United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Fryed. Today's episode is one I
have thought about doing for really many years, and I

(00:22):
moved it up to the top of the list after
I heard a clip from the oral arguments in Trump
versus Barbara, That is the US Supreme Court case on
the question of whether Executive Order fourteen one point sixty
protecting the meaning and value of American citizenship is consistent
with the fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which is the

(00:44):
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

(01:04):
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 Sonya Sodamayor said to Solicitor
General John Sower, quote, when we ruled in Thinned that

(01:28):
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 Souer
was using in his arguments would lead to the same
thing happening again. So that quote from Sodomayor and the

(01:48):
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 Sodamayor was referencing was United States versus Boggat
Singh Thinn. That was a case that hinged on what

(02:09):
it meant to be white. Boggat Singh Thinned was born
in Punjab, in the far northwest of British India on
October third, eighteen ninety two. This region was and is
predominantly sick, which some people who are white pronounced Sikh.
This is one of those words. It's a little tricky,
can sound different to different years. Finn's father was retired

(02:32):
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. 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,

(02:56):
it's pronounced sick, and the two versions sound did it
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. We are
confident there is a difference, we just can't discern it right. Correct, correct.

(03:17):
So find graduated from high school in nineteen oh eight
and went on from there to Colossa College, which was
established in eighteen ninety two by the leaders of the
Singh Saba movement. This movement developed after Britain defeated the
Sick Empire in eighteen forty nine and after Christian missionary
started arriving in this area in bigger numbers. Several Sick

(03:41):
leaders and aristocrats converted to Christianity. So this movement formed
to try to revive and preserve sick traditions and teachings,
and also to publish sick religious material and to provide
young people with an education. At some point during these years,
Thinn married woman named chin Kauer. He also decided that

(04:03):
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 Finn'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,

(04:27):
but his father had become opposed to British colonial policy
and had been imprisoned and lost his military pension due
to his activities. Multiple sources also say that Finn wanted
to go to an American university because he had started
studying the works of Transcendentalist writers and people who were

(04:48):
influenced by the Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thereau,
and Walt Whitman. Transcendentalism drew from multiple influences including German romance, philosophy, neoplatonism,
and Asian religious and spiritual traditions, so there were parallels
between the Transcendentalists and Finn's own religious and philosophical thought.

(05:12):
Finn left Punjab for Manila in nineteen twelve. At the time,
the Philippines was a US territory, and Finn 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

(05:34):
at the Port of Seattle on July fourth, nineteen thirteen,
when he was twenty years old. 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. Finn derived in the United States at a
time when immigration from South Asia was increasing, but the

(05:54):
number of South Asian immigrants in the US was still
really relatively small. Between nineteen ten and nineteen thirty two,
a little more than eight thousand people from South Asia
arrived in the United States. Some of them, like Thinned,
were educated and they wanted to go to school. Others
were merchants or skilled laborers, but Most of them did

(06:17):
manual labor or farm work. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty
percent of the workers at the mill where Thinned worked
were from India. 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

(06:41):
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
eighteen eighty two and other laws that were districted immigration
from East Asia. We have talked about the Chinese Exclusion

(07:05):
Act in previous episodes, been a number of them. Very briefly.
After the Mexican American War ended in eighteen forty eight,
the US took possession of a huge amount of land
in western North America. The country needed laborers in this
newly acquired territory and to help build the Transcontinental Railroad,

(07:25):
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 eighteen forty to thirty
five thousand in eighteen sixty, but white people in the
western part of the United States especially saw this as
an invasion, so Chinese immigrants faced racism, hostility, and violence,

(07:50):
including from state governments, and the federal government eventually restricted
and then banned immigration from China. 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

(08:12):
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 thinned were sick men from Punjab,
so there were also a lot of derogatory depictions that

(08:33):
exaggerated the beards and the turbines that they wore as
an article of their faith. This was also happening in Canada.
Canada's cracked down on immigration from Asia included a nineteen
oh eight amendment to its Immigration Act. That amendment required
immigrants to make a continuous journey to Canada from the

