[100 years ago this week, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act. That landmark legislation was the product of work from a number of influential and inspiring individuals, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them, leading up to a weekend tribute to 21st century figures continuing the fight!]
On three
distinct histories that the Citizenship Act’s sponsor helps us better remember.
Before he
was a Congressman, a Progressive Republican representing New York’s 33rd
District in the House of Representatives for the decade between 1915 and 1925, Homer
P. Snyder (1863-1937) was a successful businessman in and around the
Central New York town
of Little Falls. Over the three decades before his time in Congress Snyder
served in leadership roles for multiple businesses, including owning knitting
mills (the industry in which he had begun his work career while still a very
young child) and running banks (he was VP of Little Falls National Bank). But
perhaps most interesting was his founding of and multi-decade association with
a bicycle manufacturing company. My Guest
Poster Eivav Rabinovitz-Fox wrote an excellent Saturday
Evening Post column a couple
months back on how bicycles offered progressive possibilities for women in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, and so Snyder’s
connection to this industry might well have foreshadowed his own Progressive
political leadership.
Those
Progressive principles led Snyder to serve as Chair of the House Committee on
Indian Affairs and to sponsor the Indian Citizenship Act (also known as the
Snyder Act), both elements that led to his characterization in his December
1937
New York Times obituary as “one
of the outstanding and outspoken champions” of Native Americans. And he wasn’t
the only Congressional Representative to serve as such an ally in this important
moment, as my discussion in yesterday’s post of Pennsylvania Representative
Melville Clyde Kelly and his relationship with the performer and activist
Nipo Strongheart illustrates. I’ve written
a good bit in the last few years about the increasingly exclusionary and
white supremacist forces that came to dominate
1920s America, and those trends make it even more important to recognize
the individuals who fought against the worst of those forces, a list that
includes elected officials like Snyder and Kelly. While the exclusionary forces
won far too many victories in this era, there were more progressive moments as
well, aided by figures like these.
Yet the
Indian Citizenship Act, like virtually any legislation or policy, was not
without its complexities and critics, and Homer Snyder’s histories also help us
remember that some Native American voices and communities opposed the bill. Snyder’s
own New York district was home to many Onondaga
Native Americans, and leaders of that community offered vocal opposition to
the Citizenship Act, seeing it as a violation of multiple prior treaties
that recognized Native Americans as “separate and sovereign” from the United
States. Snyder acknowledged these views in a
speech on the House floor during debate over the bill, noting, “The New
York Indians are very much opposed to this, but I am perfectly willing to take
the responsibility if the committee sees fit to agree to this.” They of course
did, and the bill went on to pass both the House and Senate and become law—but the
Onondaga did not end their opposition, drafting
a letter later in the year to President Coolidge urging “the abandonment
and repeal of the Snyder Bill.” One more complex and crucial history that Homer
Snyder helps us better remember and engage.
Last influential
individual tomorrow
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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