American Support for India's Self-Determination from 1915-1920: Progressives, Radicals, and Anti-Imperialists

American politicians, progressives, and radicals, including Senators Robert LaFollette, George Norris, Joseph France, Medill McCormick, as well as activists Agnes Smedley, Frank Walsh, and Gilbert Roe, Walter Lippmann, and Unitarian minister Jabez T. Sunderland staunchly stood by their progressive internationalist views and spoke out against British imperialism while also calling for Indian self-determination in the tumultuous aftermath of World War I. These Americans also banded together in an attempt to cease the deportations of Indian nationalists who had been incarcerated after the Indo-German conspiracy trial in 1917-1918. I argue that these American anti-imperialists invoked their altruistic, reformist domestic views and applied them towards India’s struggling people in the United States while also calling for greater global racial equality for the world’s colonized peoples. If we are to perceive World War I in part as a racial conflict that involved imperial competition and the desire of empires to aggrandize their resources and territories inhabited by non-white peoples, it is important to look at the seminal support for global racial equality in which American progressives looked beyond their nation’s borders and colonies to include more of the world’s non-white peoples in their visions for greater equality.