One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  The combination of these sentiments—obvious religious otherness combined with an alleged violent history—suggested that the newcomers posed both spiritual and physical danger to the community. As a sermon published in the Bellingham Herald and reprinted around the region put it, “At the present rate at which they are coming, we can no more Christianize them than we can put out hell by throwing snowballs into it.”

  The Bible says that if one careth not for his own household he is no better than an infidel. This is true also of nations. Charity begins at home. While the people of the United States have gladly offered asylum and refuge to the millions of tempest-tossed and persecuted of the earth, yet we have no right before God to carry this hospitality one step beyond the point where we endanger and imperil our integrity as a Christian nation. Christ’s injunction, “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature,” does not imply that we should invite those people here in such hordes that we shall be swamped, inundated, despiritualized, and un-Americanized.

  The headline under which this sermon ran put the matter succinctly, if with less of the pulpit’s brimstone: “Unrestricted Immigration Means Total Annihilation of the American State.” Only this nearly apocalyptic fear in the face of religious difference can explain what occurred on the evening of September 4, 1907. There were by then several hundred Sikhs residing peacefully within Bellingham’s city limits. Most lived in bunkhouses constructed near the lumber mills where they worked. Others stayed in small clusters in the lodging house district. Wherever they were, the mob found them.

  The word pogrom is most often associated with czarist Russia; it usually refers to a violent attack against Jews—in cities like Kiev and Kishinev—by rampaging mobs of Christians, who, in flare-ups of anti-Semitism frequently fomented and encouraged by civil authorities and the press, murdered their neighbors and ransacked homes and businesses on hundreds of separate occasions. The era of pogroms lasted in Russia from medieval times well into the twentieth century, and is generally regarded as a precursor to the genocidal ambitions of Stalin and Hitler. Pogrom is not a word often associated with the Pacific Northwest of the United States, but it is difficult to find a more appropriate description for what occurred in the aftermath of a Labor Day celebration gone awry. On September 2, during a parade and other festivities, curious Sikhs who had come to watch found themselves jeered at and harassed at every turn. Two days later, apparently after negative feelings had time to be organized and directed, more than five hundred white men, trailed by boys apparently skipping school to watch the spectacle, moved methodically through town, stopping at every shack and lodging where “Hindus” were known to live. Papers as far away as the New York Times reported what happened next:

  The long-expected cry “Drive out the Hindus!” was heard throughout the city and along the waterfront last night. The police were helpless. All authority was paralyzed, and for five hours a mob of a half-thousand white men raided the mills where the foreigners were working, battered down doors of lodging houses, and, dragging the Asiatics from their beds, escorted them to the city limits with order to keep going.

  After a sweep of the lodging house district near the docks, the mob’s last stop was the Lake Whatcom Logging Company, the scale of which gives some indication of what it would take to organize hundreds into hours of violence spread across a city, and the enormity of the hatred that must have fueled the effort. A full five miles from the waterfront where the riot began, the largest mill in the area occupied eighty acres and produced 45,000,000 board feet of cut lumber in the year the Sikhs arrived in Bellingham. Consisting of dozens of laborers’ cottages, it was a village unto itself—a village that was stormed as midnight passed on September 5. Hundreds of men with torches descended on the company compound. Battering down doors, they pulled sleeping Sikhs from their bunks and marched them back to town.

  Far from “helpless,” as the New York Times report suggested, the police at this point—and only at this point—saw fit to respond. The chief of police made his way to “two crumbling shacks” where a crowd he numbered at close to two thousand had enclosed and surrounded the Sikhs. As reported by Collier’s magazine a month later, the chief of police, named Thomas, “a great, calm, ungrammatical man of unbounded tact,” approached with an ease of manner that does not suggest a town official concerned about the welfare of people it was his job to protect.

  “What are you doing, boys?” he asked members of the crowd.

  There were men among the mob throwing rocks at the two makeshift jailhouses, pausing only to shove back inside any “Hindu” who dared to show himself. They broke from this pastime just long enough to answer.

  “Running ’em out of town,” they said.

  Chief Thomas replied, “That’s right. But say, if you fellows keep ’em in them shacks, some bad man may start a riot. Why don’t you take ’em down to the police station? They’ll be safer there, and in the morning we’ll all chuck ’em out together.”

  Though he would later be faulted for how he handled the situation, that night the police chief earned a cheer.

  Bellingham’s Sikhs carried nothing with them as the deputized mob marched them through town. As another local report put it, “The Hindus have a love for jewelry, and hundreds of dollars’ worth of it was taken by the members of the mob. The places were also turned topsy-turvy, and much valuable clothing and articles owned by the Orientals was destroyed that was not carried off.” In a photograph of the group taken after they were locked in the basement of the city hall—Chief Thomas’s jail could only hold so many—they do not look like men who had been hoarding jewelry. Half in turbans, half in western-style hats, all wore the sad expression of men half a world away from their families. Men who had just been snatched from their meals or their beds, they do indeed look like people who have had something precious taken from them. Yet most likely the jewelry mentioned was nothing but a few of the more ornate examples of the Five Ks their code of conduct instructed them to carry: fine wooden combs, steel bracelets, bejeweled ritual blades. Even these markers of their faith they had seen snatched away, a sure sign that neither they nor their beliefs were welcome in America.

