United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Stuff You Missed in History Class

Episode: United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind

Hosts: Holly Frey & Tracy V. Wilson
Air Date: May 11, 2026

Overview

This episode explores the landmark Supreme Court case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), delving into its historical context, the life of Bhagat Singh Thind, the legal criteria for U.S. citizenship, and the reverberating impact of the Court's decision on South Asian immigrants and American immigration law. The discussion is framed through both personal narrative and legal analysis, and reflects on present-day resonances, with references to recent Supreme Court arguments concerning citizenship.

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Main Topics & Discussion Points

1. Why Cover Thind Now? (02:16)

• Context: Tracy was prompted to revisit the case after hearing it referenced during Supreme Court oral arguments (Trump v. Barbara) regarding the citizenship rights of children born to non-permanent resident parents in the U.S.
• Notable Connection: Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s query about denaturalization referenced the precedent set by Thind.

2. Bhagat Singh Thind’s Early Life & Immigration (04:10–08:25)

• Background: Born in Punjab, British India, in 1892, Thind was the eldest of three sons; his family was affected by British rule and his father’s opposition to colonial policy.
• Educational Path: He attended high school and college in Punjab, married Chint Kaur, and was influenced by Transcendentalist thinkers (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman).
  • “Transcendentalism drew from multiple influences...So there were parallels between the Transcendentalists and Thind’s own religious and philosophical thought.” — Tracy (06:36)
• Immigration: Thind left for Manila in 1912, then migrated to Seattle in 1913, working in a lumber mill before enrolling at UC Berkeley.

3. South Asian Immigration Context & Racialized Exclusion (07:47–12:02)

• Immigration Patterns: South Asian immigrants were relatively few, many pursued education or business, but most did manual labor or farm work.
• Comparisons to Chinese Immigration: Both Indian and Chinese immigrants were cast as “invasions” and faced discriminatory laws and social hostility after the Chinese Exclusion Act.
• Canadian Context: Canada’s 1908 “continuous journey” rule targeted Indian immigrants (Komagata Maru incident).

4. Political Activism & Military Service (12:02–14:47)

• Indian Independence Movement: Thind was involved with the Gadar Party, advocating for independence from British rule.
• WWI Service: Thind served in the U.S. Army, maintaining his Sikh articles of faith—one of the first to do so.

5. Citizenship Attempts & Legal Backdrop (18:33–27:07)

• Naturalization Attempts:
  • Thind gained citizenship in uniform in 1918, but it was revoked shortly after due to not being a “free white person.”
  • The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to “free white persons,” with later modifications adding "aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent" (post-14th Amendment).
• Legal Ambiguity: Courts and officials debated and inconsistently enforced the definition of “white,” leading to uneven naturalization outcomes.

6. The Supreme Court Decisions: Ozawa & Thind (24:19–30:40)

• Ozawa v. U.S. (1922):
  • Court ruled Japanese-born Takao Ozawa was not “white” despite skin color and assimilation, defining “white person” as the “Caucasian race."
• Racial Science & Aryanism:
  • At the time, racial science classified North Indians as “Caucasian,” giving Thind’s case a seemingly strong foundation.
• Thind v. U.S. (1923):
  • The Court flipped its own standard. Justice Sutherland wrote that “white” was to be interpreted in its “common understanding,” not as a scientific or anthropological category.
  • Quote: “What we now hold is that the words ‘free white persons’ are words of common speech…synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood.” — Justice George Sutherland (29:31)
  • Quote: “It may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor…but the average man knows perfectly well there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today…” — Sutherland (29:31)

7. Aftermath: Immediate & Widespread Impact (34:15–38:13)

• Denaturalization:
  • At least 65 South Asians lost their citizenship; many became effectively stateless.
  • South Asians ineligible for citizenship could not own property (alien land laws), devastating families and businesses.
• Collateral Consequences:
  • Example: Vaishnav Daz Bagai lost his citizenship and ultimately took his own life (36:26).
  • Citizenship revocations also impacted spouses, especially through laws stripping American women of their citizenship upon marriage to ineligible aliens.

8. Legal Challenges and Evolving Policy (36:50–43:29)

• Legal Pushback:
  • Attorney Sakuram Pandit shifted strategy from racial arguments to legal technicalities regarding citizenship revocations.
  • Eventually, the U.S. ceased denaturalization proceedings against Indian immigrants—but not before major harm was done.
• Alien Veteran Naturalization Act (1935):
  • Allowed WWI veterans like Thind to regain citizenship regardless of race; Thind was re-naturalized in 1936.

9. Thind’s Personal Life Post-Case (40:16–46:14)

• Marriages and Work:
  • Thind remarried (Bulin, then Davies), became an itinerant spiritual teacher, wrote 15 books, was mistakenly arrested as a fortune teller, and continued advocating for Indian independence.
  • Note: His first marriage (to Chint Kaur) ended without her input being recorded in sources.
• Return to India:
  • In 1963, he and his wife returned to India as guests of Prime Minister Nehru.

