The Passport in America: The History of a Document (33 page)

In response, Victor Metcalf, the secretary of commerce and labor, justified the continued nonacceptance of U.S. passports on the grounds that the document merely offered prima facie evidence of citizenship, and had no legal authority at the U.S. border. He contended that the only legal outline of a U.S. passport’s function, the 1835 Supreme Court case, not only declared it prima facie evidence of citizenship, but also indicated that a passport granted a status to a traveler
abroad
as an act of courtesy. Metcalf used this case to argue that passports were accepted out of convention, not law, and, further, that no legislation indicated that the U.S. passport had any role at
home
, along the U.S. border.
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In the case of Chinese arrivals, Bureau of Immigration officials specifically doubted the authenticity of U.S. passports, reiterating the belief that Chinese possessed an inherent disposition to dishonest behavior. Therefore, along with the removal of the notation, immigration officials explained their refusal to accept passports as proof of citizenship from Chinese on the grounds that they “contain no certain means of identification and are easily transferred from hand to hand.”
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Consequently, Chinese who claimed exemption through U.S. citizenship had to show signs of “Americanness” that were obvious to immigration officials: the ability to speak English, the extent to which they behaved and dressed “like Americans,” and their knowledge of U.S. history.
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Despite the State Department’s identification of the passport as a certificate of citizenship, the passport’s uncertain legal status continued to provide grounds for U.S. officials to ignore it. A second example of this occurred at Ellis Island when, in his ongoing campaign to tighten up inspection, William Williams required steamship companies to manifest citizens; steamship officials were instructed to list individuals as citizens only if they had no doubt about their citizenship. The decision to introduce additional manifests for citizens was an attempt to ensure that the underresourced Bureau of Immigration maximized all possible funding sources; in this case, the head tax from aliens, with the logic being that the need to prove citizenship would result in the identification of more aliens. Williams outlined to steamship officials and immigration inspectors ways they could eradicate any doubt about citizenship through a combination of visual and oral evidence and, if necessary, documents. The division between native-born and naturalized citizens
determined the weight given to the possible forms of evidence an individual could offer to prove their citizenship. Significantly (but not surprisingly), in neither case did Williams consider a U.S. passport primary evidence of a claim to citizenship. Immigration officials on the east coast followed their colleagues on the west coast and considered passports apparently little more than travel documents.

Williams assumed that the status of native-born citizens could be easily and effectively verified through appearance. Because they would “obviously” look like citizens, he merely requested that native-born citizens “state with accuracy their place of birth” as evidence of citizenship beyond their appearance. On the rare occasion when this visual and oral evidence failed to convince inspectors, they (or, later, a review board) were encouraged to seek evidence from documents and the corroboration of waiting relatives. In this scenario the passport did appear as one such document, but on equal footing with documents such as birth certificates and baptismal certificates that were intended to record an event, not document an identity.
⁷⁹

The concern about the enforcement of citizen manifests centered on naturalized citizens. In contrast to citizens born in the United States, officials assumed that many if not all naturalized citizens would not look or sound “American,” hence the demand for documents as primary proof of citizenship. Within the increasingly problematic association of citizenship and whiteness, the beginnings of a practical need for documents appeared, and with it a disposition to look more favorably on documentary proof of identity. However, because officials wanted verification of citizenship as a legal category, the passport was not given a primary role. Immigration officials requested naturalization certificates, as they were the official legal documentation of naturalization, although they were not issued with a physical description or photograph to link the certificate to a specific person. In contrast, while the passport contained numerous aids to connect it to a particular person, it remained only prima facie evidence of citizenship, which immigration officials continued to believe the State Department issued on the basis of “superficial investigation.”
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The limited utility of U.S. passports at the border highlights that a documentary regime of verification, such as it existed in the first decade of the twentieth century, did so in a very particular context, limited to specific documents. At this time identification documents existed within practices of verification determined by logical and historical contingencies in which the general authority of documents to determine identity was not trusted.
This distrust occurred both as a product of the dispute over which executive departments could control entry at the U.S. border, and because of the status of passports as “documents.” Two practices that the State and Labor Departments introduced in this period hint at an environment in which identification documents could be made a trustworthy and useful tool for securing the border.

After the 1905 dispute with the Department of Labor and Commerce over U.S. passports, the State Department attempted to counter the assumed dishonesty of Chinese, and thus to increase the authority of its passports when presented by Chinese. When Chinese applied for passports, they were required to send the name of their return port and two photographs with their applications. However, if they were issued a passport, neither photograph would be attached to it. One photograph was included in the application file held by the State Department, and the second photograph was sent to immigration officials at the port of reentry. As a result, the State Department argued, “the means of identification would be in the hands of the officer at the return port.”
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In this manner the two departments added an element of trust to the practice of documentation, but one that did not dispel the disbelief that a document alone could identify an individual. The authority of the second photograph to verify identity came from its separation from the document; the photograph was not in the “quick hands” of the bearer. Locating a photograph in the files of executive departments to be retrieved by the steady hand of an official guaranteed that it could be reliably used to link the document to the bearer; such reliability was not considered possible if the photograph was attached to the passport, where it could easily be substituted. The separation of photograph and document helped establish a relationship between the bearer and the passport without enhancing the status of the passport as a document that verified either an individual’s personal or official identity. The Bureau of Immigration continued to report that their own investigations had revealed that in “several cases” since 1905, Chinese bearers of U.S. passports were not actual citizens, confirming its belief that passports were issued on negligible evidence of citizenship.
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In contrast, the bureau had sufficient trust in documents it issued, in 1908 reintroducng a return certificate, complete with a photograph, albeit as an optional document.
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The placing of photographs on file and the thorough investigation of applicants indicated conditions through which identification documents could be trusted in practice to assist in securing the border—trust in the
authorities who issued them, and a faith in bureaucratic procedure to ensure the verification of identity. In the absence of these conditions, identification documents were seen to be evidence only of opinions not objective facts. In this instance, to create reliable “facts,” the production of the documents had to be located in bureau offices where supporting documents were filed. Documents in the hands of the immigrant could not secure identity as authoritatively as those in a filing cabinet.

