The First Indian-American Congressman
Dalip Singh Saund was an underdog in a hurry
Imagine this - It’s 1956. You’re an Indian man who only recently has become a US citizen. You decide to run for Congress to represent your small farming community. You’re running as a Democrat. Your district has never elected a Democrat, ever, and you suspect you’re only being allowed to run because there’s no real chance of winning anyway.
Plus, the Republican candidate is an incredibly famous, much-loved woman pilot. Not only is she accomplished and beautiful, but her husband is a very wealthy businessman who bankrolled Eisenhower’s successful bid for the Presidency. The couple regularly hang out with the Roosevelts. They fly all over the hardscrabble district in the heat, attending as many as three events a day.
Plus, the populous cities in your district see you as a hick. Bob Hope and Rin Tin Tin, the famous movie dog, are canvassing for your opposition. All you have is your car, your maize crop, and your good name.
How much would you bet on you winning?
Outstanding In His Field
The Indian man in question, Dalip Singh Saund, was no lightweight, though.
He came to America in 1920 and enrolled in UC Berkeley to study food preservation, being from an agricultural background. But he changed majors and ended up with a PhD in mathematics. In a TV interview here, he says he couldn’t land a teaching job because he was not a citizen.
When he arrived, Indians could naturalize to be American citizens, but after the 1923 judgment of State Vs. Bhagat Singh Thind, it was ruled that Indians were not the “common man’s definition of white” and hence couldn’t naturalize, and those who had naturalized had had their citizenship struck down.
Not one to be kept down, he found a job as the foreman on a farm in the Imperial Valley. Non-citizens couldn’t own land in California then. He saved up, and he leased land to farm on. His autobiography has a lot about his challenges with learning to farm in a new country.
At this time, Mother India by Katherine Mayo was a big hit, and it leaned on popular tropes about India, like the status of women and poverty. DS Saund wrote a book to counter the propaganda in the book titled My Mother India and it saw as much success as an Indie book could back then.
He met his wife Marian through her brother. When he visited their home, his mother talked of having met a charming Indian man on a ship from Europe to America many years ago, and asked if he knew that man. Saund realized the man she was talking about was him, and they had indeed met before. He courted Marian, confident that since her parents liked him, he had a chance.
Eventually, they decided to marry. However, interracial marriage was not allowed in California in 1928. They had to marry on a ship 3 miles off the California coast, in international waters. He worked as a farmer while she worked as a teacher in the Imperial Valley, and they had children and were quite happy in their small community, where everyone called him Doc Saund.
But things kept getting harder. People refused to lease land to Indian farmers. He bought his own farm in his wife’s name. But the Expatriation Act of 1907 meant a woman married to a man who was not a citizen was liable to have her own citizenship canceled, which meant her land could be confiscated. He couldn’t work as a professor. And now it looked like he was in danger of not even being able to work as a farmer.
Fight for citizenship
There were two ways that Indians could get the right to naturalize - they could either challenge the verdict of State Vs. Bhagat Singh Thind and get it struck down, or they could get Congress to pass a bill to do so.
He started a petition signed by as many of the 2000 Indians who were in California as he could muster. The problem he ran into wasn’t that Americans were opposed to it, as much as that Indians, after years of this kind of struggle, weren’t looking forward to the prospect of long-drawn-out battles that took time and money. Plus, they had no confidence that this would work. But he had a cheerful, upbeat and confident persona that wasn’t bogged down easily and managed to get the ball rolling.
The goal was to fund eminent Indians in New York who could then pull the requisite strings with members of the Congress, who could then help them create and pass such a bill. A big businessman, JJ Singh, was a big contributor both financially and with connections. In a profile in the New Yorker, JJ Singh was called a “one-man lobby”.
They drafted a bill eventually, which was presented by two Congressmenm Clare Boothe-Luce and Emmanuel Celler (hence, called the Luce-Celler Bill). The interesting thing to me here is Franklin Roosevelt, who was President at this point in 1945, wrote personally approving of this bill and urging for it to be passed. He outlines the four main arguments for this bill to pass:
This bill caps the number of Indians getting citizenship every year at a 100, which is too small a number for the population to be worried about
Indians had demonstrated bravery in fighting for the Allies (There was even a statement by an Allied general to that effect)
Indians getting citizenship meant there would be better trade with India, which was a great source of raw materials and a great market for finished products.