10. Long-term Changes in U.S. Immigration Law (47:04–48:50)

• Legislative Shift:
  • Chinese Exclusion Act repealed (1943), Luce–Celler Act allowed Filipino and Indian naturalization (1946).
  • Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 abolished racial restrictions; 1965 Act abolished quotas by country of origin.
  • Path to naturalization remained—and remains—complex.

11. Modern Reflections & Cautions (48:50–50:05)

• Supreme Court reference:
  • Justice Sotomayor, in 2026 oral arguments, used Thind’s case to illustrate how quickly citizenship rights can change, and the dangers of legal precedent being used for denaturalization.
  • Quote: “The logic of your position, if accepted, is that the next president…or Congress…could decide that it shouldn’t be prospective. There would be nothing limiting that according to your theory. So the two of them kind of went back and forth…with Sotomayor asking again if Sauer’s logic would allow people to be denaturalized…” — Tracy (48:50)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “When we ruled in Thind that Indians could not become citizens, the government then after began to unnaturalize many Indians who had been sworn in as citizens.” — Justice Sonia Sotomayor, referenced by Tracy (03:16)
• “What we now hold is that the words ‘free white persons’ are words of common speech … synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood.” — Justice George Sutherland (29:31)
• “It may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today...” — Justice George Sutherland (29:31)
• “The Supreme Court’s ruling that Bhagat Singh Thind was not eligible for citizenship…did not apply only to him. It applied…to other South Asians who had already been naturalized as citizens.” — Tracy (34:15)
• “The logic of your position, if accepted, is that the next president...could decide that it shouldn’t be prospective. There would be nothing limiting that according to your theory.” — Tracy, paraphrasing Sotomayor in 2026 SCOTUS argument (48:50)

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Key Timestamps by Segment

| Timestamp | Topic | |--------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------| | 02:16 – 04:10 | Why Thind’s case is relevant today | | 04:10 – 08:25 | Thind’s upbringing, emigration, and early U.S. life | | 09:57 – 12:02 | Anti-Asian immigration laws in the U.S. and Canada | | 13:33 – 14:47 | Thind’s activism & WWI service | | 18:33 – 22:06 | Early U.S. citizenship laws & shifting definitions | | 24:19 – 30:40 | Supreme Court decisions: Ozawa & Thind | | 34:15 – 36:26 | The aftermath: denaturalizations, statelessness | | 36:50 – 38:13 | Legal fightbacks after Thind | | 40:16 – 43:55 | Thind’s post-ruling life and third citizenship | | 47:04 – 48:50 | Changing U.S. immigration law after WWII | | 48:50 – 50:05 | 2026 Supreme Court reference and cautionary note |

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Memorable Moments

• The nuanced discussion on South Asian immigration and the complexity—and cruelty—of early 20th-century American racial categories.
• Thind’s story as both a deeply personal immigration saga and a prominent test of U.S. racial legal definitions.
• The insight that the legal standard for "white" was not scientific but based on “common understanding”—exposing the arbitrary basis of the law (29:31).
• The chilling modern relevance, as recounted via Justice Sotomayor’s grilling of the Solicitor General regarding citizenship security for immigrants’ children (48:50).
• The emotional toll of denaturalization, including the story of Vaishnav Daz Bagai (36:26).
• The episodes’ honest reckoning with the U.S.'s legacy of racially exclusive citizenship and the often-forgotten suffering that legal fictions can cause.

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Takeaways

• The United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind case illustrates how citizenship and national belonging in the U.S. have been—and remain—profoundly shaped by race, legal interpretation, and shifting definitions of “whiteness.”
• The legacy of Thind’s struggle is directly relevant to present-day debates about immigrants’ rights, denaturalization, and the legal status of “belonging” in America.
• Immigrants’ stories, both public and private, are intertwined with broader legal and social currents—underscoring the human cost of bureaucratic and legal exclusion.

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Transcript

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartradio.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

[Holly Fry]

And I'm Holly Fry.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Today's episode is one I have thought about doing for really many years, and I moved it up to the top of the list after I heard a clip from the oral arguments in Trump vs Barbara that is the US Supreme Court case on the question of whether Executive Order 141 60. Protecting the Meaning and value of American citizenship is consistent with the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which is the part that reads, quote, all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. So this Supreme Court case involves three families whose children were born in the United States, but they would not be considered citizens under this executive order because of their parents residency status. The parents include an asylum applicant, someone who was on a student visa, and somebody who was in the process of applying for permanent residency. So during these oral arguments, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said to Solicitor General John Sauer, quote, when we ruled in Thind that Indians could not become citizens, the government then after began to unnaturalize many Indians who had been sworn in as citizens. She went on to ask whether the logic that Sauer was using in his arguments would lead to the same thing happening again. So that quote from Sotomayor and the idea that the US Stripped people of their citizenship based on their nation of origin, that might raise some questions from people who are not familiar with this history. The case that Sotomayor was referencing was United States v. Bhagat Singh Thinder. That was a case that hinged on what it meant to be white.