  The following day, the jailed men crowded the train station by the hundreds. Even in the light of morning, some remained so frightened they walked north along the tracks before the first departure’s whistle was heard. Within a week, not one Sikh remained.

  The aftermath of the attacks that later became known as the Bellingham Riots was not what might be expected today. There was little handwringing within the community that things had gotten out of hand. On the contrary, the remaining residents, including the mayor, the police chief, and other officials, were glad to see the Sikhs go. The San Francisco–based Korean and Japanese Exclusion League, which had no fewer than eight hundred members in Bellingham, felt so emboldened by the riot and its success that they renamed themselves the more inclusive Asiatic Exclusion League. Within two months, copycat crimes occurred in the nearby cities of Vancouver, Aberdeen, Everett, and Boring, Oregon. Nor was this merely a story of local interest. In addition to the far-off press coverage, the violence in Bellingham was brought to the attention of the federal government by parties on both sides. A letter from the Seattle Exclusion League warned President Roosevelt that “in view of the Bellingham riots,” he must “take immediate action in checking the Oriental immigration into the Northwest.” The State Department, meanwhile, braced for inquiries from the British ambassador, demanding an explanation why these visitors to the United States, who remained British subjects, would be treated so poorly. Speculating on how the U.S. government might respond, the Times reported that this state of affairs was becoming the new normal: “All that the State Department can do in such a case as that at Bellingham is to follow the well-worn precedents established in Wyoming, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, where foreigners have been mobbed or killed,” the paper of record said. “That is, the department, in the name of the President, may addr
ess the Governor of Washington, transmitting perhaps the complaint of the British Embassy… and requesting him to take action to prevent a recurrence of the trouble.”

  Perhaps not as quickly as the various exclusion leagues would have liked, the mounting attacks did eventually result in action by the federal government. Washington did not act to protect the Sikhs and those endangered immigrants who might come after them, however. Instead, with nativist sentiment exploding as the First World War raged, Congress passed the first of a series of laws preventing anyone born in Asia to enter and remain in the United States. These laws were adopted mainly due to the rising influence of the Pacific states, which in official reports now referred to the threat of “the Hindu” far more often than “the heathen Chinee”; in most cases, this actually referred to Sikhs. Of the more than seven thousand Indians who emigrated to the Pacific coast between 1899 and 1917, nearly all were from Punjab; around 90 percent were Sikhs, and most of the rest were Muslim. No “Hindu” threat in fact existed, and yet the combined threats of foreign customs and alien religion spread by that name. “The Hindu is the most undesirable immigrant in the state,” a report from the California State Board of Control stated in 1920. “His lack of personal cleanliness, his low morals, and his blind adherence to theories and teachings, so entirely repugnant to American principles make him unfit for association with American people.”

  With the passage of the Immigrant Act of 1917, the same restrictions faced by the Chinese since 1882 now applied to those within the Asiatic Barred Zone, which included all those from Turkey to the Polynesian Islands, nearly half of the world’s population—not incidentally, the non-Christian half. U.S. immigration policy became even more strident in the years following with the passage of the Emergency Quota Act in 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, both of which hoped to stem the tide of unwanted immigrants through the creation of a quota system. Encouraging religious as well as ethnic homogeneity, the act established a formula based on the national origins of citizens of the United States as numbered in the census of 1890. The goal was maintenance of the racial composition of the population—in other words, no more diversity than existed thirty years before would be allowed.

  Of course, before these laws were passed, many supposedly “undesirable” immigrants had been making lives for themselves throughout the United States. Among these, no minority religious group did more for the ultimate acceptance of themselves and others than the spiritual kin of the men who had been chased out of Bellingham in 1907. Though derided in the press as “timid sons of India” in the days after the riot, Sikhs elsewhere in America became known as embodiments of their warrior heritage—not by answering violence with violence but by showing their grit in places as varied as farmers’ fields, sports arenas, and the courts.

  In the decade following the attacks in Bellingham, Sikhs became among the most productive agricultural workers on the West Coast. In the Imperial Valley, extending from the Mexican border to the Salton Sea, they first picked cotton as migrant laborers and then began growing it themselves. With very few women joining them in emigration from Punjab, many Sikh men married Mexican women—a cross-cultural experiment ironically aided by California’s anti-miscegenation laws, which regarded these two groups from far sides of the earth as equally “brown.” Many of the children born from these unions adopted their mothers’ Catholic beliefs, but throughout the state Sikh religious devotion remained strong enough that incorporation papers for a Sikh temple in Berkeley were granted in 1912. Continued adherence to the beliefs they had brought with them did not prevent them from becoming well versed in areas of civic life many natives failed to understand. According to Karen Leonard, the leading scholar on Punjabi-Mexican culture, Sikhs in the Imperial Valley were adept at using the legal system of their new land to address grievances both within their community and between themselves and their non-immigrant neighbors. They were so adept, in fact, that within their first decade they initiated nearly twice as much litigation in the county courts as one would expect from a population their size.