However, the practical application of documentary authority through the objectivity of archival memory was not pervasive; many departments and officials still thought it unnecessary, if not impractical. In contrast to the systems being developed to administer Chinese exclusion, the bureaucratic infrastructure at Ellis Island and other ports of entry remained in a very embryonic state. This prevented much of the potential for information collected within the inspection process from becoming an effective part of the memory of the state. The practices of collection, classification, and circulation critical to the construction of an effective state memory of identifications was of low priority in administering a border with few resources. Only in a hesitant and lazy way did the inspection of general immigrants seek to capture and fix immigrants in a mass of documents. Immigrant identity remained transitory; the limited documentation accumulated at Ellis Island during an immigrant’s arrival was intended to assess an individual’s suitability for entry to the country, not to follow them into the United States as the basis of their identity as aliens, declarants, or naturalized citizens. Although manifests were kept, they were rarely consulted when aliens who sought naturalization required certification of their arrival date; instead, documents were issued on the word of the immigrant.

The gradual recognition that identification practices associated with immigrants could provide information for later use only occurred in the more traditional context of identifying criminals—in this case, plans to more accurately identify those who might attempt to return to the United States following deportation. However, these plans would have affected all immigrants. In the decade before World War I, immigration officials at Ellis Island investigated the possibility of photographing or fingerprinting arriving immigrants so their identities could be sent to police officials for verification.
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These records would be consulted away from the border, and therefore could only alert authorities to the presence of alien criminals in the country; they could not prevent their admission. In contrast, retired rear admiral Casper F. Goodrich (who helped establish the Naval War College and the U.S. Naval
Institute) advocated branding the shoulder or tattooing the inside upper arm of convicted alien criminals with the letter U (for Undesirable). He argued that this identification practice, “hallowed by the gentle ranchman’s practice on his beloved calves and ponies,” provided a more efficient way to ensure that, once convicted and deported, an alien would be easily identified and excluded by immigration inspectors at the border.
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Goodrich appears to have been a lone voice. However, his critique of documentation was answered a year after he announced his proposal; in 1913 162 aliens were excluded after a comparison between names on manifests and a confidential list of inadmissible aliens.
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However, the extreme suggestion of branding is a reminder that documentary identification was still not positioned as an effective mode of state control. The body “documented” identity such that information was always co-present with the appearance of a person. A branded alien was easily visible to the state at a specific moment of direct control. The emergence of a large-scale state archive of identity could only offer a more indirect form of state control through which an individual was made permanently visible to the government through presence in a file. This external identity needed a complex documentary regime of verification to have any claim to reliably articulate a person to the archive. If such a system functioned, the state could always locate knowledge of the individual, if not always physically locate the individual. The sudden need to have information about individuals following the outbreak of World War I redefined border security away from an exclusive focus on the admittance of productive workers toward the collection of information on individuals. In this new environment, identification documents could offer a practicable solution to the problem of border security.

10
Reading Bodies, Reading Documents, and “Passport Control”

In October 1915 the
New York Sun
ran a short article about William K. Vanderbilt, at the time considered the head of the Vanderbilt family. The article did not mention anything about his business dealings; rather, it reported on his application for a passport at a federal courthouse under the headline “W. K. Vanderbilt Tries to Identify Himself.” The article both expressed curiosity at the novelty of a passport application and also educated the public on what to expect. Readers were informed that

“Mr. Vanderbilt after telling of his intention to go abroad had to describe the color of his hair and the shape of his nose, chin and forehead. Then Mr. Vanderbilt had to stand in front of… [the] desk and swear that while on his travels he would defend the Constitution of the U.S. whenever the occasion arose. He also had to furnish a photograph which was pasted on the application for the passport and stamped with the Federal seal in accordance with the Department’s plan for preventing aliens from getting passports fraudulently. Mr. Vanderbilt’s application… will be sent to Washington and examined carefully by an employee of the State Department.”
¹

The main point of the story seemed to be that, with the war in Europe a little over one year old, new passport rules were apparently not being waived even
for someone like Vanderbilt; by the end of World War I, Woodrow Wilson needed a passport to travel to Versailles—the
Sun
made this front page news, with the claim he was the first president to be issued a passport.
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The limited role of the passport at U.S. borders had changed. Now articulated to national security, the passport had an important role at the border, both in the minds of government officials and also in the popular imagination. The
New York Sun
’s attention to the passport was typical of newspapers and magazines, which regularly ran articles on the passport during the war. These ranged from brief State Department announcements of new requirements to lengthy feature articles, usually on either the history of the passport or the attempts of German agents to use U.S. passports. As the chief of the Bureau of Citizenship noted in a memo written at the end of 1914, “Passports were not taken very seriously, but now they have assumed an importance which they never had before.”
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