The Passport in America: The History of a Document (4 page)

The use of the passport at the U.S. border was also contested. These debates reveal the complex understanding of identity and the body that supported the conception of whiteness that underwrote U.S. national identity in this period. Until the outbreak of World War I immigration and customs officials saw little value in documents, as they believed they could adequately identify a person standing in front of them. Officials identified people by articulating them into groups—rarely were they required to identify them as individuals. Therefore, identification at the U.S. border made use of dominant understandings of the body, personal appearance, and identity that were supported by scientific and popular claims for the reliability of exterior signs to ascertain an individual’s “true,” essential identity; depending on the circumstances, that identity could be an individual’s race, class, gender, or character. Immigration policy meant that officials only needed to become astute observers of prostitutes, “imbeciles,” and potentially unproductive immigrants, either diseased or lazy. In the case of the last category immigration officials and public health officials made use of racial and ethnic stereotypes to determine potentially suspect bodies, namely “new immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe, and nonwhite immigrants, especially
from Asia. Even in the early decades of the enforcement of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which employed a system of documents, officials tended to rely on bodily evidence, such as the condition of hands, to determine whether an individual was an excluded laborer or an exempt merchant. However, the prioritizing of the body over a document changed when, for security reasons, it was determined that the government needed to know the
individual
identity of the people who crossed its borders. In World War I passports and visas became necessary as officials hoped these documents would assist in identifying German spies and Bolsheviks and controlling the movement of citizens abroad. In the 1920s the aim was to secure the racial identity of the nation through enforcement of the 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts, which restricted immigration through nationality quotas. Nationality, introduced as a response to new understandings of a hierarchy of whiteness, was determined to be an identity that was more reliably read off a document than a body. Further, it was necessary to classify specific individuals as nationals to ensure a nation’s annual quota was not exceeded.

From one perspective identity had slipped off the body. Identification had become the collection of documented information about individuals. In the larger context of a bureaucratic drive to gain knowledge about society and the economy, begun in earnest during World War I, the federal government actively sought to know and remember its population as individuals. While identities had been documented in some form prior to the early twentieth century, the passport provides an object through which to understand the contested acceptance of the reliability of these documents as a move away from the excessive documentation of “the other” to the documentation of the native born, the middle class, the respectable—the more pervasive and rigorous documentation critical to the modern nation-state. While the passport was not required by all citizens, it came to represent the anxieties and uncertainties associated with the increased “paperization” of life from the 1850s into the 1920s. It was the first required identification document that many people encountered. It therefore illuminates the cultural, social, and political negotiations involved in the acceptance of the necessity for, and accuracy of, the documentation of individual identity. The passport emerged as a “reliable” identification document in the United States as an accommodation to a variety of disputes over its authority and function—from officials who viewed documents in general as a challenge to their authority, to the various groups who read the application process and the requirement to carry a passport as a questioning of their privilege, honesty, and privacy. The
history of the passport as an identification document allows us to understand what was at stake in the development of the documentation of individual identity that has become so critical to modern society; the historicization of identification documents forces us to consider how it is that we have come to believe that identity can be documented.

This book offers a particular history of the passport and the documentation of identity. More generally, the modern passport, both inside and outside of the United States, has a history that parallels and follows
The Passport in America
. The introduction of a passport system in France immediately after the French Revolution is usually cited as the point of origin for the modern passport.
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Passports were systematically issued with the intention of establishing the bearer’s personal and legal identity through the use of a standardized document produced within a centralized structure. Earlier attempts to introduce a passport system occurred in some regions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but the demand for these identification documents was rarely enforced.
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The privilege and reputation of the limited number of people who traveled frequently trumped these early passport systems, or there was no official inclination to enforce them. This is not to deny that the ideal of unambiguous documentation of individuals and complete knowledge of the population existed in certain states in early modern Europe, notably under the Spanish King Philip II. However, these remained isolated cases that existed more as aspirations. This became apparent when the authority of the document and the practice of documentation had to be negotiated anew in the nineteenth and early twentieth century before they could become ubiquitous.

Despite its limited success, the French passport system offered a model that most European states adopted at some point during the nineteenth century. These states issued identification documents during specific periods as part of regulations that separated citizens and aliens or sought to control mobility, criminality, and military desertion.
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This arose particularly as paupers and vagabonds became the target of passport regulations introduced in the 1830s and 1840s in response to the perceived danger of unemployment and the possibility of revolution. These documents had moderate success controlling more marginal populations but this was more limited further up the social hierarchy. An 1854 travel guide, anticipating the bemusement of
the English traveler at German regulations, stated that ‘“to a German the passport is the proof of his existence,’ whereas in England ‘it was a larger kind of turnpike ticket.’ “
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Many travelers went abroad without passports, either in ignorance of regulations or with the confidence that the social and class bias in identification practices would work to their benefit. The result of the increased use of passports was, therefore, a system in which officials inspected documents with varying degrees of interest and competence.
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This ad hoc development of the passport—sometimes a document had a physical description, sometimes it did not, frequently it functioned not as a modern passport but as a visa issued to noncitizens as an entry permit—complicates any claim for a useful continuity between medieval passports and the development of the modern passport in the nineteenth century. What emerges in the increased scale of identification documentation in the nineteenth century is a cultural negotiation over the impersonal mode of trust considered necessary to achieve this goal, which needs to be understood as part of the broader mediation of public interactions that occurred during the nineteenth century.
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This is critical to modern identification and something that still had to be bargained for at a time when “respectability” in the form of class, race, and gender could still be relied upon to trump documents. Only once respectability could no longer be expected to better documents can significance be attributed to required passports—and this only began to occur at the turn of the twentieth century.