[Holly Fry]

Bhagat Singh Thind was born in Punjab in the far northwest of British India on October 3, 1892. This region was and is predominantly Sikh, which some people who are white pronounce Sikh. This is one of those words that's a little tricky and can sound different to different ears. Finn's father was retired from the British Indian army, and his mother died when he was still just a small child. He was the oldest of their three sons.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, Holly and I just had a conversation about the pronunciation of sick. And one of the things that when I was researching this podcast, I listened to a video from someone from this part of the world who was saying, it's not pronounced sick, it's pronounced sick. And the two versions sounded exactly the same to me. I could not detect a difference, which is a real thing that happens based on the phonemes we are exposed to in our lives.

[Holly Fry]

We are confident there is a difference, we just can't discern it.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Right? Correct. Correct. So Thind graduated from high school in 1908 and went on from there to Colossa College, which was established in 1892 by the leaders of the Sing Saba movement. This movement developed after Britain defeated the Sikh Empire in 1849, and after Christian missionaries started arriving in this area in bigger numbers. Several Sikh leaders and aristocrats converted to Christianity. So this movement formed to try to revive and preserve Sikh traditions and teachings and also to publish Sikh religious material and to provide young people with an education.

[Holly Fry]

At some point during these years, Thind married a woman named Chint Kaur. He also decided that he wanted to continue his education in the United States, which meant leaving that wife behind. And we don't have anything from her perspective about any of this at all. Accounts of Thin's life have given an assortment of reasons for his wanting to go to the US including that he wanted to become a lawyer and that he wanted to help support his family. They had been well off, but his father had become opposed to British colonial policy and had been imprisoned and lost his military pension due to his activities.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Multiple sources also say that Thind wanted to go to an American university because he had started studying the works of Transcendentalist writers and people who were influenced by the Transcendentalists, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Transcendentalism drew from multiple influences, including German Romantic philosophy, Neoplatonism, and Asian religious and spiritual traditions. So there were parallels between the Transcendentalists and Thin's own religious and philosophical thought.

[Holly Fry]

Thin left Punjab for Manila in 1912. At the time, the Philippines was a US territory, and Thind was there for about nine months. He earned money by working as an interpreter in court cases involving people from India, and he eventually made friends with a US Immigration officer who helped him get to the United States. He was admitted at the port of Seattle on July 4, 1913, when he

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was 20 years old.

[Holly Fry]

From there, he went to Oregon, where he worked at a lumber mill and earned enough money to enroll at the University of California at Berkeley.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Thind arrived in the United States at a time when immigration from South Asia was increasing. But the number of South Asian immigrants in the US was still really relatively small. Between 1910 and 1932, a little more than 8,000 people from South Asia arrived in the United States. Some of them, like Thind, were educated and they wanted to go to school. Others were merchants or skilled laborers. But most of them did manual labor or farm work. Somewhere between 15 and 20% of the workers at the mill where Thind worked were from India.

[Holly Fry]

From the South Asian perspective, people were typically immigrating to the United States to pursue educational or business opportunities, to try to earn more money to support their families or to escape civil unrest, persecution, or oppression from British colonial authorities. This included a lot of independence activists. From the US Perspective, the farm workers and laborers in particular were filling a need for cheap workers on the west coast after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion act of 1882 and other laws that restricted immigration from East Asia.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

We have talked about the Chinese Exclusion act in previous episodes and a number of them very briefly. After the Mexican American war ended in 1848, the US took possession of huge amount of land in western North America. The country needed laborers in this newly acquired territory and to help build the transcontinental railroad. And at first, the government encouraged Chinese workers to come to the United States. The population of Chinese nationals in the US grew from four in 1840 to 35,000 in 1860. But white people in the western part of the United States especially saw this as an invasion. The so Chinese immigrants faced racism, hostility and violence, including from state governments. And the federal government eventually restricted and then banned immigration from China.

[Holly Fry]

Immigrants from India faced a very similar cycle, including being described as an invasion. Incendiary newspaper headlines used the exact same kind of rhetoric that they did with Chinese immigrants, invoking the idea of a so called brown peril rather than the yellow peril that the Chinese immigration had been described as. White Americans described everyone from India as Hindu, regardless of what their religion was most like. Thind were Sikh men from Punjab.

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So there were also a lot of

[Holly Fry]

derogatory depictions that exaggerated the beards and the turbans that they wore as an article of their faith.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This was also happening in Canada. Canada's crackdown on immigration from asia included a 1908amendment to its Immigration Act. That amendment required immigrants to make a continuous journey to Canada from the country they were natives or citizens of. This primarily affected immigrants from India and Japan, since getting to Canada from either of those places required people to stop in other countries. This was by design. They targeted it that way to weed out people from India and Japan.

