The Passport in America: The History of a Document (51 page)

17
. Harold M. Hyman,
To Try Men’s Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), viii.

18
. Rogers M. Smith,
Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 245.

19
. Different oaths usually came from citizens whose religious beliefs prevented them from swearing allegiance to the Constitution. These were accepted by some secretaries but rejected by others. In an example of the gradual attempt to make passport policy consistent, a departmental letter from 1897 authorized an alternative oath that substituted “government” for “constitution”; this became the only alternative oath the department would accept. Moore,
A Digest of International Law
, 3:916; Hunt,
The American Passport
, 70.

20
. Flournoy to Johnson, December 24, 1914, RG 59 138.28/1, Box 66, National Archives.

21
. By the end of the 1920s there were passport agencies in New York, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and New Orleans; in other cities and towns people continued to apply to a state or federal court clerk. All applications were still forwarded to the State Department in Washington, D.C.

22
.
New York Times
, “Avoid Rush for Passports, Official Warns Tourists,” March 31, 1924; American Consul General [London] to Secretary of State, January 14, 1921, RG 59 138/1408, Box 596, National Archives.

23
. Burhman to Bannerman, May 14, 1927, RG 59 138/2248, National Archives; Shipley to Collins, October 19, 1932, RG 59 138.81.541, National Archives.

24
. Carr to Murphy, March 30, 1915, RG 59 138.7/17 Box 638, National Archives.

25
. Olds to South, July 19, 1926, RG 59 138.1/14, Box 631, National Archives.

26
. Hunt,
The American Passport
, 59.

27
. Baynard to McLane, July 20, 1888. U.S. State Department,
Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1888), 1:552.

28
. Cressy L. Wilbur,
The Federal Registration Service of the United States: Its Development, Problems, and Defects
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1916), 47.

29
. Ibid., 42.

30
. S. Shapiro, “Development of Birth Registration and Birth Statistics in the United States,”
Population Studies
4 (1950), 92–3.

31
. House Committee on the Census,
Authorizing the Director of the Census to Issue Birth Certificates: Hearing before the Committee on the Census
, 77th Cong., 2nd Sess., June 4, 9, 10, 1942, 27.

32
. Shapiro, “Development of Birth Registration,” 98–103.

33
. Consul (Prague) to Secretary of State, March 26, 1924 RG 59 138.81/95; Report, May 1, 1924, RG 59 138.81/75, National Archives.

34
. Olds to Secretary of Interior, February 20, 1926, RG 59 138.25/13, National Archives.

35
. Memo to Scanlan, January 13, 1926, RG 59 138.25/13, National Archives.

36
. Bayard to McLane, August 10, 1888, U.S. Department of State,
Foreign Relations
, 1888, 1:555. See also Moore,
A Digest of International Law
, 3:907–8. It should be noted that this particular applicant also presented expired U.S. passports, but Bayard’s memo strongly implies that personal knowledge was all that was required.

37
. An affidavit would be accepted if (a) the prior existence of the certificate was shown, (b) it could be proved the certificate had been destroyed by fire or in other circumstances, (c) in the case of a lost certificate, evidence of diligent search could be provided, and (d) it could be proved that the original record or certificate is unobtainable (Moore,
A Digest of International Law
, 3:905–6).

38
. Ibid., 3:907; Green Haywood Hackworth,
Digest of International Law
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1942), 3:492.

C
HAPTER
7

1
. The following narrative is compiled from Graham H. Stuart,
The Department of State: A History of its Organization, Procedure, and Personnel
(New York: MacMillan, 1949); Gaillard Hunt,
The Department of State of the United States: Its History and Functions
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1914); and 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).

2
. Stuart,
The Department of State
, 219.

3
. James R. Beniger,
The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 15.

4
. Christopher Dandeker,
Surveillance, Power, and Modernity: Bureaucracy and Discipline from 1700 To The Present Day
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1990); David Beetham,
Bureaucracy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Morton Keller,
Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1977), 195–210; Stephen Skowronek,
Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1870–1920
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

5
. Beniger,
The Control Revolution
, 279–80.

6
. I have borrowed this insight from Ian McNeely’s work on scribes in German states in the early decades of the nineteenth century (Ian F. McNeely,
The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s–1820s
[Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003], 165).

7
. Beniger,
The Control Revolution
, 14.

8
. Cindy Sondik Aron,
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 7, 94, 119, 130, 132–33.

9
. Keller,
Affairs of State
, 316.

10
. Aron,
Ladies and Gentlemen
; Keller,
Affairs of State
, 195–210.

