The question that United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind put before the top justices of the land in 1923 was twofold: First, should “a high caste Hindu of full Indian blood” be considered “a white person”? And second, did the 1917 Immigration Act “disqualify from naturalization as citizens those Hindus… who had lawfully entered the United States” before the act had been passed?
In other words, as the court’s decision framed the issue at hand, “If the applicant is a white person… he is entitled to naturalization; otherwise not.” Rather than a protest against the obvious racism of the existing law, Thind’s claim to citizenship rested on the assertion that people of India should be considered, in the terms of existing law, “white”—or, to use the term his lawyer favored, “Caucasian.” Based on the theory that an early people then known as Aryans had been responsible for the settlement of both Europe and India, Thind’s argument positioned Asian civilizations as distant kin of Christendom.
The justices were having none of it. As Justice Sutherland wrote in his decision against Thind, “The Aryan theory as a racial basis seems to be discredited by most, if not all, modern writers on the subject of ethnology.” Moreover, Sutherland continued, it did not really matter whether the theory was valid or not. The real issue was not heritage but the perceived possibility of assimilation. “The children of English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other European parentage, quickly merge into the mass of our population and lose the distinctive hallmarks of their European origin,” the decision states. “On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that the children born in this country of Hindu parents would retain indefinitely the clear evidence of their ancestry.”
While primarily racially motivated, the court’s ruling against Thind also demonstrated that reasons for objection to Asian immigration were not limited to skin color. They were also matters of custom and belief, the fear—announced shrilly in the Bellingham press and echoed more mutely in Washington, D.C.—that more worshippers of the “strange deities of India” might soon wash up on white Christian shores. Perhaps imagining the rebuke of history, Justice Sutherland backed away from the judgment’s obvious implications, but even then he expressed terror at the prospect of a group of people living in the United States whose very nature prevented them from ever becoming true Americans. “It is very far from our thought to suggest the slightest question of racial superiority or inferiority,” he wrote. “What we suggest is merely racial difference, and it is of such character and extent that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of assimilation.”
Though Thind ultimately was denied citizenship by the Supreme Court, several years later he quietly applied for and was granted naturalization as a beneficiary of the Nye-Lea Act of 1935, which allowed “certain resident alien World War veterans” to be naturalized “notwithstanding the racial limitations” of existing laws. Significantly, despite the countrywide application of the new act, Thind applied for citizenship this time in New York, perhaps supposing that on the East Coast neither the public nor immigration officials would harbor lingering concern about the coming “Hindu hordes” and the strange gods they might bring.
As an American citizen, Thind would live to see the passage of a number of revisions to the xenophobic immigration policies of the 1910s and 1920s. Thanks entirely to the Chinese American alliance during the Second World War, 1943 brought the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Magnuson Act of 1943 permitted Chinese nationals already living in the United States to become naturalized citizens, and allowed a quota of 105 new Chinese immigrants per year. Three years later, the Luce-Celler Act ended the era of official animosity toward “Hindus,” both those who truly were of the Hindu faith and those who merely had been painted with the same broad brush before the courts or the majority of Americans bothered to understand the difference. The new law was only a minor victory. Allowing immigrants from India at last into the quota system, it assigned a nation growing toward a billion people an annual limit of only one hundred immigrants per year, but it did allow Indians already in the country to become citizens at last.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also called the McCarran-Walter Act, claimed to remove all racial barriers to naturalization even as it maintained, in the words of its sponsor, Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada, “fixed limitations… to prevent an influx of more orientals than can be assimilated.” However, it did signal the coming end of the era in which immigration laws were shaped by successive panics over various invading ethnic “hordes.” This evolution did not come altogether for progressive reasons. It came simply because the fear of “Hindus” so prevalent early in the century had been replaced by a fear of Communists. The language in which this new fear was expressed sounds much the same as the headlines from Bellingham in 1907. On the floor of Congress, Senator McCarran railed against “indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life” and warned specifically about the supposed threat posed by the ineffectual Communist Party USA: “Nurtured by the Soviet Union, it strives incessantly to make the United States a Soviet America.” When McCarran went further and said opponents of his act “contributed more to promote this nation’s downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation,” it was clear that the yellow and the dusky perils had given way to the Red Scare.
The final corrective to the immigration policies that had hindered Bhagat Singh Thind’s claims to citizenship in the 1920s came with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Also known as the Hart-Celler Act, it brought an end to a quota system that had been devised to limit ethnic and religious diversity in perpetuity. In place of the former racially defined limitations, the new law, which continues to govern immigration to the United States, established policies favoring immigrants who brought specific skills and talents. Signed into law two years before Thind died in 1967, the Hart-Celler Act could have been written specifically for him, an educated immigrant with an apparently inexhaustible entrepreneurial spirit.