[Holly Fry]

Bhagat Singh Thind's brother, Jagat Singh Thind tried to enter Canada via Hong Kong aboard a ship called the Komagata Maru, which had been chartered in an attempt to challenge this law. Its passengers were from multiple Asian countries, including British India. When the Komagata Maru arrived In Vancouver in 1914, only about 20 people on board were allowed to disembark. They were mostly people who were returning to Canada after having been abroad. The rest of the passengers were stranded on the ship while court cases were playing out. This whole thing took about two months, with conditions on the ship getting worse the longer they were there. The Komagata Maru set sail again on July 23, 1914, after Canadian courts ruled against its passengers.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This became entangled with World War I, which officially started a few days later. Nearly 1.4 million Indian men served in the British army during World War I. But within the Indian independence movement, people had a range of views on the war and on whether to serve. Some saw cooperation with British authorities as a way to gain political power, and others saw Germany as an ally because Germany was Britain's enemy. The Gadar Party was an anti colonial movement established by Indian immigrants to North America in 1913, and it took the latter view. When the war started, Gadar Party leaders called on people in India to rise up against the British and for Indians in North America to go back to India to fight.

[Holly Fry]

So when the Komagata Maru arrived back in India, British officials thought its passengers were a potential threat. After they disembarked at the port of Budge Budge, authorities tried to force them to board a train. When people resisted doing this, soldiers fired on the crowd and at least 20 people were killed. Thin's brother survived this and returned to the village where they had grown up. In 2008, the Province of British Columbia apologized for its role in this incident, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized on behalf of the Canadian government in 2016.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Participation in the Gadar movement surged after the Komagata Maru incident, and Thind had connections to that movement. He visited Godar activists who were convicted of conspiracy in San Francisco in 1918. They asked him to take on a leadership position in the movement and he did. But he left after becoming disillusioned at the amount of infighting that was going on among the other leaders. The British Security Service, or MI5, started monitoring him and labeled him a dangerous extremist. Although his official leadership in the movement seems to have been brief, he was a vocal advocate for Indian independence for the rest of his life up until that independence actually was achieved.

[Holly Fry]

Finn, however, did not try to ally with Germany. He volunteered to join the U.S. army in 1918. He was inducted on July 22 of that year and served in the 166th Depot Brigade at Camp Lewis, Washington. Thind was one of the first six to serve in the U.S. army. While keeping his hair uncut and covered with a turban and keeping his beard.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Thind's time in the army only lasted for a few months because the war ended. After that, his unit was demobilized. He was honorably discharged on December 16, 1918. A lot of write ups about him say that he attained the rank of sergeant or acting sergeant, but according to his military records, he was a private

[Holly Fry]

the first time Bhagat Singh Thin was naturalized as a U S citizen, he was in his army uniform. We'll have more after we pause for a sponsor break.

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1970, Bhagat Singh Thind had applied for US citizenship. He was naturalized in the State of Washington on December 9, 1918. He was still serving in the army at that point, and he took his oath while wearing his uniform. And then four days later, immigration official Werner Tomlinson ordered that thin citizenship be revoked on the grounds that he was not a, quote, free white person.

[Holly Fry]

So we should take a moment to talk about who could become a U.S. citizen at this point. When the United States first established itself as a nation, there weren't really any limits on immigration. That started to change in the late 19th century, with restrictions on immigration from China, culminating in the aforementioned Chinese Exclusion Act. Other immigration restrictions followed from there, including the creation of the Asiatic barred zone in 1917, which banned immigration from most of western, southern and Southeast Asia. But even when there hadn't been any limits on who could immigrate to the US There had been limits on who could become a citizen. The first US Congress passed the nation's first Naturalization act in 1790, which stated that, quote, any alien other than an alien enemy being a free white person who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years may be admitted to become a citizen

[Tracy V. Wilson]

thereof for the next 80 years. Only white people could become U. S. Citizens, and later laws continued to reference free white persons. Then, after the U. S. Civil War, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof. That erased any possible questions about whether the descendants of enslaved Africans born in the US were citizens. The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, and two years later, Congress amended existing naturalization laws to align with the spirit of the 14th Amendment, specifying that, quote, naturalization laws are hereby extended to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.