11
. Aron,
Ladies and Gentlemen
, 78–81, 95.

12
. Stuart,
The Department of State
, 205; Peter Bridges, “Some Men Named William Hunter,”
Diplomacy & Statecraft
16 (2005): 255.

13
. Stuart,
The Department of State
, 130.

14
. Ibid., 143.

15
. Peter Bridges, “An Appreciation of Alvey Adee,”
Diplomacy & Statecraft
10 (1999): 47.

16
. Stuart,
The Department of State
, 273, 275.

17
. A rough parallel to this is evident in the broader cultural move away from “men of affairs” and the “best men” to the “bureaucratic technician” and “scientist-official” as authoritative sources of knowledge. On this see Matthew G. Hannah,
Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in NineteenthCentury America
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 55–56, 61–76.

18
. An earlier example of the attempt to extract relevant material from State Department correspondence is the series entitled
Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States
. Begun in 1861, it was an annual compilation of U.S. diplomatic documents and other materials. In the 1850s the State Department also issued its first book-length set of instructions for consuls. See Stuart,
The Department of State
, 122.

19
. The first attempt to excerpt passport policy from correspondence occurred as part of the publication of the U.S. government’s multivolume
Digest of International Law
(Francis Wharton,
A Digest of International Law of the United States
[Washington, DC: GPO, 1886], 2:456–81). However, Hunt’s work represented the first attempt to provide a specific, detailed history of the State Department’s passport policy.

20
. Stuart describes this as a harsh picture of the department, but Root’s comments appear to endorse it (Stuart,
The Department of State
, 194).

21
. Keller,
Affairs of State
, 318.

22
. Hunt,
Department of State
, 416–18.

23
. Milton O. Gustafson, “State Department Records in the National Archives: A Profile,”
Prologue
2 (1970): 179.

24
. For a detailed summary of the 1909 categories see Hunt,
Department of State
, 418–23.

25
. Matt K. Matsuda,
The Memory of the Modern
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

26
. Edward Higgs,
The Information State in England: The Centralized Collection of Information on Citizens since 1500
(Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmilllan, 2004), 54.

27
. “A press book [also called a copy book] is a bound book containing three hundred to five hundred sheets of tissue paper. Letters were written or (later) typed with copying ink and when they were ready to be sent out they were placed between the dampened sheets of tissue in the book. Then a letter press was used to compress the book, causing impressions of the letters to remain in the tissue paper sheets.” JoAnne Yates, “From Press Book and Pigeonhole to Vertical Filing: Revolution in Storage and Access Systems for Correspondence,”
Journal of Business Communication
19 (1982): 9.

28
. JoAnne Yates, “Business Use of Information and Technology During the Industrial Age,” in
A Nation Transformed By Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present
, ed. Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and James W. Corteda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 118; Joanne Yates,
Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 62.

29
. This discussion of the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act draws heavily from Adam McKeown,
Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 218–91.

30
. Ibid., 240–41.

31
. For an example of this argument see Miles Ogborn,
Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company
(Chicago, University of Chicago, 2007).

32
. For an example of this from the 1920s see Karen W. Tice,
Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). The idea of “simplification” comes from James C. Scott,
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

33
. The previous two sentences are adapted from a summary of Suzanne Briet’s definition of a document (Michael K. Buckland, “What is a ‘Document’?”
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
48 [1997]: 804–9). Briet was a mid-twentieth-century French documentalist. The documentalists developed “documentation” as a set of techniques to manage information starting in the late nineteenth century. This is a further example of the broader context of the developing information management practices that enabled modern identification documents to function as a technology within the archival problematization of identity. Also see Ronald E. Day
The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 7–37.

C
HAPTER
8

1
.
Urtetiqui v. D’Arcy
, 34 U.S. 698 (1835). For the background of the case see Stephen Krueger,
Krueger on United States Passport Law
(Hong Kong: Crossbow, 1996), 7–14.

2
. John Bassett Moore,
A Digest of International Law
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1906), 3:862.

3
. 1 Stats at Large USA 103 (March 26, 1790); 1 Stats at Large of USA 414 (January 29, 1795).

4
. Quoted in Andor Klay,
Daring Diplomacy: The Case of the First American Ultimatum
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957), 165–66.

5
. Brent to Glazer, June 7, 1823, RG 59 Notes to Foreign Legations, III, 137, National Archives.

6
. Buchanan to Huren, August 20, 1846, RG 59 Domestic Letters 36: 73, National Archives.