The Passport in America: The History of a Document (19 page)

The notary public’s role as an “official stranger” in the application process ended with the outbreak of World War I.
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From the end of 1914 passport applications had to be executed in front of a court official before being sent to the department. Another measure that brought the application process more securely into the legal and administrative realm of the state
was the postwar decision to open passport agencies in port cities. The State Department employees who staffed these agencies took passport applications and, if necessary, issued emergency passports.
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In the 1920s the department continued to actively police the individuals involved in the application and issuance of a passport. Instructions were issued to officials about evaluating the “witness” used in passport applications. Although notaries public were no longer involved, the process still required an individual who could verify the personal identity of the applicant and, therefore, that the applicant was indeed the person the supporting documents had established as a citizen. The witness was required to appear in person at the time of application rather than signing the form prior to the applicant going to the agency or courthouse. This “inconvenience” became a frequent source of complaints.
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State Department circulars described an appropriate witness as a “respectable citizen,” but this category was not defined, leaving individual officials to police it at their discretion. These respectable citizens not only had to establish their own credentials; they also had to convince officials that they knew the applicant. Enforcement of the latter was given regulatory teeth in the late 1920s, when the Passport Division declared a “professional witness” unacceptable. This regulation was intended to exclude people with a financial interest in the issuance of passports, usually either steamship company employees or lawyers.
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Similar regulations were enacted in regards to people eligible to witness an oath of allegiance. These witness requirements were relaxed in the case of passports issued abroad. On occasion, if conditions prevented an applicant from traveling to the nearest consulate, departmental regulations allowed an oath of allegiance to be sworn in front of a foreign official authorized to administer oaths. However, another U.S. citizen had to be present at this act so that the U.S. state witnessed the application in surrogate form.
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Another instruction from the State Department added that if the witness to a passport application was not personally known to the consul, “he” was still allowed to witness an affidavit if “his personal appearance, as well as that of the applicant, indicate[d] American nationality.”
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In the early 1920s the equation of citizenship with a particular definition of whiteness (and its association with respectability) meant that in certain circumstances personal appearance was still accepted as evidence of U.S. citizenship in lieu of paper documents; this form of verification had been useful to enforcing immigration restrictions from the 1880s.

Witnesses, in the form of notaries public and citizens, had been used to verify the personal identity of all applicants but only the citizenship of
those who claimed birth in the United States. The “birth” of naturalized citizens was documented in the form of a naturalization certificate. Therefore, as the initial application requirements made clear, the claim to citizenship of a naturalized citizen called for this document instead of the affidavit demanded of people claiming citizenship through birth in the United States. In the 1880s the different evidence and statements required of naturalized and native citizens resulted in the State Department issuing three different sets of instructions and application forms for native citizens, naturalized citizens, and for people claiming citizenship through the naturalization of a husband or parent (
figure 6.5
).
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The necessity that naturalized citizens submit a naturalization certificate was frequently seen as a hardship—aside from Donald McKenzie’s incredulity, we have also seen frustration resulting from the requirement that the name on the certificate and application be the same. For other applicants this requirement was also discriminatory, in contrast to what they perceived as the more easily satisfied demand for an affidavit from applicants claiming birth in the United States. The State Department rejected this assertion, and with it the implicit privileging of a particular understanding of whiteness and citizenship. In 1888 Secretary of State Thomas Baynard wrote, “The rule of proof applied to each class of citizens is the same.” He clarified that this was the “legal rule,” that “in all cases the proof to be submitted of the existence of a fact must be the best proof of which the case is in its nature susceptible.”
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For naturalized citizens the best proof was the legal record of their naturalization. In the developing practice of official documentation, the naturalization certificate also represented the ideal evidence of citizenship. As a record of the bureaucratic “birth” of the citizen, a naturalization certificate is produced by designated officials within the apparatus of the state. The “birth” could not take place outside of the state and its official record. It required the actions of officials who were located more comfortably within the state than the notary public, who, while an official, was not fully accountable to the state. The judge presiding over a person’s naturalization possessed a clearly defined authority derived from his position within the state, an authority that provided the sole way in which an alien could become a citizen. A judge did not merely witness an event, but the event could not happen without him. Therefore, this “birth” was documented in court records and through a certified copy issued under the seal of the court. This pointed toward an ideal scenario in which a passport would be created exclusively from documents that were rationally and objectively produced within the administrative control of the state. In such a documentary regime

Figure 6.5. Application form for Native Citizen, 1892 (National Archives, College Park, MD).

of verification, documents would beget documents to successfully articulate an official identity in a well-documented life.

