[Re-Elect Hastings to Congress]

Campaign Placard
Loan Courtesy of the Judge Charles Gordon Watts Collection
University of Oklahoma Libraries
Western History Collections

After years of service as attorney for the Cherokee Nation, William Wirt Hastings was elected in 1914 to the U.S. House of Representatives. As a Democrat from eastern Oklahoma, he served nine terms over twenty years, with seats on the House Indian Affairs Committee and Appropriations. His Vanderbilt classmate and one-time law partner William Pressley Thompson described Hastings as “the guide and advisor, not only of his own Cherokee Tribe and of the other five tribes of Oklahoma, but of the Indians of the entire United States.” In his final term in Congress, he shaped the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 by exempting Oklahoma tribes, which ultimately rebuilt their governments pursuant to a separate regulatory regime established by the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of 1936.