[Holly Fry]

So aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent was a more concrete description than white person, which had no formal official definition. And this led to issues as more people arrived in the United States from places other than Europe and Africa. People from other parts of the world who tried to become citizens generally described themselves as white, both because they didn't have documented African ancestry and and because it was obvious that people of African descent were relegated to second class citizenship in the U.S. often, this wasn't just a matter of filling in a blank with a color. A lot of Asian applicants for citizenship, including Thind and his attorney, also leaned on racist stereotypes to differentiate themselves from black people and align themselves with this idea of white. For a while, state courts had the authority to handle naturalizations and state officials made judgment calls about whether applicants could be considered white. This led to inconsistencies about whose applications were approved and whose were not.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

All of this factored into the passage of the Basic Naturalization act of 1906. Among other things, this act made the Federal Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization responsible for everything related to naturalization. So that took it out of the hands, hands of state courts. Immigration officials all around the country started asking the Bureau to create policies that would clearly define who could and could not be naturalized. Advocacy groups also started trying to get different nationalities and ethnic groups included in any policies that might be drafted to define what white meant. But some policymakers and officials thought these questions really needed to be settled by the courts, not created by a government bureau.

[Holly Fry]

So to return to Bhagat Singh Thind, when he applied for citizenship in 1917, his declaration of intention listed his color as white with a dark complexion, dark brown hair, and brown eyes. He also listed his color as white. When applying for the second time from the state of Oregon, Werner Tomlinson objected to that application as well.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

But then on November 18, 1920, Federal District Court Judge Charles Wolverton dismissed the government's filing that denied Thin's eligibility for citizenship. Wolverton noted that there were some reasons to question whether Thind was suitable for US Citizenship, including his connections to the Godar party and to the men who had been convicted of conspiracy in San Francisco. He also noted that it was true that Thind advocated for India to be freed of British rule, but he pointed out that Thind did not advocate for an armed revolution for that purpose. Wolverton described Thind as a veteran who had been honorably discharged and had excellent character and quote, a genuine affection for the Constitution, laws, customs and privileges of this country. The United States appealed Wolverton's decision, and ultimately this case made its way to the Supreme Court.

[Holly Fry]

The Supreme Court had already heard a case on who could be classified as a white person. That was Ozawa versus United States in 1922, just a few months before they heard Thin's case. Takao Ozawa had been born in Japan, but spent most of his life in Hawaii, which the United states annexed in 1898. He had graduated from high school in Berkeley, California, and attended the University of California. He was a Christian and he spoke English, and he and his wife had raised their children to speak only English. Counting his time in the territory of Hawaii, he had lived in the United States for 20 years when he applied for citizenship.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

So Ozawa used all of this and the actual color of his skin to argue that he was white. His attorney also argued that the original framers of the 1790 immigration law had included the words free white person for the sole purpose of excluding the black or African race and the Indians then inhabiting this country. But the Supreme Court countered that white person was not meant to exclude everyone who was not African or indigenous. It was meant to include only white people, and that white could not be determined only by skin color. Instead, the court ruled that the words white person indicated, quote, only a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race. A Japanese born in Japan, being clearly not Caucasian, cannot be made a citizen of the United States. There had also been some lower court rulings that had used similar judgments hinging on the term Caucasian.

[Holly Fry]

So the racial science of this era imagined most of humanity as belonging to one of three races. And those were Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. People from Japan were classified as Mongoloid, but people from Northwest India were classified as Caucasian. This was all rooted in the idea that Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, which were the oldest known languages at the time, all came from a common source. And centuries ago, light skinned Aryans who spoke this common source language had settled in what is now northern India, bringing that language with them. By the mid 19th century, the term Aryan was associated with the white race and was becoming part of the idea of white racial superiority. It would go on, of course, to become tightly connected with white supremacy and Nazi ideology, even as the scientific community moved away from the idea of Aryan as a race.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

So with this idea of racial categorizations in mind, the court's decision in Ozawa vs United States made Thin's case actually seem promising. The court said only Caucasians could be citizens. And the science of the time said that Thind was Caucasian. Thind's attorney, Sakaram Pandit, had immigrated to the United States from India and had become a citizen after successfully arguing that he was white. Under these same definitions, documents from Thind's

[Holly Fry]

Supreme Court case describe him as, quote, high caste, Hindu stock, born in Punjab, one of the extreme northwestern districts of India, and classified by certain scientific authorities as of the Caucasian or Aryan race. As we said earlier, Thind was Sikh, not Hindu. But in the US People from India, as we mentioned earlier, were called Hindu regardless of their religion.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The idea that Thind was high caste is kind of complicated. Overall, the idea of caste is more specifically Hindu than broadly Indian. And it has nuances that really aren't reflected in most writing about it from outside of India. The idea of caste is repudiated within Sikhism, but at the same time, a lot of Sikhs living in India have a kind of complex relationship with it. As the educated son of a military officer, Thind was part of his community's higher class in India. This was part of the argument that Thind was suitable for US citizenship because, like the white population of the United States, he was in the more elite and prestigious group in the place that he had come from.

