The Passport in America: The History of a Document (35 page)

The need for cooperation also existed outside of the United States. The 1917 joint order required all aliens to have a visa issued by a U.S. diplomatic or consular official; this was intended to procure information to protect the United States. The visa application, which included basic identification details along with the intention of the visit and destination and contacts in the United States, had to be signed in triplicate at least two weeks prior to departure. The consul was expected to attach a copy to the alien’s passport, send another ahead to immigration and customs officials at the port of entry, and retain the third for the consulate’s records. However, distance and a lack of coordination often resulted in travelers considered suspicious arriving in the United States before consular concerns could be transmitted via the State Department to the appropriate immigration officials.
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Military and naval attachés were to assist consuls in ascertaining the intention and necessity of an alien’s planned visit to the United States. The State Department granted wide discretion to consuls. It only limited their authority through the suggestion that
laborers, students, and businessmen with adequate evidence be granted visas. If a consul refused a visa, he was meant to contact consular officers in all countries through which the unsuccessful applicant could subsequently travel and reapply. This system appeared to function with some success, though on occasion naval attachés believed that, as passport control was a war measure, they should have the final decision on the issuance of a visa, not a consul.
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The reality that a passport was now required for international travel was initially discovered by those U.S. citizens already abroad. The initial weeks of the war witnessed chaos at U.S. consulates in Europe, as U.S. citizens fleeing the continent sought a passport or some other official document to satisfy the demand of steamship companies that all passengers have an officially issued identification document—a process that, according to one newspaper, revealed “a contingent [of U.S. citizens] whose numbers had never been suspected until the flight from war disclosed them.”
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Officials tended to issue passports and certificates on their discretion, not according to the State Department’s rules for determining citizenship; often times the words “American citizen” were crossed out and “American resident” written on the passport.
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These “passports” and so-called consular certificates later caused problems when individuals presented them as proof of citizenship to other consuls, or when foreign officials accepted them as passports certifying citizenship.
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The limited apparatus in place for efficient administrative control also meant the time lag involved in the centralized collection of applications made it difficult to prevent any intentional misuse. The legation in Berlin reported that between late October and late November 1914 one individual had obtained three passports from three different consulates in Germany.
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When the State Department sought to counter such lax practices with more rigorous enforcement of issuance procedures, officials at home and abroad encountered a problem that had already come up in the decades before the war—many “citizens” did not have a document that recorded their birth or naturalization. In the context of a limited documentary culture, the immediate wartime requirement that officials only issue passports on “unquestionable evidence” became (at least at the London embassy), in the absence of birth certificates but the presence of complaints from citizens, “identification by reputable persons,” with the documentary evidence of letters and traveler’s checks being of secondary value.
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However, officials were instructed to apply
“special strictness” to passport and emergency passport applications from persons born in the United States of foreign-born parents. A State Department dispatch asked the U.S. ambassador in Paris to require these people to produce affidavits and evidence that established the cause of their foreign residence, that provided evidence of continuing ties to the United States, and that proved they had indeed chosen to become U.S. citizens.
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Passport applicants encountered these attempts to enforce more rigorous requirements in a Europe in which a passport was required at most borders within the first nine months of the war. Navigating these novel requirements was made all the more difficult by the fact that a uniform passport system did not emerge.
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Travel in France proved particularly bewildering, as officials demanded other documents in addition to a visaed passport. According to newspaper accounts, these difficulties were enhanced by French officials who rigorously sought to compare the facts of the documents to the person who presented them, especially physical descriptions and photographs.
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In Britain the need to carry a passport for travel within parts of that country confounded many of the estimated eleven thousand U.S. citizens who lived there. Many of these were long-term British residents who struggled to comprehend that they could not provide satisfactory evidence of their U.S. citizenship, thus according to one reporter “adding corrugations to the heavily-lined brows of secretaries and clerks” at the embassy in London.
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While some citizens were able to get a passport on appeal, there were many who became known as “twilight-zone Americans”; unable to prove their citizenship (after living abroad for up to thirty years in some cases), they were thus prevented from moving in “restricted areas.”
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In another attempt to more effectively control the issuance of passports outside the United States and, therefore, to manage the movement of its citizens abroad, the State Department issued passports that were valid for only six months, with two renewals allowed. Prior to the war a combination of protocol and practice had historically made the passport valid for one journey or two years. Any citizen already abroad who held a valid passport now had to report to a consul to swear an oath of allegiance and get his (and only occasionally her) passport verified. Verification took the form of the consul writing “Good” on the passport and signing and stamping it. For those citizens who lived too far from a consulate, an oath could be taken before any local official authorized to administer oaths, “provided the signature of the person applying for amendment of his passport is witnessed by at least one other American citizen.”
