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ABSTRACT
The first decade of the twentieth century saw several thousand men migrate from India to the North American West Coast. While most settled in British Columbia or California, a smaller number moved to the US Pacific Northwest states of Washington and Oregon. A series of violent riots in 1907–8 drove many from the region. The basic contours of this population in the region after this time remain unclear. I uncover evidence that Indians persisted for a longer time period, and in more varied locations and occupations than some previous research suggests, but that ultimately violent exclusion led them to disappear almost entirely from the region. I investigate the conditions in which these men lived and toiled, and the ways in which they were viewed by the larger society, particularly in terms of evolving concepts of race and assimilation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 ‘Hindus Hounded from City’, Bellingham Herald, Sept. 5, 1907, 1.
2 ‘Mob in Bellingham Drives out Hindus’, San Francisco Call, Sept. 6, 1907, 5.
3 ‘Hindu Refugees Here’, Seattle Daily Times, Sept. 10, 1907, 8.
4 The Bellingham Riot was covered by most local newspapers of the day, including The Seattle Daily Times. It received a mention in various works on Indian immigration, including H. Brett Melendy, Asians in America: Filipinos, Koreans, and East Indians (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977), 192; Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigration in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 45–9; Gary R. Hess, ‘The Forgotten Asian Americans’, Pacific Historical Review 43 (1974): 576–96. Secondary scholarship includes Gerald M. Hallberg, Bellingham, ‘Washington’s anti-Hindu riot’, Journal of the West 12 (1973): 163–75.
5 These patterns could also be seen on the Online Exhibit, now no longer accessible: http://www.wingluke.org/pages/sikhcommunitywebsite/mainpage.html (accessed September 30, 2012).
6 I access this and later censuses through Ancestry Library Edition, which allows for expanded searches with relative ease. Ancestry Library Edition (http://ancestrylibrary.proquest.com/) is a subscription database that includes the US censuses up through 1930 in a scanned, online, searchable format. This makes historical censuses far more useful for small-scale sociodemographic research than in the past. The more typical tool for conducting historical demographic research – the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) Database – was not of use in this case, as it represents only a one percent random sample of the population, and thus picks up only a very small number of Indians per census year for the time period of interest.
7 ‘Hindus Beaten by Enraged Laborers’, Salt Lake Herald-Republican Mar. 23, 1910, 1.
8 David Atkinson, ‘Out of One Borderland, Many: The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots and the Spatial Dimensions of Race and Migration in the Canadian-US Pacific Borderlands’, in Entangling Migration History: Borderlands and Transnationalism in the United States and Canada, eds. B. Bryce and A. Freund (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015), 122.
9 This literature is wide-ranging; the review here is limited to an overview to contextualise the population in Washington and Oregon. Some items focus explicitly on British Columbia or California; many cover a wider geographical area in theory, but in practice focusing on these areas. See Jogesh C. Misrow, ‘East Indian Immigration on the Pacific Coast’ (thesis, Stanford, CA, 1915); Rajani K. Das, Hindustani Workers on the Pacific Coast (Berlin: W. de Gruyter & Co, 1923). S. Chandrasekhar, ‘Indian immigration in America’, Far Eastern Survey 13 (1944): 138–43; Gary R. Hess, ‘The ‘Hindu’ in America: Immigration and Naturalization Policies and India, 1917–1946’, Pacific Historical Review 38 (1969): 59–79; Melendy, Asians in America; Norman Buchignani, Doreen M. Indra, and Ram Srivastiva, Continuous Journey: A Social History of South Asians in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985); Hugh J. M. Johnston, The East Indians in Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1984); Sucheta Mazumdar, ‘Punjabi Agricultural Workers in California, 1905–1945’, in Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States before World War II, eds. L. Cheng and E. Bonacich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984): 549–78; Bruce La Brack, The Sikhs of Northern California (New York: AMS Press, 1988); Jensen, Passage from India; Hugh J. M. Johnston, ‘The Sikhs’, in Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples, ed. P. R. Magosci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
