The Passport in America: The History of a Document (20 page)

The explanation for the decision fits into the dominant understanding of citizenship and race in the United States. The specific concern over Asians drove the restrictions on Japanese immigration introduced in the early twentieth century and the passage of the first Chinese Exclusion Act two decades earlier. The deployment of documentation within a racialized conception of citizenship is a useful reminder that while the documentation of individual identity is articulated through claims to objectivity (against the subjective
bias of “local” practices), it is always enacted within a distinct social context with very specific cultural understandings of identity.

By the 1920s the privileging of documents issued by designated officials securely located in the state apparatus was still an emerging ideal. This piecemeal and contested process can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century. Its gradual development was a product of a lack of trust in some citizens (naturalized, and non-”white”) but not all (native born) citizens, and the inconsistent documentation of important facts such as birth in the United States. The development of application procedures was an attempt by the state to control an individual’s claim to be a citizen. This involved not only the authority to issue documents, but also establishing who had the authority to verify identification in the absence of documents. The developing faith in documentation could still be trumped by undocumented leaps of faith. In the same correspondence from 1888 when Secretary of State Baynard stated the necessity for a naturalization certificate, he allowed a passport to be issued to a naturalized citizen in the absence of any supporting documents on the grounds that “the personal knowledge of a minister of the United States necessarily obviates the necessity of more formal proof.”
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The fact that the U.S. representative in Paris knew the applicant rendered not only a naturalization certificate unnecessary but also the alternative evidence of an affidavit allowed in exceptional circumstances.
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The possibility for a personal relationship between a citizen and the state harkens back to the identification practice that the increased scale of social interactions had made unreliable. Therefore, at the periphery of the state, where the state (such as it was) interacted regularly with a small number of citizens, the possibility for reliable official identification without documents could exist. However, the issuance of a passport in the absence of supporting documents was the privilege of the state. Donald McKenzie’s frustration with his mother’s passport application arose from his belief in the reliability of a relationship of identity and identification based on a trust in self-identification, reputation, and local knowledge. In this situation the State Department did not share this belief. McKenzie’s mother was not “known” to the state either through the documents it produced or the personal knowledge of one of its trusted senior officials.

A 1906 law digest included Baynard’s decision to issue a passport on the word of the U.S. minister, implying it was still an extent precedent; it was not in an abridged section on evidence of citizenship in the subsequent digest, published in 1942.
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After World War 1 the emerging rationale was that the state could only accurately “know” people through documents. If no documents existed to verify birth prior to a passport application, the application process had to create them; the verification of identity required a more visible documentary trace than what had been acceptable in the nineteenth century. However, the absence of prioritized documents could not be resolved by the mere translation of individual statements onto paper. The conditions in which documents were created had became critical to their reliability, especially who produced them.

7
Bureaucracy

Who actually read passport applications in the State Department? Which officials were responsible for issuing passports? Over the course of the nineteenth century the answer to these questions changed, as State Department staff increased in size and adopted administrative practices that can be recognized as bureaucratic. These changes were typical for government departments in this period. However, their consequences for the passport were significant. The standardization of the personal name, signature, physical description, photograph, application, and appearance of the passport can all be viewed as a consequence of the broader development of bureaucracy. The changing designations of the clerks and officials responsible for the passport further illustrate how a developing bureaucracy was utilized in an attempt to improve the processing of the document.
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Before 1806, it appears that the chief clerk issued passports. In 1818 an executive order was issued that specifically stated the duties and salaries of a number of clerks. The production of all credentials and certificates, including the few hundred passports issued annually now became the responsibility of a junior clerk. Bureaus and divisions were established in 1833 in response to an increase in the number of clerks in the State Department to a dozen. In this structure, the Translating and Miscellaneous Bureau initially issued passports, before the Home Bureau took responsibility for what in the 1830s was an annual average of close to a thousand passports. By the 1840s seven clerks worked in the Home Bureau, with three clerks allocated to a collection of tasks that included responsibility for passports; in 1857 there were twenty-eight
officials and clerks in the department, including the secretary of state. As a result of a major overhaul, a Passport Bureau was created in 1870, only to be eliminated three years later as a result of budget cuts; in 1873 the passport clerks were transferred to the Bureau of Archives and Indexes. Over the next two decades the number of clerks in the State Department continued to increase. In 1889 there were forty-eight clerks (including eleven women) in a staff of eighty-one; less than a decade later clerks comprised sixty-six of the eighty-six State Department employees. The same bureau continued to issue passports until 1898, when the passport clerks were moved to the Bureau of Accounts when it became responsible for collecting passport fees. In 1902, with the State Department receiving over ten thousand applications annually the issuance of passports became the responsibility of a separate bureau with multiple staff members. In the following decades this bureau had various names, reflecting the changing status and role of the passport, which subsequent chapters will address—the Passport Bureau (1902–7), Bureau of Citizenship (1907–17), Division of Passport Control (1917–25), and Passport Division (1926–52).

