June 6, 2024: The Indian Citizenship Act: Homer Snyder

[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 21^st 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 33^rd 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 19^th and early 20^th 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?