(08:53):
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. Bagatsingh Thinn's brother,

(09:14):
Jagatsingh Thinned, tried to enter Canada via Hong Kong aboard
a ship called the Koma Gata Marou, which had been
chartered in an attempt to challenge this law. Its passengers
were from multiple Asian countries, including British India. When the
Koma Gata Meru arrived in Vancouver in nineteen fourteen, only
about twenty people on board were allowed to disembark. There

(09:37):
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 Koma Gata
Maru set sail again on July twenty third, nineteen fourteen,

(09:58):
after Canadian court ruled against its passengers. This became entangled
with World War One, which officially started a few days later.
Nearly one point four million Indian men served in the
British Army during World War One, but within the Indian
Independence movement, people had a range of views on the

(10:19):
war and on weather 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 nineteen thirteen, and it

(10:42):
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 so. When the Koma Goat
Deamaru arrived back in India, the British officials thought its
passengers were a potential threat. After they disembarked at the

(11:06):
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 twenty people were killed.
Sin's brother survived this and returned to the village where
they had grown up. In two thousand and eight, the
province of British Columbia apologized for its role in this incident,

(11:27):
and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized on behalf of the
Canadian government. In twenty sixteen. A participation in the Gudar
movement surged after the Komagatamuru incident, and then had connections
to that movement. He visited Gadar activists who were convicted
of conspiracy in San Francisco in nineteen eighteen. They asked

(11:50):
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 mi I five
started monitoring him and labeled him a dangerous extremist. Although
his official leadership in the movement seems to have been brief,

(12:13):
he was a vocal advocate for Indian independence for the
rest of his life up until that independence actually was achieved.
Find however, did not try to ally with Germany. He
volunteered to join the US Army in nineteen eighteen. He
was inducted on July twenty second of that year and
served in the one hundred and sixty six Deep Obrigade

(12:36):
at Camp Lewis, Washington. Find was one of the first
six to serve in the US Army while keeping his
hair uncut and covered with a turbane and keeping his beard.
Finn'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 sixteenth, nineteen eighteen. A

(13:00):
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. The first time
Bagot singh Thin was naturalized as a US citizen, he
was in his army uniform. We'll have more after we
pause for a sponsor break. In nineteen seventeen, Bogotzyngthened had

(13:31):
applied for US citizenship. He was naturalized in the state
of Washington on December ninth, nineteen eighteen. 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 then citizenship be revoked
on the grounds that he was not a quote free

(13:52):
white person. So we should take a moment to talk
about who could become a US 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 nineteenth century, with restrictions on immigration
from China culminating in the aforementioned Chinese Exclusion Act. Other

(14:16):
immigration restrictions followed from there, including the creation of the
Asiatic Bard Zone in nineteen seventeen, 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

(14:39):
Naturalization Act in seventeen ninety, 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 thereof,

(14:59):
for the next eighty years, only white people could become
US citizens, and later laws continued to reference free white persons. Then,
after the US Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment to the
Constitution granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States
and subject to the jurisdiction thereof. That erased any possible

(15:22):
questions about whether the descendants of enslaved Africans born in
the US were citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in
eighteen sixty eight, and two years later, Congress amended existing
naturalization laws to align with the spirit of the fourteenth Amendment,
specifying that quote naturalization laws are hereby extended to aliens

(15:46):
of African nativity and to persons of African descent. 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

(16:07):
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 because
it was obvious that people of African descent were relegated
to second class citizenship in the US. Often this wasn't
just a matter of filling in a blank with a color.

