The Passport in America: The History of a Document (57 page)

56
. McDonald, “Visa Fee Cut.”

57
.
New York Times
, “Reveals Passport Survey,” March 28, 1930;
New York Times
, “Passport Fee Sought By Ship Man,” February 27, 1932;
Literary Digest
, “Nation Spends Millions on Travel,” September 30, 1933, 38.

58
.
World’s Work
, “Passports for Summer Travel,” June 1930, 22.

59
.
New York Times
, “Business Men Ask Cut in Passport Fee,” January 3, 1930.

60
.
World’s Work
, “Passports for Summer Travel,” 22.

61
.
New York Times
, “Passports Are Too Expensive,” March 19, 1921; Kenneth Roberts, “Trial by Travel,”
Saturday Evening Post
, September 4, 1920.

62
.
New York Times
, “American Travelers Tired of Passports,” September 21, 1924.

63
. House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Passport Renewals: Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Affairs
, 71st Cong., 2nd sess., April 15–16, 1930, 8.

64
. Ibid., 9.

65
. Ibid., 20. In 1930 the cost of the issuance of a passport was reduced to $6, and renewals were extended to all citizens at a cost of $2. In 1932 the cost of a passport was again raised to $10.

66
. Brist to Adee, January 13, 1922, RG 59 138.101/266 Box 634, National Archives.

67
. Stimson to Shipley, March 3, 1933, RG 59, 111.28/232A, Box 224, National Archives.

68
. Roberts, “Trial by Travel,” 67.

69
. 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 had to apply to a state or federal court clerk. All applications were still forwarded to the State Department in Washington, D.C.

70
. Greer to Phillips, July 3, 1923, RG 59 111.28 NY, National Archives.

71
. 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).

72
. Dumenil,
Modern Temper
, 86.

73
. Max Weber,
From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.); David Held,
Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

74
. Simon A. Cole,
Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 165.

75
. Menken to Stimson, July 23, 1930, RG 59 111.28 NY/63 Box 225, National Archives.

76
. “DFN,” April 20, 1931, RG 59 111.28 N.Y/67, National Archives.

77
. Watts to Kellogg, May 13, 1927, RG 59 138/2223, National Archives. For another example of frustration with the need for birth certificates see Sophie Kerr, “You Must Tell All,”
Saturday Evening Post
, April 18, 1931, 22.

78
. Watts to Kellogg, May 13, 1927.

79
. Watts to Olds, May 26, 1927, RG 59 138/2223, National Archives.

80
. Ibid.

81
. Olds to Watts, May 25, 1927, RG 59 138/2223, National Archives.

82
. Ibid.

83
. For a sample of newspaper articles see clippings attached to Hogdon to Carr, December 5, 1932, RG 59, 811.111, Einstein, Albert, National Archives.

84
.
New York Times
, “Einstein Ultimatum Brings a Quick Visa,” December 6, 1932.

85
.
New York Times
, “Einstein Resumes Packing for Voyage,” December 7, 1932.

86
.
New York Times
, “Einstein Embarks; Jests About Quiz,” December 11, 1932.

87
.
Washington Post
, “Visa Dispute Cleared Up, Einstein Sails Saturday,” December 7, 1932.

88
. RG 59, 811.111, Einstein, Albert, National Archives.

89
. Memo, Hogdon, Visa Division, December 17, 1933, RG 59, 811.111, Einstein, Albert, National Archives.

90
.
New York Times
, “The Alien Entering America Must Answer Many Questions,” December 11, 1932; Alexander H. Kuhnel, “The Einstein Episode,”
New York Times
, December 8, 1932.

91
. Charles F. Ault, “The Passport Inquisition,”
New York Times
, July 21, 1927.

92
. Hilton Burnside Sonneborn, “Easing Passport Difficulties,”
New York Times
, March 5, 1929.

93
. Lynn Dumenil, “‘The Insatiable Maw of Bureaucracy’: Antistatism and Education Reform in the 1920s,”
Journal of American History
77 (1990): 518.

94
.
World’s Work
, “Borah on Local Self-Government,” June 1925, 127–28; Dumenil, “Insatiable Maw,” 518.

95
. Stimson to Shipley, March 3, 1933, RG 59 111.28/232A, Box 224, National Archives.

96
. Nancy F. Cott,
The Grounding of Modern Feminism
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 216. For an analysis of the masculinized enforcement model J. Edgar Hoover introduced in the 1920s see Rachel Hall,
Wanted: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press), 95–106.

97
. Stimson to Shipley, March 3, 1933, RG 59, 111.28/232A, Box 224, National Archives.

98
. Peaslee to Kellogg, August 24, 1925, RG 59 111.28/New York 15, National Archives.

99
.
New York Telegram
, September 3, 1926, RG 59 111.28/NY 32, National Archives.

100
. Ibid.

101
. Progressive, [untitled letter],
New York Times
, June 5, 1934.

102
. Femina, “Passport Information,”
New York Times
, May 30, 1934.

