The Passport in America: The History of a Document (29 page)

The comments from the U.S. ambassador to France came in response to a survey initiated by a commission established to report on citizenship, expatriation, and protection abroad; the report of this commission was intended to help the drafting of what would become the 1907 “Act in Reference to the Expatriation of Citizens and their Protection Abroad.”
¹¹⁹
The authors of the commission report (three men affiliated with the State Department including Galliard Hunt) recommended that Congress use the general principles the State Department had utilized to determine expatriation since 1873.
Following this recommendation, the 1907 act finally defined the actions that led to a presumption of expatriation and to the overcoming of expatriation albeit three decades after Secretary of State Fish’s request. The commission report also argued the passport should be “returned to its original purpose to provide free and safe passage through foreign territory on a temporary sojourn abroad.”
¹²⁰
Acting on this recommendation a system of registration for citizens living abroad was introduced to avoid such citizens using the passport as a document to certify citizenship. The department “invited” U.S. citizens living abroad to register with diplomatic or consular officials, whereupon they would be given a certificate of registration. This certificate, issued on the same rules of evidence the department had used for the passport, would then serve as evidence of their citizenship. Although such certification remained optional, diplomatic and consular officials were instructed to read a refusal of the “invitation” to register as a presumption of expatriation. The introduction of this alternative certificate of citizenship as an attempt to make the passport a temporary travel document did result in the certificate of registration being used illegally as a travel document, as a second-tier passport.
¹²¹
Despite such attempts, the passport remained the most prominent certificate of citizenship issued by the U.S. government in the eyes of many officials and members of the public. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, citizenship was no longer a critical source of problems for the development of the passport as an identification document. The passport continued to be important in debates about citizenship, but, unlike in the second half of the nineteenth century, these debates did not create problems for the documentary verification of identity. While there were debates in the early twentieth century over the citizenship of women and residents of “insular possessions” such as Puerto Rico, these did not significantly affect the development of the practices necessary for the passport to be accepted as a reliable identification document.

9
Suspicious People and Untrustworthy Documents

Although in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the State Department sought to establish the U.S. passport abroad as a certificate of citizenship, passports had no official use along the borders of the United States in this period. Regulations at these borders included some restrictions on the entrance of goods, but allowed freedom of movement for most individuals; until the 1870s individual states were responsible for regulating the arrival and departure of people along the national border.
¹
After the federal government took control of U.S. borders, customs officials (and later immigration officials) did not perceive the passport as a useful border document, or, in fact, as a border document at all. For these officials, the U.S. passport, even as a certificate of citizenship, retained its primary purpose as a travel document. The passport was a document of courtesy to enable citizens to elicit assistance from officials within the borders of the countries visited in their travels.

When entry was policed at the border, it tended to be through the reading of bodies and personal appearances, not the reading of documents. The body was held to provide something close to absolute evidence of an individual’s true identity. The essentializing properties associated with appearance (and clothing) solved the problem of identification at U.S. borders by allowing officials to identify a person as a member of an excluded group. After the Supreme Court ruled in 1875 that individual states did not have the authority to regulate immigration, Congress began to restrict the entry
of certain groups. In 1882 Congress passed legislation excluding Chinese laborers. That same year it also passed an immigration act that excluded the entry of “idiots,” “lunatics,” convicts, and people unable to look after themselves who were likely to become “public charges”; the 1891 Immigration Act added polygamists, persons convicted of crimes of “moral turpitude” (prostitutes), and those suffering from loathsome or contagious diseases to the list of those excluded.
²
In the absence of a regular need to identify and know a particular individual, the body could provide the general evidence needed to secure the border; without any required documents officials did not use knowledge of immigrants’ past behavior to assess entry nor did they use documents to collect information to increase knowledge to assist in governing the population and society.

The assumption that the body provided easily accessible evidence of identity was popularly accepted, with occasional corroboration from scientific and medical expertise. The authority of science was useful when it supported the belief that citizenship as a racial identity could be confirmed by not much more than a fleeting look.
³
However, in the early decades of the twentieth century, when leading anthropologists began to label Syrians and Asian Indians as “Caucasian,” the legal evidence for whiteness as a criteria for naturalization was explicitly articulated through what a Supreme Court ruling labeled “common knowledge.” The Court made this comment in a 1923 decision that, legal and political historian Mae Ngai argues, seemingly ended a struggle “to reconcile race as a popular concept, as scientific classification, and as judicial and congressional precedent.”
⁴
Rejecting the scientific manipulation of “Caucasian,” the Court stated,

It may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them to-day…. We venture to think that the average well-informed white American would learn with some degree of astonishment that the race to which he belongs is made up of such heterogeneous elements.
⁵

The dismissal of origin, of the not–immediately visible “dim reaches of antiquity,” underscored that racial identity was something that could only
be accurately verified by presence in the present. Recognizing racial identity by looking at the person in question championed the authority of the average man over that of science.

