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In Modern Review Har Dayal said, of the peasants as much as the students, that America had “lifted [them] to a higher level of thought and action. The great flag of the greatest democratic state in the world’s history, burns up all cowardice, servility, pessimism and indifference, as fire consumes the dross and leaves pure gold behind.”24 Of course this exposure to liberal discourses and rising expectations advertised by the land of opportunity, combined with systematic exclusion from access to the same, is what fired their ire, not merely the imbibing of some magically liberating influence inherent in the American atmosphere.
Between 1907 and 1910, white American anxiety and hostility increased apace as the number of Indians grew, although opinion was far from unified during this period of dramatic social and cultural flux. Moreover, class positioning on both sides conditioned American responses to Indian newcomers, causing Indians to be read as exotically tantalizing Orientals if they came from educated elite backgrounds, and as threatening dark-complected aliens if they came as low-wage workers. According to Rattan Singh’s account, the Sikh “pioneers” did fairly well in prosperous periods, but an economic downturn in the United States in 1907 led to tensions with white workers. Joan Jensen attributes this to a predictable pattern: whenever the economy put pressure on low-income white laborers, anti-Asian hysteria rose in direct proportion, as the incoming workers, who were ready to accept even lower wages, were seen as competition. Just as the West Coast’s Asiatic Expulsion League had thought things were under control with the Chinese and Japanese, now here came the latest manifestation of the “Yellow Peril,” this time in the form of a “tide of turbans.”25 Organized labor accused Sikhs of being in league with the bosses who colluded with the steamship companies in recruiting Asian laborers. Oft en even Socialists judged Asian workers backwards and unorganizable, a drag on the progress of more advanced and “modern” white labor.26
Indian laborers were used as strikebreakers in Tacoma.27 An escalating series of hostile incidents followed, beginning with the August 1907 riot in Bellingham, Washington, that literally drove the Indians out of town, in an act premeditated to be the grand finale of a Labor Day parade, and followed by other acts of vandalism and vigilantism in California and Oregon. In March 1910, “white hoodlums” in St. John, Oregon, apparently with the collusion of the police, attacked the quarters of Indian workers, who beat them back with sticks and clubs.28
The views of the West Coast anti-Asian groups and certain sectors of the white labor movement notwithstanding, the American public as a whole was not ill disposed to the Indians; Americans identified with the rhetoric of an anti-British independence struggle and tended to sympathize with refugees from foreign tyranny. But as American power on the world stage, along with the United States’ imperial ambitions, waxed around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, the balance of social attitudes toward the rest of the world and its émigrés was shifting. President Theodore Roosevelt, recent recipient of congratulations and approval from Rudyard Kipling on his successful conquest of Cuba and the Philippines, along with a copy of Kipling’s poem “White Man’s Burden,” affirmed his appreciation for the British Raj’s effectiveness as “the most colossal example history affords of a successful administration by men of European blood of a thickly populated region on another continent … one of the most admirable achievements of the white race during the last two centuries.”29 Still, the Indians continued to find support among progressive leftists and left-liberals, civil libertarians, pacifists, and anti-imperialists, who opposed World War I, and of course Orientalist intellectuals and theosophists.
Meanwhile policymakers proposed increasingly sly ways to keep Indians out without explicitly banning them. For example, the United States might make an agreement with the British requiring Indians to carry passports, and then refuse passports to laborers.30 Or the United States might persuade shipping lines to discontinue service for Asians or to refuse to sell tickets to Indian laborers, thereby in effect privatizing or contracting out enforcement of an exclusion policy.31 A 1910 Immigration Commission report recommended congressional exclusion and a gentlemen’s agreement with Britain to stem the flow of East Indians, as they were by now “universally regarded as the least desirable race of immigrants thus far admitted to the United States”;32 also, the report suggested, requiring a literacy test might help curtail East Indian immigration.
In 1912, the Root amendment to the pending Dillingham immigration bill called for the deportation of “any alien who shall take advantage of his residence in the United States to conspire with others for the violent overthrow of a foreign government recognized by the United States.” It was defeated. In 1913 the Alien Land Law was passed, in part to prevent Japanese or Sikh agricultural workers from accumulating their own profitable land base in California’s Central Valley, a process already underway. At the same time another bill was debated though not passed, restricting not entrance, but eligibility for citizenship. Of course, restricting immigrants from entering and disqualifying them from citizenship were two different tasks. It was not until 1917 that the Asiatic Barred Zone was declared, drastically restricting entry for anyone originating within a geographically (if not politically) arbitrary latitude and longitude that covered most of China, part of Russia, part of Polynesia, and all of India, Burma, Siam, the Malay States, Arabia, Afghanistan, and the Indian Ocean islands.
ACTIVISTS
As early as 1907, officials in Punjab noted the circulation of “seditious pamphlets” addressed to soldiers in the local army garrisons “pointing out to them how easy it would be to throw off British rule…. The circular emanated from some Natives of India now in the United States.”33 As North America grew as an organizing center, revolutionaries abroad in Europe, such as Har Dayal, Ajit Singh, and Bhai Parmanand, increasingly started looking west in hopes of advancing their work. Once there, the necessary tasks would be to carry out anti-British “sedition” and to protect the community from North American racism. The two imperatives were complementary: in the organizers’ calculations, the latter was precisely what might prime a potential mass movement to develop its consciousness of the former. In other words, the rage fueled by discrimination might be channeled toward anticolonial struggle. Still, this conjunction of Indian independence and American civil rights could also lead to conflicts in priority. The difference in primary aspirations for status as American citizens versus status as free Indian citizens was eventually reflected in a divergence of interest between moderate permanent settlers and radical temporary sojourners, though this may ultimately be a circular argument, given that it was the radicals who left to go fight in the mutiny, leaving the moderates behind. But it was only between 1912 and 1918 that the Indian frame came to override the American one with such urgency, and that the narrative arc of national liberation came to blot out that of immigrant arrival and success. Before the Ghadar movement coalesced, while organizers did habitually speak against British rule, in the immediate sense they prioritized worker education and the social welfare of the immigrant community. A few examples of the organizers follow.
Ram Nath Puri
Ram Nath Puri was a bank clerk in Lahore when he first drew the attention of the British authorities for a few “objectionable pamphlets”and a “seditious cartoon” he had published in 1905.34 In 1906 he left for America. There he worked first as a hospital watchman and then as an interpreter for the Sikh laborers who were then beginning to arrive in larger numbers. It was also reported that he “employed his talents in cheating them at every opportunity” and was “regarded by the Indians as a swindler and by Americans as a loafer.” He enrolled in a mining college, and later worked in the fields picking fruit, as a “waiter in the house of an American lady,” and as an unsuccessful entrepreneur. Both