The Passport in America: The History of a Document (40 page)

The move away from the sometimes excessive documentation of “the other” to an attempt to document all citizens did not, of course, originate with the passport, nor was it limited to the passport. However, the passport became an important site for the negotiation over the documentation of individual identity and the general paperization of everyday life—the pervasive demand for documentary verification that many people increasingly encountered in various aspects of their lives. From the perspective of the federal government, passports seemed to fit into the wartime emergence of the “will to know,” to document “facts” in order to produce information about the population it governed. This was also articulated to the domination of bureaucratic methods in the federal government. The State Department wanted all claims to citizenship to be verified by specially designated
officials according to specific documents; to widen the use of official documents was to narrow the opportunities for individuals to invoke a “local” or personal practice of identification. To some applicants, it seemed officials ignored the respectability that most assumed they naturally exhibited, and which therefore should have automatically verified the truth of their statements. A
New York Times
letter writer, unclear who the State Department now considered respectable, asked with minimal humor and evident frustration, “Who ever heard of an irresponsible philatelist or a frivolous certified public accountant?”
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The State Department was attempting to replace respectability with the standardization of documentary practices. Through these practices, officials sought to make the population visible, to simplify people and objects so facts could be collected and governing could become more efficient. The fees associated with the passport system also angered applicants. This increase in the cost of travel was identified as both inefficient and in opposition to the government’s perceived function to encourage U.S. businesses. It was also considered an affront to the reciprocal bonds of loyalty and protection at the heart of the relationship between state and citizen that the passport was understood to represent.

In this manner the passport changed from something like a letter of introduction and protection into an identification document in a very public way. The benevolent state offering protection in the form of a letter addressed to foreign officials became a nation-state practicing surveillance to gain knowledge about its citizens. The official processes of acquiring facts made it clear to many applicants that they had lost control of one aspect of the public representation of their identity; that identification practices produce a new identity is evident in the awareness that the “formalities” associated with a passport application turned citizens into objects of inquiry.

The passport nuisance developed in the early 1920s, as European countries struggled to rebuild a tourist infrastructure in a world with a changed understanding of national security. After the end of World War I, U.S. citizens did not vacation in Europe in significant numbers until 1922. A shortage of ships and coal had limited the number of available passages in the first two years of peace, and major tourist destinations such as England, France, and Italy did not allow tourists until the summer of 1921. In the years of limited tourism, newspapers and magazines published numerous articles on the problems tourists would encounter when they returned to the new Europe.
One journalist described central Europe in 1921 as “a mapless, bewildering and intensely annoying world in which to travel. Roughly re-made by the Treaty of Versailles, it has not yet become used to itself and its new boundaries and multitudinous regulation.”
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Lingering wartime control of international travel through passport and visa regulations was invoked to explain a continent where “every frontier that one used to slip over without knowing… now bristles with high military formalities. Everywhere in your path are sheds and offices crammed with bureaucrats who scribble on your passport for a consideration.”
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Magazine and newspaper readers were treated to detailed descriptions of the many hours needed to obtain the numerous documents required just to travel between two countries. In 1919 Gilbert Fuller, the president of the American Association of Tourist and Travel Agents, recounted how, for his journey from London to Paris, he had to get visas from the U.S. consul, the English police, the French consul, the French military control, the inspector on the boat crossing the Channel, and the police in Paris.
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Two years later a journalist reported he had had to add six pages to his passport to accommodate the 131 rubber stamps he had accumulated in his travels through postwar Europe—the visa had become formalized as a rubber stamp in an attempt to reduce the time involved in inspection.
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A 1922
New York Times
article informed potential travelers that “the passport system gives employment to an army of officials who have become adepts in the art of using rubber stamps on documents with one hand and collecting fees with the other.”
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The simultaneous significance of the redrawing of European boundaries and the annoyances it produced for tourists was humorously expressed in the suggestion of one reporter that “we shall undoubtedly read in years to come learned dissertations on Europe in the Reign of the Rubber Stamp.”
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By the middle of the 1920s, the awkwardness of the lingering wartime reign of the rubber stamp had become the peacetime efficiency of “the passport regime”; the label the League of Nations gave its attempts to intervene in travel documentation. The League’s Organization for Communication and Transit held two passport conferences (in 1920 and 1926).
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Both conferences began with the stated intention of abolishing what was considered to be an expensive and restrictive wartime passport system. However, in spite of this aim, these conferences ended up cementing the wartime system. The conferences created the standardized object that is now recognized as a passport, and, with the assistance of non-League members such as the United States, sketched the conditions that established the passport as the “conventional inter-state permit.”
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Within its own history, the League of Nations’ response can be read as an example of the failure of its doctrine of liberal internationalism in the postwar era of economic nationalism.
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The “liberal internationalism” espoused by the League tended to be shorthand for the unrestricted movement of people, goods, and capital—a shorthand that defined people, goods, and capital as one inseparable mass. Therefore, the passport conferences linked the mobility of people to the movement of goods and capital. Debates about freedom of mobility became debates about free trade. As a general mandate, the League’s Organization for Communication and Transit clearly understood that they had “met in order to facilitate travel for the public and also in particular for businessmen.”
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In opening statements at the 1926 conference, delegates acknowledged the public expectation of a return to unfettered mobility, evident in the coverage given in U.S. newspapers and magazines to the conferences as a possible end to the passport nuisance. But delegates also conceded that the requirements of the “present” (usefully defined in the words of one historian as the “problems of demobilization, dislocation, unemployment, fears of Communist subversion, [and] monetary crises”
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) were so prevalent that the world could not return to the “good old days when optional passports existed.”
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Therefore, the conference legitimated the introduction of the general traveling public into a world of travel documentation that had previously been largely restricted to marginal mobile populations: immigrants and vagrants. However, it did so through a different logic—to facilitate, not control—albeit with the same practical consequences. As recorded in the minutes, conference delegates convinced themselves that the establishment of a passport regime to guarantee freedom of mobility in an
efficient
manner provided the only way to recreate and ensure a sense of the freedom of movement that had characterized prewar travel for nonimmigrants.