103
. Forty Plus, “Passport Age Data,”
New York Times
, June 5, 1934.

104
. Charles S. Taylor, “Passport Data,”
New York Times
, June 1, 1934.

105
. Highham to Shipley, August 28, 1928, RG 59 111.28 Boston/29, National Archives (emphasis added).

106
. Anthony Giddens,
The Consequences of Modernity
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 90.

107
.
New York Times
, “Why Object to Finger-Prints?” February 7, 1928.

108
. Sankar, “State Power and Record-Keeping,” 245.

109
. Ibid., 246, 254;
New York Times
, “Wider Use of Fingerprinting,” May 3, 1931.

110
. By the end of the month, eighteen thousand people had been voluntarily fingerprinted. See
New York Times
, “Rockefeller Files his Fingerprint,” February 8, 1935.
New York Times
, “18,000 Are Fingerprinted at Invitation of Police,” February 28, 1935.

111
. Donald C. Dilworth, ed.,
Identification Wanted: Development of the American Criminal Identification System, 1893–1943
(Gaithersburg, MD: International Association of Chiefs of Police, 1977), 218–22.

112
.
New York Times
, “Buffalo Police Head Suggests Rogues Gallery in Every Home,” September 18, 1932; Sankar, “State Power and Record-Keeping,” 296.

113
.
New York Times
, “Millionth to File Fingerprints,” November 22, 1938.

114
.
Literary Digest
, “To Fingerprint us All,” October 24, 1925, 21–22.

115
.
Literary Digest
, “Finger-print Identification in Banks,” August 24, 1912, 297.

116
. For a detailed example of the importance of “safety” to modern practices of governing in the United States, see Jeremy Packer,
Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

117
. Courtney Ryley Cooper, “Hold for Identification: Twenty-Five Hundred Fingerprints A Day,”
The Saturday Evening Post
, January 12, 1935, 66; American Civil Liberties Union,
Thumbs Down! The Fingerprint Menace to Civil Liberties
(New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1938), 6.

118
. Thorsten Sellin, “Identification,” in
Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences
(New York: Macmillan, 1932), 7:573–74.

119
. Hull to Watts, September 27, 1934, RG 59 138/3333, National Archives.

120
. Ruth Shipley, “Memo,” September 15, 1934, RG 59 138/3333, National Archives. In a subsequent memo, Shipley clarified that she was not opposed to fingerprinting (“Memo,” November 1, 1934, RG 59 138/3333, National Archives).

121
. A similar claim can be made about the United Kingdom in this period. See Edward Higgs, “The Rise of the Information State: The Development of Central State Surveillance of the Citizen in England, 1500–2000,”
Journal of Historical Sociology
14 (2001): 190. As well as proving their identity people encountered an increased demand to answer detailed questions about things previously considered private. This included job interviews. See, Kerr, “You Must Tell All.”

C
ONCLUSION

1
. Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, “Identity and Reality: The End of the Philosophical Immigration Officer,” in
Modernity and Identity
, ed. Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

2
.
Oxford English Dictionary
, 2d ed.

3
. Dan Schiller,
How to Think About Information
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Mark Andrejevic,
iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007).

4
. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,”
Representations
40 (1992): 81–128.

5
. Fred Barbash and Sara Kehaulani Goo, “U.S. Begins Tracking Foreign Arrivals,”
Washington Post
, January 5, 2004.

6
. Washington Post, “U.S. Pilot Fined for Obscene Gesture in Brazil,”
Washington Post
, January 15, 2004; Elaine Sciolino, “World Opinion is Fragmented on Tighter Security for Visitors,”
New York Times
, January 7, 2004.

7
. Shelley de Alth, “ID at the Polls: Assessing the Impact of Recent State Voter ID Laws on Voter Turnout,”
Harvard Law and Policy Review
3 (2009), 187–189; Robert Pear, “Citizens Who Lack Papers Lose Medicaid,”
New York Times
, March 12, 2007.

8
. Forty Plus, “Passport Age Data,”
New York Times
, June 5, 1934.

Bibliography

A
RCHIVAL
S
OURCES

National Archives Branch Depository, College Park, MD, and Washington, D.C. Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. RG 85.

———. Records of the U.S. State Department. RG 59.

A. 1789–1906.

Diplomatic Correspondence; Consular Correspondence; Miscellaneous Correspondence (Domestic Letters and Miscellaneous Letters).

B. 1906–1910.

Numerical File.

C. 1910–1963.

Decimal File: 130–138.

D. Inventory 15.

Records of the Passport Division, 1790–1917.

Records of the Passport Division, 1906–1925.

Numerical series: indexed by subject.

New York Public Library: William Williams Papers.

O
THER
S
OURCES

Abbott, Edith.
Immigration: Select Documents and Case Records
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924.

Adair, Ellen. “War Time Traveling in France is Beset With Trials, Especially for One who Can Speak German.”
Washington Post
, August 29, 1915.