The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  In this, Dawes seemed to protest a bit much, considering all his experience as a presidential adviser in several fields. Coolidge’s own position seemed puzzling, given that as vice president he had seen how helpful sitting in on cabinet meetings had been to him when he moved into the presidency. Soon after, in advance of their inauguration, Dawes wrote again suggesting to Coolidge, “In view of my unfamiliarity with Senate procedures, I think it best to get to Washington in time to be posted a little.” But Coolidge ignored “posting” him, a slight that later might have saved Dawes much embarrassment and Coolidge much disappointment in having a cabinet appointment rejected by the Senate over which Dawes presided.20

  In taking the vice presidential oath in March, Dawes ignored the notion that the occupant of the second office should be seen and not heard. He surprisingly seized the spotlight to harangue members of the Senate for wasting their time engaging in filibusters and other excesses. Of the Senate Rule 22, requiring a two-thirds vote to close down debate, Dawes loudly lectured that it “at times enables senators to consume in oratory those last precious minutes of a session needed for momentous decisions [and] places in the hands of one or a minority of senators a greater power than the veto power exercised under the Constitution by the President of the United States, which is limited in effectiveness by an affirmative two-thirds vote.”21

  Dawes’s lecture to the senators was hardly a message to assure a smooth beginning to his role as presiding officer of their proud body. Worse, it took the play in news coverage from Coolidge, whose face was said to stiffen, but he made no open rebuke of the haughty Dawes. Nevertheless, a coolness clearly set in between the two men, diminishing the contribution Dawes might have made to the administration. Later, Dawes also took his case against the Senate filibuster to the stump, proclaiming that unless the issue went “to the people the fundamental institutions of the country [would] suffer.”22 But the matter remained for the Senate to decide, and so the filibuster survived.

  Subsequently, Dawes committed an even more memorable faux pas during a lengthy debate on the Senate floor over the confirmation of Charles Warren, a controversial member of the Sugar Trust whom Coolidge wanted as his attorney general. Dawes, told by the majority and minority leaders there would be no vote that day because six senators had indicated they wanted to speak, asked a senator to preside and headed back his Willard Hotel apartment for a nap. Unexpectedly, five of those senators decided not to take the floor. Majority Leader Charles Curtis called for the vote on the nomination, and fearing the possibility of a tie requiring the vice president to break, Curtis sent word to Dawes to return to the Senate at once. He dressed quickly, raced down to the Willard lobby, and hailed a cab to the Capitol. But before he arrived, the vote did produce a tie. One Democrat who had voted for Warren switched his vote, thereby defeating Coolidge’s choice. Had Dawes been present, he could have broken the tie in Warren’s favor.

  Coolidge, obviously chagrined, resubmitted Warren’s name, but this time it failed by seven votes.23 This was the first time in nearly sixty years that the Senate had denied a president a cabinet nomination. Later, some speculated that Dawes might have snoozed intentionally, because at the 1924 Republican convention in Cleveland, Warren had cast the sole vote in the Michigan delegation against Dawes.24

  As a result, Dawes became the brunt of humiliating ridicule. Someone placed a sign over the entrance to the Willard lobby reading “Dawes Slept Here.” Soon after, he was showing a friend around the Capitol and took him to the Supreme Court, where a particularly boring case was being heard, causing some of the justices to seem about to nod off. Chief Justice William Howard Taft, spotting Dawes in the chamber, sent him a note that said, “Come up here. This is a good place to sleep!”25 Also, at the 1926 Gridiron dinner, at which high government officials were spoofed by members of the Washington press corps, Dawes was given a large clock, supposedly from Coolidge, with the admonition to stay awake because more ties were anticipated.26 All this inevitably jeopardized any presidential ambitions Dawes harbored.

  In the Senate, the strong-willed Dawes found ways to get around the tradition that the presiding officer was not to enter into or affect the outcome of legislative debate. From 1924 to 1928, he negotiated a deal whereby a major bill authorizing the sales of surplus food abroad and another extending the charters of the Federal Reserve Bank were passed.

