The Passport in America: The History of a Document (13 page)

In a country that did not demand passports at its borders and did not require its residents (citizen or otherwise) to register with government officials, the passport frequently appeared as a certificate of citizenship in official correspondence of the U.S. government. This moved it well beyond a letter of introduction in the eyes of most officials, but within a context in which identification documents were not required, the passport still had an ambiguous relationship to a modern identification document. The State Department required documentary evidence of citizenship by midcentury; in the last quarter of the century officials even began to rigorously enforce the demand for supporting documents. But, significantly, State Department officials stopped short of adapting the physical description to more “modern” forms of personal identification technologies: anthropometry, fingerprinting, and photography.

The limited interest in the passport as an identification document can be attributed to what is a recurring argument throughout this history: popular thinking considered only marginal populations—especially criminals—to be the appropriate targets of official identification practices. Identification practices should target “them”—those without power—not “us”—those with power. It is in this sense that the passport is an example of a contested move from the excessive documentation of “the other” to the inclusion of an entire population in a regime of documentation. Through the first decades of the twentieth century (and arguably beyond), fingerprinting and photography were identification practices that were associated with criminals, not the segment of the population who could afford the luxury of international travel. This indeed is the theme of the
New York Times
’s lengthy recounting of Aldrich’s 1880s Russian adventures, in which the failure to have a passport is presented through what is seemingly intended to be read as an incongruous invocation of criminality; the retelling of Aldrich’s journey ends with the
image of designated cells for the “passportless” in “gloomy” prisons. The article makes explicit that this could have been the temporary home for this esteemed American gentleman and his wife; as we know from the previous chapter, the absence of her passport had made them probable objects of a “suspect file.” Such a scenario was only averted because the U.S. consul in St. Petersburg personally vouched for their identity. The tale thus provides an example of the personal world of reputation and status within which the passport partially and awkwardly took on the role of an identification document; hence the “incongruity” that structures the
Times
article. In the face of the happy ending, the absurdity of pursuing this demand for documents beyond a polite request provides a somewhat humorous recounting of Aldrich’s travels. In “knowing” criminals the official need for an external source of identity was apparently obvious. In contrast, an honest and trustworthy person, it seems, did not need an identification document. Such documents were considered to be necessary only for suspect populations, at least by those people who felt that their own appearance clearly verified they were honest and trustworthy.

In this context even the requirement of a physical description was seen as a somewhat delicate request, if not an affront to the sensibilities of a passport applicant—for this reason British passports in the mid-nineteenth century did not have a physical description.
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In 1882 a notary public described how he assisted people in filling out a U.S. passport “blank,” or application.

We generally mention the chief peculiarity of each feature mentioned in the blank. I remember one passport in which the nose was described as ‘common.’ Most persons would object to such a description. Single ladies who apply for passports sometimes blush or even show signs of anger when I ask them their age or perhaps the length of their feet but I show them the law on the subject and they are generally satisfied.
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The request for age in this explicitly gendered example is seen as an intrusion, an invasion of privacy even for a document intended to facilitate public movement. It should be noted that the State Department did not require the recording of the length of a person’s feet. If anything, this type of intrusion was precisely what officials seemed to avoid either on the grounds of sensitivity, or, more pragmatically, because such detailed descriptions (or degrees
of accuracy) were not considered necessary for the NineteenthCentury passport to do its job. A possible source of the mistake could have been how the application form requested height (“Stature:___ feet, ___ inches, Eng”) which, if it indeed led the notary to believe that he was required to provide a measurement of the applicant’s feet in inches, provides another example of the argument that filling in forms required a distinct literacy. However, while that specific example is inaccurate, the general tone of the notary’s explanation accurately captures the discomfort caused as the passport became a document that required a version of identity that many applicants considered to be an inaccurate representation of their sense of who they were. The notary’s concern over the “common nose” further indicates how the requirement of a physical description revealed that the documentation of individual identity was changing the relationship between identity and identification. The stark, simple adjectives used to describe a person’s body turned the complexity of a “romantic” perception of the personal uniqueness of appearance and character into a standardized and thus simplified list of physical traits.

