Various Wobblies later popped up several times in the crevices of the so-called Hindu-German Conspiracy. Har Dayal persuaded an IWW member called Jones, who had become interested in the Indian movement while living for a time in Assam (!?), to serve as New York liaison between Germans and Indians in America. Ambassador Spring-Rice informed the secretary of state that the “world-wide organisation” centered in Berlin was not only employing some Irishmen as agents but also making efforts “to affiliate some of the industrial workers of the world [sic], one of whom is now in Berlin.”173 Another, identified as an American anarchist or Wobbly named Jack or Jenkins, makes an appearance in M. N. Roy’s memoirs, while a Foreign Office Memorandum mentioned that Har Dayal “was on intimate terms” with an IWW member named Anton Johansen, one of the accused in the 1916 California dynamite conspiracy case.174
The wartime repression, trial, and imprisonment of Ghadarites and Wobblies, then, followed a similar timeline, defined by the United States’ entry into the war and its attendant legislation against dissidents. Taraknath Das formed an acquaintance during his two years at Leavenworth with fellow inmates William “Big Bill” Haywood, one of the IWW’s founding heroes, and Ralph Chaplin, the movement’s legendary artist. According to Das’s biographer Tapan Mukherjee, Das habitually gathered with a whole group of IWW prisoners (ninety-three of whom had arrived there after the Chicago trial of 1918) “in a corner of the prison yard which they named the ‘campus,’ ” to discuss politics, poetry, current events, the Russian Revolution, history, and Vedanta philosophy, in which Das held special classes in the evening.175
As it happens, yet another fellow inmate at Leavenworth was Ricardo Florés Magón, the Mexican transborder revolutionary leader and cofounder of the syndicalist Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). Although kept secluded, Magón was imprisoned at Leavenworth from May 1918 until his death in 1922. He had been active in Los Angeles since 1910. Ghadar had little presence in Los Angeles, although it was reported that Munshi Ram, part of the Astoria Indian Association prior to its absorption into the PCHA and later assistant manager in charge of correspondence and subscription records at the Ghadar Press under Ram Chandra, was assigned to go “preach sedition” there in March 1915.176 Har Dayal had declared himself a supporter of the Magón brothers and their activities back in 1912. Khankhoje was also a personal friend of Magón’s, whom he had met through a Mexican fellow cadet during his Tamalpais years.177
I have found no evidence to suggest that any Indians took part in the IWW brigade that marched to Baja to support the PLM that year, although Khankhoje and Pingle had long been entertaining a similar idea. Together they dreamed up a (perpetually thwarted) vision of a home base in Baja, first for training their guerrilla army outside the view of United States authorities and later as a place where “after the revolution, Punjabi farmers could till the soil.”178 The Indians’ intimate association with the Mexican farm labor population in California, and their habit of looking to the Mexican border whether for refuge from United States law or for covert entry and exit when necessary, would have made such a thing plausible.
This eventuality didn’t materialize, however, nor did Pingle and Khankhoje’s later attempt at joining the battle to the south in 1911. After the Mexican Revolution broke out Khankhoje was eager to join in at the head of a force of Sikh veterans recruited in Oregon and California, as a sort of rehearsal for the revolt against the British Raj. But his putative squad, more experienced than he, advised him to cool his hot young head and scout things out first. His Mexican friends advised him to cross from Calexico to Mexicali, which he did. But once across the border he concluded with disappointment that his men were right; the plan was not feasible. It was a brutally violent situation in which bandits were abroad, and Spanish fluency was required—no place for a training exercise and too risky for the premature sacrifice of Indian blood, which must be saved against their own urgent cause.179 Nevertheless, the border-crossing revoltosos of various factions involved in the Mexican Revolution from 1911 onward offered a constant background to the development of official American attitudes to the Ghadar movement, offering the immediate precedents for the legal discourse around the launch of military expeditions from U.S. soil, and providing the alibi for Ghadar’s attempts to ship arms during war time.
Perhaps the most significant political divergence between the Ghadarites and the Wobblies was their attitude to the Great War. Many North American and European syndicalists and anarchists, including Har Dayal’s old friend, supporter, and Indian Sociologist printer, Guy Aldred, who spent several years in prison as a conscientious objector in England, expressed their anti-imperialism through staunch opposition to the war. Those who did take sides chose liberal Britain and France over militaristic Germany. But the Ghadarites, given their relationship to one of the major antagonists, saw the war not as a disaster but as a longed-for opportunity; they expressed their far more direct and personal anti-imperialism through an alliance with Germany against Britain. However, regardless of their feelings toward the war itself, the Wobblies and the Ghadarites may indeed have agreed on opposing the United States’ entry into the war, since that was what brought them to grief as violators of neutrality.
Finally, aside from the tasks of resistance, both the IWW and the Ghadar Party occupied themselves with worker education and mutual aid, defense of free speech and civil liberties (necessitated by the repression of their other work), and cultural production. Both the IWW and Ghadar sourced a prolific wellspring of militant propaganda, newspapers, pamphlets, and volumes of singable poems in the 1910s and 1920s: where the IWW had the Little Red Songbook, Ghadar had Ghadar-di-Gunj. These iconic repositories of lasting inspiration arguably proved more of an influential contribution to the history of radical movements than the immediate instrumental results of any of their direct actions. And even these tangents were fortuitously entangled: American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) founder Roger Baldwin was among the foremost supporters of the Friends of Freedom for India in the 1920s, serving on its executive committee during the postwar antideportation campaign. The ACLU, of course, was a direct outgrowth of the IWW’s war time free-speech struggles.
Hopkinson had attended another of his quarry’s lectures in early 1913, this one sponsored in some way, he reported, by the San Francisco Russian Revolutionary Society. Har Dayal opened with an apology for the presence of the American flag on the platform, for which he said he was not responsible, as he didn’t believe in any government, and all flags were a “sign of slavery.” He then proceeded to his planned remarks titled “The Revolutionary Labor Movement in France.” At the time, this would have referred to the syndicalist Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). “Although he had not been in the United States very long,” nevertheless “he had carefully studied the revolutionary movement in America, to include socialist activities and the IWW. This latter, he characterized as bearing the closest resemblance to the Anarchist Society of France of which, he said, he was proud to be a member.”180
Despite the relationship of Har Dayal and his overseas comrades with European Socialists, and their awareness of some individualist anarchists, they had not engaged with this sector of French radicalism; after all, it was only in North America and not in France or England, that a working class–based popular movement became significant as a radical partner on the Indian side. The Indians politically active in Europe were primarily intellectuals and students from elite backgrounds; they interfaced most with a rarefied circle of other intellectuals and exiled professional revolutionaries, not with local trade unionists. Even so certain parallels with the traits of the Ghadar movement suggest themselves.
Bernard Moss characterizes French syndicalism as the domain of independent skilled artisans who were not yet alienated from the process and product of their labor and retained an attachment to their national tradition of republican radical democracy, in contrast to the thoroughly proletarianized and alienated factory workforce to whose working conditions Marx’s more centralized and unified organizational model was most applicable. This syndicalist combination of libertarian and egalitarian principles strikes me as reminiscent of the Ghadarites’ tendency, albeit stemming from different situational origins. In any case
