1928: What if Curtis was the GOP nominee?

[TDAS04]

What if Charles E. Curtis was on top of the Republican presidential ticket in 1928, with Herbert Hoover as his running mate?  Specifically, would Curtis’s Native American ancestry have been an issue?

Discuss with maps.

[One Term Floridian]

I highly doubt it would supersede Al Smith's Catholicism which was already an "issue" during the campaign. A few margins shift here and there, but I doubt any state actually flips other than maybe NY which was Al Smith's home state and doesn't exactly have the best relationship with the Iroquois that reside upstate.

[Agonized-Statism]

It's hard to say exactly what effect Curtis' ancestry would have in certain areas. The fact that he got so far and made so many friends at the top should indicate that he would have little trouble. Frankly, he was an assimilationist and while we'll never know for sure, a lot of his peers probably saw him as white in spite of the few things he did to honor his heritage that all the articles about him keep repeating.

Especially when pitted against a Catholic wet, the map shouldn't change much. Worst case scenario, New York and maybe some Western states (Utah, maybe Nevada) where the last of the Indian Wars had just wrapped up four years prior. But that's iffy because Hoover won those by pretty convincing margins.

[TDAS04]

I guess the “one drop rule” didn’t apply to Native American ancestry the way it did to African ancestry.

[Mexican Wolf]

I guess the “one drop rule” didn’t apply to Native American ancestry the way it did to African ancestry.

J. Kehaulani Kauanui gives a good overview of how mixed-race White and Native American ancestry was viewed differently than mixed-race White and African ancestry in her book Hawaiian Blood.

To put it basically, Native ancestry was seen as more readily assimilable to the dominant White culture because the Native population of the U.S. was small and thus Native ancestry couldn't overtake White ancestry if it were assimilated into White racial identity. Also, assimilating mixed-race Native people made it easier to deracinate and displace Native peoples from their land as the U.S. expanded westward and overtook more tribal lands.

Prevailing stereotypes of Black people as "submissive, obseqious, imitative'" and Native people as "'indomitable, courageous, and proud'" in the 19th century also factored into why "'it remained a popular truism that while "red" and "white" blood blended "quickly and easily" both resisted fusion with "black" blood'" (17). So a White person who said they had Native ancestry would still be considered white (and would have to prove somehow that they had Native ancestors in order to be seen as Native), while a White person who had any Black ancestors would be considered Black.

Blood quantum and the one-drop rule allowed for "'the simultaneous appropriation of Native American culture into and the exclusion of African American cultures from national culture'" (18).