The Passport in America: The History of a Document (43 page)

The requirement that applicants verify their identity through official documents presented practical difficulties that further accentuated the affront some people felt. This frequently arose from the demand that applicants who claimed citizenship through birth in the United States present specific documents to prove that “fact”; the State Department preferred a birth certificate as proof of citizenship. In a series of letters to the State Department in 1927, a resident of Philadelphia, Harvey M. Watts, argued against the “gross bureaucratic absurdity” that required birth certificates.
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For Watts, the demand for documentary proof of birth was pointless, as in many cases the requirement could only be met through what he labeled “amiable minor perjuries” forced upon a state with limited memory and administrative reach. This was a reference to the alternative documents the State Department accepted in the absence of a birth certificate. Officials were instructed first to ask for a baptismal certificate. However, if the applicant’s birth had been undocumented by either church or state, then the department required affidavits from individuals who it considered had to have witnessed the birth (mother, doctor, or midwife). If these individuals were unavailable, the State Department resorted to its prewar technique to verify facts through
documents—an affidavit from a citizens known to the applicant whom the department deemed “respectable.” In practice, Watts argued, this meant passport clerks “are all busily engaged in accepting any kind of statement” to prove citizenship. He explained to the secretary of state,

I have been interested, as well as amused in the perfectly frank way in which American citizens cheerfully certify to each others births, wives for husbands, husbands for wives, brothers for sisters, wherein the older members of the families and doctors and all the neighbors have been gathered to their ancestors or moved to distant and inaccessible parts of the country.
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However, Watts did not retain his humor for long. He perceived an irritating inconsistency in the way clerks exercised discretion in passport applications. Clerks accepted documented statements verifying citizenship from people who had not witnessed births, but not undocumented statements from respectable citizens; he saw no merit in claims to the primacy of a documented statement over the oral statement of a person’s word. Watts offered the example of an “absurd” incident that occurred when he accompanied a “distinguished citizen” to apply for a passport. Although his friend did not have a birth certificate Watts was prepared to verify his citizenship as were two other acquaintances who happened to be there by chance: the provost and vice provost of the University of Pennsylvania. The clerk refused to accept the validity of the statements of either Watts or these two “respectable” gentlemen, especially because the other proscribed alternatives to a birth certificate had not been explored. The applicant was instructed to obtain a sworn statement from his invalid mother that “she knew he was born.” The ceding of authority to documents in the official definition of truth and reliability challenged what Watts saw as a more natural and proper understanding of “truth” as manifested in the appearance and status of individuals. He sought a return to what he called the “normal manner” of identification, in which an individual claiming citizenship through birth in the United States in the absence of a birth certificate should be trusted to verify his citizenship, personal identity, and his chosen witness. Before the war this form of identification was only the norm for native-born citizens not naturalized citizens; Watts claimed to have been informed that the postwar requirement for specific documents was in fact targeted at naturalized citizens. His letter made clear that naturalized citizens should indeed be expected to provide a naturalization certificate. Further,
the citizens Watts wanted exempt from demands for documents were very particular native born citizens—”Americans who may have come over on the Mayflower and who are indubitably born.”
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The strong implication here was that appearance (a specific recognizable racial and cultural whiteness) would clearly verify the applicant as a distinguished citizen or what Watts labeled the “bona-fide citizen.”
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In reply to Watts’s letter to the secretary of state, the assistant secretary of state argued that documentary proof of citizenship was not “unduly burdensome,” particularly as such requirements were necessary to “maintain the prestige of the American passport.”
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That is, such requirements ensured that State Department officials only issued passports to U.S. citizens. Although in his reply he admitted that this created occasions when “it seems superfluous for distinguished American citizens to be required to submit with their applications for passport, documents of [this] nature,” this was necessary because minor officials could not be given the discretion to determine citizenship—the discretion that Watts had claimed to observe during his seemingly frequent visits to passport agencies.
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This official response offers a useful reminder that evidence requirements policed all “local” practices of verification. Documentary requirements were not only used to enforce a specific definition of respectability that took control of the verification of their own identity from citizens, they were also intended to remove the subjective opinions of distant officials. The criteria of bureaucratic objectivity constituted a regime that, at least in theory, policed its own procedures. However, while an official based in Washington, D.C., could outline the documentary regime of verification in its ideal form, Watts’s letters indicate that centralized and standardized attempts to produce a constant series of objective decisions did not always guarantee their realization in the actions of minor officials distant from the department.

The response to Watts’s letter emphasized the centralizing practices that the State Department had introduced in an attempt to make the U.S. passport an authoritative statement of citizenship, a document that border officials could trust to be in the hands of the right person. A centralization and standardization of the application procedure defined that authority against localized practices of verification, the latter in, contrast, were seen as arbitrary and were therefore “illegible” to an efficient bureaucracy. A controversy over the treatment of a U.S. visa application from Albert Einstein provides a more public example of how the potential administrative reach of the documentary regime of verification could challenge the “local” privilege of social status and reputation in individual identification.

