The Passport in America: The History of a Document (55 page)

35
.
Washington Post
, “Threaten Suits to Obtain Passports,” November 4, 1915.

36
. In contrast, a U.S. official visaed an alien’s passport with the word “seen” (Carr to Murphy [Consul-Gen., Cape Town], March 30, 1915, RG 59 138.7/17 Box 638, National Archives).

37
.
Washington Post
, “Asks For Unused Passports,” January 13, 1916; Assist. Secretary of Treasury to Secretary of State, March 29, 1916, RG 59, 138.81/18,
National Archives; Secretary of State to Secretary of Labor, October 28, 1916 RG 85, MLR#9, 54410/331c, National Archives.

38
. Flournoy to Johnson, December 24, 1914, RG 59 138.28/1 Box 66, National Archives.

39
.
Washington Post
, “New Passport Ruling,” April 19, 1916.

40
.
New York Sun
, “Passport Rules Strict,” June 19, 1917.

41
.
New York Sun
, “Branch Office Opens Here,” January 4, 1916. The State Department had employed individual passport agents in New York City and Boston during the Civil War.

42
.
Washington Post
, “Tighten Rules on Passports,” February 2, 1917.

43
.
Washington Post
, “Hard To Get U.S. Passports,” March 5, 1916.

44
. Ibid.

45
. Ibid.

46
.
Washington Post
, “No Missionary Passports,” October 10, 1915;
Washington Post
, “No Student Passports,” September 18, 1915;
Washington Post
, “New Passport Policy,” October 26, 1915.

47
.
Washington Post
, “Passports Held Back,” April 8, 1915;
Washington Post
, “Kaiser Puts Americans into Army When their Passports Expire,” October 8, 1917.

48
.
Washington Post
, “Limits Passport Issuance,” April 24, 1915.

49
.
New York Sun
, “Adolph Dietzel Arrested at Aberdeen,” April 1, 1915.

50
.
New York Times
, “Baron Zwiedinek Sent Suggestion to Buy Passports,” December 11, 1915;
New York Times
, “Bryan Admits Spies Get our Passports,” November 14, 1914;
New York Times
, “Exposure Balks Officer,” January 6, 1915.

51
.
New York Sun
, “Stiegler Arrested New German Plot,” February 25, 1915.

52
.
New York Tribune
article (stamped August 29, 1915) attached to Page to Secretary of State, June 18, 1915, RG 59 138.8/55, National Archives.

53
. Page to Secretary of State, June 16, 1915, RG 59 138.8/53, National Archives.

54
. Ibid.; Page to Secretary of State, June 28, 1915, RG 59 138.8/64, National Archives.

55
. “RWF” to Lansing, June 18, 1915, RG 59 138.8/78, National Archives; “RWF” to Woolsey, July 14, 1915, RG 59 138.8/78, National Archives.

56
. Page to Secretary of State, November 11, 1915, RG 59 138.8/87, National Archives.

57
. Aristide R. Zolberg, “The Great Wall Against China: Responses to the First Immigration Crisis, 1855–1925,” in
Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives
, ed. Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 1997), 308.

58
. Clifford Alan Perkins,
Border Patrol: With the U.S. Immigration Service on the Mexican Boundary, 1910–54
(El Paso: Texas Western Press, University of Texas at El Paso, 1978), 73.

59
. Assistant Secretary of Treasury to Secretary of State, April 18, 1918, RG 59 811.111/4681, National Archives.

60
. Totten, “Report on Conditions on the Mexican Border,” January 20, 1918, RG 59 811.111/3253, National Archives, 7.

61
. American Consul [Sonara] to Secretary of State, May 6, 1921, RG 59 13/1459, National Archives.

62
. U.S. Bureau of Immigration,
Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigration to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1918), 11, 321.

63
. Berkshire to Adee, March 4, 1920, RG 59 811.111/28903, National Archives; Berkshire to Chief, Division of Passport Control, May 15, 1921, RG 59 811.111/21691, National Archives;
New York Times
, “Criticizes Ruling on Mexico Passport,” September 14, 1920;
New York Times
, “Hard Drinking Oasis Before the Cabinet,” October 22, 1921.

64
. David M. Kennedy,
Over Here: The First World War and American Society
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 98.

65
. Alfred D. Chandler Jr.,
The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1977); Stephen Skowronek,
Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1870–1920
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 200. For debates about the changes this brought to social priorities in the United States, see Ellis W. Hawley,
The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and their Institutions, 1917–1933
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1992); Paul L. Murphy,
World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States
(New York: Norton, 1979); Kennedy,
Over Here
.

66
. Kennedy,
Over Here
.

67
. Charles H. McCormick,
Seeing Reds: Federal Surveillance of Radicals in the Pittsburgh Mill District, 1917–1921
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 4.

68
. Ibid., 29; Kennedy,
Over Here
, 67–68.

69
. Christopher Capozzola,
Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 23.

70
. U.S. Department of Justice,
Annual Report of the Attorney General of the United States, 1918
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1918), 15; Kennedy,
Over Here
, 82.

71
. Capozzola,
Uncle Sam Wants You
, 37, 22–53.

