write to Berkeley, and someone else would come up to meet them. The recommended course was to arrive in the spring, work over the summer, and enroll in the fall, either at the university straightaway or at a free Berkeley high school for a year first.
Har Dayal also published a series of articles in Modern Review, praising the United States as the ideal place in all the world “from which a solitary wandering Hindu can send a message of hope and encouragement to his countrymen.” As the future-oriented nation par excellence, the United States was the perfect foil for India, whose ancient culture it was thus eager to embrace. Indeed, such a rapprochement would be mutually beneficial: Vedantic philosophy would do wonders for the superficial, “restless, noisy,” “overfed, self-complacent” Americans, while modernity would stimulate and inspire the Indians mired in tradition, stunted by colonial chains, and hampered by current repression. He thought the social and political climate of the United States would be very salubrious for Indian students, virtually “an ethical sanitarium.” Here they could openly explore “the value of unity, the lessons to be learned from Japan, the importance of industrial progress, the greatness of the American people, the blessings of democracy, the honourableness of manual labour, the meanness of Theodore Roosevelt and the necessity for education, liberal and technical, for the uplifting of the people of India.” As they were in Har Dayal’s opinion “endowed with energy and brains but little money,” they would benefit in practical terms not only from technical training but from the moral effects of supporting themselves for the first time through manual labor, thereby “learning self-reliance and resourcefulness of mind.”19
In a similar vein Harnam Singh Chima published “Why India Sends Students to America” in 1907. He asserted that the real purpose for him and his fellow students was “that we may deserve the title educated in the fullest and practical sense of the word. We came here to imbibe free thoughts from free people and teach the same when we go back to our country and to get rid of the tyranny of the rule of the universal oppressor (the British).”20
No less than the workers, the students experienced racism. Boarding houses and restaurants often declined to serve them, and they were ineligible for membership in most campus clubs. This, along with the need for them to do menial labor, may to some degree have neutralized the class privilege they had enjoyed in India. In any case the Ghadarites and their immediate predecessors deliberately fostered secularism, tolerance, and fraternization across religious and caste lines. Of course it would be disingenuous to suggest that all differences of class, caste, religion, and regional origin were erased in the New World. However, it does seem that these differences faded into lower relief in comparison to their mutual interests and experiences in the North American context. Even if these and other differences were not completely erased—only temporarily deemphasized to reemerge later—by 1912 the Ghadar community’s two main ingredients were present. The movement’s “outstanding characteristic,” in participant Gobind Behari Lal’s opinion, was the “combination of university-bred scholar and the cultural leader and of the pre-educated Indians, workers, farmers and small shopkeepers etc. of the Pacific Coast.”21 But the ensuing emphasis on education for workers and manual labor for students closed the distance between them and encouraged the merging of each group’s concerns with those of the other—a volatile fusion that illuminated and ignited both of them.
Neither students nor laborers as a group were overwhelmingly political upon arrival, as the majority were focused on their own personal advancement. The farmers had come seeking prosperity, the students professional success. However, an important minority had come with other ideas in mind. A professor complained: “[The students] are generally revolutionaries, or if not such when they come, are soon taken in hand by their fellows and converted,” after which, “having come under the influence of the socialistic and revolutionary ideas they regarded it as their mission in life to work for the subversion of the British rule in India.”22 A California Immigration officer observed in 1914 that “most of the Indian students residing there are infected with seditious ideas,” so thoroughly that “even Sikhs of the labouring class have not escaped their pernicious influence.”23 But who radicalized whom?
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
