The Passport in America: The History of a Document (47 page)

Notes

I
NTRODUCTION

1
.
New York Times
, “Grows Mustache to Leave Germany,” October 16, 1923;
Washington Post
, “Shave Spoiled His Passport,” March 18, 1915;
Washington Post
, “Forgets To Give Passport Shave When He Gets One; Nearly Excluded,” November 12, 1916.

2
. While several histories of the passport have emerged in recent years, most accept the fact that a passport could document identity. Such histories include Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps, “‘Passport, Please’: Legal, Literary, and Cultural Fictions of Identity,”
College Literature
25 (1998): 94–138; Radhika Viyas Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport,”
Public Culture
11 (1999): 527–56; John Torpey,
The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Martin Lloyd,
The Passport: The History of Man’s Most Travelled Document
(Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2003); Mark B. Salter,
Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations
(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003); and Jane Doulman and David Lee,
Every Assistance & Protection: A History of the Australian Passport
(Sydney: Federation, 2008). The exceptions that address aspects of the passport as an identification document are Andreas Fahrmeir, “Governments and Forgers: Passports in NineteenthCentury Europe,” in
Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World
, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 218–34; Valentin Groebner,
Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe
, trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck (Brooklyn, NY: Zone, 2007); and Adam McKeown,
Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

3
. Lloyd,
The Passport
; Salter,
Rights of Passage
; N. W. Sibley, “The Passport System,”
Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation
7 (1906): 26–33; Egidio Reale, “Passport,” in
Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences
(New York: Macmillan, 1934), 12:13–16.

4
. Alfred D. Chandler Jr.,
The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1977); Richard Franklin Bensel,
Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Morton Keller,
Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1977); Stephen Skowronek,
Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1870–1920
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Leonard D. White,
The Republican Era: A Study in Administrative History, 1869–1901
(New York: MacMillan, 1958).

5
. James W. Carey, “The Internet and the End of the National Communication System: Uncertain Predictions of an Uncertain Future,”
Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly
75 (1998): 28–33. These developments, along with the passport, provide examples of “logistical media” that arrange people and property into time and space. On this see John Durham Peters, “Calendar, Clock, Tower” (lecture, Media in Transition 6 conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, April 25, 2009).

6
. Matthew G. Hannah,
Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in NineteenthCentury America
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Margo J. Anderson,
The American Census: A Social History
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).

7
. Charles Dickens,
The Pickwick Papers
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 512. For a brief discussion of this scene see Erving Goffman,
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
(Englewoods Cliff, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 70.

8
. For an analysis of this change in record-keeping practices in prisons in the United States see Pamela Sankar, “State Power and Record-Keeping: The History of Individualized Surveillance in the United States, 1790–1935” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992).

9
. Keller,
Affairs of State
, 316.

10
. S. Shapiro, “Development of Birth Registration and Birth Statistics in the United States,”
Population Studies
4 (1950), 87–8, 92–3.

11
. Sankar, “State Power and Record-Keeping,” 24.

12
. Bruce Curtis offers a useful list of possible sources of local knowledge in the mid-nineteenth century: “kinship, neighborliness, mutual economic dependence, community school and community church, parish institutions and exchange networks.” (Bruce Curtis, “Administrative Infrastructure and Social Enquiry: Finding the Facts about Agriculture in Quebec, 1853–4,”
Journal of Social History
32 [1998]: 312.)

13
. Jennifer L. Mnookin, “Scripting Expertise: The History of Handwriting Identification Evidence and the Judicial Construction of Expertise,”
Virginia Law Review
87 (2001), 1763; Sankar, “State Power and Record-Keeping,” 164.

14
. Josh Lauer, “From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in NineteenthCentury America,”
Technology and Culture
49 (2008): 301–24.

15
. Richard Bensel, “The American Ballot Box: Law, Identity, and the Polling Place in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,”
Studies in American Political Development
17, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 1–27.

16
. Mnookin, “Scripting Expertise.”

17
. These are adapted from the questions that Mary Poovey argues could structure a history of numeracy (Mary Poovey,
A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 5).