India is soon to be an independent country and it would be a useful ally to have.
The opposition came from the Southern Democrats, and was mainly about religion - most Indians were not Christian, and they didn’t want the Hindu-Muslim conflict that was currently causing the partition of India, to be imported into America.
On October 10th 1945, the Luce-Celler bill was passed with overwhelming majority. And Dalip Singh Saund lost no time in applying for citizenship.
Citizen Saund
Once Dr. Saund became a citizen in 1949, he lost no time in standing to be the Justice Of Peace in his small town. He won the election unopposed, but since the post required that the candidate be a citizen for at least one year, his candidacy was cancelled. Since there was now no candidate, a judge had to be appointed, and there was public support for him. Plus, he had eventually completed a year of citizenship. But the county board of supervisors appointed someone else instead. In 1952, he ran against that guy and won hard. He was now Judge Saund.
Judge Saund was tough on crime, good to the people, and worked hard against drug kingpins. One of the things that stood out to me was he wanted tougher laws about crossing the border to Mexico and back, because south of the border seems to have been some kind of Wild West where kids could go, consume drugs, and come back, and druglords would come over to sell drugs and escape across the border when pursued by authorities. He threw the book at this sort of criminal.
By 1955, he had made a name for himself as a member of the Democratic party. The party’s current candidate for Congress lived in Riverside County, and deputed Saund to manage Imperial county. He caught the party leadership’s eye due to his organization skills and charm, and they made him a delegate to the DNC.
When the sitting Republican Congressman announced his retirement, the party supported his running for Congress. Having had experience as a respected judge and enough on-ground organizing experience made him a strong candidate.
But the Republican party put up Jackie Cochran against him.
Jackie Cochran
Jackie Cochran was a powerhouse herself. She had learned to fly planes and quickly became a formidable air racer. She had worked with Amelia Earhart to open up air racing to women. At this point, she held many of the aviation records for altitude, speed, and distance.
She then suggested to Eleanor Roosevelt that a Women’s flying division in the Air Force should be formed, which could take over domestic noncombatant aviation jobs to free up more male pilots for combat. She helped create the Women Airforce Service Pilots division, and after the war, received the Distinguished Service Medal, which was then the highest non-combat award in the US. She then served in the Armed Forces Reserve as a Lieutenant Colonel. And, much later in the 60s, she was part of the Mercury 13 program exploring the possibility of female astronauts.
So Jackie by herself was a formidable candidate.
She was married to Floyd Odlum, who was among the 10 richest men in the country. Together, they were friends with Eisenhower. She was a big part of convincing Eisenhower to run for President and campaigned and bankrolled his successful run.
The natural progression for her then was to run for Congress. She defeated five men in the Republican primaries and it looked like it would be a cakewalk for Jackie to get into Congress.
She left no stone unturned to run a great campaign. She flew everywhere in the district to attend fundraisers and campaign events. She ran ads on the radio. She installed large billboards all over. The media magnified her candidacy, giving no airtime to her opposing candidate. She also ran a cosmetic line, and hence had a lot of contacts in Hollywood, some of whom campaigned for her, including Bob Hope and Rin Tin Tin, the famous dog that now had a TV show.
What would Saund do?
Judge Saund For Congress
Saund was a formidable candidate himself, but when faced against someone with a national profile like Jackie Cochran, he was very much an underdog.
He didn’t have much money to spend on running for Congress. He had to drive to get from campaign event to campaign event. He wasn’t able to respond to the attack ads that Jackie ran on the radio. His supporters could only set up handwritten plywood boards in their yards that said “Judge Saund For Congress”.
But while resources were lacking, supporters were not. People thronged to support his candidacy. Many men and women joined him in registering people to vote and going door to door to campaign for him. One lady painted ads for Judge Saund on the sides of her trailer home. Another came all the way from the Coachella Valley, rented an apartment in Riverside, and worked on registering as many people to vote as she could. At one point, someone came up to him and said “if I don’t vote for you, it is only because we want to give Eisenhower another Republican Congressman”.