At the border the average men who read not only racial identity but also morality and criminality were initially officials from the customs service, who maintained a significant degree of local autonomy. After 1891 they came from the Bureau of Immigration, which the federal government created to implement its authority to police the U.S. border. Initially located within the Treasury Department, and subsequently in the Department of Commerce and Labor, the Bureau argued that effective exclusionary work needed a broad policy that allowed for problems (anticipated or not) to be dealt with quickly and efficiently. Efficiency thus required the uncontested authority of officials on the spot.
⁶
By the turn of the twentieth century, in the name of efficiency, men of science joined these average men. Unlike anthropologists who provided “evidence” that Asian Indians were Caucasian and therefore eligible to become citizens, doctors from the Public Health Service (PHS) provided expertise that supported the administration of immigration according to the categories constructed by immigration law. They were employed to read the body not for a racial identity but for signs of disease; in practice these were not necessarily distinct, as health authorities tended to work with the belief that disease was both foreign and nonwhite.
⁷
The percentage of immigrants denied entry for health reasons increased from 2% of those denied entry in 1898 to over 50% by 1913—but throughout this period the overall rate of exclusion hovered around 1% of all immigrants.
⁸
Although doctors brought expert eyes to the body to enforce the exclusion of those with loathsome or contagious diseases, disease had become a useful way to police the “public charge” category of exclusion; people could be excluded if it was believed their health would prevent them from working, thus making their support the responsibility of the state. In reading the body at immigration stations, inspectors and doctors frequently came to privilege what medical historian Amy Fairchild labels “industrial citizenship” in determining admission. In their inspections PHS doctors were in effect asking “Are you capable of working?” rather than “Do you have a contagious disease representing a threat to the health of the nation?”
⁹

Illness and physical deformity fit into the dominant enforcement practices used at the border, as they were considered to be visibly obvious.
¹⁰
A commissioner general of immigration declared in 1902, while “vice may come in the cabin or the steerage, in rags or fine raiment, and escape
detection,… diseases… proclaim their presence and are their own detectors.”
¹¹
However, inclusion of the eye disease trachoma as one of only two “contagious diseases” leading to deportation required a different form of visual verification. It was a disease whose diagnosis needed an examination of the eyelid by experts; this was not a “truth” that clearly proclaimed itself upon a cursory glance. The identification of trachoma employed a scientific method in which a doctor’s expertise was used to define health and disease, not simply to cure what others could see. It also fit into the expectation of which national bodies were most likely to bring disease to the United States, and more generally, those bodies that were thought to pose a threat to the nation. In a 1912 article from
Popular Science
, an Ellis Island doctor made clear that that trachoma was mostly found in “Russians, Austrians and Italians, although it is of common occurrence in Oriental and Mediterranean countries. It causes a large percentage of the blindness in Syria and Egypt.”
¹²
These groups were important constituents of the undesirable “new immigrants” who came to be policed by the immigration quotas introduced in the 1920s, quotas that represented a complex and contradictory redefinition of whiteness different from that used in debates about naturalization.
¹³

Identification documents had no significant role in the assessment of people under immigration law. However, it is precisely this absence that makes a more detailed analysis of turn-of-the-century immigration enforcement critical to understanding the emergence of the documentation of individual identity. In a space where documents have come to play a critical role, their nonappearance provides examples of the identity and identification practices that made a document such as the passport unnecessary in this period. Outside of immigration law, though, documents did have a role in the enforcement of Chinese-exclusion laws. However, these documents were used in an environment in which they both challenged and were challenged by the assumption that the body and appearance provided a useful way to verify not only racial identities, but categories exempt from exclusion such as “merchant.” The restriction of Chinese laborers came to rely on a reading of both the body and documents creating what Chinese immigration historian Estelle Lau describes as a complicated relationship of “hyper-bureaucratization and hyper-discretion.”
¹⁴
Although in the attempts to control Chinese immigration from the turn of the century, documents started to have increasing authority, their use beyond this marginal and targeted population was not considered necessary, nor, it seems, did techniques of documentation and
bureaucratic skills move easily from this domain to other areas of the federal government.

From 1892, when the federal government opened Ellis Island, officials worked to establish an inspection process to more effectively distribute and organize the immigrants who were arriving in steadily increasing numbers. The authority of these officials had been established three years earlier, when a Supreme Court decision positioned the exclusion of aliens as a sovereign right, rather a right derived from the control of foreign commerce.
¹⁵
This decision, endorsed through subsequent court rulings and federal regulations, was read to effectively deny aliens any claim to due process and therefore to locate absolute sovereign power in border officials. Identification documents did not have any utility or authority within this conceptualization of border control. Not only did they verify an individual identity that was deemed unnecessary, their issuance outside of the Bureau of Immigration was seen as a challenge to the sovereign authority recently granted to federal officials to determine entry at U.S. borders. Of equal importance was the fact that those officials had little faith that documents in any form could identify a person more accurately than the body an immigrant presented to them. Official discretion was recognized as expertise because of the dual sources of the authority granted to presence—this authority derived from the legal understanding of immigration law and from the popular belief in the body and personal appearance as reliable evidence of identity and character. Thus, with tautological certainty, an official’s discretion could be justified through the privileging of an identity that could only be verified through an official who was present at a port of entry.