  In 1927, when Coolidge shocked the nation by tersely announcing, “I do not choose to run,” for another term the following year, Dawes was mentioned as a possible Republican nominee, but he too announced he was not interested and would back his old friend Governor Lowden of Ohio. On leaving the Senate, Dawes did nothing to hide or retract his contempt for the filibuster. In his book, Notes as Vice President, Dawes cited a senator telling him at the time that the membership finally thought highly of him as the presiding officer, adding, “But the Senate got very tired of you at the beginning of your service.” Dawes shot back, “I should have to think that the Senate was as tired of me at the beginning of my service as I am of the Senate at the end.”27 And in his farewell speech to the chamber, he said of his assault on the Senate rule: “I take nothing back.”28

  Writing of the second office on June 27, 1928, Dawes surprisingly provided a view contrary to the prevalent dismissive one: “The superficial attitude of indifference which many public men assume toward the office of Vice President of the United States is easily explained. It is the office for which one cannot hope to be a candidate with sufficient prospects for success to justify the effort involved in a long campaign. One’s political availability for nomination to the position cannot be determined until the nominating convention has in effect decided upon the head of the ticket.… The office is largely what the man in it makes it—which applies to all public offices. The fact that the Vice President in the Senate Chamber cannot enter into debate is considered a disadvantage, yet for that reason he is removed from the temptation to indulge in the pitiable quest for that double objective so characteristic of many Senate speeches—the placating of public opinion and of an opposing local constituency at the same time. For his prestige as a presiding officer, it is to his advantage that he neither votes nor speaks in the Senate Chamber. Outside the Senate Chamber, his position as Vice President gives him a hearing by the general public as wide as that accorded any Senator, other things being equal.” Yet he concluded, “The occupancy of a public office, unless decorated with public respect, is a curse to anyone.”29

  All this was a generous assessment of the importance and actual influence of the vice president from a man who certainly enjoyed more of both in his positions as an appointed private citizen, in both war and peace.

  In April 1929, the new president, Herbert Hoover, appointed Dawes as the American ambassador to Great Britain, and in 1932 he was named head of the new Reconstruction Finance Corporation, established to help banks and corporations recover from the Great Depression. But in June of that year he abruptly resigned to attend to the near collapse of his own Central Republic Bank of Chicago. Dawes reorganized the bank as the City National Bank and Trust Company of Chicago and paid off its loans. His stock as a financial wizard remained so high that there was some talk in 1932 of dumping Hoover’s chosen running mate, Charles Curtis of Kansas, to bring some “Hell’n Maria” fire to the Republican ticket. But Dawes was too engaged in rescuing his bank to consider the possibility. On April 23, 1951, he died at age eighty-five, still not broken to the saddle of political limitations imposed on any subordinate office.

  CHARLES CURTIS

  OF KANSAS

  As the first American vice president of Native American lineage, Charles Curtis of Kansas rode a colorful course to national prominence, starting as a horserace jockey, speaking the Kaw language of Kansas Indians, and living with his maternal grandparents on the Council Grove reservation, sixty miles from Topeka. Despite this rather bizarre path to his political career, Curtis, known in his youth as a daring “half-breed Indian,” developed int
o a skilled practical politician. That reputation, however, never earned him any role in policy in the star-crossed administration of Herbert Hoover, in which he served.

  Curtis was born in 1860 in North Topeka, in a mixed white and Indian community of what was then the Kansas-Nebraska Territory, a year before Kansas was admitted to the Union under the Wyandotte Constitution. He was the son of Orren A. “Jack” Curtis, a white man, and Ellen Pappan, who was one-quarter Kaw Indian, and a great-great grandson of a Kansas-Kaw chief called White Plume, who aided the Lewis and Clark expedition into the Northwest in 1804. Curtis’s grandmother, Julie Gonville, of mixed French and Indian heritage, and her husband, Louis Pappan, a French trader, lived on a federal land grant near Topeka in 1825 under a Kansas-Kaw treaty for “half-breeds.”