72
. Department of Justice,
Annual Report, 1918
, 29–31, 686–727; Pamela Sankar, “State Power and Record-Keeping: The History of Individualized Surveillance in the United States, 1790–1935” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992), 261–63.

73
. Capozzola,
Uncle Sam Wants You
, 174.

74
.
New York Times
, “President Urges Longer Alien Ban,” August 26, 1919.

75
.
New York Times
, “Barring Undesirables,” October 19, 1919.

76
. House Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Fees Charged for Passports
, 25.

77
. House Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Extension of Passport Control: Hearings
, 66th Cong., 1st sess., October 7, 8, 10, 1919, 29, 9.

78
. House Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Extension of Passport Control
; House Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Fees Charged for Passports
; McCormick,
Seeing Red; Washington Post
, “Alien Order Is Modified,” July 2, 1920, 6; Polk to Atty.-Gen., February 12, 1920, RG 59 138.8/119.

79
.
New York Herald
, “Test May Be Made In Passport Mixup,” April 3, 1921;
New York Times
, “Need Passports No Longer,” April 5, 1921.

80
. House Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Further Regulating
, 32.

81
. Adee to Otter Manufacturing Co., September 5, 1922, RG 59 811.111/38008, National Archives.

82
. Flournoy to Carr, Oct 15, 1919, RG 59 811.111/27192a, National Archives.

83
. House Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Fees Charged for Passports
, 36.

84
. Assistant Secretary of Labor to Secretary of State, November 12, 1921, RG 59 811.111/34894, National Archives; 2nd Assistant Secretary of Labor to Secretary of State, November 8, 1922, RG 59 811.111/38504, National Archives; Secretary of State to Consular Officers, November 19, 1923 RG 59 811.111/42198a, National Archives.

85
.
Washington Post
, “Germans Coming To U.S.,” March 7, 1920;
Washington Post,
“State Department Power On Alien Passports Final,” January 20, 1921.

86
. For example, a 1923
New York Times
editorial argued that the Departments of Labor and State should work together so that quota numbers determined the issuance of visas, an argument that incorrectly assumed an already existing role for visas in immigration regulations (
New York Times
, “Controlling Immigration at the Source,” August 3, 1923). See House Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Fees Charged
, 30–31.

87
. 42 Stat 5 (May 19, 1921).

88
. Mae Ngai traces the principle behind this change back to the 1917 Act, which introduced a literacy test (Mae M. Ngai,
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
[Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004], 19).

89
. RG 59 811.111/41008, National Archives;
New York Times
, “Controlling Immigration at the Source,” August 3, 1923.

90
.
New York Times
“Controlling Immigration at the Source.”

91
.
New York Times
, “Aliens on Four Ships Too Soon to Enter,” September 2, 1923.

92
.
New York Times
, “Fines Ships $600,000 for Surplus Aliens,” September 6, 1923.

93
. Department of Labor,
Annual Report 1924
, 1.

94
. Perhaps not surprisingly, some immigration officials still considered the face-to-face expertise of immigration inspectors more effective than a system of excessive documentation (“Taking the Queue out of Quota: An Interview with W. W. Husband, Commissioner-General of Immigration,”
Survey
, March 15, 1924, 667–69.)

95
. I did not find any discussion of how the issuance of visas abroad was coordinated with visas issued in Canada or Mexico to ensure that the monthly and
annual quotas were not oversubscribed. But neither did I find any complaints, so the system appears to have worked more effectively than under the 1921 act.

96
. Thomas M. Pitkin,
Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island
(New York: New York University Press, 1975), 155–57; William C. White, “Ellis Island Altered by Immigration Trend,”
New York Times
, October 8, 1933, 12.

97
. U.S. Department of State,
The Immigration Work of the Department of State and its Consular Officers
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1932), 6.

98
. By 1932 medical inspections had been implemented in the United Kingdom, the Irish Free State, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Austria (U.S. Department of State,
Immigration Work
, 2). For the initial English experiment, see Amy L. Fairchild,
Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 259–76;
New York Times
, “Examine Britons Before Coming Here,” August 2, 1925;
New York Times
, “Examining Immigrants Abroad,” August 7, 1925;
New York Times
, “Examining Immigrants Abroad,” May 31, 1926.

99
.
New York Times
, “Held in Poland for Visa Forgeries,” February 28, 1930;
New York Times
, “Nine Indicted Here as Fake Visa Ring,” March 5, 1930.

100
.
New York Times
, “False Passport Plot Nipped in Hungary,” November 2, 1925, 25; Nathan to Secretary of State, July 24, 1924; RG 59 138.28/52, National Archives.

101
. Carr to White, April 7, 1930, RG 59 138/2673, National Archives.

102
. Consul-Gen. (Budapest) to Secretary of State, Nov 14, 1925, RG 59 138.28/67, Box 636, National Archives; “American Passport Fraud Detection in Italy,” June 11, 1934, RG 59 138.81/388, National Archives; Consul-Gen. (Naples) to Secretary of State, November 3, 1931, RG 59 138.81/238, National Archives.

103
. House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization,
Review of the Action of Consular Officers in Refusing Immigration Visas: Hearings
, 72nd Cong., 1st sess., March 16, 1932; House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization,
Review of Refusal of Visas by Consular Officers: Hearings
, 73rd Cong., 1st sess., May 18, 23, 1933.