18
. This book focuses on the “regular passport” issued to citizens. Over the course of its history the United States has issued other types of passports; these include “special passports” to people going abroad to represent the country in some way and diplomatic or service passports to official representatives of the State Department. Courier passports have also been issued to people going abroad as bearers of official dispatches. The State Department issued a specific identification document to seamen. In specific circumstances the U.S. government has also issued distinct travel documents. See Green Haywood Hackworth,
Digest of International Law
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1942): 3:442–62; U.S. Passport Office,
The United States Passport: Past, Present, Future
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1976), 89–116.

19
. Jane Caplan also argues that identification is more usefully understood as a history of “categories and indicators” (Jane Caplan, “‘This or That Particular Person’: Protocols of Identification in NineteenthCentury Europe,” in
Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World
, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001], 51).

20
. Christopher Dandeker,
Surveillance, Power, and Modernity: Bureaucracy and Discipline from 1700 To The Present Day
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1990).

21
. Lynn Dumenil,
The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); Warren I. Susman,
Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Pantheon, 1984); Miles Orvell,
The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Roland Marchand,
Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

22
. It is in this sense that the passport needs to be understood as an “identification document,” not an “identity document.” The use of the former is intended to place explicit emphasis on the practice of identifying. This is done to make the argument that a document does not merely represent an “identity;” rather it produces a specific new identity unique to the logics and procedures of identification as a practice. For a discussion of the importance of distinguishing identity
and identification see David Lyon,
Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveillance
(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009), 10–15.

23
. Craig Robertson, “A Documentary Regime of Verification: The Emergence of the US Passport and the Archival Problematization of Identity,”
Cultural Studies
23 (2009): 329–54.

24
. This borrows from Michel Foucault’s idea of a regime. See Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power” in
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977
, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 133; Michel Foucault, “Questions of Method,” in
The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality
, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 79.

25
. Torpey,
The Invention of the Passport
, 21–56.

26
. Groebner,
Who Are You
? Although I only encountered Groebner’s landmark research as I finished writing this book, our overlapping interest in how documents identify people has resulted at a general level in a series of similar arguments about the translation of identity onto paper. Most notable are two arguments: that identification is the production of a distinct identity, and therefore, there is a loss of individual control over their official identification; and that official identification provides a potential basis for an all-knowing state. But despite this overlap his oft-repeated claim for the medieval origin of modern passports demands some important clarification.

27
. See Andreas Fahrmeir,
Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the German States, 1789–1870
(New York: Berghahn, 2000), 100–151; Fahrmeir, “Governments and Forgers”; Lloyd,
The Passport
, 74–89, 115–18; Torpey,
Invention of the Passport
, 57–92; Susan Buck-Morss, “Passports,”
Documents
1 (1993): 66–77; Leo Lucassen, “A Many Headed-Monster: The Evolution of the Passport System in the Netherlands and Germany in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in
Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World
, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 235–255.

28
. Fahrmeir,
Citizens and Aliens
, 129.

29
. Groebner,
Who Are You
?, 234.

30
. James W. Carey,
Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society
(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

31
. Prior to the formation of the United States some of the British colonies required people to have a pass issued by the governor before leaving the colony; this was to ensure people did not leave owing money. However, these passes made no attempt to identify the bearer beyond their name. For the example of Virginia see U.S. Passport Office,
United States Passport
, 8–13.

32
. Dorothy Williams Potter,
Passports of Southeastern Pioneers, 1770–1823: Indian, Spanish and other Land Passports for Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi, Virginia, North and South Carolina
(Baltimore: Gateway 1982).

33
. Elizabeth Pryor argues that the slave pass system was more standardized and systematic in its implementation and therefore important in identifying Black
people as “anti-citizens.” (Elizabeth Pryor, “‘Jim Crow’ Cars, Passport Denials and Atlantic Crossings: African-American Travel, Protest and Citizenship at Home and Abroad, 1827–1865” [Ph.D diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2008], 88–100.) See also Sally E. Hadden,
Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Runaway notices provided an informal print-based system for the identification of slaves. These notices were either advertisements in newspapers or handbills that had basic descriptions of runaway slaves. Daniel Meaders, “South Carolina Fugitives as Viewed through Local Colonial Newspapers with Emphasis on Runaway Notices 1732–1801,”
Journal of Negro History
60 (1975): 288–319; Rachel Hall,
Wanted: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2009), 42–50.