The United States is an important site for understanding the discontinuities between the “passports” of early modern Europe and the passports of today. Lacking Europe’s history of more rigorous attempts at systematic registration and identification, the United States provides an even clearer picture of the specific problems and novelties of modern identification practices. The United States was not exempt from attempts to use documents to manage internal mobility.
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However, these documents were not part of a system of registration nor were they the product of an application process to verify the identity of the bearer; they lacked the attempt at centralization and standardization evident in some European states. “Passports” that were permits to travel through “Indian territory” were required by treaties and occasionally issued.
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The closest the United States had to some European systems were the documents slaveholders and states issued to police the movement of African Americans. However, while slave passes were legislated in some state slave codes these documents lacked a standardized format and were not issued in a particularly systematic manner; it was important for African
Americans to carry “passes” or “free papers” but they were not often accepted.
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Within the federal government a slightly more rigorous system existed to issue what were known as “Mediterranean Passports” or ship passports. These did not identify individuals but, following a European tradition, they were issued with the intention of ensuring U.S. ships could sail and conduct business in the Mediterranean without interference.
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In the context of this limited documentation of movement, the federal government issued the regular passports that are the focus of this history. While passports were not centralized in the sense of present-day databases or record keeping, officials did record the issuance of these passports; for example the State Department issued 21,792 passports from April 2, 1801, to July 22, 1850.
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But these documents were not issued to unambiguously identify an individual, nor did they signify citizenship, as these documents could legally be issued to non-U.S. citizens. No passports were required at U.S. borders. As with many foreign states the exception was during times of war—the Civil War in the case of the United States—when passports were seen as important for policing desertion. This centrally issued passport began to change in the United States (and other countries) in the decades from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1930s when a document for managing movement and mobility through the identification of an individual in terms of nationality was deemed necessary and the documentation of identity was ultimately made viable and practical.

The belief that identity could, and equally importantly, should be documented became a general assumption in the 1930s. The passport in the United States obviously has a history beyond the 1930s. Debates about the right to travel (notably a 1950s controversy over the refusal to give passports to accused communist sympathizers) or the need to improve border security during the so-called war on terror are two key moments in this later history.
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By arguing for an analysis of the passport as an identification document I intend to highlight the process through which the passport acquired this authority; that is, the process through which one particular identity became accepted as the identity that individuals have to prove. For the documentation of identity to make sense and be useful, it had to be rethought within the “archival problematization of identity.”
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This was the rethinking of identity and identification that produced the identity documented in a passport, a historically specific and not inevitable response to the need to have a distinct identity. In this process identity came to be thought of as a problem of documented information intentionally collected
in anticipation of future use. This “modern” understanding of an official identity, which came to be accepted by the 1930s, continues to determine the ongoing conditions for responses to the problem of identification. This is not citizenship or nationality but identity as information that can be collected, classified, and circulated, and when necessary verified through the presentation of a document.

While in the early years of the twenty-first century biometrics is presented as a more reliable set of identification practices, the claims to reliability are still understood within an archival problematization of identity. Biometrics uses computer technology to identify individuals by matching people to records through patterns derived from the measurement of facial features, iris structures, fingerprints, and voice characteristics; identity is still thought of as a problem of information and of linking that information both to a body and a file. The digitalization of identity is purported to provide a more “accurate” set of identification practices as it continues the retreat from subjectivity begun with documents. The use of computers to verify identity speaks to the fundamental problem to which identification has had to respond since the beginning of the twentieth century—the perceived need to lessen the role of individuals in the verification of identity. The authority of the documentary regime vested in the hands of bureaucratic officials has been supplanted by the more disembodied objectivity of the digital regime. The debates around the REAL ID Act of 2005 made clear the establishment of the technical and scientific authority granted to “smart cards” relative to the now apparently “dumb documents” of the twentieth century. REAL ID mandated improved security for drivers’ licenses and personal identity cards through a variety of methods including the use of digital photography, secure machine-readable technology, and information-sharing practices using interlinked databases of states’ departments of motor vehicles.
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The resultant new drivers’ licenses and ID cards would embed both the archive and the body into a card, thus making it “smart.”