The Passport in America: The History of a Document (49 page)

16
. George Kennan, “T. B. Aldrich’s Adventure with Russian Police,”
New York Times
, June 25, 1911.

17
.
New York Times
, “Ruth Hale or Mrs. Broun?” February 18, 1921. Interestingly, her passport was issued in the form very similar to that by which the State Department would resolve this problem four years later: “Mrs Heywood Broun, otherwise known as Ruth Hale.”

18
. Una Stannard, “Manners Make Laws: Married Women’s Names in the United States,”
Names
32, no. 3 (1984): 114–18, 123; Susan Kupper,
Surnames for Women: A Decision-making Guide
, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990), 16.

19
. Assistant-Secretary of State to Secretary of State, April 15, 1925, RG 59 138/1952a, National Archives.

20
. Matthews to Kellogg, April 27, 1925, RG 59 138/1952a, National Archives; “Memo,” ‘RLF’ Department of State Solicitor, May 16, 1925, RG 59 138/3455, National Archives.

21
. Margaret Whitmore, to Kellogg, April 15, 1925, RG 59 138/1952a, National Archives.

22
. “Brief of the National Woman’s Party Against the Rule” in Matthews to Kellogg, April 27, 1925, RG 59 138/1934, National Archives.

23
.
New York Times
, “Why Content with Father’s Name?” May 8, 1925.

24
. “Memo,” “RLF”; “RLF” to MacMurray, May 4, 1925, RG 59 138/3455, National Archives.

25
. “Memo,” “RLF.”

26
. Miss Elizabeth Achelis to Kellogg, May 6, 1925, RG 59, 138/1942, National Archives.

27
. “RLF” to MacMurray.

28
. Memo, “RLF.”

29
. “RLF” to MacMurray.

30
. Ibid.

31
. “A-2 (McM)” to Secretary of State, Memo, April 16, 1925, RG 59 138/3455, National Archives.

32
. Ibid.

33
. Memo, “RLF.”

34
.
Equal Rights
, “A Preliminary Victory,” April 25, 1925.

35
. Shipley to English/Hackworth, October 20, 1937, RG 59 138/3837A, National Archives.

36
. Hoyt to Shipley, May 21, 1938, RG 59 138/3857, National Archives; Shipley to Hoyt, May 27, 1938, RG 59 138/3857, National Archives.

C
HAPTER
3

1
. Department of State to Consul General at Naples, February 13, 1933. Quoted in Green Haywood Hackworth,
Digest of International Law
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1942), 3:481.

2
. Roy Harris,
Rethinking Writing
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 182.

3
. Consul [Southampton, England] to Secretary of State, September 19, 1921, RG 59 138/1536, Box 597, National Archives.

4
. Gaillard Hunt,
The American Passport: Its History and a Digest of Laws, Rulings and Regulations Governing its Issuance by the Department of State
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1898), 61.

5
. Seward to Irving, December 14, 1861, RG 59 Domestic Letters, 56: 46, National Archives. For the signature to function as an attempt to prevent fraud officials had to assume that the person who had originally signed the passport was the person named in the application and supporting documents. Issuance procedure meant that no official actually witnessed the signing of the passport by an applicant.

6
. It is important to note the U.S. law does not share this cultural understanding of the form of the signature. In the absence of any specific statute “the law requires nothing of a signature other than that it be a documentary mark intended by the signer to be (and be accepted as) a signature.” Therefore, what is important is the intention of the signers that these mark be their signatures and that they are intended to authenticate the documents to which they are appended. See Michael Hancher, “The Law of Signatures,” in
Law and Aesthetics
, ed. Roberta Kevelson (New York: Peter Lang, 1992): 234.

7
. Roy Harris,
Signs of Writing
(London: Routledge, 1995), 82; Harris,
Rethinking Writing
, 181. Harris also points out that as a result of the demand for an idiosyncratic signature many people produce a signature that in fact is not written in their usual hand (Harris,
Signs of Writing
, 83).

8
. Jennifer L. Mnookin, “Scripting Expertise: The History of Handwriting Identification Evidence and the Judicial Construction of Expertise,”
Virginia Law Review
87 (2001), 1760–64.

9
. Quoted in Tamara Plakins Thornton,
Handwriting in America: A Cultural History
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 91.

10
. Quoted in ibid., 90.

11
. Randall McGowan, “Knowing the Hand: Forgery and the Proof of Writing in Eighteenth-Century England,”
Historical Reflections
24 (1998): 385–414; Mnookin, “Scripting Expertise,” 1762.

12
. Mnookin, ‘Scripting Expertise,’ 1756, 1763.

13
. Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,”
History Workshop
9 (Spring, 1980): 5–36.

14
. Mnookin, “Scripting Expertise,” 1789.

15
. Thornton,
Handwriting in America
, 92–105; P. G. Baxter, “The Distinction between ‘Graphology’ and ‘Questioned Document Examination,’
Medicine, Science and the Law
6 (1966): 75–86. Thornton argues that graphology was more of a mass phenomenon in the United States, while it achieved more recognition as a science in Europe, particularly Germany (Thornton,
Handwriting in America
, 132).

