The Passport in America: The History of a Document (42 page)

For most citizens vacationing abroad, the “stupid system by which Americans pay $10 each for passport visas and everyone else pays 30 cents or nothing” continued, such that in 1929 a disgruntled traveler could still write that after he had paid a $100 fare to travel from New York to the United Kingdom, he had to pay $60 in visa fees to travel through Europe.
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However, by the end of the decade, these fees had begun to drop after Congress gave the president the authority to negotiate reciprocal visa agreements with individual nation-states; thus after several unsuccessful attempts to reduce the visa fee through legislation, the campaign by business groups did see one important success in its attempts to reduce visa fees. Although Congress granted this authority in 1925, the initial agreements were with South American countries and smaller European countries, destinations less favored by the majority of U.S. travelers, business or otherwise; hence travelers still complained in 1929.
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However, such complaints decreased after an agreement was finally reached with France in 1929, and largely disappeared after Great Britain agreed to reduce its visa fee for nonimmigrants in 1936. In both cases the cost was reduced to $2, the fee the League of Nations had suggested as an international standard.
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The
New York Times
reported the French decision in a front-page story, which described it as “a development in international relations of considerable importance,” especially for the “quarter of a million Americans who visit France annually.”
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In 1930 national business associations turned their attention to the $10 passport fee and the two-year duration of validity of passports for all citizens except teachers. By the beginning of the 1930s, approximately half of all U.S. citizens going to Europe traveled “tourist third” at a cost of less than $100.
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Opponents, therefore, continued to present the fee for the passport as a “war tax “and “class taxation.” The representation of a passport as a wartime measure attempted to cultivate its contemporary image as a pointless document, “a bit of pasteboard stamped with a red seal,” as one opponent put it.
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A spokesman for the New York Board of Trade commented,

It seems to take strenuous efforts to convince certain departments of our government that the World War has been over a long time. Although our military and naval branches of the government closed their part of the fight ten years ago the tax department is still functioning splendidly along old lines in many cases. The increased passport fee was a considerable source of revenue at a time when a national emergency existed, but the need has long since been removed.
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The passport fee and an additional $5 departure tax gave rise to the complaint that the middle-American third-class tourist paid an anachronistic and unfair 15% tax to travel abroad.
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This was cast as “class taxation” in the argument that government departments should be funded from the general tax dollars of all citizens, not particular groups; a response to some State Department officials and members of Congress claiming that those citizens who tended to benefit from the Foreign Service should maintain it through passport and visa fees.

The anti–passport fee campaign was successful enough to cause Congress to hold hearings on the issue. However, comments from congressional participants indicated a healthy skepticism that the need to pay a $10 passport fee every two years had a significant negative impact on the ability of large businesses to function smoothly—the primary reason business groups gave to support their campaign to reduce fees. This caused opponents to place more emphasis on the time-consuming nature of passport and visa applications and requests. These concerns were not new, and had existed alongside complaints about fees from the beginnings of the 1920s. The “irritatingly complex” passport system was “expensive too as regards both time and money,” with one traveler in the early 1920s estimating that “passport and visas cost $150 and the loss of approximately $1000 worth of time.”
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In 1924 a congressional opponent of the passport system claimed that many citizens in Europe spent “a fourth of their time in satisfying officials they were what they represented themselves to be and had no dangerous motives against the peace of Europe.”
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In a 1930 hearing before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, representatives of business groups took up these concerns. They requested an extension of the validity of passports to six years from the “standpoint of economy of time and also very materially from the standpoint of convenience.”
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Business representatives outlined “the nuisance and annoyance which our people at the present time are suffering from”: presentation of proof in person, photographs, and birth certificates.
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The attempt to satisfy these demands could take at least three or four days, and in some instances delayed departure.
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The fulfillment of these requirements not only cost businessmen valuable time, they also made clear the demand for documents and witnesses was considered disrespectful. As early as 1922, George Brist, chief of the Division of Passport Control, in a memo to the
assistant secretary of state, had noted this as a significant source of public problems with the passport application process. He wrote that complaints originated “most often with men at the head of, or high up in some business organization. Among other associates their word is accepted and they feel that government officials should give their statements equal credit.”
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As Brist’s comment indicates, the passport nuisance originated in the perception of a required passport as a challenge not only to the wallet but also to accepted notions of respectability and privacy. The delicate nature of passport applications in a peacetime era of required documentation was an ongoing concern for government officials. A decade after Brist’s memo, the secretary of state congratulated then–Passport Division chief Ruth Shipley for the manner in which the division dealt with the public:

You have had charge of a division which touches the public in a very intimate manner. You have succeeded in maintaining with firmness the principles which underlie the treatment of the subjects with which you have been called upon to deal and, at the same time, applying those principles in a considerate and humane manner. You have made your division an important link in the relation of the Department to the public.
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While the secretary of state felt he could celebrate a passport official’s considerate and humane manner, the passport nuisance of the previous decade was constituted by complaints that indicated that U.S. citizens felt not intimacy but anxiety as the State Department asked them questions about things they considered private, and then further demanded verification of their responses through documents. This had been a theme from the beginning of peacetime passport requirements. Introducing readers to the postwar world of passports, the pro–immigration restriction journalist Kenneth Roberts reported his frustration with the incessant desire of officials to seek answers “which would be about as valuable on the government records as information as to whether the applicant took two or three lumps of sugar in his coffee, and whether or not he cared for the later works of Henry James.”
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Roberts’s frustration with the passport system and his support of immigration restriction
show what constituted the “normal circumstances” he and other opponents of the passport longed to return to. Normality was a prewar world of mobility where it was “obvious” and “natural” which people officials could trust and which they had to be concerned about, and, therefore, a world where the lives of “naturally” respectable and trustworthy people were of no interest to the government.