[Holly Fry]

In spite of its earlier decision in Ozawa vs United States, on December 10, 1923, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Bhagat Singh Thind. The court's opinion was authored by Justice George Sutherland, who was a naturalized British immigrant. He wrote, quote, what we now hold is that the words free white persons are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word Caucasian only as that word is popularly understood.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Sutherland went on to say, quote, the term race is one which, for the practical purposes of the statute, must be applied to a group of living persons now possessing in common the requisite characteristics, not to groups of persons who are supposed to be or really are descended from some remote common ancestor, but who, whether they both resemble him to a greater or less extent, have at any rate ceased altogether to resemble one another. It may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today, and it is not impossible. If that common ancestor could be materialized in the flesh, we should discover that he was himself sufficiently differentiated from both of his descendants to preclude his racial classification with either.

[Holly Fry]

In other words, this whole ruling states that Thinned might be Caucasian, but he wasn't white. He was something different from white people, and being white was what mattered. Consequently, he could not become a U S Citizen.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

We will talk about what happened after the court issued this decision. After a sponsor break

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Holly Fry]

Most people are only driving about 40

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

The Supreme Court's ruling that Bhagat Singh Thin was not eligible for citizenship on the grounds that he was not white did not apply only to him. It applied to other South Asians whose applications were in process or who might try to apply after this. And it also applied to other South Asians who had already been naturalized as citizens. After the court's decision, the United States started revoking the citizenship of at least 65 South Asians who had already been naturalized. The official documentation rescinding Thin's citizenship arrived in 1926.

[Holly Fry]

Under U.S. law, to become a naturalized citizen, people had to renounce their allegiance to quote any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, and particularly by name to the prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of which the alien may be at the time, a citizen or subject. Immigrants from India, for example, had to renounce their allegiance to the British crown. So this decision essentially rendered them stateless. They could not become US Citizens and also could not get a passport allowing them to go elsewhere. Many had left India because they were being persecuted for their advocacy for independence from Britain or they were facing other political or religious persecution. Returning to India was not an option, even if they had been able to get the paperwork to do so.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This decision also put Indian immigrants into the category of aliens ineligible for citizenship and under alien land laws that states had started passing in the 19 teens, aliens who were ineligible for citizenship could not own property. California passed the first of these laws in 1913. The vast majority of immigrants from India were living in west coast states that had these laws, so people lost their homes and their businesses in addition to their citizenship.

[Holly Fry]

One man, Vaishnav Daz Bagai, was wealthy and had come to the US with all of his money to start a business. After his citizenship was revoked, he had to turn over his business to a white man and he had no way to get A passport to visit family who were still living in India. He took his own life because of all of this in 1928.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Under the Expatriation act of 1907, any American woman who marries a foreigner shall take the nationality of her husband. In 1920, this law was amended to apply only to women who married aliens not eligible for citizenship. Taraknath Das had immigrated from India and become a U.S. citizen in 1914, and then he had married a U.S. citizen named Mary Keating Morse in 1920. When his citizenship was revoked after this court decision, she lost her citizenship as well.

[Holly Fry]

Thin's attorney, Sakuram Pandit, was one of the people who fought attempts to strip him of citizenship in court. His arguments were not based on whether he was white or whether he was eligible to become a citizen. They focused on legal details surrounding the revocation and the court cases themselves. The Ninth Circuit Court's decision in favor of Pandit stated that the Supreme Court had previously found a judgment granting a certificate of naturalization to be a final judgment. Whether that judgment was correct didn't affect its finality. After this, the US stopped pursuing the denaturalization of people from India, but the majority of people this applied to had already lost their citizenship.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The descriptions of his arguments here are kind of vague because it's all very lawyer talk, right? A lot of the court cases that we talk about, there is a, like, layperson's explanation that I'm able to find pretty easily, but this one was like, all very dense legal stuff and I feel like, ask a lawyer friend. There's a finite number of times I can intrude on the lawyer friends to answer law questions about a podcast. So to continue, this ruling in United States vs Bhagat Singh Thind also became a part of ongoing efforts to have other nationalities and ethnicities classed as non white and barred from citizenship. For example, Mexican nationals who had remained in the territory that the United States acquired after the Mexican American War were supposed to become full citizens under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. But a lot of those same people had at least some amount of indigenous ancestry, and the treaty used the term Mexican, not Indian or indigenous. The treaty also did not say anything to suggest that Mexicans were considered white. Immigration to the United States was increasing in the early 20th century, and these new arrivals were not covered under the terms of that treaty. The U.S. government's inconsistency in whether it considered Mexicans to be white is something else that we have talked about on the show before, including in our episode on Hernandez vs Texas in 2017. The Supreme Court did not hear any cases on whether Mexicans were white in the context of the Thinned ruling. But nativist and eugenicist groups used this ruling as evidence as they did things like lobbying their legislators and filing complaints with the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization.

