The Passport in America: The History of a Document (14 page)

The cards at the center of Bertillonage did not record the biography of an individual; rather, their contents prioritized the body, which was assumed to be harder to alter than the details and evidence of an individual’s social identity. The formalized physical description combined anthropometrical
measures and a standardized description of physiognomic and bodily details. In contrast to the identity forms that had become more common in this period, there was no information about birthplace, place of residence, religion, or other biographical details.

In this manner Bertillon organized the recording of identity so it provided only those aspects of an identity that would be useful in identifying a recidivist who had been subjected to Bertillonage. His goal was to create a system that produced the very identity it needed to be a successful identification technique. Bertillon did not make use of an existing (social) identity; he used Bertillonage to produce a new identity. He did this by delimiting the nature of the identity he recorded to privilege anatomical and physiological categories. And, of equal significance, this system recorded the identity it produced in such a way that it could easily be retrieved; thus Bertillon created an identity that adhered to the conditions of bureaucratic objectivity. The description on the card derived its logic from what Bertillon saw as the needs of identification—information arranged systematically and according to relevance. It was common for a description of the face to begin with hair and end with the beard to recreate how they appeared in “natural” facial order to facilitate easier identification. However, Bertillon recorded hair and beard next to each other, following the logic that they belonged to the same group of physical characteristics. He also ordered the information on the card so that it began with the features he considered most relevant to identification (forehead, nose, and ear).
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In this manner Bertillon hoped to produce an identity that could more easily be retrieved from the large volume of records modern states had begun to compile.

The purported accuracy of Bertillonage came from not only the information that was prioritized—anatomically “factual” evidence—and how it was recorded, but also most importantly how the resulting cards were filed. This system could only be used to identify someone successfully if the card could subsequently be found; the lack of a successful system of classification had limited the usefulness of photography as an identification technology. Bertillon created a complex system of filing that began by separating the identification cards by sex. The cards were then arranged into successive subdivisions, each divided into below-average, average, and above-average figures; these categories were defined through statistical studies of prisoners in Paris. The first subdivision was head length. This was then subdivided into head breadth, followed by middle finger length and so on as the classification system made use of measurements recorded on the cards. The resulting
groups were filed into drawers ultimately being arranged by ear length. If done correctly this system could break a collection of over 100,000 cards into groups of no more than a dozen.
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In contrast to Bertillonage (but more faithful to anthropometry), physical appearance read off the surface of the body could also be used in attempting to identify the behavioral and character traits of a particular social group. This specific understanding of the exterior of the body developed outside of administrative police work. Criminology and broader medico-legal approaches interpreted the surface of the body in the name of “science”—the former originating in anxieties over the physical and mental degeneration of the European race, the latter in concerns over urban disorder and population growth. In both cases the goal was to isolate a typical set of characteristics. Criminology focused on identities like “the criminal” or “the prostitute” that overwhelmed the individual identity Bertillon sought.
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While this is also in contrast to the individual identity that was the goal of the passport, it does point us in the direction of an identity that could be read off the body. This was an identity that many individuals and officials believed made a document such as the passport redundant.

The faith in the reading of the body was not limited to experts. Outside the police station and the university, a preexisting, everyday amateur reading of appearance provided what many considered a satisfactory way to identify people. By the turn of the twentieth century people in the United States increasingly saw bodies as the surface reflections of interior characteristics.
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The development of this belief can be traced to the popularization of physiognomy and phrenology.
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Physiognomy sought to establish a person’s character through external appearance, particularly the face and profile. More popular in the United States was phrenology, which argued that the personality traits of a person could be derived from the shape of their skull.
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Modernity (in the form of the bustling, overcrowded metropolis of the second half of the nineteenth century) did present a challenge to the belief that people could read identity off bodies, while simultaneously granting new legitimacy to these pseudo sciences. In response to the increased mobility in the nineteenth century “crimes of mobility” emerged based largely on the deceptiveness of appearance, particularly swindles and the work of “confidence men.”
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Cultural historian John Kasson reads such crimes as suggesting to the public “that character was not permanent but malleable, that identity was not coherent but fragmented, and that social appearances were not dependable but subject to the most cynical manipulation.”
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However,
while in this context the value of such signs as evidence of identity may have been questioned, neither they, nor the identity they verified, lost their authority in identification. An explanation for this is offered in the emergence of etiquette and manners books (as well as detective novels). In response to the possibility of deception such books popularized a concern with the need to accurately read appearance from signs by developing specific modes of looking. Their authors sought to simultaneously give readers various techniques of inspection to ascertain the appearance of others and to advise them on how to become anonymous and to disappear safely into the crowd.
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Despite the mutability of the body that such techniques demanded (and that various forms of “passing” also illustrated), faith continued to exist in the subjective observation of the visual as critical evidence for determining identity. The emergence of the rogues’ gallery in the second half of the nineteenth century provided another forum in which people were encouraged to think of looking at the body as an important form of detection. These galleries were rooms, usually in police stations, that displayed wall-mounted photographs of criminals to enable crime victims to identify suspects or police to compare the faces of people in custody to see if they had previously offended (possibly under different names). However, they quickly became viewed as a form of popular entertainment, so popular that the New York City Police Department closed its gallery; New Yorkers could continue to visit a rogues’ gallery at P.T. Barnum’s museum. While the photographs were originally intended to assist in the identification of specific individuals it is fair to suggest that in the context of physiognomy and phrenology the photographs encouraged visitors to view the images as evidence of the existence of a “criminal” type.
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In the absence of voter registration and official documents, the mid-century identification of voters at polling booths drew from this belief in the ability to use social and physical markers to identify other people. In this case individuals did not read the body to determine character or individual identity but to verify race and ethnicity. When race in particular was in dispute, prior to the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing African Americans the right to vote, concerned parties sought evidence from the body of the voter. This generally occurred when a voter had what were seen as ambiguous features. At this time voter eligibility was established by a process involving community members assigned by parties to challenge people as they voted, with a final decision made by an “election judge,” often under the influence of the assembled community. Race was usually determined by employing a checklist of four features through which the community believed the
“presence of black blood and its proportion” could be detected, particularly in a person unknown to them: hair, nose, lips and complexion. Telltale signs of African American identity could be seen in “kinky” hair, “flat” noses, “protruding” lips and a “dark” complexion. A list such as this was developed to try to bring rational order to the potential problem of verifying racial identity. This form of voter identification was used more frequently in urban areas where the size of the precincts produced an anonymity that prevented the assembled public from appealing to communal knowledge to establish an individual’s genealogy. In cities, in the absence of documents, ethnicity was somewhat similarly verified. However, bodily accoutrements such as speech, behavior, and most importantly attire were read as evidence of ethnic identity.
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In a similar manner officials at the U.S. border believed they could read the individual bodies and appearances of new arrivals and identify individuals as members of suspect populations (such as prostitutes or excluded Chinese laborers). An individual’s physical appearance along with his or her general deportment (including clothing) was viewed as providing sufficient evidence of identity to enable that individual to be, if not specifically known, at least trusted (Aldrich) or not (Chinese laborers). In this context the surface of the body was “read” through increasingly complex understandings of race (and class) that drew categories of “inferior” and “superior” from Darwinism, eugenics and physical anthropology.
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Ultimately, this identification of some
body
, not some
one
, produced a useful identity by attaching individuals to a group of behavioral expectations based on their adherence to certain physical types.