One ironic consequence of the radical change in immigration policy adopted in the 1960s was that Sikhs, who early in the century accounted for the majority of immigrants from India, quickly became a minority within a minority. With the door now open to all varieties of immigrants from the subcontinent, the population of actual Hindus, not merely those mislabeled as such, skyrocketed, while that of Sikhs in America grew at a slower rate. According to the Pew Forum’s 2012 statistics on religion in the United States, there are now approximately two hundred thousand Sikhs, while the number of Hindus is over two million. Following such a drastic demographic shift, history looks back and often misremembers those who bore the brunt of both prejudicial legislation and violent attacks.
Yet precisely because they are now perhaps among the most marginal in relation to the faith held by the majority of their fellow citizens, the story of Sikhs in America provides the best example of the ability of even tiny religious groups to make themselves known in a vast nation now filled with too many gods to count. Bhagat Singh Thind no doubt would have understood why the Sikhs of Bellingham refused to draw their kirpan blades when they were attacked. It was likely the same reason why he had refused to cut his hair or shave his beard. He knew that the faith and traditions he had brought with him would make his country more, not less, of what it claimed to be.
Recalling his time at Camp Lewis in 1918, Thind described his insistence that he would serve as his people always had in time of struggle. “When my commander told me that there was a law that no whiskers were allowed, I told him: ‘My people are Sikhs; they are fighters, the finest soldiers in the world. Even the British have admitted it.’ ” Faced with a choice between his identity and his loyalty, he contended that he should not have to choose. “I don’t mind fighting for you,” he said. “But I must fight as a Sikh.”
With war still raging in Europe and fighters of all kinds needed, the Sikh sergeant’s commanding officer apparently took this in strid
e.
“Thind, I will let you have a chance,” he said. “Go ahead, keep your whiskers; it makes no difference.”
Japanese Americans behind a barbed-wire fence say good-bye to others departing for relocation camps around the country, 1942. Photograph by Julian F. Fowlkes. U.S. Signal Corps, Wartime Civil Control Administration. (Library of Congress)
CHAPTER 16
War Prayers
1941–1950
As the priest rose to speak to his grieving congregation, nothing about his manner suggested that he had recently been arrested as a spy.
Certainly, he appeared as worn-down as any of the women and men arranged on the benches before him, as cautious as anyone might become living under guard and far from home. Just thirty-four years old, the priest had lately taken on an air of aged wisdom in his thinning face. So slight that he was sometimes called pakkai—“spareribs,” in his native tongue—he looked in danger of disappearing into his flowing robes. Nonetheless, given the circumstances, he seemed remarkably in control. Offering prayers at a time of need was, after all, what he had been training to do since adolescence. With no hint of the anxiety one might expect in the falsely accused, nor any outward sign of his own private grief, he was the image of a man made confident by his faith.
On this late August evening in southwestern Arizona, in the hot summer of 1944, the Reverend Bunyu Fujimura of the Buddhist Mission of North America had not yet been cleared of the charges of espionage that had started his journey through four federal detention centers more than two years before, but at the moment he had more immediate concerns. Tonight he was to deliver a sermon in memory of two Japanese Americans even more grievously affected by the war: Privates Yamamoto and Shiomichi, U.S. servicemen recently killed in action while fighting in Italy. Their families sat before Fujimura now—all of them, like him, doing their best to respond as the Buddha might to tragedy both personal and political. In this improvised liturgical setting of a tar paper and plywood mess hall of a desert internment camp, the priest’s seemingly impossible task was to provide a comforting religious context in which to consider lives given in defense of a nation that had already taken everything else away.
A young man incarcerated because his beliefs were thought to make him a threat to the United States, and two even younger men now dead because they had fought for it—their intersection on this wartime evening represented the paradox of Buddhism in America during the Second World War. The supposedly foreign religion to which they stubbornly clung had made them easy targets for accusations that they might be willing to work against the interests of their adopted country, and yet their desire to maintain the traditions and language of that religion had contributed in a singular way to the American military effort on both fronts.
Fighting in Europe, the unit to which the two soldiers had belonged—the 442nd Combat Regiment—was not only entirely Japanese, it was predominantly Buddhist. By V-E Day, it would also be the most decorated infantry regiment of the war. In the Pacific theater, meanwhile, six thousand more American servicemen of Japanese descent worked as linguists and codebreakers. While many of their contributions would remain classified for more than twenty years—even to the point of having their names withheld from memorials to the war dead—it later became known that the Japanese Americans recruited into the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) had served in battles including Guadalcanal and Bataan, had gone deep behind enemy lines, and by the end of the war had handled between two and three million intelligence documents, most significantly Imperial Navy plans that led to the defeat of the Japanese fleet in the Philippines. It was largely thanks to them that General Douglas MacArthur could later say, “Never in military history did any army know so much about the enemy prior to an actual engagement.”
A more personal view of the experiences of Buddhists during the war can be seen in the lives of these three men—the privates and the priest. Their stories came together in the Poston Relocation Center, which was home to nearly eighteen thousand imprisoned Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1945. Made up of seventy-one thousand dusty acres near Arizona’s border with California, it was the largest of ten long-term internment camps spread out through the western United States. Poston consisted of three compounds of several dozen buildings each, each a mile square, all enclosed within a “man-proof” perimeter fence that made those inside feel, according to a poem circulated among the confined, “like rats in a wired cage.”
