The Passport in America: The History of a Document (10 page)

While State Department officials agreed there was no legal requirement for a married woman to take on her husband’s family name, in contrast to the NWP’s brief, the State Department’s solicitor, Richard Flournoy, argued that an acknowledgement of a woman’s marriage was necessary to accurately establish and verify her identity.
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Personal identification was only a successful practice if it followed agreed-upon norms; and within identification practices “the object of a name is to identify an individual.” Jurisprudence defined a lawful name as “the designation by which (one) is distinctively known in the community.” Therefore, it was not “merely a name which he or she may choose to use at a particular time or upon a particular occasion for a particular purpose.”
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Fundamental to the State Department’s argument was the assumption that a married woman was known in the community through her marriage and thus through her husband. Marriage was the source of a woman’s public identity, recognized in what Flournoy labeled the “universal custom” of taking a husband’s family name. In a letter of support to the secretary of state, Miss Elizabeth Achelis endorsed this argument. She described Lucy Stone League members as women “who have been disappointed and disillusioned in their married life, or are suffering from too great an ego of their own importance, and an equal unwillingness to accept the whole importance of the marriage contract.”
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In contrast, it seems that a husband was at minimum simultaneously always a public figure and a husband, as is implicit in Flournoy’s statement that “the argument that a
married woman need make no mention of her husband’s name, since her husband would not be required to make any mention of his wife’s name is specious and unconvincing.”
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Flournoy and other department officials defended the policy by explicitly defining the passport through its “nature [as] an introduction to the authorities of foreign countries.” In this possibly specious argument the passport as a letter requesting the favor of foreign officials needed to acknowledge the legal status of a woman as a wife to comply with conventions of “civilized” nation-states (“including the Far East”).
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Correspondence with twelve diplomatic officials revealed to the State Department that, except in Norway, the failure to identify a married woman through her husband would result in “embarrassment,” “confusion,” and “misunderstandings” not only for U.S. citizens and foreign officials, but also for U.S. officials abroad who would be “called upon to make explanations.”
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They would be called on to do so because the department believed that “officials of foreign countries will require proof that they are husband and wife.”
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Sites for potential difficulties included not only immigration stations, but also steamship and railway agencies, and perhaps tellingly hotels.
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A State Department official made it clear that it was this extra work for officials along with their embarrassment that was the point of concern, not the problems it would create for “the individual who thought it worthwhile to insist on her own individuality to the extent of ignoring the question of her marital status.”
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To issue a separate passport to a woman and not acknowledge her legal relationship to the man she traveled with could imply inappropriate behavior and the official sanctioning of such behavior. While Flournoy acknowledged that a passport issued to a woman under her maiden name would not raise such concerns and problems for a married woman traveling alone, the controversy was largely based on the assumption that a respectable married woman would not travel abroad without the protection of both her husband and a passport.
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In 1925 the State Department changed its policy to allow a married woman the option of having a passport issued in her maiden name, followed by the phrase, “wife of.” This solution emerged largely in the name of expediency—to go further would require a new executive order signed by the president. However, consistent with its position that a name should be able to easily identify an individual, the State Department required married women who wanted a passport issued in this form to provide documentary evidence to support the claim that they still used their maiden name. Nonetheless, according to the NWP magazine,
Equal Rights
, the decision was
“hailed with delight by feminists.”
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Thus the new policy apparently averted any potential affront to the family of nations; domestic and diplomatic harmony was maintained.

However, a dozen years later, the Passport Division began with little debate to issue a married woman a passport in her maiden name if she requested it without noting her identity as the “wife of.” The suggestion for this change is recorded in a memo from division director, Mrs. Ruth Shipley, who, after acknowledging that passports issued to married men had never stated “husband of,” argued that

because our position would be very difficult to defend under any really definite and logical attack, it seems the part of wisdom to make the change and permit a woman to use on her passport her maiden name if she habitually uses it. There has been much controversy on this point and if you are interested in seeing the Subject File I shall be glad to send it to you.
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In response to this new policy the department’s ever diligent New York–based passport agent, wanting to be “prepared when the next group of nuns call,” enquired if this decision would allow a nun to be identified on her passport simply by her religious name—the established practice was to issue a nun a passport naming her in the letter’s example “Bridget McGuiness known as Sister Mary Theresa.” In reply Shipley stated she did not see the situations as analogous as she did not consider “that names in religion as a rule sufficiently identify the bearer of passports.”
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3
Signature

The personal name of the passport bearer appeared on the passport in two places, performing two very different functions. First, the name appeared handwritten within the text that identified the bearer as a citizen and requested safe passage; by the early nineteenth century this was a printed form, though the standardized text was printed to simulate handwritten script. Second, by 1815 the name appeared handwritten below the designation “Signature of the Bearer.” The personal name as a signature functioned as a form of identification somewhat distinct from simply being the personal name that verified individual identity across documents. While the handwritten name appears twice, what is of course unique about the signature is that it is assumed to be in the handwriting of the bearer, in contrast to the other occurrence of the handwritten name. A second name, that of the Secretary of State, was also signed onto a passport. This signature guaranteed the authenticity of the document, while also personalizing the authority of the state. The text of the passport, written in the form of a request echoing letters of introduction and protection, carried with it the expectation of the writer’s signature. However, the secretary of state’s signature, particularly when it was stamped onto the document, suggests the need for a more nuanced understanding of the signature as an identification technology.