16
. Thornton,
Handwriting in America
.

17
. Harris,
Rethinking Writing
, 175.

18
.
New York Sun/Herald
, “The Unsigned Passports,” March 17, 1920. See also
New York Sun/Herald
, “U.S. Can Issue No Passports,” March 16, 1920.

19
. Thornton,
Handwriting in America
; Michael Warner,
The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

20
. Thornton,
Handwriting in America
, 31.

21
. David M. Henkin,
City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 157.

22
. Samuel J. Barrows and Isabel C. Barrows, “Personal Reminiscences of William H. Seward,”
Atlantic Monthly
, March 1889, 382. It should be noted that in the sample of Seward’s signatures I have seen, there are clearly discernible letters between the S and D.

23
. Ibid.

24
. Ibid. The State Department issued 40,683 passports during Seward’s eight years as secretary of state, averaging fourteen passports a day for him to sign. However, many of those were issued in his first three years, when passports were required for leaving the United States during the Civil War. U.S. See U.S. Passport Office,
The United States Passport: Past, Present, Future
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1976), 220.

25
. I am indebted to Henkin’s insightful argument in
City Reading
about the importance of a paradoxical relationship between replication and singularity in the development of printed documents.

26
. Sherman to Storer, September 18, 1897, quoted in U.S. State Department,
Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1897), 27–28. This dispatch lists Seward as one of the secretaries whose signature was stamped on the passport.

27
. U.S. Passport Office,
The United States Passport
, 220.

28
. Gaillard Hunt,
The Department of State of the United States: Its History and Functions
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1914), 380.

29
. The culturally specific value attached to the signing of a name by hand is apparent when it is contrasted with the practice of using a seal. The distinct cultural
origin of these practices was evident when the League of Nations sought to establish what should count as a signature. In summarizing Beatrice Fraenkel’s research on this, Harris argues that Western delegates did not regard the “Oriental” practice of using a seal as adequately constituting a genuine signature. From a Western perspective, “the seal placed too much emphasis on the replication as a guarantee of authenticity.” From a non-Western perspective, “the insistence on the signature as a direct manual trace placed too much emphasis on the specifics of each signing” (Harris,
Signs of Writing
, 82).

30
. Frances Robertson, “The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Printed Banknotes as Industrial Currency,”
Technology and Culture
46 (2005), 47.

31
. Ibid.

C
HAPTER
4

1
. R. C. Lehman “The Passport,”
Living Age
, April 3, 1915, 49–50.

2
. U.S. Passport Office,
The United States Passport: Past, Present, Future
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1976), 29–30, 40; Gaillard Hunt,
The American Passport: Its History and a Digest of Laws, Rulings and Regulations Governing its Issuance by the Department of State
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1898), 82–85.

3
. John Torpey,
The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

4
. Andrea Geselle, “Domenica Saba Takes to the Road: Origins and Development of a Modern Passport System in Lombardy-Veneto,” 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), 204.

5
. Andreas Fahrmeir,
Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the German States, 1789–1870
(New York: Berghahn, 2000), 103.

6
. Hunt,
The American Passport
, 78, 79; U.S. Passport Office,
The United States Passport
, 61, 62.

7
. George Kennan, “T. B. Aldrich’s Adventure with Russian Police,”
New York Times
, June 25, 1911.

8
. In contrast the actions of some European states indicate a greater concern with passport fraud. See 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), 225.

9
. Ibid., 228.

10
.
New York Times
, “The Value of Passports,” December 3, 1882.

11
. A similar development occurred in the format of prisoners’ files in U.S. jails in this period. 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), 76.

12
. Paul Fussell,
Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 25.

13
.
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
, “Noses,” August 1858, 378.

14
. Tooker to Secretary of State, June 8, 1885, RG 59 Entry 509, Box 80, National Archives; Bailey to Bayard, November 7, 1888, RG 59 MLR 509, Box 86, National Archives.

15
. John Miller to Department of State, June 27, 1896, RG 59 MLR 509, Box 95, National Archives.

16
. Martine Kaluszynski, “Republican Identity: Bertillonage as Government Technique,” in Caplan and Torpey, eds.,
Documenting Individual Identity
, 123–38.

17
. Peter Becker, “The Standardized Gaze: The Standardization of the Search Warrant in NineteenthCentury Germany,” in Caplan and Torpey, eds.,
Documenting Individual Identity
, 140.

18
. Simon A. Cole,
Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 34–43.

19
. Becker, “The Standardized Gaze,” 150.

20
. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,”
October
39, no. 3 (1986): 28; Cole,
Suspect Identities
, 45.

21
. Jane Caplan, “‘Speaking Scars’: The Tattoo in Popular Practice and Medico-Legal Debate in NineteenthCentury Europe,”
History Workshop Journal
44 (1997), 127–28.