The use of a discrete list of features and descriptors was an early way in which the passport entered the world of standardization, a world that characterized modern identification practices in terms of precision and economy. These practices were driven by an ad hoc flight from subjectivity to objectivity—in this specific example, a boilerplate text that sought to avoid any unique flourishes in attempts to clearly describe individuals so they could be more easily recognized. The introduction of an application form in the 1830s that included the list of features on the passport encouraged applicants to describe themselves according to the criteria the State Department had chosen; likewise, the early-NineteenthCentury listing of physical categories on the passport itself served a pedagogical function for clerks writing up passports.
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The
Punch
parody acknowledged that this was the official strategy by illustrating the applicant’s “subversive” description of his eyes as gentle. In another example an English author was said to describe himself as “of melancholic appearance.”
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Thus, the ascription of character traits to these physical features, while perhaps also ridiculing people for reading too much into such features, also stressed that the application and the passport turned personal identity into something very generic and impersonal. This was not an understanding of identity drawn from the palate of the “romantics”; it was most definitely not the identification of people through their character and social status. In practice a small number of physical descriptors came to dominate. Eyes and hair were described by color, a face was generally either
round or elongated, a nose was common, large, or small. But even with a limited set of options, space still existed for different interpretations. As the article from
Punch
illustrated, people could disagree, and “common” could be all too common if the alternative was a “large” nose. Or, as a nineteenth century commentator noted, an applicant would more than likely “contest the terms applied to their nasal organ in a passport, insisting upon a kindly adjective to designate the shape thereof, although it may cast a doubt of identity.”
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Problems raised by the possibility of different descriptions of physical appearance are problems of mediation. Standardization was an attempt to prevent descriptions from being too subjective, but as a form of mediation it introduced other problems. While the increasing belief in the need to standardize the collection and presentation of information made some sense as an attempt to stabilize an official identity or a legal identity such as citizenship, it could be more problematic when personal identity was abstracted into a physical description. Applicants recognized an aspect of this when, in renewing passports, they alerted officials that features of their appearance had changed. When people applied for a new passport they sometimes mentioned the graying of hair, or that a previously “round” face had become “elongated”—perhaps indicating a loss of weight.
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In producing a stable identity to facilitate identification, the passport had artificially fixed physical appearance in the midst of the natural aging process. Another problem of mediation came from the mechanism used to record physical appearance on a passport; the physical description was not only translated through the subjective assessment of one person, but also remained susceptible to transcription errors in the writing up of a passport—the physical description was filled in by the hand of a passport clerk using details handwritten onto the application form. On occasions a clerk would incorrectly transfer information from the application to the document. Such errors resulted in applicants “officially” aging ten years or more overnight, having their hair color changed, or their wife omitted. These were generally noted by the bearer and returned for correction, but, as recounted earlier, this was not always the case.

The problems associated with mediation were potentially troubling because they affected the consistency with which a document could reliably represent an identity. A documented identity was deemed useful when it could be counted on to accurately link the bearer to the document. Although application forms and identification documents allowed state officials to dictate
the parameters of a physical description, the translation of a person’s physical appearance into words still relied on the specific perception of individuals. Even with the policing mechanisms of a form and a clerk reviewing the form, the brief, standardized formality of the description could not be guaranteed to abstract an individual’s physical appearance into a document so it could always be seen as an accurate resemblance by all those who looked at the document and the bearer. Possibly motivated by this concern, a high school teacher applying for a passport in 1896 submitted a “picture” with his application. From the accompanying letter it appeared that he believed the picture (probably a photograph) provided an accurate representation of his face; noting his age, height, and the color of his eyes, he added “the rest can be seen from the picture.”
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Simply put, the physical description favored the potentially particular observations of an individual. By the second half of the nineteenth century, in some parts of the state apparatus the translation of observations into verbal descriptors was considered neither sufficiently accurate nor useful as an identification technology. Beyond the documentation of individual identity in a passport, identification practices in the world of policing became structured by attempts to limit discretion in the name of objectivity—both scientific objectivity and bureaucratic objectivity.

While the increased disposition in favor of objectivity was more pronounced in the nineteenth century development of criminal identification practices, the purported objectivity and, therefore, assumed accuracy of modern identification technologies were important to the articulation of the passport’s usefulness during (and after) World War I. Thus, although the passport was not at the forefront of the new identification technologies developed in the nineteenth century to police suspect populations, these developments are critical to understanding the move toward documenting everyone, and therefore to comprehending how the passport became an acceptable answer to the question “Who are you?”

New policing techniques and technologies initially emerged on the European continent and reached broader public consciousness when Alphonse Bertillon, a French police clerk, applied anthropometry (the scientific measurement of the human body) to criminal identification. With a father who was a pioneer of nineteenth century social sciences, Bertillon had grown up in a household filled with anthropometric tools and a belief in Adolphe Quetelet’s groundbreaking “social physics.” After his father, in an attempt to settle his wayward son, found him a job in the central Paris police station, Bertillon quickly became appalled at the chaotic identification and
record-keeping practices he encountered. To solve the problem he invented a system that became known as “Bertillonage,” or sometimes erroneously as anthropometry. It differed from the preexisting practice of anthropometry in two important ways: it was directed toward the identification of individuals, not types; and it used techniques other than measurement. This technology of identifying individuals through the precise measurement of the body and the statistically based storage of files experienced both a rapid growth and decline in the last decades of the nineteenth century—the former through an understanding of identity that linked it to phrenology and physiognomy, and the later largely as a consequence of fingerprinting.
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Bertillon’s intervention occurred in a century in which European police officials became increasingly anxious about procedure, specifically that inadequate physical descriptions jeopardized the attempt to thwart criminals.
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While the development of a standardized form was an initial step toward solving this, anthropometry offered a potentially more significant move, as it replaced personal memory with a set of techniques to establish identity through the collection of measurements. Bertillon required eleven different anthropometric measurements: height, head length, head breadth, arm span, sitting height, left middle finger length, left little finger length, left foot length, left forearm length, right ear length, and cheek width. These were believed to be the proportions least likely to be affected by weight change or aging. Each measurement was recorded with specially designed calipers, gauges, and rulers. To ensure the required accuracy and the ability of different measurers to achieve the same result, Bertillon outlined precise instructions that delineated the position of the body of not only the prisoner but also the officer who measured the prisoner’s body. For example Bertillon prescribed twenty distinct movements just to measure the left foot. Bertillonage did not finish with these anthropometric measurements. The prisoner’s physical appearance was also recorded in a detailed and standardized fashion using a system of precise terminology Bertillon developed that included more than fifty types of eye color. The prisoner was also photographed twice: a frontal image and a profile shot. A clerk then recorded all this information onto a card. Bertillon also introduced a system of standardized abbreviations for clerks to use.
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