The strong belief that a signature can be used to identify a person, like any other identification practice, needs to be seen as a historically specific assumption. To sign a document is to make a mark. However, a signature is not just any mark. It is commonly understood to be a representation of a name, and
it is the link between the name and a person that gives the signature value. The importance of the name to the act of signing locates the signature within literate cultures, although in specific circumstances literate cultures tend to accept a signature that does not take the form of a written name. In the case of U.S. passports by the early twentieth century illiterate people were allowed to sign with an “X” as long as they were mentally capable of understanding the significance of an oath and the mark was witnessed by two people who could write; if an illiterate person did not understand the significance of an oath a parent or guardian could sign on his or her behalf.
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To mark a document with an “X” is a common practice to accommodate illiteracy within a writing-based culture of identification. This is accepted as signing because it is a mark made by a particular individual signifying their understanding and presence. However, because the mark does not make a person’s name visible it fails to fulfill the function of identification; the signer remains nameless and thus anonymous. In such situations the person’s name is written separately to counter this anonymity. The “X” and the name combined are considered to authenticate the document, to tie the signer to any agreement made in the document; the signature is assumed to do this in one act.
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Voicing a long-held belief in the value of a bearer’s signature on a passport a U.S. consul wrote the “signature is one of the surest means of identification”
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—a comment made in 1921 even after the introduction of passport photographs during World War I. The importance of the signature was further recognized when a passport expired or had to be canceled—by the early decades of the twentieth century standard practice called for an official to draw three lines through the signature to indicate the passport was no longer valid. The value of the signature in the verification of identity derived from a specific understanding of the relationship between presence and repeatability. In the second decade of the nineteenth century when State Department regulations started requiring a bearer’s signature to be appended to the passport, a space was left for it at the end of a paragraph describing the physical appearance of the bearer. There followed a parenthetical comment: “(whose name is here repeated in his own handwriting, viz),” followed by the bearer’s signature.
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The State Department removed this explanation of the relationship of the signature to the bearer from the passport in the 1820s. However, in the middle of the century officials still considered it necessary to clarify the role of the signature in the process of identification, instructing a passport agent working in New York City during the Civil War, “Care should be taken to ascertain that the persons presenting
the same are the ‘bona fide’ owners and this may be done by comparing the signatures of the persons holding them with the signatures on the documents themselves.”
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In the case of the bearer the signature tied the document to his or her hand making the individual an active participant in the verification of their identity. As an identification technology this signature depended on the possibility of the bearer repeating his or her signature in the presence of any doubtful official and doing so in such a fashion that the official was satisfied the two signatures were identical. This is based on the assumption that people have unique handwriting and that they sign their name consistently.
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A “proper signature” is generally one that is considered to be distinctive and typical, that is, recognizable and repeatable. The importance this places on developing a unique signature, however, conflicts with the signature as the representation of a name; a signature risks becoming a mark rather than an easily decipherable representation of a name.
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In the case of passports, with the bearer’s name legibly written elsewhere on the document, the repeatability of the signature as a mark seemed to matter more to officials. Although officials received no formal training the assumption was that they would be able to see similarities or differences if a passport bearer was required to repeat his signature in their presence. The belief that most people could accurately compare signatures was challenged by the emergence of “experts” in handwriting analysis. These people argued that the accurate comparison of signatures, and handwriting in general, required training in breaking down writing into its constituent parts. The attempt to advance handwriting analysis as a science brings to the foreground the not always coherent assumptions that allowed the signature to be accepted as an accurate and reliable form of identification.

The development of techniques to verify handwriting offers an important point of entry into the historically specific nature of how handwriting was understood to link a person to a document. In the second half of the nineteenth century the acceptance of evidence from handwriting experts in courtrooms demonstrates important changes in how the relationship between a person and their writing could be proved and hence different conceptions of the relationship between identity and identification. The basis for legal resolution of disputes over the authenticity of written documents changed from personal knowledge of the writer to the belief that accurate identification
could be achieved through the articulation of designated “facts” visible to experts who by following a specific set of procedures could analyze handwriting as a series of precisely measured marks. The emergence of handwriting analysis through claims to rationality and objectivity is what turned it into a “modern” form of identification.