders. The family got a deed. The community lost four-fifths of its land. That is the engine of the loss, and it explains why historians commonly cite a drop in Native-held land from roughly 138 million acres in 1887 to roughly 48 million by 1934. Subtract and you get about 90 million acres. Treat those two totals as figures to check in a good history, but the direction is not in doubt.

So what should a fair person say? Two things at once. First, that the policy was a mistake, and the people hurt by it deserve to have that said plainly. Second, that Curtis and many of his contemporaries thought they were helping, and that their idea of what "help" meant had been shaped by an assumption, widespread in their time, that tribal life had to give way. A conservative's respect for local institutions and for property that belongs to people, not to the government, points toward a different lesson: that communities should decide their own future. It is a reminder that "property rights" is not a magic phrase. A policy that dissolves a community's own institutions in the name of property is not conservatism. It is social engineering with a deed attached. Subsidiarity Is the Old Idea Behind Keeping Power as Close to Home as Possible describes the principle Curtis's era neglected.

The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924

Curtis also belongs to a happier chapter. On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act, which declared that all Native Americans born in the United States were citizens. Before this law, many Native people were citizens through treaty, military service or other statutes, but others were not. The bill was introduced in the House by Representative Homer Snyder of New York, and Curtis was a senior Republican in the Senate when it passed. I will not claim for him authorship of the law, and I cannot tell you from memory how he voted on it; the Congressional Record will show you. What is clear is that he sat in the Senate that passed it, and that his own career was proof that a Native American could serve at the highest levels of the government.

A caution: citizenship did not instantly mean the vote. Some states continued for years to deny Native Americans the ballot, and full access to voting took decades. The 1924 law was a large step, not the end of the road. Silent Cal said little and ran one of the loudest budget records in history has more about the President who signed it.

An early voice for women's rights

Another fact that surprises people: in December 1923 Curtis introduced the Equal Rights Amendment in the Senate, in what became the first introduction of the amendment in Congress; Representative Daniel Anthony, also a Kansas Republican, introduced it in the House. It was the idea of the National Woman's Party, with Alice Paul as a leading figure. The proposal would not go to the states until 1972, and its story is a long one. But it was a Kansas Republican who first put it before the Senate. You can read about the party's earlier role in women's suffrage in The Republican Congress That Sent the Women's Suffrage Amendment to the States.

You do not have to like the Equal Rights Amendment to see the point. Curtis was not a rubber stamp. He was a pragmatist who took up a cause that his constituents cared about and who was willing to carry it.

Running the Senate in the 1920s

What did a Majority Leader do in those years? The job was less grand than it later became. There was no large staff and no cable-news megaphone. The leader scheduled the floor, kept the party conference together, bargained with the committee chairmen and, above all, counted votes. Curtis was known for the quiet arts: he remembered names, he never made an enemy needlessly and he could tell a President or a chairman what was possible and what was not.

That skill matters for a reason beyond biography. Conservatives sometimes admire the loud member and neglect the one who runs the machine. But policy is passed by the second kind. The tax cuts of the 1920s that The Mellon Tax Cuts of the 1920s and What Happened to Revenue describes moved through a Congress in which leaders like Curtis kept the Republican majority working. Fame belongs to the speech; the law belongs to the whip count.

1928: the ticket with Hoover

At the Republican convention in Kansas City in June 1928, Herbert Hoover was nominated for President on the first ballot, and Curtis was chosen as his running mate. Part of the logic was geography and balance: a Kansan to complement a Californian, a legislative insider to complement an administrator who had never held elective office. In November, the Hoover-Curtis ticket defeated the Democratic ticket of Al Smith and Joseph Robinson in a landslide. Curtis was sworn in on March 4, 1929.

Then came the funniest episode of his vice presidency, which you can enjoy without offense. Curtis was a widower, and his half-sister, Dolly Gann, served as his official hostess. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt and the wife of the House Speaker, declined to give Mrs. Gann precedence at dinners, and the question of seating became a Washington sensation, with diplomats and newspapers weighing in. It is a useful reminder that Washington's obsessions are older than any of us. The real business of the administration was heading toward a very different kind of crisis. For the Hoover side of that, Seven myths about Herbert Hoover the do-nothing president is worth reading.

1932 and the end

The stock market crashed in October 1929, and the Depression deepened. In 1932 Hoover and Curtis ran for re-election and were defeated by Franklin Roosevelt and John Nance Garner. Curtis left office in March 1933. He died on February 8, 1936. His time as Vice President had been short and overshadowed by events; his long career as a legislator was the real accomplishment.

What we can learn

The easy mistake with a figure like Curtis is to flatten him into a symbol: either a trailblazer to be celebrated or a villain to be condemned. The record gives you something richer.

Verdict one: ability opens doors. He rose by mastering the craft of counting votes and working with colleagues.

Verdict two: representation is not the same as good policy. Having a Native American in the Senate did not mean Native interests were well served. That should make us cautious whenever anyone says a person's background guarantees a particular result.

Verdict three: policy should be judged by outcomes. Allotment sounded like a property-rights policy, and its results were a disaster for the people it was meant to help. Always ask what a law did, not what it was named.

Verdict four: leaders should be remembered whole. A mixed record is still a record, and it is the only honest kind.

There is an objection to include. Some will say the Curtis Act cannot be separated from the man, and that the achievements are therefore tainted. Others will say the Act reflected its times, and that the man should be judged by his best. I think both are too tidy. A fair historian says he did these things, in this order, with these results, and leaves the reader to weigh them. That is how I would want my own record handled.

The bottom line

• Charles Curtis was the first Vice President of acknowledged Native American ancestry and a Senate Majority Leader from 1925 to 1929.
• His record includes the Curtis Act of 1898, a policy of allotment that harmed Native communities, and a career-long support for citizenship.
• Judge laws by what they do to people, not by the slogans attached to them.
• Read the actual text of the Indian Citizenship Act and the Curtis Act on a trusted source such as the Library of Congress before you form a view.
• When you meet a historical figure with a mixed record, tell the whole story, and teach it that way.