The assumed correspondence between physical appearance and an individual’s essential identity, particularly the ways class, gender, and race were articulated to embody privilege or not, offers a parallel history to that of the passport—or more accurately, a framework for understanding why documents were not considered necessary. From this perspective we can return to the “absurdity” of T. H. Aldrich’s passport woes in Russia. Aldrich’s presence, the racialized, classed, and gendered body he presented, was thought by some to make explicit that he was a person who could be trusted, a person whose word (made manifest in his body) should be sufficient to establish identity; he only had to be looked at. In the case of “Americans” like Aldrich, the encoding of class and whiteness as status and privilege was so naturalized as to be practically invisible. Their identity allowed them to do what they wanted and to go where they wanted; it was something that did not need to
be commented on. Within the world of the Aldriches a demand for the verification of identity beyond the “obvious” constituted an affront. In one sense it took away from individuals the control of their identity. The indignation, the occasional awkwardness of anything that associated the passport with “requirements” (in either description or use), challenged the sense of self and rights; it denied the understanding of self-control that most passport bearers used to distinguish “us” from “them.”

To clarify; what someone like Aldrich offered to be “read” was less the body itself and more a body’s social accoutrements. While, in the words of the
Punch
parody, the “normal complexion” of whiteness was important, beyond race the reading of people’s appearance also privileged their social distinction through the way the body was clothed, the way it moved, and the voice that came out of the body. Further within the complex articulation of public and private that constituted decency and deportment, for those with privilege the body itself was off limits, in contrast to “the others” whose bodies revealed their lack of privilege. Thus neither the precise measurements of anthropometry nor its successor, fingerprinting, were considered acceptable ways to establish the identity of “us” as opposed to “them”; nor, it seems, were “abnormal” physical features (such as tattoos and scars) that on other bodies could be used to “verify” identity.
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In the case of the U.S. passport, this appeared to be a very conscious choice, albeit for reasons that are unclear. The paragraph allotted to the physical description on early passports included two lines to describe any distinguishing physical marks or features.
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In the reformatting of the passport at the beginning of the 1820s, the State Department increased the number of physical features listed, but did not provide any space for distinguishing physical marks or features. There is no record of the rationale for this decision. The use of the body over facial features was perhaps seen as inappropriate—scars and tattoos not on the face would more than likely be hidden under clothing.

The removal of references to bodily “deformities” may have had less to do with people and more to do with the hesitant entrance of the U.S. passport into the world of efficient, standardized, and objective identification documents. It could be that officials presumed that distinctive markings such as tattoos and scars appeared so infrequently on the body of “Americans” that it was unnecessary to allocate space on every passport for the occasional noticeably blemished body. Thus the lack of space to describe physical markings could perhaps be more fully located in the belief that efficiency and standardization were necessary for more useful and reliable identification. In
contrast to the presentation of the physical description in paragraph form, the move to vertically listing specific features implied a conscious effort to produce a document that would be more effectively and efficiently filled in and read. Two blank lines also provided empty space that could be filled at the discretion of the official or the bearer. Such discretion ran counter to the ideal of objectivity to which modern identification was increasingly being held. Objectivity in the form of standardization was in large part used to control the creation of identity by limiting the opportunity for an official’s discretion to influence the creation of a document.