(16:31):
A lot of Asian applicants for citizenship, including Thinn 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

(16:53):
be considered white. This led to inconsistencies about whose applications
were approved and whose were or not. All of this
factored into the passage of the Basic Naturalization Act of
nineteen oh six. Among other things, this act made the
federal Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization responsible for everything related

(17:14):
to naturalization. So if that took it out of the
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

(17:35):
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 so to return to bogatsingh thinned.
When he applied for citizenship in nineteen seventeen, his declaration

(17:57):
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, but then on November eighteenth, nineteen twenty, Federal

(18:18):
District Court Judge Charles Wolverton dismissed the government's filing that
denied Finn's eligibility for citizenship. Wolverton noted that there were
some reasons to question whether Finn was suitable for US citizenship,
including his connections to the Gadar Party and to the
men who had been convicted of conspiracy in San Francisco.

(18:40):
He also noted that it was true that Finn advocated
for India to be freed of British rule, but he
pointed out that find did not advocate for an armed
revolution for that purpose. Wolverton described Finn as a veteran
who had been honorably discharged and had excellent care and

(19:00):
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.
The Supreme Court had already heard a case on who
could be classified as a white person, that was Ozawa

(19:21):
versus United States in nineteen twenty two, just a few
months before they heard Sinn's case to cow. Ozawa had
been born in Japan, but spent most of his life
in Hawaii, which the United States annexed in eighteen ninety eight.
He had graduated from high school in Berkeley, California, and
attended the University of California. He was a Christian, and

(19:42):
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 twenty years when he applied for citizenship, so
Ozawa used all of this, and the actual color of
his skin to argue that he was white. His attorney

(20:03):
also argued that the original framers of the seventeen ninety
immigration law had included the words free white person quote
for the sole purpose of excluding the black or African
race and the Indians than inhabiting this country. But the
Supreme Court countered that white person was not meant to

(20:24):
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.

(20:47):
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 hinji on the term Caucasian. So the racial science
of this era imagined most of humanity as belonging to

(21:07):
one of three races, and those were Caucazoid, 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

(21:29):
a common source, and centuries ago, light skinned Arians who
spoke this common source language had settled in what is
now northern India, bringing that language with them. By the
mid nineteenth 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

(21:51):
become tightly connected with white supremacy and Nazi ideology, even
as the scientific community moved away from the idea of
air as a race. So with this idea of racial
categorizations in mind, the Court's decision in Ozawa versus the
United States made Finn's cases actually seem promising. The court

(22:14):
said only Caucasians could be citizens, and the science of
the time said that Finn was Caucasian. Finn's attorney, Sakaram Pandit,
had emigrated to the United States from India and had
become a citizen after successfully arguing that he was white
under these same definitions. Documents from Thinn's Supreme Court case

(22:36):
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, find was sick not Hindu, but
in the US people from India, as we mentioned earlier,

(22:58):
were called Hindu regardless of religion. The idea that Find
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

(23:19):
is repudiated within Sikhism, but at the same time, a
lot of six living in India have a kind of
complex relationship with it. As the educated son of a
military officer, Find was part of his community's higher class
in India. This was part of the argument that Finn

(23:39):
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.
In spite of its earlier decision in Ozawa versus United States,
on December tenth, nineteen twenty three, the Supreme Court unanimously
ruled against bogatsingh Thinned. The court's opinion was authored by

(24:04):
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.

(24:26):
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

(24:48):
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 blonde Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a
common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, But the

(25:10):
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.

(25:34):
In other words, this whole ruling states that Sinn 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 US citizen. We will talk
about what happened after the Court issued this decision after
a sponsor break. The Supreme Court's ruling that Bagatsingh Thint

(26:08):
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

(26:31):
started revoking the citizenship of at least sixty five South
Asians who had already been naturalized. The official documentation rescinding
Thinn's citizenship arrived in nineteen twenty six. Under US law,
to become a naturalized citizen, people had to renounce their
allegiance to quote any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty,

(26:56):
and particularly by name to the prince potentate's 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

(27:17):
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. This decision also

(27:40):
put Indian immigrants into the category of aliens ineligible for
citizenship and under alien land laws that states had started
passing in the nineteen teens, aliens who were ineligible for
citizenship could not own property. California passed the first of
the laws in nineteen thirteen. The vast majority of immigrants

