Чарльз Кертис: АҚШ-тың алғашқы американдық үнді вице-президенті

Vice President of the United States from 1929 to 1933

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. A member of the Kaw Nation born in the Kansas Territory, Curtis was the first Native American and first person in a racial minority group to reach either of the highest offices in the federal executive branch. Based on his personal experience, 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 Indian Territory. Despite Curtis being unhappy with the final version of it, implementation of the Act completed the ending of tribal land titles in Indian Territory and 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. 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. 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—winning 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 in 1932 during the Great Depression, they lost as the public gave the Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Nance Garner a landslide victory that year. Curtis remains 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. He remained the only mixed race vice president in American history until the inauguration of Kamala Harris in 2021.

Born on January 25, 1860, in North Topeka, Kansas Territory, a year before Kansas was admitted as a state, Charles 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. During his Civil War service, 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. Curtis re enrolled in the Kaw Nation, which had been removed from Kansas to Indian Territory when he was in his teens. Curtis was strongly influenced by both sets of grandparents. After living on the reservation with his maternal grandparents, M. Papin and Julie Gonville, he returned to the city of Topeka. There, he lived with his paternal grandparents while he attended Topeka High School. Both grandmothers encouraged his education. Curtis read law in an established firm, where he worked part time. He was admitted to the bar in 1881 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. To date, Curtis is the last vice president who was 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.

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. 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' 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 had 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 hand 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. Curtis served several consecutive terms in the House from March 4, 1893, to January 28, 1907. (Popular election of U. S. senators had not yet been mandated by constitutional amendment.) At the same time, the legislature elected Curtis to the next full Senate term. From March 4, 1907, he served until March 3, 1913. In 1912, Democrats won control of the Kansas legislature and so Curtis was not re elected. The 17th Amendment, providing for direct popular election of Senators, was adopted in 1913. In 1914, Curtis was elected to Kansas's other Senate seat by popular vote and was re elected in 1920 and 1926. In total, he served from March 4, 1915, to March 3, 1929, when he resigned to become vice president. Curtis was remembered for not making many speeches and was noted for keeping the "best card index of the state ever made." Curtis was celebrated as a "stand patter", the most regular of Republicans but also as a man who could always bargain with his party's progressives and with Senators from across the aisle.

Curtis received 64 votes on the presidential ballot at the 1928 Republican National Convention in Kansas City out of 1,084 total. The winning candidate, Herbert Hoover, secured 837 votes and had been the favorite for the nomination since August 1927, when President Calvin Coolidge took himself out of contention. Curtis was a leader of the anti Hoover movement and had formed an alliance with two of his Senate colleagues, Guy Goff and James E. Watson, as well as Governor Frank Lowden of Illinois. Hoover's pedigree as a progressive follower of Theodore Roosevelt did not sit well with conservatives like Curtis. Less than a week before the convention, he described Hoover as a man "for whom the party will be on the defensive from the day he is named until the close of the polls on election day." However, Curtis had no qualms about accepting the vice presidential nomination. Although Hoover gave few speeches during the 1928 presidential campaign, Curtis traveled coast to coast and spoke almost every day. Curtis arranged for a Native American jazz band to perform at the inauguration. Curtis's election as vice president made history because he was the only native Kansan, the only Native American, and the first non European to hold the post. The first person enrolled in a Native American tribe to be elected to such a high office, Curtis decorated his office with Native American artifacts and posed for pictures wearing Indian headdresses. Soon after the Great Depression began, Curtis had endorsed the five day work week with no reduction in wages as a work sharing solution to unemployment. In October 1930, in the middle of the campaign for 1930 midterm elections, Curtis made an offhand remark that "good times are just around the corner". The statement was later erroneously attributed to Hoover and became a "lethal political boomerang." At the 1932 Republican National Convention, Hoover was renominated almost unanimously. Curtis failed to secure a majority of votes on the first ballot for the vice presidential nomination. He received 559.25 out of 1,154 votes (or 48.5%), with Generals Hanford MacNider (15.8%) and James Harbord (14.0%) being his nearest contenders. On the second ballot, the Pennsylvania delegation shifted its votes to Curtis from Edward Martin, which gave him 634.25 votes (54.9%) and secured him the nomination for the second time. Curtis opened the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and so became the first U. S. executive branch officer to open the Olympic Games. Curtis cast three tie breaking votes in the Senate. Following the stock market crash in 1929, the problems of the Great Depression deepened during the Hoover administration and resulted in the defeat of the Republican ticket in 1932. The Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932 as president, with a popular vote of 57% to 40%. Curtis's term as vice president ended on March 4, 1933. Curtis's final duty as vice president was to administer the oath of office to his successor, John Nance Garner, whose swearing in ceremony was the last to take place in the Senate Chamber.

Curtis decided to stay in Washington, D. C., to resume his legal career, as he had a wide network of professional contacts from his long career in Congress and the executive branch. He participated in one of the earliest known triathlons in the city. Curtis died from a heart attack on February 8, 1936, at the age of 76. By his wishes, his body was returned to Kansas and buried next to his wife at the Topeka Cemetery.

Curtis was the first multiracial person to serve as Vice President of the United States, and was the only one until Kamala Harris was inaugurated in 2021. Curtis was also the only United States vice president to have inaugurated the Olympic Games. Over the course of his career, Curtis was featured on the cover of Time magazine on three occasions. Two of these appearances – on December 20, 1926, and June 18, 1928 – occurred while Curtis was a senator. The third occasion was December 5, 1932, during the final months of his vice presidency. Curtis' house in Topeka, Kansas is now operated as a historic house museum known as the Charles Curtis House Museum. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated as a state historic site.