  Young Charlie spoke French as well as Kaw before learning English. His mother died when he was three, and in 1863, his father was called into the Fifteenth Kansas Cavalry of the Union Army, commissioned a captain.1 Subsequently, he remarried, divorced, and married again, was dishonorably discharged from the Union army after hanging three “bushwhacker” prisoners, then pardoned.2 The father was a poor influence on his son, so young Charlie continued to live with his grandparents on the reservation. His grandfather Louis Pappan ran a small ferry across the Kansas River, charging a dollar a wagon, until Charlie’s father bought him out and operated it for a time.3

  Charles Curtis’s biographer, Don C. Seitz, wrote, “As a child little Charlie always thought of himself as an Indian. When he was a year old he was given a smart pony named Kate and was taught to ride her bareback, clinging to her mane to keep from falling off. By the time he was three he could ride alone at some speed, and his mother had already taught him to swim by dropping him in the Kansas River and letting him splash around by himself.”4 Years later Charlie wrote, “Until I was eight I lived there [on the reservation], happy and contented, playing, riding horses and learning very little.” He also amused himself by chasing jackrabbits, prairie chickens, and quail and downing them with bow and arrow.5

  In 1869, upon an attack by hostile Cheyenne Indians, Charlie was sent on foot to Topeka for help, a cross-country feat that won him local fame and later accusations of gross exaggeration and dramatization. It was later found that word of the approaching attack had been leaked.6 In any event, his paternal grandparents, William and Permelia Curtis, decided the boy needed to grow up in more “civilized” circumstances, so he went to live with them in North Topeka.

  By now, at the age of nine, Charlie was an excellent bareback pony rider, taking part in his first horserace on a track built by his grandfather Curtis. Known eventually as “the Indian Boy,” he continued to ride for the next seven years, winning steadily. He became a favorite of local gamblers and betting prostitutes, who showered him with clothes and other presents.7 The owner of a particularly good Kansas horse named Tilden hired Curtis to race him regularly, and they toured the Southwest without losing. Curtis later recalled riding for another owner in Texas who summoned him for final orders before a particular race. The owner, seated with a rifle across his knees, told him, “Son, the last dollar I have in the world is on this race. If you don’t win, don’t stop when you cross the finish line. Keep right on going.” Curtis made sure he won.8

  Grandfather Curtis proved to be a great benefactor to young Charlie, assuming parental responsibility for his errant son. His death in 1873 was a severe to blow to the boy. Still intrigued by the tribal life, Charlie left Topeka and joined his other grandparents, Louis and Julie Pappan, traveling with the Kaw tribe to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma. But his welcoming grandmother told him if he stayed he would wind up like most of the other men there, with inadequate education and a dismal future. He took her advice, returning to Topeka to resume life with his other grandmother, Permelia Curtis, now a widow.

  She put him on the straight and narrow, requiring him to give up horseracing and go to a decent high school. He did not, however, abandon his association with horses. He rented a livery hack and ran a profitable service, meeting incoming trains, and for a time sold news he gathered along the way to the Topeka Times.9 Thereafter he studied law, and in 1881, at age twenty-one, he was admitted to the Kansas bar. By this time, Charlie had inherited federal land from his mother under Indian treaties around Topeka,10 opened a real estate business, and started his own law firm. Three years later he married Anna Baird, and she bore him three children in a marriage of nearly forty years.11 They also took in his half-sister Dolly.

  Meanwhile he had followed his grandmother into the Republican Party, becoming a foot soldier in Topeka for the presidential nominee James A. Garfield in 1880. Four years later, still remembered as the popular jockey, he ran for county attorney in Shawnee and won. In the election he was supported by the local liquor interests, both his father and grandfather having run saloons in North Topeka. But upon his election he cracked down on prohibition enforcement, as the law he had sworn to enforce required. He held a retainer from the liquor interests, however, who mistakenly figured they had bought him. He noted that while he himself was not a teetotaler, it was his obligation to enforce the law, and he intended to do so.