(28:05):
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. One man, Vaishna Dasbagai, was
wealthy and had come to the US with all of
his money to start a business. After his citizenship was revoked,

(28:25):
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 nineteen
twenty eight. Under the Expatriation Act of nineteen oh seven, quote,
any American woman who marries a foreigner shall take the

(28:47):
nationality of her husband. In nineteen twenty, this law was
amended to apply only to women who married aliens not
eligible for citizenship. Tarak Nath Das had immigrated from in
India and become a US citizen in nineteen fourteen, and
then he had married a US citizen named Mary Kating
Morse in nineteen twenty when his citizenship was revoked after

(29:11):
this court decision, she lost her citizenship as well. Finn'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

(29:35):
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

(29:56):
the majority of people this applied to had already lost
their citizen ship. 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 lay person's explanation that I'm able

(30:18):
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've been
intrude on the lawyer friends to answer law questions about
a podcast. So to continue this ruling in the United

(30:40):
States versus bagatsingh find 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

(31:01):
citizens under the eighteen forty eight Treaty of Guadeloupe 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.

(31:22):
Immigration to the United States was increasing in the early
twentieth century, and these new arrivals were not covered under
the terms of that treaty. The US government's inconsistency and
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 versus Texas In twenty seventeen.

(31:45):
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 ledgen slaters and
filing complaints with the Bureau of Emigration and Naturalization. As

(32:06):
for Bagatsingh Thinn's life after this, Shortly after losing his
Supreme Court case on December twenty second, nineteen twenty three,
he married Annez Marie Pierre Bulin. Find claimed to be
a widower, but his first wife, Chhin Kauer was still
alive in India. She apparently went to live with her
family and helped raise her brother's children, and Finn sent

(32:29):
her money from time to time until she died when
she was in her fifties. We really don't know anything
about all of this from her point of view. We
also don't know if Bulin and Finn understood that Bulin
would lose her citizenship in the US if Thinn's was revoked.
It's possible they were hoping the revocation would never actually happen,

(32:52):
or that the court decision would be overturned somehow. Initially,
find and Bulin described themselves as soulmates. Mullin 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

(33:13):
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.
Around the same time, find also started working as an
itinerant spiritual teacher and advisor, which is one of the
ways that Indian immigrants who were stripped at their citizenship

(33:36):
and property were able to earn some money. Like the
New Thought movement, Finn's lectures and teachings drew from lots
of influences, including sick, 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

(33:57):
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 sick immigrants, was that they were exoticized by the

(34:18):
communities that they visited, particularly by women. Finn 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

(34:40):
eventually he was known to his students as doctor g
Finn's marriage to Bulin did not last long. They separated
in nineteen twenty four, with Finn alleging that Bulin was
having an affair with another spiritual teacher, who he sued
at one point for alienation of affection, and Bulin alleging
that Finn was physically and mentally cruel to her. Their

(35:03):
divorce was final in nineteen twenty seven, and at that
time Finn said they were still soulmates and that he
would never remarry. He was ordained as a minister at
a sick temple in Stockton, California, in nineteen thirty two.
In nineteen thirty five, Congress passed the Alien Veteran Naturalization Act,

(35:23):
which allowed military veterans from World War One to be
granted US citizenship even if they were not considered white.
Thinned applied for citizenship in New York, listing his race
as Indo Aryan. He was naturalized again on March second,
nineteen thirty six, and he remained a US citizen for
the rest of his life. Finn married for a third

(35:45):
time in nineteen forty to a woman named Vivian Davies.
Vivian had a daughter named Rosalind known as Roz from
a previous marriage, and then she and Finn had a
son together named David. In nineteen forty one, work as
a spiritual teacher led to him being arrested and imprisoned
in Omaha, Nebraska, under an anti fortune telling law in

(36:08):
nineteen forty two, spiritualist ministers were required to register with
the city, and Bend 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 ninety days in jail. While he was imprisoned,

