The Passport in America: The History of a Document (45 page)

The figures of the kidnapped child, the unidentified dead body, and the amnesiac were invoked to play on the fear of being a stranger that proponents argued the preemptive act of fingerprinting would prevent.
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In this argument, the possibility of becoming a “stranger” had been increased through the enhanced mobility of modern life, which purportedly took individuals away from small communities and into large cities where people could easily be strangers even in their everyday life. Within the new modern form of anonymous community epitomized by the large city the state needed to have the right and the ability to know its population in order to provide the comfort of familiarity in a developing mass culture. Supporters of a fingerprint-based identification system also argued it would protect honest citizens on vacation or business trips, and even their commercial transactions at home in the city—in fact, one of the earliest attempts to extend fingerprinting to noncriminals involved advocates convincing some banks to use thumbprints in identifications.
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Through actions such as these, supporters presented fingerprinting in a discourse of safety both to counter its association with the identification of criminals and to assuage concerns that universal fingerprinting constituted an attempt to institute a comprehensive system of state surveillance.
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To convince the public that state officials collected fingerprints not out of suspicion but to assist individuals, various officials assured people that their fingerprints would be stored in a separate collection from criminal prints; they would be consulted only when individuals were in situations where they could not identify themselves. The FBI presented the proposed collection of fingerprints as a “depository of protection.”
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Protection and safety became the official rationale for the renegotiation of the public and the private in the form of attempts at the more pervasive collection of information about individuals. The entry on “identification” in the U.S.-published 1932
Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences
authorized this discursive move, linking official identification, as a practice within “the growth of modern science,” to its development as an “important means of safe-guarding civil rights.”
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The author of the entry offered a list to justify the potential value of identification
techniques in “civil life,” beginning with the use of passports “containing personal descriptions and photographs” and ending with the frequent footprinting of babies at maternity hospitals. However, he concluded the entry by recognizing that this potential remained largely untapped because of the deep-rooted association between identification practices and the identification of criminals. These practices produced the image of the criminal as an object of inquiry in the public mind, a person whose behavior exhibited dishonesty and a distrust of authority that needed to be investigated; only when those conditions were present did the majority of U.S. citizens believe the state had a right to collect information on individuals.

The association between criminals and fingerprints was even stronger than that between criminals and identification documents. The State Department refused to use fingerprints in passport applications or on the document itself on the grounds that “it is quite certain that the majority of the applicants would look upon this requirement as a hardship and a humiliation.”
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While in its use of supporting documents, the State Department subscribed to the idea of objective reliability associated with the perceived authority of modern practices of identification, in its rejection of fingerprints, the department did not let such claims to accuracy trump the social identities of passport applicants. In the case of fingerprinting, reliability was reevaluated within a web of cultural practices and processes; beyond its association with criminals, the overt use of the body hindered the broader use of fingerprinting as an identification technology. The fact that the body was culturally off-limits produced a greater practical need for, and faith in, the “fact” that identities remain stable, and documents can “verify” that identity. In this context, the department preferred the scientifically less “reliable” but more acceptable combination of the photograph, description, and signature to establish a relationship between the passport and the correct bearer. While in other contexts passport fraud remained an ongoing concern for the State Department, in the correspondence over fingerprinting, officials downplayed the threat of fraud to national security. The Passport Division claimed there was fraud in less than 1% of passports, and, therefore, any excessive attempts to decrease fraud could not be prioritized over the efficient issuance of passports to the majority of citizens who applied in good faith.
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The rejection of fingerprinting was grounded in the belief that by the mid-1930s, respectable people were no longer appalled by the requirements of passport applications; as noted such demands had ceased to be a hardship, and had become a regular occurrence in the navigation of everyday practices in “modern” society. In
comparison fingerprinting remained an irregular occurrence and an exceptional practice.

As the documentary verification of identity became a pervasive practice, and therefore, paradoxically, it was seen less in terms of surveillance. When “average” Americans encountered initial piecemeal forms of state observation such as passport requirements in the early decades of the twentieth century, these were novel and alien. They were comprehended in two ways that linked them to a changing understanding of surveillance: Firstly, identification practices retained the historical associations of intermittent state observation—a marginalization generally invoked rhetorically through images of the criminal or the insane. Secondly, with this as the dominant understanding of the function and role of surveillance, demands for documents in their lives seemed to cause the “better classes” to assume that surveillance had become pervasive through society. The previous absence of state “inquisitions” in their lives in the United States led many citizens to understand the need for passports as evidence of a new form of continuous surveillance orchestrated by a pervasive bureaucratic state. This fueled some of the anxiety over the passport. However, the difficulty of enforcing evidence requirements for the U.S. passport indicates that administrative surveillance remained at best intermittent. It would very quickly become more consistent over the following decades, such that by the end of the 1930s, the need to prove individual identity to a variety of officials and institutions had become a common occurrence.
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However, by that time knowledge and the skills of how to negotiate modernity in the form of the documentary mediation of people and the world had been acquired, and the giving of information previously considered personal to official strangers had lost much of its annoyingness. Thus the use of documents to mediate interactions with the state and other institutions provoked a decreasing amount of frustration and lessened its association with surveillance. In contrast, fingerprinting remained an occasional and visceral act popularly perceived as surveillance. Therefore, as articles continued for and against universal fingerprinting in the 1930s and the 1940s, the passport nuisance disappeared from the pages of the country’s newspapers and magazines.