The comments of Mary Greer, who worked at one of the regional passport agencies established in the 1920s, reiterate this implicit definition of a dominant and racialized respectability.
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In a letter to the Division of Passport Control she expressed discomfort at subjecting “respectable” citizens to identification practices. More precisely, Greer made clear how awkward she found the need to get previously private information from trustworthy citizens in the very public space of the New York Passport Agency, where she worked. There, as in other locations where people applied for passports, applicants stood in a line waiting to be asked questions by a clerk who stood behind a counter. Greer informed the division that she had

always considered the counter arrangement very bad. If it was possible for each applicant to sit at a desk with the agent who was taking his or her application, it would be so much better and so much more dignified than having to stand in line with the person next listening to every word that is said, or being jammed in with a nervous mother and a crying baby or a hot and unpleasant member of the Jewish race.
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These comments speak to a perceived need to accommodate the dignity of those “respectable” citizens recently introduced to official identification practices. Her complaints implicitly position this undisputed citizen as a white, Christian male whose status should not require exposure to such awkward situations. The passport became a nuisance when the requirements of identification documentation were “inappropriately” applied to these people, away from their historic focus on the unstable or marginal populations that governments not only needed to know, but who required their assistance: the untrustworthy (the eavesdropper and the Jew) and those who cannot look after themselves (the nervous mother and her child, and, doing double duty, the unhygienic Jew).

Roberts’s and Greer’s concerns usefully articulate the passport nuisance to, and through, the cultural conflicts of the 1920s. In this decade, white
Anglo-Saxon “old stock” Protestants struggled to maintain dominance in an “American” society in which their vision of a homogenous world of shared values, local control, and individual autonomy was thought to be under threat; the Red Scare and concerns with immigration restriction were a manifestation of the drive for conformity and homogeneity that many historians argue characterized the 1920s.
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While at the border the passport played an important role in attempting to police perceived racial threats to national identity, internally the application for a U.S. passport brought out another aspect of the cultural and social uncertainty associated with the 1920s. In her survey of the decade, Lynn Dumenil argues, “The expansion of the corporate national economy eroded local ties and propagated bureaucracy, specialization, and routinization, helping to undermine the individual’s sense of community and autonomy. Similarly, urban mass society underlined the individual’s fragile status in an anonymous society and compounded a sense of fragmentation.”
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These changes illustrate both modernization and the emergence of modernity, an overused but still useful shorthand to foreground cultural and social responses to new modes of society and experience as rapid technological and social change altered the experience of everyday life—notably captured in Max Weber’s arguments about rationalization and the Frankfurt School’s analysis of an administered society.
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The ad hoc development of official identification practices, beginning in the 1840s, offers important insights into the history of such challenges to an individual’s sense of community and autonomy prior to the twentieth century. However, in the 1920s the more focused development of identification practices (including fingerprinting) made this more explicit, as the need to know the population was articulated to efforts to create an efficient, systematic, well-behaved, fair, and prosperous society.
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Opponents of this attempt to “know” citizens through the collection of administrative facts were therefore able to link the extension of identification practices to broader social concerns about the increased power of the state, concerns that centered on questions of individual autonomy and identity.

Throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s, many applicants were still shocked at the rigorous application of bureaucratic methods they encountered in applying for a passport. Their word, in the form of personal opinion, did not matter; they encountered a world where documents had to verify “facts.” This impersonal mode of interaction in what was considered the personal matter of identity constituted much of the “nuisance” associated with the passport outside of the financial costs connected to the document; these interactions failed to recognize respectability. In 1930 an aggrieved son (and lawyer) informed
the Passport Division that while his mother was attempting to get a passport, the clerk “was most discourteous and she felt as if he were treating her like a criminal endeavoring to get into the country by unfair means rather than as an American citizen merely asking the courtesy of her own Government.”
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This is an iteration of a frequently invoked framework for the passport nuisance—the association of identification practices with criminals—also seen in concerns over the passport photograph. Because these applicants did not consider themselves criminals, but rather respectable and trustworthy citizens, in forcing them to apply for a passport, and in this manner, their government had seemingly misidentified them as criminals. The demand for documentary proof of identity was a sign of mistrust and a lack of courtesy. Most citizens expected a passport application to be formal and a formality, and certainly not dependent on the forms that a bureaucratically inclined state now considered necessary. One example of this confusion occurred when a woman sought to extend a passport so she could return abroad for health reasons. Although she had been treated courteously on previous visits, this time, her husband wrote, the “treatment received was brusque and offensive, the official not only asking for and making her write and rewrite a detailed account of everything she had done in Europe for the last two years, but also demanding a certificate to prove her contention that she was taking the cure for her ailment.”
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