The Passport in America: The History of a Document (39 page)

they cross the borders in wide gaps of unguarded stretches… [and] unless these stretches are patrolled by a force of sufficient strength, efficiency and authority to at least make attempts to cross the border dangerous and to hold illegal entry down to small proportions, our whole system fails, and we might just as well abandon our ports of entry and give up the expensive stations maintained thereat.
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Congress granted funding for a border patrol in 1924. The number of subsequent newspaper and magazine articles on the topic suggests that in the popular imagination this replaced passport control as the symbol of border security. However, in practice initial congressional efforts to establish a border patrol amounted to little more than a symbolic acknowledgment of the desire to rigorously enforce immigration restrictions along the land border. Contrary to positive reports in newspapers and magazines, it was introduced with the same administrative and legal shortcomings that had characterized other initiatives to manage the border and immigration. Specifically, the new border patrol of immigration inspectors was located squarely within a battle with customs officials over inspection authority, and was thus a dispute between the Departments of Labor and Treasury; an attempt in the early 1930s to create a unified border patrol failed. The federal government’s priorities in this turf war were made explicit in 1924 when the Department of Labor received an appropriation of $1 million to create the border patrol; the same year $12 million was appropriated by the Treasury Department for enforcement of Prohibition. In the initial years, the exact role of the inspectors assigned to the border patrol was subject to both formal and informal negotiations with the Treasury Department’s customs officials. In 1925 border patrol inspectors were given the power to arrest aliens and search vehicles, but by the end of the 1920s, they had gained and lost the right to apprehend aliens who were smuggling alcohol, but retained the right to examine aliens and search houses. This apparently did not stop them regularly questioning and arresting aliens for a variety of smuggling offenses, beyond the illegal “importation” of individuals. By 1930 the border patrol consisted of 847 officers. Therefore, less than one thousand men were responsible for turning the long spaces between ports of entry into a governable border along both the northern and southern boundaries.
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For the officials who policed it, a land border required a different mode of surveillance than that prioritized at seaports and abroad. It was believed the direct surveillance of the border patrol could prevent illegal immigration more effectively than the indirect administrative surveillance of the documentary regime used at seaports. In this environment, the increasingly complex understandings of whiteness, nationality, and the border still provided a
role for personal appearance as a useful and efficient way to verify individual identity and keep the nation secure.

By the end of the 1920s, identification documents, specifically the passport and visa, had developed a particular and at times important role at the U.S. border. This role was frequently tied to the record-keeping practices of immigration restrictions, as well as the precise identities outlined in the quota acts. While a system of identification based on documents could not solve all problems at the border, officials continued to see documents and record keeping as a way to facilitate greater official awareness of individuals, particularly in the more manageable border environment of seaports. An example of this was the establishment of a requirement that aliens be issued certificates of arrival and reentry permits. The ultimately successful introduction of these documents was predicated on an official belief that archived records generated a more accurate memory than that of individuals. It was through such a belief that practices of individual identification gained an authority they had lacked prior to the war. The 1907 Immigration Act had required the issuance of certificates of arrival, but it is unclear how long, if at all, this practice lasted. In the absence of these documents, and given the limited enforcement of any immigration laws regarding record keeping, officials had issued certificates of arrival for naturalization proceedings on the basis of “nunc pro tunc” (now for then); officials rarely consulted the ship’s manifest to confirm the date of arrival, assuming the individual had accurately remembered the name of the ship and the date of arrival. After 1927 the arrival of an immigrant was recorded through the filing of the papers required to enter the country, verified by issuing each immigrant a certificate of arrival. These certificates were subsequently used to obtain reentry permits and eventually to prove an immigrant had satisfied the residency requirement for naturalization. In this manner a documentary regime of verification emerged for aliens in which documents verified documents, and the authority of the state remained to some extent continuous; it did not need to rely on the individual opinions or memories of its subjects.