Conclusion

We have now reached what critic Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm calls the “paradigmatic scene… of the modern era… the immigration officer examining a passport.”
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It took almost a century for this moment to coalesce into a typical occurrence, but by the end of the 1930s the authority of the passport to identify an individual was, if not universally accepted, at least decreasingly challenged. Based on its history in the United States, immigration officials had come to accept a passport as evidence of identity. Members of the public had seemingly come to tolerate both the general demand for identification, and the passport in particular, as a representation of their identity. This implicitly brought with it the expectation that a person should have an identity that a modern state could recognize, know, and demand to “see.” The passport as a seemingly inevitable response to these demands came to represent the naturalization of this state of affairs.

The passport arrived at this paradigmatic moment only after negotiation over its status as proof of identity, and, of the identity the state had come to deem necessary. The arrival of the passport in its modern form critically involved the acceptance of the larger assumption that identity could be documented. The now-apparent naturalness of the passport occurred through a collapsing of identity into identification. However, in questioning this inevitability, the preceding history of the passport is premised on a rejection of the collapsing of identity and identification. To separate identity and identification is to see how the documentation of individual identity depended on a rethinking of identity as the object of identification, and a general acceptance
of this new way of thinking about identity. Aspects of the passport nuisance and its scattered forerunners in the nineteenth century indicate a struggle to fully grasp this new relationship between identity and identification. The passport has a history as an identification document precisely because of this struggle to comprehend and accept that identity could be documented. Somewhat anecdotal evidence of the 1930s being the point at which documentation became more pervasive and acceptable can be seen in the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of identification through identity documents; all the examples provided for this usage are dated after 1940.
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The need to think critically about the under examined relationship between identity and identification is increasingly urgent, as this unexamined identity has been at the center of contemporary concerns about security and the much-touted solution to these concerns—digital surveillance in the form of biometrics. This identity is not self-awareness or self-knowledge on the part of a person, but identity as an object produced through the investigations of an institution such as the modern nation-state. While today, outside of the so-called “war on terror,” the surveillance practices of governments and corporations are frequently ignored or accepted in the name of convenience, their novelty around the turn of the twentieth century made them all too visible and seemingly excessive, particularly for those people not previously exposed to demands to prove their identity. The necessity for travelers to carry a passport made some individuals aware that not only did the government “know” who they were, but also made them conscious of the techniques through which they were known. The demand for standardized forms verified by authorized officials marked for some people an abrupt change from a personal mode of trust to an impersonal mode of trust in official identification. In this manner individuals encountered the rethinking of identification as a problem of record keeping—specifically, the collection, classification, and circulation of information. This archival problematization of identity came to determine the way identity was officially conceived; it provided the parameters within which problems were now understood and solutions offered in a variety of situations. Bertillonage, which emerged from an increasingly bureaucratized and professional French police force in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, embodied the archival elements that would gradually define accurate practices of identification through techniques of cataloguing and retrieval. In the United States, it was not until the first decades of the following century that official identification practices began to be explicitly
used to construct a “memory” for the state, albeit in an environment less centralized and possibly less prone to trust the centralization of authority than in France. However, by the 1920s the federal government’s need to remember an individual in anticipation of future interactions required the application of archival logics to identification; at that historical moment, documentary technologies and practices came to be seen as a necessity.

As in our current moment, national security concerns brought attention to identification practices. State officials became interested only in those aspects of personal identity that were useful to them. Modern practices of identification such as the passport and fingerprints were useful precisely because they “simplified” identity to only that information necessary for the state, and thus it was thought that accurate identification would be easier to achieve. In this understanding, identity had become something that could be duplicated and filed, and, therefore, potentially more rigorously verified. While these somewhat novel identification technologies produced the stable identity necessary for any ongoing official identification, they did not simply identify people. As this history has shown, these technologies produced a new identity, something made all too explicit to those citizens who felt as if they had become dehumanized objects of inquiry for their government.

The perception by individuals that they were objects of inquiry acknowledges a disconnect between their sense of self and their official recognition, and, therefore, is a recognition of identification as the production of a new identity. In this sense, identification is usefully thought of, and critiqued, as a practice of verification; identification is an act of comparison between a person and his or her official representation. As a technology of verification, the passport performs the function of collapsing reality into representation; it naturalizes the assumption that identity can be documented, as well as the presentation of the passport as an accurate representation of a preexisting identity. The passport did this within a documentary regime of verification.