10 Paul Spickard, Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007).
11 Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
12 Astoria receives a mention in many texts, mostly in the context of the Ghadar Party, an association formed there in April, 1913. Officially the “Hindi Association of the Pacific Coast,” they were commonly called Ghadar (meaning “revolt”) after their newspaper. The group consisted of expatriate Indians protesting British rule in India, and was driven to some extent by the racist conditions they encountered in North America. See Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Party Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Seema Sohi, ‘Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in the Transnational Western U.S.-Canadian Borderlands’, Journal of American History 98 (2011): 420–36; Mark Juergesmeyer, ‘The Gadar Syndrome: Ethnic Anger and National Pride’, in From India to America, ed. S. Chandrasekhar (La Jolla, Calif.: Population Review Publications, 1984). Additional works include social history and documentaries based on personal interviews, including Turbans, a film based on the memoirs of Astoria resident Kartar Dhillon, written and directed by her granddaughter, Erika Surat Andersen.
13 Ramnath, Haj to Utopia; Sohi, ‘Indian Anticolonialism’.
14 Sohi, ‘Indian Anticolonialism’; Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 127.
15 Shah, Stranger Intimacy.
16 For instance, Das cites the 1910 census as his source for the statement that there were 1,414 Indians in Washington State (Das, Hindustani Workers). On the other hand, Melendy cites the US Immigration Commission Report of 1911 to place the number at 161 (Melendy, Asians in America, 204). The 1911 Immigration Commission Report also implies a number a bit under 1,000 for Washington and Oregon: “At present perhaps four-fifths of the 5,000 or more are found in the one State [California], and none are found elsewhere than in the three Pacific Coast States and Nevada.” See: U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports of the Immigration Commission, Vol. 1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911).
17 Padma Rangaswamy, Namasté America: Indian Immigrants in an American Metropolis (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 42. There are varying views on how many of these people were ethnically Indian. For example, Das argues that the majority of individuals in the 1909 census from India were “other races born in India” (Das, Hindustani Workers, 9). In contrast, the U.S. Immigration Commission Report claims that the “greater part of these were East Indians” (U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports Volume 23, 325).
18 Rangaswamy, Namasté America; Das, Hindustani Workers, 9.
19 For example, Chicago’s 1893 Colombian Exposition featured a “Hindoo” village with camels, jugglers and street performers.
20 Arthur M. Helweg and Usha. M. Helweg, An Immigrant Success Story: East Indians in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 16; Jensen, Passage from India, 24.
21 Erika Lee E., and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Jensen, Passage from India, 24.
22 Rajit K. Mazumder, The Indian Army and the Making of Punjab (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003). Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 67.
23 Misrow, East Indian Immigration, 2.
24 Jensen, Passage from India, 26.
25 William L. Mackenzie King, Report of the Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Methods by which Oriental Labourers Have Been Induced to Come to Canada (Ottawa, 1908), 76. Cited in U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports Vol. 23, 329.
26 Ibid.
27 Archana B. Verma, The Making of Little Punjab in Canada: Patterns of Immigration (New Delhi: SAGE India, 2002).
28 Great Britain remained largely responsible for Canadian external affairs until 1931.
29 Additionally, beginning in 1908, Indians were required to possess $200 upon arrival, an eight-fold increase from 1907. Another regulation from 1913 prohibited the entry of any “laborer not needed,” which could be used arbitrarily for deportation. These regulations culminated in the Komagata Maru incident, in which a steamship with 376 South Asians was kept in Vancouver harbour for two months in 1914, before being sent back to India. See David C. Atkinson, The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2016); Hugh J. M. Johnston, The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989).
30 Atkinson, The Burden of White Supremacy, 136; Jensen, Passage from India, 82.
31 U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports Volume 23, 330.
32 Ibid.
33 John R. Commons, Races and Immigrants in America (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920). Commons reported that among the men inquiring with the Consul were “ten sturdy Punjab Mohammedans” who “already had friends working on dairy farms in America,” and whom the Consul found to be “stronger and more intelligent than the Chinese coolies” (Ibid., 103).