Although the Italian delegation complained that the focus on the facilitation of communication and trade ignored the rights of immigrants and foreign laborers, the delegation offered a minority opinion at a conference that illustrated that travelers (commercial and recreational) were intended to be the primary object of the so-called passport regime.
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These new subjects of the passport regime were clearly differentiated from emigrants who “started their journey from a native village.”
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In a preconference statement, the Canadian representatives invoked a particular history of the passport as a guarantee of privilege to argue for abolishing transit visas on the grounds that “consular officials were after all important officials who could hardly be expected to welcome with open arms the humble peasants who made up
the great mass of emigrants.”
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Prioritizing the privileged as the bearers of passports, it was reasoned that the passport regime should offer a limited number of obstacles. To that end, the committee’s report encouraged the checking of passports on moving trains prior to border posts, the extension of a passport’s standard duration from a single journey to at least two years, and the gradual abolishment of departure and transit visas. Acutely aware that well-to-do travelers now had to use passports, one delegate requested identification techniques be made more appropriate for “people of means.” He argued that a photograph should be sufficient identification, for although fingerprints were useful for most immigrants, they “might have some tendency to affect the free movement between countries of the really good class”; an attitude the State Department shared.
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In the United States at the end of the 1920s, when the increasingly standardized passport regime began to take shape, the “really good class” of nonimmigrant travelers had been broadened, as a new middle class took over transatlantic steamships from immigrants. While Atlantic steamship companies had struggled to attract tourist business into the early 1920s, they suffered a greater threat to their business through the introduction of immigration quotas in 1921, followed by the stricter enforcement of quotas abroad after 1924. Immigrants had accounted for at least a third of all passengers, but had contributed an even greater percentage to profits because of the minimal care given to them in steerage, and thus the limited money spent accommodating them. In response to changes in immigration law, steamship companies redeveloped steerage as third class cabins in an ultimately successful attempt to remain profitable. Steerage, thanks to tales of immigration to the United States, had long been associated “with hordes of aliens crowded down somewhere in the bowels of a ship, tiers of steel bunks, mattressed [
sic
] with gunny sack, wretched food, no service, and scant opportunity for personal cleanliness or decent privacy.”
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In the mid-1920s it became “a remodeled and uplifted steerage with private staterooms, embroidered bedspreads, clean table cloths, electric lights in every berth, running water and baths,” all for a $160 round-trip ticket, or, if you were lucky, a thirty-three day vacation to the United Kingdom and France for $243.
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These ships generally still carried immigrants, albeit in a separate part of the ship, where it was expected they would remain invisible to tourists.
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Some companies renovated entire ships into “tourist third.”