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On instructions from the State Department, U.S.
customs officials asked returning citizens to surrender any unexpired passports. The Bureau of Citizenship (renamed the Division of Passport Control in 1917) would hold these passports, and citizens who wished to travel while they were still valid would have to “apply” to the State Department for them before their next departure. The State Department had no right to ask citizens to surrender their passports; therefore, those who exercised their right to keep their passport had their names recorded and sent to the State Department instead of their passports.
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The centralization and rationalization of passport applications occurred in the United States with rigor similar to efforts abroad. In the early years of the war, numerous requirements were introduced in an attempt to locate the application process more securely within the state apparatus. The removal of notary publics from the application process was greeted with much delight by the official in charge of passports.
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As the Vanderbilt article illustrated applications now had to be taken at a federal courthouse or a state courthouse authorized to naturalize citizens, before being sent to the State Department in Washington, D.C.
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In 1917 applications had to be received in Washington at least a week before the applicant departed, rather than the five days previously mandated.
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The State Department took even more direct control of applications when it opened an agency in New York City devoted exclusively to passports.
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At either a courthouse or the passport agency, sworn passport applications had to be made before a designated clerk in the presence of a witness; the latter being a U.S. citizen “known” to both the applicant and the clerk. In 1917 the State Department required a person making an application outside of their place of residence to give contact information for a “reputable professional or business man having his office or place of business in the place where the applicant resides.”
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The department also instituted what they labeled an “intensive examination” of each applicant. This “intensity” referred to the requirement that all applicants provide documentary support of most of the claims made on their application. This included not only their identity as U.S. citizens, but also the purpose and necessity of their journey. The list of countries to be visited and a brief statement of the journey’s purpose was written on the passport, and, from late 1914, a photograph was attached. An applicant also still had to provide a physical description and swear an oath of allegiance, the latter “while the penetrating eye of the clerk is holding him.”
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According to one reporter, “This part of the procedure is the most impressive, and the most cynical of applicants is charged with a spark of patriotism as he solemnly answers: ‘I do.’ “The new “seriousness”
with which the passport was taken meant that “the road toward getting the precious bit of paper is a hard one and must be proved a straight one.”
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In the first year of the war in Europe, fifty thousand citizens successfully walked the hard and straight road to get a passport, but not all applicants completed the journey.
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As the war progressed, the State Department adopted procedures that restricted the issuance of passports to various occupational and social groups; no passports were to be issued to missionaries, to students for studying abroad, or to journalists who did not work for accredited news organizations.
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Naturalized citizens were “discouraged” from traveling to their country of origin, particularly if that country was at war and did not have an expatriation treaty with the United States. The concern was that, with U.S. citizenship not being recognized, a male could be drafted into the army of his country of birth. In the eyes of the department, “very few satisfactory explanations” were offered; thus most applications from naturalized citizens in this situation were rejected.
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More generally, the State Department tried to prevent citizens from traveling in the war zone—apparently, the traditionally popular destination of France was for some U.S. citizens even more alluring with a war going on. In a statement from the secretary of state explaining the policy, it was noted, “The department believes that the presence of American tourists in and about places where military operations are being carried on is most undesirable, and can give such persons no assurance that they will be immune from arrest and difficulties if they persist in attempting to visit such places.”
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The need to provide proof of the necessity of a journey was subsequently extended to travels in neutral neighboring countries. After the United States entered the war in 1917, “proof of necessity” was required in all passport applications, though this was more strictly enforced for travel to Europe. The State Department’s attempt to exert more direct control over the passport, and therefore indirect control over the movement of its citizens, was not limited to the issuance of a passport. A passport could only be used to enter the specific countries officials wrote on it, and only for the purposes that were listed on it; in this sense it functioned somewhat like visas do now. If citizens changed their itinerary, they had to apply to a consul for an emergency passport for their new destinations.

The intensification of passport requirements in the United States and abroad was partly a response to the early wartime reputation of the U.S. passport as the “forger’s friend.”
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The threat of German spies carrying a U.S. passport loomed large in the initial years of the war, owing to several German spies being caught in possession of stolen U.S. passports, and also because of two cases that captivated U.S. newspapers, in which Germans were
charged and sentenced in the United States for conspiring to obtain passports for German reservists residing in the country.
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The second of these cases revealed the difficulties involved in policing passport applications when it was discovered that the conspirators had overcome the obstacle of the required photograph that the State Department had trumpeted as a way to prevent fraud. As the
New York Sun
explained the Germans had bypassed this through the “simple expedient of having the reservist apply for the passport in person, using the name of an accommodating American citizen, but submitting his own photograph.”
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