This is news to me! Republican Charles Curtis 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?