The changes in the administration of passports seemingly occurred in response to the volume not only of passport applications but of the work of the State Department in general; in 1909 the department employed 135 clerks.
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These administrative developments manifest not only a belief in bureaucracy but also an increasing faith in rationalization. While bureaucracy increases control by improving the capability to process information, rationalization increases control through decreasing the amount of information to be processed.
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The dependence on standardized documents, along with the policing of the personal name, signature, physical description, and photograph, are all ways in which the passport was altered to produce a more rational identity. In this manner the reliability of identification that came to depend on a belief in the objectivity and neutrality of bureaucratic procedures over the subjectivity and discretion of individual action was directed not only at applicants but also officials. Bureaucratic rationality was the logic that, consciously or not, drove the transformation of the passport into a modern identification document. The reliability that came to be associated with the documentation of identity derived from the increasingly pervasive belief that bureaucratic objectivity produced useful knowledge on a scale large enough for effective government in a NineteenthCentury nation-state.
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More than as a context for understanding the development of the modern documentation of identity, bureaucracy needs to be understood
as being as important to the passport as the signature or the photograph. Bureaucracy in this argument is not a neutral mechanism for representing identity; it is an active process that affects the form and nature of the identity verified by the passport. This new form of identity made it possible for people to think that it could in fact be documented accurately. While attempts were made to standardize identification techniques to assist in the verification of identity, bureaucratic rationality was equally important in the rethinking of identity as the collection of information, if not more so. Standardized application forms and supporting documents turned it into a problem centered on the collection, classification, and circulation of information—the archival problematization of identity that remains critical to the documentation of everyday life into the twenty-first century. Therefore, a fuller appreciation of the novelty of the assumption that identity could be documented requires locating the passport within the equally novel and contested introduction and implementation of bureaucracy in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Bureaucracies of some sort had existed in a variety of forms in the West from at least Roman times, but they lacked the distinct structures and specialization of tasks that came to characterize the modern form of bureaucracy that emerged to organize and administer commerce and government in the era of industrialization.
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The reorganization of the State Department into bureaus in the 1830s is an example of how a more modern bureaucratic practice began to appear in the federal government. The move in little over a decade from a junior clerk with multiple responsibilities to different bureaus signaled an attempt to create a more clearly defined administrative structure to process information. Previously, the creation of documents was arranged around the act of writing, but with the introduction of bureaus the content of documents became the formal organizing principle that determined which clerk prepared a document.
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This was a response to the increasing size of government and with it the number of documents produced. However, while the federal government increased in size in the early decades of the nineteenth century in 1831 only 665 civilians ran all three branches of government in the nation’s capital. The dramatic increase in size occurred throughout the rest of the century. By the 1880s there were approximately thirteen thousand civilian employees, and twice that number
a decade later, although a majority of those worked outside of the capital in the postal service.
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By this point the growth of government offices had prompted experimentation with more bureaucratic methods of administration and evaluation. The cabinet-level agencies, previously divided into bureaus, were subdivided into divisions devoted solely to functional duties. The technical, legal, and administrative duties once performed by clerks were often transferred to bureau “chiefs” or “assistant secretaries.”
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Within this structure were a large number of clerks, members of the new middle class who were brought in to handle the increasing amount of paper the burgeoning bureaucracy produced.
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Despite these changes in organization and structure, according to U.S. historian Cindy Sondik Aron, for much of the nineteenth century, government offices continued to operate “in ways that were more reminiscent of small, informal, and even family-run businesses.” This was arguably the result of the shared class background of supervisors and clerks, and the patronage system that provided the majority of the workers.
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The reform of civil service through the introduction of a merit system in the 1880s was intended to make the labor of governing more efficient. However, a few years after the passage of this reform, work within departments and bureaus remained sufficiently fluid that the majority of those in charge could not tell a select committee exactly what duties each worker performed.
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