Jackie challenged Saund to a debate, which he agreed to. This debate was much-publicized, with the venue filled to capacity, and ran live on radio.
In this debate, Saund made it clear that while Jackie might have many accomplishments to her name and wanted to be in Congress to support President Eisenhower, his focus would be on representing the people of the 29th district and passing laws and programs that helped them.
Jackie attacked Saund, saying the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was leaning more towards Communist ideals, insinuating that Judge Saund was a Communist himself. He hit back saying he stands for election as an American citizen representing the people of the 29th district, and the political inclinations of the leader of a country he was not a citizen of didn’t matter to him.
This debate raised Saund’s profile and made many more people aware of him. This possibly was an error on Jackie’s part.
As the votes were counted, it became apparent that while Jackie had polled 75% of the votes in Riverside City and Palm Sprints, Saund got 60% of the votes in the Imperial Valley, Coachella Valley, and other farming areas.
Saund had polled 4000 votes more than Jackie Cochran!
But, there were 5000 absentee ballots to be counted, which brought it straight down to the wire.
Finally, it turned out Dr. Daleep Singh Saund won by a margin of 3,300 votes.
Congressman Saund!
Congressman Saund
Daleep Singh Saund went on to serve three terms in Congress. In his first big speech to the Women’s Press Club in DC, he called himself “A living example of American democracy in action.” Remembering his time as a judge, he got laws passed so that minors couldn’t cross the border into Mexico without an accompanying adult. He mostly focused on agriculture and land issues as a Congressman, being every inch the working-class politician his people had elected him to be.
In 1962, his district was redistricted into the 38th Congressional District. Towards the end of his third term, he experienced a stroke and was left unable to speak. He still stood for elections despite his illness, though he lost, and polled 44% of the votes!
In 1973, he finally passed away.
Reflection
Seeing this journey of Dr. Saund, I wonder if State Vs Bhagat Singh Thind had not turned out as it did, Dust Bowl-era California would have thrown up more Indian-origin politicians, and the agricultural areas in California would have had Indians be a formidable voting block. The iconic books of that era representing California, like Cannery Row by John Steinbeck and Human Comedy by William Saroyan have no inkling of Indians being present, ever (but to be fair, I’m not sure Saroyan sprinkled that many Armenians in his book either).
It took 74 years to go from Indians being allowed to naturalize as American citizens to there being an Indian-American woman in the White House. It seems to have taken much, much longer for Catholics, even. It makes sense why the American establishment enacted the Asian Exclusion Act of 1891.
Dr. Saund seems to have been a very outgoing, very upbeat person who was easy to have a beer with. The most successful, trailblazing people from minority groups tend to have golden retriever energy or a magnetic charm about them.
Another thing stories of greatness have in common is for the protagonist to be stuck in a place much below his level, which he finds purpose in. If Dr. Saund had been a professor, that job would probably have kept throwing up interesting challenges and similar peers, and his day-to-day would have been occupied with staying in place on the hamster wheel. But having to work the land, make oneself liked in a small community, and experience discrimination at a systemic level with plenty of time to do something about it seems like a more potent combination.
The race against Jackie Cochran is an interesting case study. It shouldn’t have been as close as it was. Dr. Saund being so entrenched in his community and having a strong grip and passion on the issues of his constituents, was a game changer. It reminds me of the electoral losses of famous people like Nandan Nilekani or Irom Sharmila Chanu. They might be very accomplished, but they aren’t immersed in the issues of their constituents. Electoral politics isn’t for those who want to get by on the merits of who they are than what they do for their voters.
I wonder if there’s something like an “underdog boost”, where people come to work with you more because they feel they can make more of a difference.
The foundation, though, seems to be how hard you work at things and how persistent you are in the face of failure. But what seems to help with that is not being defeatist in how you approach life. When you blaze a trail, you face too many failures, and it’s hard not to internalize some of that. But finding support systems and internal confidence such that you don’t define yourself by those failures is important to staying in the race long enough and focusing on doing whatever it takes to get every vote you muster.
It’s been a short 64 years from the first Indian-American Congressman to the first Indian-American in the White House. What an impressive, grounded, well-loved person Doc Saund was who began our journey.