[Holly Fry]

As for Bhagat Singh Thin's life after this, shortly after losing his supreme court case, on December 22, 1923, he married Inez Marie Pierre Bulin. Thind claimed to be a widower, but his first wife, Chint Kaur, was still alive in India. She apparently went to live with her family and helped raise her brother's children. And Thind sent her money from time to time until she died when she was in her 50s. We really don't know anything about all of this from her point of view. We also don't know if Bulin and Thind understood that Bulin would lose her citizenship in the US If Thind's was revoked. It's possible they were hoping the revocation would never actually happen or that the court decision would be overturned somehow.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Initially, Thind and Bulin described themselves as soulmates. Bulin was a New Thought practitioner that's a metaphysical and religious movement that has some inspirations in both Transcendentalism and Asian religion. But it's like. It's tricky to pin down an exact definition because there is a lot of variety in the specific beliefs of different New Thought groups. They were married by Pastor Albert Greer of the New Thought Church in Spokane, Washington.

[Holly Fry]

Around the same time, Thind also started working as an itinerant spiritual teacher and advisor, which was one of the ways that Indian immigrants who were stripped of their citizenship and property were able to earn some money. Like the New Thought movement, Thind's lectures and teachings drew from lots of influences, including Sikh religious and philosophical teachings and the works of the Transcendentalists. His tours often included lectures on religious and spiritual topics in the mornings and afternoons and a workshop on breathing techniques. In between them. He took donations from his audiences, which he framed as love offerings. This has a lot of layers, and we're not really getting into them like that. One of the reasons this was a potential way to make a living for Indian immigrants, particularly Sikh immigrants, was that they were exoticized by the communities that they visited, particularly by women.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Thind said that he earned a PhD or a doctor of Divinity, and in some counts it said that he earned that in Lahore before leaving India. And in others it said that it was from the University of California at Berkeley. There's actually no documentation of his earning a doctoral degree, but eventually he was known to his students as Dr. G.

[Holly Fry]

Thin's marriage to Bulin did not last long. They separated in 1924, with Thind alleging that Bulen was having an affair with another spiritual teacher, who he sued at one point for alienation of affection, and Bulin alleging that Thind was physically and mentally cruel to her. Their divorce was final in 1927, and at that time Thin said they were still soulmates and that he would never remarry. He was ordained as a minister at a Sikh temple in Stockton, California in 1932.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1935, Congress passed the Alien Veteran Naturalization act, which allowed military veterans from World War I to be granted U.S. citizenship even if they were not considered white. Thind applied for citizenship in New York, listing his race as Indo Aryan. He was naturalized again on March 2, 1936, and he remained a U.S. citizen for the rest of his life.

[Holly Fry]

Thin married for a third time in 1940 to a woman named Vivian Davies. Vivian had a daughter named Rosalind, known as Roz from a previous marriage. And then she and Thinned had a son together named David.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1941, Thind's work as a spiritual teacher led to him being arrested and imprisoned in Omaha, Nebraska under an anti fortune telling law in 1942. Spiritualist ministers were required to register with the city and Thind refused to do that because he was not a spiritualist minister because he didn't have this registration that they wanted. He was arrested and fined and sentenced to 90 days in jail. While he was imprisoned, his turban was taken from him and he was given bologna sandwiches to eat, even though he was a vegetarian. News coverage of all of this made him sound really paranoid and sort of obsessed with the idea that the British were spying on him, even though British intelligence had actually classified him as an extremist and his advocacy for Indian independence had come up repeatedly in court. They're sort of making it sound like he was not in his right mind when the things he was focused on were reflecting reality. Eventually, friends got him registered as a Sikh minister with the city of Omaha and he was released.

[Holly Fry]

India became independent from British rule on August 15, 1947, under the Indian Independence Act. What had been British India became two countries. India which would be predominantly Hindu, and Pakistan, which would be predominantly Muslim. The boundary between these two nations went through the provinces of Bengal and Punjab, including dividing the predominantly Sikh region region of Punjab, where Bhagat Singh Thind was from, in 2. This partitioning led to a massive human rights disaster as People tried to get from one side of this newly created border to the other. An estimated 2 million people were killed, some of them in massacres. This is definitely its own topic. One of our colleagues, Neha Adiz, covered it as a 10 part podcast called Partition in 2022.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In 1963, Thind made a trip back to India with his wife, where they were guests in the home of President Dwarhal Nehru. They also visited the village where Thind had been raised. His first wife had died about 10 years before, so she was no longer there when they went.

[Holly Fry]

Over the course of his Life, Thind wrote 15 books on religion and spirituality. He also continued to advocate for Indian independence and to advocate for the rights of Indian immigrants to the United States, including students. In 1967, the Gadar Party in California described him as having done more for India than any other Indian in the United States. He died about a month later, on September 15, 1967, at the age of 74.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

By that point, US immigration law was very different from when Thind first moved to the US and when his case was heard before the Supreme Court. The Chinese Exclusion act was repealed in 1943. During World War II, China was allied with the United States during the war, and among other things, Japan was using the Chinese Exclusion act in anti American propaganda. In 1946, Congress passed the Loose Cellar act, which applied to two other World War II allies. Those were the Philippines, which became independent from the US that same month, and India. This act specified a quota of 100 immigrants from each of those two nations per year, and it also granted naturalization rights to Indians and Filipinos.