34 U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports Volume 23, 327–28.
35 Ibid., 326.
36 Sohi, ‘Indian anticolonialism’, 426.
37 U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports Volume 23, 326.
38 Sant N. Sing, ‘America’s New Immigrant: The Hindoo’, Pacific Monthly 20 (1908): 109.
39 Ibid, 111.
40 Sarah Isabel Wallace, Not Fit to Stay: Public Health Panics and South Asian Exclusion (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017).
41 ‘Mob Drives Out Hindus’, Los Angeles Herald, Sept. 6, 1907, 1.
42 Ibid.
43 U.S. Dept. of Labor, Reports of the Department of Labor, 1919 (Washington, 1920), 251–52.
44 Prior to this, the Luce-Celler Bill of 1946 had restored naturalisation rights for Indians and Filipinos, and re-established immigration from these countries with a quota of 100 visas yearly.
45 Pew Research Center, Indians in the U.S. Fact Sheet. 2017. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/asian-americans-indians-in-the-u-s (accessed September 16, 2020).
46 Shah discusses the case of three South Asian men being arrested for sodomy and rape after a drunken evening in the railroad and lumber town of Gate, Washington in 1912. (p. 79), as well as other sodomy cases from Seattle (p. 148) and Cosmopolis, Washington (p. 149). Shah, Stranger Intimacy.
47 Amy Bhatt and Nalini Iyer, Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013).
48 Even as the introduction of this work lays the foundation of the first wave of immigrants in the Pacific Northwest (1890s–1920s), the narrative focuses on the Bellingham riot, the Ghadar Party and other stories of struggle and resistance through the writings of the non-working class South Asian activists, visionaries and students that contributed to the discourse on the anti-British colonial movement.
49 Although a search for those with a birthplace of India yields a long list, almost all of these people were in fact born in Indiana; the former was frequently abbreviated ‘Ind.’ by census takers, and miscoded as India during transcription. On the other hand, many people listed on the original census sheets as being born in India do not show this information in the available database. The race question is similarly of no help in identifying Indians, since the newness of this population to the US meant that the American racial typology prevailing at that time did not include them as a distinct category, as discussed in depth later in the paper.
50 U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports Volume 23, 337.
51 Unfortunately, the relative homogeneity in surnames is echoed (to a lesser extent) in given names, making it impossible to track individuals from census to census, or between any other data sources, with any certainty.
52 Additional sources used include the US Immigration Commission Report of 1911, prepared by Millis and containing a section on “The East Indians on the Pacific Coast.” The data in this report were gathered in 1910 from thirty-six groups of Indians comprising 159 members, and from 395 additional men employed in farms and other occupations. However, of these, only seventy-nine were from Washington and Oregon. Another useful report is “Hindustani Workers on the Pacific Coast” by Das, a Special Agent of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics who was charged with studying the social and economic conditions of this population. The centres of Indian populations that Das identified were all located in California and British Columbia; although he discussed the overall population in the Pacific Northwest under “miscellaneous localities.” While the census and the immigration and labour reports provide snapshots of the population at specific points in time, newspapers provide additional ongoing information. I searched newspapers published in Washington and Oregon prior to 1925 using the America’s Historical Newspaper Index by Readex, which contained three newspapers from Washington (The Morning Olympian, The Seattle Daily Times and The Tacoma Daily News) and one from Oregon (The Democratic Standard). Of the four, The Seattle Daily Times yielded the majority of results. Finally, I used City Directories for additional insight on communities that appear to persist beyond 1930. These precursors to the modern-day phone book include address and name of employer, making it somewhat easier to link individuals from year to year.