However, for such a system to work, documents had to be retrieved; the state had to be able to “remember.” The novelty of a documentary regime, of the need to remember through the consultation of documents, increased the awareness of the importance of the physical act of filing. In 1924 the
State Department warned consuls against using excessive ribbon on visas. This followed a complaint from the secretary of labor that “it has been found, in filing these visas that the excessive quantity of ribbon attached, and the manner of applying it to the visas, unnecessarily consumes a large amount of the file space and the tangling of the ribbon makes exceedingly difficult the access to these visas in the file.”
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Half a decade later, these initial concerns about the material construction of a retrievable memory for the state became a constant concern regarding the inability of overworked clerks to complete and file documents. By the 1930s staff at Ellis Island annually issued fifty thousand reentry permits and twenty thousand monthly verifications of arrivals.
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There were long delays in getting reentry permits, accentuated if an alien chose not to get a reentry permit prior to departure. The
New York Times
cited a 105-day delay as an extreme example of the problems created by a lack of staff to enforce the use of records to prove arrival for nonnaturalized long-term residents.
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Ten short-term staff assigned to Ellis Island in 1929 took a year to clear the backlog in the card index of immigrant arrivals, only for the Ellis Island office to then be given the additional responsibility of maintaining an index of visitor arrivals and departures, which often involved searching through manifests from other ports. This new index quickly fell five months behind. The Ellis Island commissioner, in requesting that three of the ten temporary clerks become permanent, promised that with “prompt and effective action it should never be more than 60 days in arrears.”
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While this system indicated the possibilities (as well as practical limitations) offered by documents for collecting information about people, the need for official documentation of identity was still treated with skepticism by some sections of U.S. society. An attempt to introduce a system to register aliens failed; this campaign generated much more publicity than the actual introduction of the system to record the entry and departure of these same individuals. The attempt to establish registration and documentation into the everyday lives of people brought with it accusations of a “Soviet model of espionage” and the oppressive and intrusive relationship between state and citizen this was understood to represent. Opponents viewed alien registration as a form of government surveillance that was in opposition to the spirit of the constitution and a purported American tradition to treat citizens and aliens alike; partially driven by the association of identification practices with criminals or the insane.
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Advocates, notably Secretary of Labor James Davis, tried to position registration and documentation as the efforts of a
benevolent government to look out for its population. Davis often referred to it as an enrolment plan to assist aliens in accessing citizenship education programs, equivalent to the requirement that citizens register to vote. He less frequently admitted that registration would facilitate the arrest of aliens who had entered the United States illegally.
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Promoting the former, an editorial in the
Saturday Evening Post
argued in favor of alien registration and the identification cards that would enable it, contending that

It would exhibit for him what he is and it would entitle him to all the consideration which is owing to duly admitted foreigners who are peaceable, law abiding and industrious. The more positive the means of identification employed, the more serviceable they would be to the alien if he were unjustly accused in a court of law. The fuller the record, the more the accused would enjoy the benefits of an honorably earned good repute. Only the lawless and the criminal would have anything to fear from the working out of such a system.
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Opponents also believed that documents and their bureaucratic support system marked individuals with identities that would affect how they negotiated their daily life, but they considered that this would be an identity that invited the state into the private lives of its individuals, something that law-abiding people had done nothing to deserve. While the United States did not implement national registration for aliens, the application for a required passport, like the various documents required of aliens, was perceived by some citizens as part of the extension of state-sponsored information gathering into the private lives of citizens, which problematized the relationship between the state and individuals.

11
“The Passport Nuisance”

In the aftermath of World War I, U.S. officials were not alone in seeing the value of requiring aliens to have passports and visas in peacetime; foreign governments made the same demand of U.S. citizens. Therefore, when the number of U.S. citizens traveling abroad dramatically increased in the 1920s, so did the number of citizens who came across the demand to identify themselves through documents. The initial responses to this situation made clear that using identification documents was a novelty for the majority of the population. The reactions also indicate that this was typically not an enjoyable first encounter. Having completed a journey through Europe in 1919, one traveler considered the passport a “souvenir of the persisting doubt, the official suspicion of your character.”
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An article in the
Washington Post
declared, “It is difficult for any one who has not actually gone through it to realize the feelings of personal humiliation which the process implies. In many instances passport officials went apparently on the theory that every applicant was to be considered a spy until he had proved the contrary.”
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The causes of frustration with the process of obtaining a passport included the demand to apply in person along with a witness, the need to submit a photograph, and the requirement for documentary proof of citizenship—an application process that was less acceptable outside of a wartime state of emergency. The humiliation stemmed from the request for these documents over and above an individual’s word. Travelers took this rejection of their word (and appearance) as a sign that officials considered them dishonest and untrustworthy—a response grounded in the association of identification documents
with suspect individuals such as criminals. The annoyance with the system intensified when it became clear that the required passport was not going to disappear like other emergency wartime measures. This increased when a combination of an increase in population and a decrease in the price of transatlantic steamship tickets exposed more people to passport demands. The Passport Division authorized the issuance of 1.6 million passports in the 1920s (compared to 200,000 in the decade prior to World War I, when passports were optional).
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Newspapers and magazines labeled the negative response to postwar passport requirements the “passport question,” or more frequently the “passport nuisance”; the additional cost of travel as a result of increased passport and visa fees was another source of this frustration.

The passport nuisance implicitly referred to the perception that an element of mistrust had entered the relationship between the federal government and its citizens, as well as more visibly structuring U.S. citizens’ interactions with foreign governments. The relationship with the federal government had been a somewhat limited one as it was.
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Most applicants had only had infrequent interactions with their government; it was only in the 1920s that income taxes become a centerpiece of the federal tax system. The historically limited interactions between citizens and state officials had produced a perception that only people whose (mis)behavior drew the attention of the state deserved official intervention, particularly in the form of the collection of personal information; travel was not considered a form of behavior that warranted official attention. For the “us” who simply wanted to travel, the “them” of criminals, the insane, the poor, and (less consistently) immigrants represented populations whose behavior and appearance indicated insufficient self-control to warrant trust and, therefore, the need for the state to keep track of them through the production of files and identification documents.