Though machine guns pointed into the camp from one of the fence’s guard towers, a schoolhouse within betrayed the fact that it was not enemy combatants held here but families and children. That the schoolhouse was made of the adobe favored by the natives of the region might have reminded those who saw it that this was not the first the surrounding desert had seen of forced relocation. The part of the vast Colorado River Valley in which the camp stood was now an Indian reservation; the chaparral to the northeast had once hosted Mormons chased across the country to one of the harshest landscapes America had to offer.
The newest inhabitants of the valley had also come on orders of the U.S. government. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the evacuation of all of those of Japanese descent from the West Coast to war relocation centers—often called “concentration camps” before that term came to have other connotations.
Like the anti-Sikh, anti-Hindu, and anti-Chinese sentiments at large through much of the preceding hundred years, the anti-Japanese feelings that led to the relocation of Japanese-born immigrants (known as Issei) and their American-born children (Nisei) were justified on racial rather than religious grounds. Those forced to leave behind homes, farms, and businesses in states bordering the Pacific were not of a single faith. There were Buddhists among them, and many maintained Shinto rituals that spiritually connected the Issei to their homeland, but there were also Christians of various denominations, as well as those with no particular affiliation. Despite this seeming diversity, however, and again like the “yellow peril” and the “dusky peril” before it, the treatment of Japanese Americans during the war also had a religious dimension.
When the FBI first set about compiling its list of suspect individuals after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the formal entry of the United States into World War II, they had naturally included members of various American Nazi parties and groups with political ties to Japan. Yet they also paid particular attention to Buddhist priests. The Custodial Detention List initiated by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover used a classification system designating the supposed risk of individuals and groups on an A-B-C scale, with an “A” ranking assigned to those deserving greatest scrutiny. While immigrants from other Axis powers were also arrested and brought in for questioning, the number of each group in custody as of December 9, 1941—497 Germans, 83 Italians, and 1,221 Japanese—is a reflection of those believed to have posed the greatest immediate threat to national security.
Within Hoover’s A-B-C system, ordained Buddhist ministers like Reverend Fujimura were designated “A-1,” those whose apprehension was considered a matter of urgent concern. Even before Executive Order 9066, leaders of various Buddhist organizations were rounded up as “dangerous enemy aliens.” The motives for government policy toward Japanese priests, as well as the suspicions of the public, were captured in Alan Hynd’s best-selling Betrayal from the East (later turned into a film of the same name), a jingoistic potboiler, ambiguously sold as nonfiction but often described as a novel in the press, that claimed to recount “the inside story” of a network of 1,300 spies active in America since well before the attack on Pearl Harbor. “Buddhist and Shinto missions, officiated by Japanese priests, dotted the whole of southern California,” Hynd wrote. “If these supposedly religious sanctuaries were going to be integrated into the Japanese spy machine on the Pacific Coast, the work of the O.N.I. [Office of Naval Intelligence], the F.B.I. and other investigative bodies was going to be just that much more difficult.”
Caught in the snare of
such suspicions, the priests became the first of a relocation effort that would soon detain more than 110,000. Many within this larger group, having heard of the sudden arrests and harsh interrogations endured by Buddhist community leaders, sought refuge in Christianity, hoping—in vain, it turned out—that church membership might shield them from such treatment. Others had made similar calculations upon their arrival in the United States. Fewer than 10 percent of the Issei had been Christians when they left Japan, but by the time of the war, they were converted to the faith they believed moved them well along the path to assimilation. Regardless of their particular religious affiliation, then, the Nisei born in America were for the most part just one generation removed from the traditional beliefs and practices of Japan. The most famous member of the 442nd Combat Regiment, for example, the late senator Daniel Inouye, recalled that his father had been a Buddhist, as had his grandparents on both sides. Only when his mother’s parents died and she was adopted into the home of American Christians did the predominant faith of her new nation determine the faith of subsequent generations of her family.
Those who did not go this route but maintained their traditional beliefs despite social pressures were called “Buddhaheads,” an epithet often applied to the Japanese Americans of Hawaii. Even before the war, Japanese Buddhists were thought to be less “Americanized” than their countrymen who had converted to Christianity, and in some ways this was true. Within the Japanese community, Buddhists were more likely than Christians to maintain their native language, as well as their facility with customs and rituals performed in that language. They were also more likely than Japanese Christians to read publications concerned with Japanese political affairs. Subscription rolls of such publications provided the FBI with a natural starting point for building its “A” list of suspects. Finally and obviously, they were more likely than Christians to attend Buddhist temples, which were not merely places of religious observance but served as social hubs, education centers, and function halls. In short, in their design and adornment, temples seemed to help erase the distance the immigrants had traveled from their homeland.
One Nation, Under Gods Page 39