53 Researchers in the University of Washington libraries have found records for twenty or more Indian students at the university in the years in and around 1910. See Linda di Biase. New, Thinking, Agile, and Patriotic: “Hindu” Students at the University of Washington, 1908–1915, https://www.lib.washington.edu/specialcollections/collections/exhibits/southasianstudents (accessed May 9, 2019). None of these students was identified through my inspection of the census, since only one was named Singh and they presumably did not all live together. Moreover, as foreign students they would have been reasonably likely to go unenumerated. Judging by surnames, they came from a broader geographical range of India, especially Bengal. A number were highly active in the Ghadar Party, particularly Taraknath Das, who is discussed in more detail in Ramnath, Haj to Utopia. They also include Jogesh Misrow, who later produced one of the contemporaneous reports on the U.S. East Indians, the topic of his thesis research at Stanford. As these men were largely distinct from the rest of the local Indian population culturally, linguistically, and economically, and since their work with the Ghadar party has been recently explored by Ramnath, I have not focused on them here.
54 An additional source of underestimation – and probably a much larger one – is the exclusion of some Indian men from the census, either because their remote lumber or railroad camps were skipped altogether, or because the census-taker did not take the extra effort needed to include those who often spoke little English and lived in marginal environments. Indeed, in 1911 the agents of the Immigration Commission charged with collecting data on East Indians in the Pacific West found that many simply
could not be reached by the agents in person, and it was found impossible to secure the data otherwise because of the inability of the majority of these immigrants to read and write English, and because of the disinclination of the foremen under whom they worked to devote the time necessary to secure the desired information and to record it. (U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports Volume 23, 323)
55 Some of these additional men also have the surname Singh, but were either missed during database construction, were mistyped, or were mistakenly given Singh as their first name. Excluded from this list is a man from China named Ah Singh (likely a mis-spelling of Sing).
56 The Indian population in the US was clearly overwhelmingly male, but it does not appear to be exclusively so. For instance, the US Immigration Commission Report compiled reports from the Commissioner General of Immigration to show that 109 of the 5,762 Indian immigrants recorded in the first decade of the twentieth century were women, or a little less than 2% (U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports Volume 23, 327). Thus, the completely male nature of the population in the Pacific Northwest is mildly surprising.
57 U.S. Immigration Commission, Report Volume 23, 349.
58 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
59 Shah, Stranger Intimacy, 83.
60 In California’s Imperial Valley, an altogether different, and fascinating, phenomenon occurred. California’s anti-miscegenation law was on the books until 1948. The men who moved ever southward, to this area with a Punjab-like climate on the Mexican border, married Mexican immigrant women, creating “Mexican-Hindu” households. They produced a hybrid culture, along with children and grandchildren, and some of their descendants remain in the Valley today. This community has seen interest in their unique piece of the American story, including a PBS documentary, Roots in the Sand, by filmmaker Hart (1998). For a thorough investigation of this community, see Karen I. Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
61 Some refugees of the Bellingham Riot in Seattle were at one time employed in “digging a sewer” (The Seattle Daily Times, November 21, 1907, 5). The Indian-run tamale business appears frequently in the newspapers. For example, one individual sold “hot tamales” in Tacoma and supported his thirty unemployed countrymen from those earnings (The Seattle Daily Times, December 15, 1907, 30).
62 Cheap Living at Minimum by Hindus, Seattle Daily Times, December 15, 1907, 30.
63 The one exception is a lone man in Medford, Oregon, who was in the hospital at the time; likely he was more typically resident with the nearby cluster at Eagle Point.
64 Cheap Living at Minimum by Hindus, 1907, 30.
65 Hindus Hurrying Southward, Seattle Daily Times, November 21, 1907, 5.
66 Ibid.
67 Cheap Living at Minimum by Hindus, 1907, 30.
68 U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports Volume 23, 342.
69 Wallace, Not Fit to Stay, 3.
70 Filipinos faced their own form of racial ambiguity, in that scientists had long differed as to whether or not “Malays” (i.e. southeast Asians) were a distinct race from East Asians (“Mongolians”) or not, and where Filipinos fit into this distinction. This played out in a number of legal debates in the US, particularly around miscegenation. See, e.g. Rachel F. Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
71 The text, and more information on the 1910 census, can mostly easily be accessed from the University of Minnesota’s Integrated Public Use Microdata Center, at http://usa.ipums.org/usa/voliii/inst1910.shtml.