  Further up the coastline, Sikhs gained a reputation as wrestlers of the first order. Importing the ancient art of Punjabi judo known as kabaddi to lumberjack camps of the Cascades and the Sierras, grapplers such as Dodan Singh and Kapoor Singh established themselves as men who would not be pushed around. The latter (described in the press as “the burly Hindu… a magnificent specimen of brawn and muscle”) also bore the dubious distinction of being the first “Hindu” sent to San Quentin State Prison, while the former fought one Eddie O’Connell for the welterweight title in Astoria, Oregon, in 1910. Before the bout, O’Connell trash-talked his opponent, indicating that he expected no timidity from him in the ring. “The turbaned wonder from the trans-Pacific shores will not last,” he taunted. Emerging victorious, “Dodan Singh: The Hindu” was declared the new welterweight champion of the Pacific coast. A rematch between the Sikh and the Irishman was canceled when judges announced they had evidence that O’Connell was not planning to fight fair.

  If acceptance in the United States was at times a matter of endurance in the face of rules that seemed constantly to change to an immigrant’s disadvantage, none had more right to call himself an American than another new resident of Dodan Singh’s adopted hometown of Astoria. After the dissolution of Bellingham’s Sikh community, this Oregon lumber town became briefly the hub of the South Asian community in the Northwest. Born like most Sikhs at the time in Punjab, Bhagat Singh Thind made his way to Astoria in 1913, settling for a time in the part of town known by all as “Hindu Alley.” Like so many before him, he worked turning the region’s timber into milled lumber, earning enough in this profession that he regularly sent money home. In letters to his father he sounds very much like the Philadelphia Jewish merchant Jonas Phillips writing to Amsterdam to arrange payments to his mother 140 years before. In each man’s letters there is religious sentiment mixed with practical concern, as well as notes of an immigrant’s impatience for news from his homeland. “My dear old and saintly father,” Thind wrote:

  … May The Wonderful Teacher bless you with good health for a long time! Please accept my greetings. Everything is fine here. I pray to the Immortal for your well-being day and night… In the month of December, I had sent 280 rupees to you, but do not know whether you received the same or not. Please do favor me with a reply.

  It was said that immigrants from India were slow to assimilate. Thind adamantly refused to change his appearance or otherwise accommodate the public in this regard. Later describing his first years in the country, he wrote, “America got everything except my whiskers and my turban, and I want to keep my head Indian.” It would have been a simple thing, he added, to change his appearance—“to shave and cut everything off in five minutes”—and so better to go unnoticed among all the other newcomers. “But why should I do that?” he asked. “Some people will think I am an Italian, a Jew, a Rabbi, a Greek. Now, nobody thinks who I am. They know it. They know I am from India, a Sikh teacher and philosopher.”

  He was in fact trained in philosophy, and later would go on to become a well-known lecturer on the subject, but for his first few years he took on odd jobs, including washing dishes, before he began at the Astoria lumber mill, where his religious otherness came as a surprising boon. When asked if he was willing to work Sundays, he replied, “Thank God, I am not a Christian; I can work on Sundays, too.” Willing to clean saw blades on the Sabbath in advance of the working week ahead, he was paid overtime.

  When not working in the mills, he worked toward a degree at the University of California in Berkeley, and soon set about establishing a career as a writer and spiritual teacher. Like a page torn from a Horatio Alger story, his journey began with a mixture of immigrant naïveté and improbable optimism. He booked a hall for himself and determined that if he filled it every day for a series of sixty lectures he would be able to pay the rent. Taking to the street with a stack of printed handbills, he worked like a carnival barker to find an au
dience. As he recalled his strategy: “If people looked spiritual, I asked them: ‘Are you interested in lectures on divine realization?’ If they looked business-like, I asked: ‘Are you interested in lectures on applied psychology?’ ” He tried in vain to get attention from the local press, but never lost his sense of humor about the kinds of stories most often published about men like him. “Sometimes I even felt tempted to go and punch the editor on the nose,” he wrote, “and thus get a front page story—‘Hindu lecturer knocks down editor.’ I would get lots of publicity.”

  Thind’s insistence that his Sikh identity and residence in the United States were not incompatible showed itself most when he was drafted into the U.S. military at the tail end of the First World War. “I made my mark during the World War and that in spite of my whiskers,” he said. “I was a good soldier. When I joined the army I forgot I was a philosopher and my only idea was that I should shoot and shoot quick. You can’t keep a good man down even in the United States Army.”

  Told by his commander that had he been an American citizen he would have been recommended for a commission, Thind applied for naturalization before his discharge and received a certificate of citizenship while still in uniform at Camp Lewis, just south of Tacoma, Washington. However, when his pending naturalization came to the attention of immigration officials in the state, it was revoked just four days later. Six months after that, now honorably discharged from the army after the war’s end, he applied again in Oregon. This time denied by an immigration examiner, he brought the matter to the Federal District Court in Oregon and was again granted a certificate of citizenship. The Oregon Bureau of Naturalization appealed the ruling on the grounds that the Immigration Act of 1917 required that naturalized citizens be “free white persons” or aliens of “African descent.” Thind’s case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court.