In 1932 Einstein’s planned visit to the United States required an appointment with a U.S. consul. While all visitors or immigrants had to go through an interview, this was a first for Einstein; on his previous visits he had been an official representative of the German government and was therefore exempt from this requirement. In the interview the consular official asked Einstein about his relationship to communist organizations. These specific questions were in part a response to a sixteen-page letter the State Department had received from an organization called the Woman’s Patriot Corporation that demanded that Einstein not be issued a visa because of his purported membership in communist organizations. The State Department had forwarded this information to Berlin in what it subsequently explained was standard practice so a consul could assess a visa applicant with all available information. Although the consular official determined the accusations to be false and issued Einstein a visa within twenty-four hours of the interview, the exposure of someone of his stature to the “intensive examination” used in the visa process generated dozens of newspaper articles and considerable correspondence to the State Department.
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In part this was fueled by comments attributed to Einstein after the interview. Having avoided such an encounter in the past, he was described as reluctantly attending the meeting. According to one report, Einstein walked out when questions were raised about his political beliefs, allegedly asking the consul officials, “Gentlemen, are you trying to kid me?”
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However, a day after the interview it was reported that little of the “clash was left in his mind, which is more accustomed to deal with infinite time and space” (not, it would appear, finite national spaces, and the restrictions on movement they increasingly produced).
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Einstein later told reporters, “The trouble with hearings of that kind is that you don’t realize until some time has passed just where the inquisitor is trying to get under your skin. I suggest in the future consuls put pins in their victims’ chairs so they will feel stuck from the beginning.”
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Newspaper editors, their readers, and letter writers to the State Department generally expressed surprise and regret that someone of Einstein’s status had been exposed to such an “inquisition”—according to “Frau Einstein,” the couple also received “a deluge of cables” that indicated “Americans of all classes were deeply disturbed over the case.”
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Letters to the State Department were generally critical of the decision to interview Einstein, labeling it “humiliating” and “absurd,” and expressing concern that it had made the United States a “laughing stock” around the world. The letters were also critical of the Woman’s Patriot Corporation. Numerous other organizations passed resolutions that condemned this group, as well as the State Department’s
implicit support of it. These organizations included several posts of the American Legion, the United States Veterans Association, Quaker groups, and the Detroit Philosophical Society.
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The concern over the reputation of the United States was consistent with the belief that Einstein’s reputation should have been privileged in this situation. The State Department’s standard reply stressed that it had to treat all aliens equally as the law dictated, insisted that Einstein had been treated with “utmost courtesy and consideration,” and noted that he had been issued the visa because the consul determined the accusations against him were false. The State Department did not send replies to letters it considered too rude.
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The public response indicated that the documentation of identity was still considered secondary to a culture of respectability; if documents were to exist, then prominent people should obtain them without inconvenience and intrusion into their private lives. But the simultaneous acknowledgment that under similar circumstances another person with Einstein’s political views might have been denied a visa gently questioned the biases still inherent in the supposedly objective use of documents.
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However, the attempt to deny Einstein the privilege of his status made explicit that the increasing authority state officials located in the documentary regime of verification had unsettled such undocumented claims to privilege.

The nature of the mistrust applicants could perceive in a passport application is captured in Einstein’s characterization of it as an “inquisition.” This was a common way for disgruntled citizens to describe the passport application. A letter to the
New York Times
in 1927 headed “The Passport Inquisition” detailed the frustration of such applicants. The writer concluded his letter by stating that “the preliminary modus operandi exacted in applying for passports is today more complicated than ever and one cannot help wondering what reason, if there is any reason, can be back of such silly questions and what their relation to the granting of a passport can possibly be.”
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For some, the answer to such a question was clear—”so long government has meant the browbeating of citizens by the bureaucracy that the purpose of issuing passports to facilitate the needs of the citizen has been lost sight of.”
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From this perspective the government’s obsession with bureaucratic procedures generated the mistrust that caused the excess of documents and questions that showed a lack of respect and inappropriate interest into what many considered was a citizen’s private life. As noted, in pejoratively using the label “bureaucratic,” critics of the passport nuisance sought to tap into this anxiety about lost community and personal autonomy in a rationalized, fragmented, and “modern” society. For critics of
state intrusion (but not increased corporate influence) the “b-word” became shorthand for “images of a pervasive and pernicious federal presence that strangled local and individual initiative.”
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Senator William Borah, one of the fiercest critics, argued against “the remorseless urge of centralization” through which the “average citizen becomes the victim of bureaucratic interference— tortured with its persistent leering upon the affairs of his daily life and burdened and exploited by its chronic inefficiency and habitual waste.”
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Although State Department officials were sensitive to the fact the Passport Division “touches the public in a very intimate manner,”
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the demand for personal information inherent in the creation of an identification document could easily be turned into a negative critique of the role of the twentieth-century state. When this occurred, the “public” victim of the passport nuisance tended to be a woman. Although, as previous examples indicate, it was the letter of a man that usually made her frustrations known. The use of a woman’s experience to expose particular apprehensions regarding the passport acknowledges the complex articulation of anxieties and concerns wrought through the contemporary perception of rapid social and cultural change in the decade following the end of the war. That the rationalism, scientific standards, and objectivity through which some of this change was articulated were in opposition to dominant stereotypes of women (emotional, subjective, irrational, and personal) created one possible context in which it might be assumed that women would experience difficulties negotiating the bureaucratized passport application.
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However, the regular appearance of women in complaints implicitly illustrated one consequence of the new bureaucratic state; it modeled a new relationship between citizen and state, albeit not what the secretary of state meant when noting that the Passport Division had become “an important link in the relation of the Department to the public.”
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The vulnerability of citizens (represented by women) to the “maw of bureaucracy” lent itself to an implicit critique of the transformation of the passport from a document primarily intended to protect the individual to one that offered the state protection from individuals. Although never explicitly expressed as such, the loss of the protective role of the passport for the individual was in contrast to the men who wrote letters on behalf of annoyed women. As one indignant man complained, “We have a right to apply to the State Department of our own government for aid in such matter and we have a right to know that our wives can go there for aid that is their right without being exposed to insult.”
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In correspondence such as this, men in their role as husband, father, or son exhibited the benevolent, paternal, pastoral protection the state had historically been perceived to offer its citizens
through the letter of the passport. However, instead of watching over its citizens, the passport application illustrated for many of these citizens a particular form of the modern nation-state’s surveillance of its citizens; a detached accumulation of knowledge, which turned citizens into objects of inquiry.