(36:29):
his turban was taken from him, and he was given
Beloney 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

(36:51):
Indian independence had come up repeatedly in court. So they're
sort of making it sound like he was not in
his right mind when the things he was spoke were
reflecting reality. Eventually, friends got him registered as a sick
minister with the city of Omaha and he was released.
India became independent from British rule on August fifteenth, nineteen

(37:12):
forty seven. 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 sick region of Punjab where Bagatsingh

(37:36):
Thind was from in two 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,
and estimated two million people were killed, some of them
in massacres. This is definitely its own topic. One of

(37:56):
our colleagues, Neha Ads, covered it as a ten part
podcast asked called Partition in twenty twenty two. In nineteen
sixty three, Thind made a trip back to India with
his wife, where they were guests in the home of
President Djuarhalal Nerhu. They also visited the village where Thinn
had been raised His first wife had died about ten

(38:18):
years before, so she was no longer there when they went.
Over the course of his life, find wrote fifteen 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 nineteen sixty seven,

(38:39):
the Gaedar 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 fifteenth, nineteen
sixty seven, at the age of seventy four. By that point,
US emigration law was very different from when Thinned first

(39:00):
moved to the US and when his case was heard
before the Supreme Court. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed
in nineteen forty three 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 nineteen forty six, Congress passed the

(39:21):
Loose Sellar 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 one hundred immigrants from each of those
two nations per year, and it also granted naturalization rights
to Indians and Filipinos. The US eventually moved away from

(39:46):
restricting citizenship only to white people and Africans and people
of African descent. The Immigration and Nationality Act of nineteen
fifty two abolished the racial restrictions for citizenship that had
gone back to seventeen ninety and eighteen seventy. Then the
Immigration and Nationality Act of nineteen sixty five got rid

(40:07):
of quotas based on immigrants countries of origin, which have
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

(40:30):
the US and no way to move to a legal
status after entering the country illegally or after overseteing a visa.
In the Trump versus Barbara oral arguments that we mentioned
at the top of the show, Justice Soda Mayor asked
the listener General sour whether under the logic he was
using people could be denaturalized as they had been after

(40:54):
the court's decision in United States versus bagatsinkh Thint. Sour
had previous 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 perspectively.
But Sodamayor said, quote, the logic of your position, if accepted,

(41:15):
is that the next president, this president, or the next president,
or a congress or someone else could decide that it
shouldn't be perspective. 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 Soda
Mayor asking again if Sour's logic would allow people to

(41:35):
be denaturalized, and Sour repeating that the court should issue
a decision that quote applies perspectively only, and then Soda
Mayor's answer to that was, quote, well, but that's not
what we did in thin uh, And that's the United
States versus I got Syna thinned hoorray for yucky things. Uh.

(41:59):
Do you have listener that is hopefully less irate making
I do well? I have mails. This is actually from
a while back. I've had it flag 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

(42:22):
to share old house experience and offer some information. I
bought my house in two thousand and eight, and it
was constructed in the late eighteen nineties. 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 fifty years. Apparently many
things were done by whoever volunteered, and a lot of

(42:43):
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. I wanted to
offer a little information that I find a lot of
people don't understand. There are permits that are discretionary and

(43:06):
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

(43:28):
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.

(43:53):
My review team may include half a dozen people, a
wildlife biologist, a wetland biologist, an air 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

(44:14):
record is fourteen 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
timeframes forgetting 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 upfront. So that's my PSA

(44:36):
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

(44:56):
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

(45:17):
got a beautiful picture of the first successful Freezia flowers
after many years and many bulbs of trying, beautiful, beautiful
yellow flower. We are as we're recording this right at
the time where stuff is really starting to bloom where
I live. So even though this email was from a

(45:41):
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 notehere at history Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com,
and if you would like to read our show notes

(46:01):
with all of our sources, this is that our website
which is at missinhistory dot com. And you can subscribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio app, but anywhere else
you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(46:25):
you listen to your favorite shows.

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