The lack of a system of birth registration was far from this ideal, especially once government officials began to take the passport more seriously in the early decades of the twentieth century. There had been a history of calls for universal birth registration, but although a 1903 congressional joint resolution had endorsed the American Public Health Association’s suggested standard certificates for births and deaths and its proposal for enforcement, Congress gave it no financial support.
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Although some cities and states (notably Pennsylvania) enforced birth registration laws, the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century remained in a “barbarous state of existence without complete vital records,” according to a 1916 report from a former chief statistician for the Census Bureau.
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The federal government slowly oversaw the achievement of national birth registration, with Texas being the last state to implement and enforce registration of births in 1933.
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Despite the limited history of birth registration, the State Department made birth certificates a requirement in 1921 for applicants born in the United States, following the initial introduction of the demand during World War I. While it signaled another attempt to bring the issuance of a passport closer in line with the practices of modern identification practices, the demand for a birth certificate was only a gesture towards this. As late as 1942 the Census Bureau estimated 40% of the population (54 million people) did not have birth certificates.
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Further research clarified that in 1948 the claim to universal birth registration represented the registration of 95% of the population, up from 90.7% in 1935. The complicated social context in which any identification practice occurs is evident in statistics that estimated that while 97.1% of the births of white babies were registered, this dropped to 85.9% for non-white babies. A higher percentage of births outside of hospitals and rural residence for non-whites were offered as possible explanations for this difference.
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In the realistic expectation of the absence of birth certificates, the State Department required affidavits from people who they thought must have witnessed the birth (mother, doctor, or midwife) or a document issued close to birth (such as a baptismal certificate). If the approved witnesses had either died or could not be located and no document had been issued contemporaneously to the birth, and the applicant had satisfied an official that he or she had made a genuine attempt to locate this evidence, the department resorted to the previously accepted evidence of a sworn statement of a “respectable” person who knew the
applicant to be a citizen—this statement was also required if the applicant presented a baptismal certificate, as it was a document issued outside of the authority of the state.

The demand for a birth certificate and the ranking of the alternative evidence of citizenship indicated the importance of proximity for the reliable documentation of an event as an accepted fact. Ideally, an event would be documented close to its occurrence. A less ideal alternative was proximity to the applicant in the form of a personal relationship. Therefore, while officials were instructed to accept a sworn affidavit by someone not present at the birth as a last resort, they were told to reject “birth certificates” that local health departments issued retrospectively to adult citizens; in response to the demand for documentary evidence of birth, state and local health departments and hospitals had begun to issue these certificates to people who claimed birth in their state. State Department officials decided to reject this document because it was not issued contemporaneous to the birth—it did not adhere to a definition of reliability based on proximity. The authority of these birth certificates tended to derive principally from the word of an individual or, less frequently, a document such as a baptismal certificate, and even less often, a hospital record that the State Department considered unreliable. In the former two cases the passport application already required a statement from the applicant and, if necessary, a baptismal certificate, thus making a document produced from them redundant. In the case of the latter, the perhaps questionable belief of department officials that record-keeping practices were unreliable was supported by occasional examples of the dubious manner in which some retroactive birth certificates were issued. An investigation of certificates issued by the New York State Department of Health revealed an institutional failure to grasp the precise nature of documentary authority. In 1924 passport officials discovered that standard office practice had different health department officials signing the certificates in the name of the designated official, thus limiting the usefulness of the signature as a sign of authority and authenticity. The certificates under review also all had the same date from 1912 because staff had been unable to change the date on the stamp for a dozen years.
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While the demand for a particular type of birth certificate can be located in an increased belief in the reliability of documents produced within systematic and rational bureaucratic procedures, such a belief existed alongside other criteria of reliability that could trump adherence to process and
documentary authority. In 1926 the State Department decided not to accept any passport applications without birth certificates from the territory of Hawaii even if they included one of the affidavits allowed in lieu of a birth certificate, described to applicants in a footnote to published regulations. The new policy was explained to the secretary of the interior in the following way:

In this connection it may be added that while the footnote above quoted is contained in forms of applications prepared by this Department, these forms were prepared primarily for use in the continental United States after an examination of the conditions existing in this country with reference to the difficulty sometimes encountered in obtaining evidence of birth by applicants for passports claiming to have been born herein.
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An internal State Department memo was more explicit as to why continental conditions could not be assumed to apply in Hawaii:

The substitute evidence which we will take in the cases of persons born in this country of white fathers and mothers is appropriate when the circumstances warrant our taking such action, for we may do so with reasonable safety; but when it comes to extending the same practice to members of the Japanese race, with their well-known racial tendency to equivocate and their racial similarity of physical appearance, we cannot do so without danger of being imposed upon, both in the matter of the identity of the applicant and in the matter of his alleged birth on the soil of the United States.
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