The Passport in America: The History of a Document (34 page)

This new importance took the form of wartime “passport control.” It manifested itself in two ways: an attempt to have all people who entered and left the United States present a passport, and, as the Vanderbilt article indicates, the introduction and enforcement of new application requirements. Through “passport control” the document became associated with a new regime of international travel and bureaucracy in which the passport was recognized more as a border document and less as the travel letter of the nineteenth century. Significantly, the passport’s new role as a modern identification document did not disappear after the war. However, in the absence of suspected German agents, but with the purported presence of thousands of “aliens” trying to enter the United States illegally, new, more direct forms of border control soon joined the passport. The development of a border patrol after the war captured the public imagination as the symbol of a new approach to border security and of the new focus on the land border, not seaports. But, that being said, the passport continued to have a far more significant role at the border than at any time prior to 1914. The claimed success of the documentary surveillance of borders during the war gave identification documents legitimacy in the postwar administration of immigration. The passport grew in importance as the acquisition of knowledge about individuals became fundamental to an official understanding of national security and border control. The state had to know and remember everyone who crossed its borders. Documents did not replace the body as an important source of information; however, a document like the passport was read to provide information that could not easily be seen on a body, but
which was now considered necessary to the enforcement of border security. After 1921, annual quotas limited immigration based on nationality. Therefore, the state had to identify an individual’s nationality and know that he or she had been counted and accepted within their nation’s annual quota. The identity of “immigrant” (and “alien”) became the product of administrative facts, not simply the outcome of an official’s glance. While the nationality quotas enforced a specific racial hierarchy, in practical terms the articulation of race through nationality privileged an identity that needed to be verified through documents.
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Initial attempts at passport control came in the form of State Department proclamations and executive orders per the act of 1856. In November 1914 the State Department released an announcement stating that all citizens going abroad “should” carry passports. A year later President Wilson issued an executive order to the same effect, stating that the regulations of European countries made passports a necessity, though the order did not require aliens or citizens to have passports to enter and leave the United States.
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The lack of a requirement for citizens to carry passports continued to be a concern for State Department officials, especially those responsible for passports in the Bureau of Citizenship.
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However, although no law existed requiring U.S. citizens to have a passport to leave the country, federal officials pressured steamship companies to refuse to carry passengers without passports on the grounds that European nations required them.
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Newspapers also fostered the belief that a passport was needed, as they continued to publish ambiguous statements that implied it was required to leave the country.
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Despite regular announcements to this effect, in the middle of 1915 citizens were still “shocked to learn” of these “requirements.”
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In June 1917, two months after the United States entered World War I, the secretary of commerce sent a letter to all steamship lines to “formally request” that they not accept passengers without passports examined and approved by customs officials.
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Therefore, as the chief of the Bureau of Citizenship commented, “in a very informal and haphazard way,” the executive required passports of all people leaving the United States during the war; or, in the words of one approving congressman, the federal government effectively required passports by “stretching the law and stretching its own regulations to meet the situation.”
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The first attempt to legally control the entry of aliens to the United States came in a joint order of July 26, 1917, issued by the State and Labor Departments. This required that all aliens who intended to enter U.S. territory have a visa issued by a U.S. consul. At the end of 1917, despite the precedent of passport requirements during the Civil War, the attorney general ruled that the executive did not have authority to control the departure of aliens, nor the departure and entry of U.S. citizens.
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While the attorney general offered the possibility of issuing certificates to U.S. citizens, the State Department wanted the U.S. passport to remain the only certificate of citizenship issued by the executive. Secretary of State Robert Lansing argued, “I can not with propriety or out of regard to the proper conduct of international relations sanction any plan which would tend to minimize the importance and significance and value of the American passport. On the contrary I believe that every effort should be made to enhance its dignity and integrity amongst nations.”
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As a result Congress passed the Passport Control Act of May 22, 1918, which delegated to the president the power in wartime to control the travel of citizens and others to and from the United States, and the authority to give executive departments the power to enforce it. In congressional hearings for this bill, executive officials argued that, while steamship companies had cooperated in controlling arrivals and departures at ports, the government needed more authority to enforce passport requirements on the land borders, particularly with Mexico, “where most of our trouble has come.”
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With the war in Europe in its last days, President Wilson proclaimed rules and regulations in an executive order on August 8, 1918, governing departure and entry into the United States. This gave legal backing to the visa system, passport requirements, and the restriction on the issuance of passports unless in proven cases of need; it also made legal the use of departure permits for aliens.