  In 1889, Curtis ran for the U.S. Congress but lost by a single vote. Later, the editor William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette took him under his wing, and Curtis, with his dominant personality and his background, won the seat essentially by default in 1892, a year of otherwise Populist success in the state. The House Republican leader Tom Reed also took to Curtis, giving him a leadership position in the House.12

  White well captured Curtis’s political appeal thus: “His enemies made the mistake of stressing his Indian blood in ignominy. When he appeared in a little town the people went out to see the Indian. What they saw was a gallant young Frenchman, suave, facile, smiling, with winning ways and a handshake that was a love affair itself.” But, White went on, they also saw that internally his governing spirit had been New England, inherited from his stolid Grandmother Curtis.13

  In Congress, Curtis focused on the House Indian Affairs Committee, drafting and passing a bill in 1898 that abolished many Indian treaty and mineral rights and placed them under the Interior Department, where his committee role could best look out for the interests of the Kaw tribe. In 1902 he also wrote legislation that gave him and his children title to certain Kaw lands in Oklahoma.14 In 1898 he wrote the Curtis Act, allowing residents of Indian Territory to incorporate towns and elect their own officials.15

  In 1907, he was elected by the Kansas state legislature to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate. He later lost the seat in a Republican Party split over a high tariff policy that he supported, but in the first direct election for the Senate in Kansas in 1914, Curtis won it back and became the Senate Republican whip. In 1919, while hardly a progressive, he led the floor fight for the Nineteenth Amendment, providing women’s suffrage.16

  At the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1920, Curtis, as head of the Kansas delegation, was among the senators who in the infamous “smoke-filled room” pushed through the presidential nomination of Warren G. Harding. Curtis’s role gave him entrée to the Harding inner circle of poker-playing cronies at the White House after the election. In 1923, when Harding was facing a stiff fight for a second term, Curtis reportedly inquired whether he intended to keep the dour Coolidge as his running mate. Harding interrupted by telling him if there was to be switch, “Charlie Dawes is the man!” But fate intervened with Harding’s assassination.

  Curtis meanwhile continued to move up the party ladder in the Senate, becoming the majority leader in 1925. There he served more as a traffic cop on legislation and generally supported the Coolidge administration, though occasionally breaking with it to back state interests, as in farm relief. When in 1928 Coolidge vetoed such a bill, however, Curtis voted to sustain in a show of solidarity.

  In 1928, Curtis challenged Herbert Hoover for the Republican nomination, denying he was really seeking only the vice presidency. He argued that to
nominate the Great War relief czar, a man with no political experience, would place “a hopeless burden” on the Republican ticket.17 But farm protests against Hoover and his opposition to some major Harding-Coolidge administration bills were not enough to bar his first-ballot nomination in Kansas City.

  Hoover first considered as his running mate the Progressive senator George W. Norris of Nebraska but settled on Curtis, known as “Egg Charlie” for his heavy support of the poultry industry. As a solid farm-state leader, Curtis signed on despite differences with Hoover on farm legislation. The reporter Thomas L. Stokes wrote of Curtis’s acceptance of the role: “He had eaten his bitter words, but he was suffering from indigestion, you could see.”18 For the first time, both Republican nominees came from west of the Mississippi.

  On the Democratic side was New York’s governor Alfred E. Smith, seeking to become the first Roman Catholic president, and Senator Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, a Protestant and a teetotaler, balancing off Smith’s prominent beer drinking. Smith’s Catholicism, as well as his gruff if friendly street smarts developed on the sidewalks of New York, made him seem foreign to many Americans outside the teeming cities of the East and did him in. Hoover and Curtis were easy winners, giving little hint of a Democratic sea tide to come four years later.

  Curtis moved comfortably into the presiding officer’s chair but sometimes asserted authority that seemingly went beyond its constitutional limit. He seemed to many in the Senate to play now to his Indian origins, filling his Senate office with native artifacts and often posing in Indian headdress. He appeared to chafe at the lesser influence than he had enjoyed as the Senate majority leader and began to insist on deference to his vice presidential stature. One aspect was a search he began for an official vice presidential residence, where he could entertain as he thought the position warranted, beyond the Mayflower Hotel suite he rented.