We had a Native American Vice President?

[blackcrowheart]

We had a Native American Vice President?
www.philosophistry.com/archives/2007/02/we_had_a_native_american_\
vice_president.html
<http://www.philosophistry.com/archives/2007/02/we_had_a_native_american\
_vice_president.html>
This is news to me! Republican Charles
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Curtis> Curtis
<http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/VP_Charles_C\
urtis.htm> was a quarter Kaw Indian, and vice president to Herbert
Hoover during 1929-1933. Some ideas come to mind:
* Barack Obama's potential ascendancy as the first African-American
President seems a little less interesting or novel. * Only 70 years
ago, Republicans were, in some ways, the "diversity party"? * Was
America open-minded 70 years ago? (during the Jazz Age and Roaring
Twenties) * If so, how did we lose that? * Does our collective
amnesia of this factoid point to a property of the media that always
seeks to exalt our current generation? i.e. Barack Obama's story is much
more interesting if we forget about Charles Curtis. * "News" comes
as much from discovering the past as it does from experiencing the
present (or the FOXNews version of it)
My understanding of history between the end of the Civil War up until
the Great Depression is totally blank save for a few random interesting
tidbits, such as the prevalence of marijuana usage, Nietzsche, Freud,
and the Titanic. What if we as a society we were more enlightened in
1907 than we are now?