Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives, Gift of Dr. Eric Saund
Object Details
Campaign biographies were part of American politics from the beginning, but when Dalip Saund published his in 1956, it was like nothing Americans had seen before. Saund was the first Asian American elected as a full-fledged Representative. In fact, until 1949, he and other immigrants from Asia were barred from acquiring U.S. citizenship. Saund lobbied for a bill to gain the right of citizenship. Once in Congress, he became one of the nation’s most convincing advocates abroad. “The American people elected me to their Congress,” he wrote in this pamphlet, “Where else in the world could this happen?”