The prime object of passport and visa requirements was to “control the transmission of information in and out of the country.”
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This was how State Department officials explained the rationale behind the need for passports to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs during hearings for the Passport Control bill. One official stated that since the beginning of the war

one of the very perplexing questions has been how best to control travel into and outside of the United States for the purpose of preventing persons who are spies or enemy agents from coming into the United States and doing damage, and also persons from going out, and carrying with them, perhaps, data or information or in some other way seeking to injure the United States.
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Officials believed this question could best be answered through a system of required documents anchored by the passport. The requirement for noncitizens to have a departure permit, introduced shortly after the United States declared war in 1917, had been suggested as a way to even more successfully control the flow of information. It not only promised to provide the U.S. government with information on departing aliens, but also, if not to prevent, at least to delay the departure of possibly valuable information from the United States.
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Similarly rigorous enforcement of more comprehensive passport applications allowed officials to know the travel plans and purposes of its citizens, and to track their movement through requiring them to renew passports more frequently. Outside of the country it was suggested that officials could use the requirement for a visa to bar the entry of a German even if there was incomplete proof that “he is dangerous as a means of communication from Germany.”
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Passports and visas not only controlled the flow of information by stopping the movement of “knowledgeable” bodies, they also facilitated governing over distance by making knowledge mobile; the passport contained information for officials to read. Once acquired, this knowledge could be assembled in the war effort, to be made available to government representatives, whether they were at the nation’s capital, its borders, or its diplomatic and consular outposts. However, security could only be guaranteed over distance if knowledge acquired throughout the governing apparatus could be successfully coordinated and transmitted. In contrast to prewar levels of bureaucracy, wartime administrations attempted to develop elaborate schemes for the classification and coordination of information that illustrated the possibilities documentary surveillance offered for governing over distance. Newspaper reports on the apprehension of suspects and the confiscation of passports abroad supported the idea that the improved circulation of information in the form of documents was making the United States safer.
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If this occurred, it was because during the war, the information diplomats, consuls, and military officers gained from interviewing visa applicants abroad became suspect lists that could be distributed throughout the government, in contrast to the prewar period when, in the words of one official, “there was no suspect list… other than in the brain of the minister himself.”
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However, while the usefulness of identification documents became apparent, suspect lists had to be compiled, information had to be collated, evidence requirements had to be enforced, and, critically, government departments and agencies had to cooperate. The new conception of a passport within a broader documentary regime of verification still had to be accommodated to ongoing problems of authority and coordination and contradictory policies in governing practices both within and outside the United States. The extent to which initiatives around passport control were actually put into practice is unclear. Although passport control was premised on a faith in documentary surveillance, only in March 1918 did government officials float a proposal that customs officers who examined and stamped the passports of aliens and citizens as they left the United States should use this requirement to compile a record of people leaving the country. On the suggestion of the chief of military intelligence, Secretary of State Lansing requested that this record of names, passport numbers, nationalities, and destinations could then be forwarded to representatives of military and naval intelligence.
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Any attempts to institute the intensive surveillance of the arrival and departure of citizens and aliens depended on the cooperation of various federal departments. Policing the arrival and departure of aliens involved the following departments: the Department of Labor, which administered the laws governing the immigration of aliens; the Treasury Department, which supervised customs officials who examined the passports of people who left the United States; the Department of Commerce, which controlled the clearance of ships carrying passengers from ports; the Department of State, charged with the conduct of foreign affairs, which received daily information from its agents abroad about the activities of hostile aliens who should not be allowed into the country; the Department of Justice, which prosecuted aliens who violated U.S. laws, and which through its Bureau of Investigation gathered information on enemy agents in the United States; and the Departments of War and Navy, which were directly charged with conduct of war, and hence the safeguarding of ships and troops against the machinations of enemy agents. Therefore, despite public statements celebrating the success of passport control, it is fair to say that a tradition of independence amongst these departments undercut its effectiveness. For example, the inspection of documents at U.S. ports continued to be a problem. After a visit to New York, Richard Flournoy, who as chief of the Bureau of Citizenship was in charge of issuing passports, noted that the requirement that customs officials check the passports of U.S. citizens against duplicate applications as they boarded ships
was not being followed—no one had established a system to get copies of the applications to the office of the customs collector. Flournoy wrote to his superior, the secretary of state, complaining, “Under the present system, or lack of system, each office in any way interested in this work seems to expect the responsibility to be carried somewhere else.”
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Although he believed that officers at the ports looked to the State Department for direction, the constantly forthcoming guidance from the department was often unwelcome, and frequently ill-informed. A State Department request that customs officers closely scrutinize any passports issued out of Germany revealed the legal problems involved in the enforcement of passport control. Interdepartmental turf wars prevented the “stretching” of the law utilized in other situations with nongovernment agencies such as steamship companies. The secretary of the treasury informed the secretary of state that customs officials could only detain people for customs violations, and similarly, that his officials had no authority to turn anyone over to immigration officials. He did suggest that, on the approval of the secretary of labor, he would instruct customs officials to immediately report any suspicions to immigration authorities.
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Customs officials did begin to control foreign travel under the 1917 Espionage Act, and soon assembled a staff of five hundred to handle the work. However, after the Passport Control Act gave legal authority to wartime border control practices, the State Department issued a supplemental order that divided control of foreign travel between immigration and customs officials—but without consulting customs officials.