[Holly Fry]

The US eventually moved away from restricting citizenship only to white people and Africans and people of African descent. The Immigration and Nationality act of 1952 abolished the Racial restrictions for citizenship that had gone back to 1790 and 1870. Then the Immigration and Nationality act of 1965 got rid of quotas based on immigrants countries of origin, which had been part of immigration law for decades, instead focusing on the skills of prospective immigrants. That said, the path to naturalization in the US is long. It's difficult, it's complicated, and it's very expensive for most people today and for many, there is really no legal path to immigration to the US and no way to move to a legal status after entering the country illegally or after overstaying a visa.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In the Trump vs Barbara oral arguments that we mentioned at the top of the show, Justice Sotomayor asked Solicitor General Sauer whether, under the logic he was using, people could be denaturalized as they had been after the court's decision in United States versus Bhagat Singh Thind. Sauer had previously said that the executive order applied only prospectively, meaning to people who were not born yet, and that the government was asking the court to rule only prospectively. But Sotomayor said, quote, the logic of your position, if accepted, is that the next president, this president, or the next president or a Congress or someone else could decide that it shouldn't be prospective. There would be nothing limiting that according to your theory. So the two of them kind of went back and forth a couple of times, with Sotomayor asking again if Sauer's logic would allow people to be denaturalized, and Sauer repeating that the court should issue a decision that, quote, applies prospectively only. And then Sotomayor's answer to that was, quote, well, but that's not what we did in Thind, and that's the United States versus Bhagat Singh Thind.

[Holly Fry]

Hooray for yucky things. Do you have listener mail that is hopefully less irate making?

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I do. Well, I have mail. This is actually from a while back. I've had it flagged to read for a while and I just lost sight of it. This is from Rebecca who wrote hello My Fair Ladies. I have to add this caveat every time I write, but I'm rather behind again. But I just listened to your behind the Scenes on the Doomsday book and I wanted to share old house experience and offer some information. I bought my house in 2008 and it was constructed in the late 1890s. I love many things like the wood floors and built in shelves and cabinetry, but not only is my house old, but it was the church vicar's house for about 50 years. Apparently many things were done by whoever volunteered and a lot of stuff was definitely never to code. I sometimes joke that buying a house, particularly an old house, is owning a hole in the ground into which you throw money. As to bureaucracy, I am guilty when asked to identify my general job type. I am a regulator and I wanted to offer a little information that I find a lot of people don't understand. There are permits that are discretionary and those that are not. A classic non discretionary permit is a building permit. There is a set and rigid standard which must be met. The roof must be at this angle. The maximum step height is that in general non discretionary permits shouldn't take long to get. A discretionary permit has standards, but they're less rigid and open to interpretation based on the specific circumstances. Examples of discretionary permits would be a zoning variance or a site plan approval. Because they involve consideration of multiple factors and usually are not reviewed or approved by a single individual, they usually take longer. Many may also include a public review element, which of course adds to the processing time. I process discretionary environmental permits. My review team may include half a dozen people, a wildlife biologist, a wetland biologist, an air emissions engineer, a wastewater engineer, and of course, many include attorneys as well. If the project is continuous or has a high public profile, executive staff may be involved too. Two to three months is generally the minimum processing time for an application. My personal record is 14 years. I would note that included multiple periods where the applicant was working on revisions or information gathering and nothing was under review. So any consideration for time frames for getting a permit should consider whether it's discretionary or not and how many approvals are needed. A good consultant should make you aware of this up front. So that's my PSA on regulation and permitting. I think this followed a discussion that we had that was about zoning laws and zoning variances and how it can take a while and how there are people who are opposed to things like the building of housing who will use that process intentionally to slow things down because they don't want an apartment building in their neighborhood. There's one last thought which is that the staffing levels and individual decision making discretion may vary across agencies, individual municipalities, and even departments within the municipality, all of which can affect the time permitting takes. Thanks always for the amazing job you do. And then we got a beautiful picture of the first successful freesia flowers after many years and many bulbs of trying beautiful beautiful yellow flower. We are as we are recording this right at the time where stuff is really starting to bloom where I live. So even though this email was from a few months ago that I forgot to get up to the top of the reading list of seeing this beautiful yellow flower. Seems very time and weather appropriate. So thank you Rebecca for that psa. If you would like to write us a note, we'[e-mail] and if you would like to read our show notes with all of our sources, this is at our website which is@missed inhistory.com and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff youf Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Electric Vehicle Advocate]

Wouldn't it be great to never buy gas again? EVs are as easy to charge as your phone and they are a perfect addition to your everyday life.

[Holly Fry]

Most people are only driving about 40

[Electric Vehicle Advocate]

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[Chelsea Handler]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

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