Charles Curry: California Secretary of State and Nine-Term Congressman

Charles Forrest Curry was a California Republican congressman who represented the state’s 3rd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives for nine consecutive terms, from 1913 until his death in 1930. Before Congress, he spent more than a decade as California’s Secretary of State and worked his way through a long series of state and local offices.¹

Rise Through California State Government

Curry won a seat in the California State Assembly in 1887 and served through 1888. He then moved through a sequence of appointed and elected positions in San Francisco: superintendent of Station B post office from 1890 to 1894, and clerk of San Francisco city and county from 1894 to 1898.¹

His highest state office was Secretary of State of California, which he held from 1899 to 1910. After leaving that post, he served briefly as California’s building and loan commissioner in 1911 and represented the Pacific Coast and Intermountain States at the Panama Pacific International Exposition the same year.¹

The 1910 Race for Governor

In 1910, Curry sought the Republican nomination for governor of California and lost. He ran as a “stalwart,” representing the establishment wing of the party, against four other candidates. The decisive opponent was Hiram M. Johnson, backed by the Lincoln-Roosevelt League and the party’s “insurgent” progressive faction.² Johnson won the primary and the general election, going on to become one of the national faces of the Progressive movement. Curry’s loss ended his statewide ambitions and pushed him toward federal office.

Nine Terms in the U.S. House

Curry was elected to the 63rd Congress in 1912 and took his seat on March 4, 1913, as the representative for California’s 3rd Congressional District. Voters returned him eight more times, and he served continuously through the 71st Congress.¹

His principal leadership role was chairman of the Committee on Territories, which he led from the 66th through the 71st Congresses, roughly 1919 to 1930. The committee oversaw governance of U.S. territories, including Alaska and Hawaii, both still decades away from statehood.³

Curry also wrote on tax and land policy. In 1916 he published a work on inheritance taxes and the wine tax, and in 1921 he presented a paper on alien land laws and alien rights, examining anti-alien land laws in the United States, Japan, and other countries. California had enacted laws of this kind restricting land ownership by immigrants ineligible for citizenship, measures that primarily affected Japanese and other Asian immigrants.¹

Death in Office and His Son’s Succession

Curry died on October 10, 1930, in Washington, D.C., while still serving in Congress. He was 72.¹

His son, Charles F. Curry Jr., had worked alongside him for years, as his secretary from 1913 to 1917 and as clerk to the House Committee on Territories from 1919 to 1930. After his father’s death, the younger Curry won election to the 72nd Congress as a write-in candidate, taking the seat. He served a single term, from March 1931 to March 1933, and lost his bid for reelection in 1932.⁴

Background Before Politics

Curry was born on March 14, 1858, in Naperville, Illinois. He attended common schools and the Episcopal Academy in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, studied for a year at the University of Washington in Seattle, and worked with a private tutor. He moved to Seattle in 1872 and to San Francisco the following year, then worked in agriculture, cattle ranching, lumber, and mining before being admitted to the bar in San Francisco in 1888.¹

1
History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives. Charles Forrest Curry
2
The New York Times. Hot Fights in California
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History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives. Charles Forrest Curry
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History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives. Charles Forrest Curry Jr.