72 Andrea Geiger, Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste and Borders, 1885–1928 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 150.
73 Even in a 1978 survey, when asked whether they considered Indians to be white, black or something else, eleven percent of Americans answered white, and thirteen percent did not know how to classify them. See Peter Xenos, Herbert Barringer, and Michael J. Levin, Asian Indians in the United States: A 1980 Census Profile (Honolulu: East-West Center, 1989). Moreover, in the 1970 census Indians were assigned to the Caucasian race, before being redefined as Asian by 1980. Note also that an earlier case in the United States circuit court of appeals in New York had determined that Parsees from India could become naturalised citizens, since their Persian ancestry made them white, in contrast to Hindus (U.S. Immigration Commission, Report Volume 23, 348).
74 Hindus Attacked by Italians, Seattle Daily Times, Aug 22, 1908, 4. It was reported that forty Hindus were attacked by the striking Italians whom they had replaced on the Northern Pacific Railroad, Tacoma yards.
75 U.S. Immigration Commission, Report Volume 23, 349.
76 Ibid., 337.
77 U.S. Immigration Commission, Report Volume 25, 331.
78 Ibid., 332.
79 Although the 1940 census individual results have been made public, they are not indexed by name and can only be browsed or searched by address.
80 Shada Ram, a lumberman, who in 1920 was living with his white, Indiana-born wife Gertrude, their four-year-old Washington-born son William, and five other Indian lumbermen. In 1930 they were in nearby Aberdeen, living with three children (Marvel, William and Nola). This latter residence was in the “Bay City Barracks” along with many other Indian lumbermen, and a second family: that of Chaffie Khan, his white, Oregon-born wife Pearl, and their two Oregon-born children Gaylord and Thelma. The same year there was a third couple living in Cosmpolis: Ara and Fannie Singh; Ara was a forty-ish Indian sawmill worker, and Fannie was his fifty-ish, Oklahoma-born wife.
81 Paul Singh, his wife Melissa, her two children Helen and Melissa, and their son Paul Jr. were all living together in Portland in the 1930 census. Given the anti-miscegenation law still in effect in Oregon, it is possible that the couple married in Washington prior to relocating to Oregon.
82 Sohi, ‘Indian Anticolonialism’, 433.
83 E.g. Spickard, Almost All Aliens. Even at the time, a Congressional hearing on Hindu exclusion in 1914 referred to the “very large number that worked their way down to California” from Washington State as a result of “a local agitation commencing four or five years ago.” See United States Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalisation, Hindu Immigration: Hearings before the Committee on Immigration, House of Representatives, Sixty-Third Congress, Second Session, Relative to Restriction of Immigration of Hindu Laborers (Washington, 1914), 105.
84 A full search for all Indians might reveal others in these interior West states, yet the experiences of these (admittedly very small) communities have not received any documentation by historians. Indeed, one of very few states that appear to have specifically mentioned South Asians in their miscegenation laws at any point was the interior West state of Arizona, suggesting a growing presence there; “Hindus” were added to the list of groups that could not marry whites there in 1931; see Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 118. Other states with similar laws include Georgia and Virginia, although this appears to stem not from a growing Indian population there, but rather from a particularly zealous effort on the part of officials in the heart of the former Confederacy to define exactly who was “white,” and keep them pure. (Ibid, 144–5).
85 Shah spells his first name “Channan,” and indeed the spelling does vary among trial documents, although Chenam appears more commonly.
86 Washington State Penitentiary, Case File #WSP 7342.
87 Hindus Wanted to Kill Their Foreman, Seattle Daily Times, June 2, 1908, 5.
88 Religion Hands One to Callous Business, Seattle Daily Times, Dec. 10, 1911, 18.
89 Tamale Vendors in Fight Mess Up Hall, Seattle Daily Times, Aug. 3, 1910, 7.
90 Das, Hindustani Workers, 109.
91 Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices, 135.
92 Sing, ‘America’s New Immigrant’, 109.