The Passport in America: The History of a Document (41 page)

Magazine and newspapers began to run feature stories on this new form of travel in the summer of 1924, when some shipping lines offered a limited tourist-third service. Although initially college students dominated the public presentation of the new traveler, the “white-collar steerage” tourist increasingly became associated with “the school teacher, the clergyman, the college professor and student, the army veteran who had or hadn’t been across, and Mr. and Mrs. Average American with a moderate income and a short vacation period,” as described by one journalist;
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tourist third also became an acceptable way for women, particularly female college students, to travel unaccompanied by men, either alone or in groups.
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The increasing number of “average Americans” abroad was to some critics an indication that travel, like other leisure practices, had been commercialized for easy consumption by a mass audience.
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For these people, tourist third was “the thin edge of the wedge perhaps in transforming foreign travel from a leisure class to a popular avocation.”
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At the end of the 1930s, an embittered travel writer proclaimed that “modern travel [had become] an excursion into a more extended Coney Island.”
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Travel as a relatively fast-paced leisure experience packaged for the middle class allowed people to travel who the writer believed were “not entitled to travel in the first place” because they lacked “the mature knowledge of the historical and psychological conditions which produced them. To the average tourist they are merely a succession of passing objects, a kaleidoscopic profusion, and as such, as destitute of spiritual value as the sights of the American carnival.”
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Who exactly were these “average tourists”? In 1930 the State Department began to issue an annual breakdown of passport applicants at the request of steamship companies and travel agents. These initial figures, which took over a year to compile, revealed a pattern that remained consistent throughout the 1930s; of the 200,000 applicants in 1929, the largest group did not list an occupation (26,428), closely followed by 23,947 housewives. Other notable groups included: 16,345 laborers, 10,910 clerks, 5,317 bankers, 6,873 merchants, and 630 writers. Almost half the applicants listed travel as the purpose of their trip (94,054), with a third offering family reasons (68,314). Other reasons included: commercial business (15,636), education (12,838), health (3, 033), and professional business (2,324). More than a fifth of applicants gave New York City as residence, with another 13,734 living in other parts of New York State. Pennsylvania provided 18,499 applicants, New Jersey 15,033, Illinois 14,029, Massachusetts 12,479, California 7,877, Nevada 118, and New Mexico 79. Western Europe was the most popular destination (133,479) followed by Eastern
Europe, with 10,615. Just over 8,000 people applied for passports for travel to Latin American, the West Indies, and Mexico; 1,201 to Africa; and 670 to Australia and New Zealand.
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While the new tourism these U.S. citizens generated may have angered some of their (not so) fellow travelers, the commercialization of travel generated few dissenters within the treasuries of European nations. The annual expenditure of U.S. citizens abroad had been steadily increasing since 1922 when, returning to Europe, they spent $360 million; in the two decades prior to the war, annual expenditure had been $170 million.
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In 1928 the 430,955 citizens who left the United States spent $860 million abroad. Those who went to Europe spent $525 million, or more than two and a half times what European countries paid to the United States in war debt that year.
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Despite the economic depression, in 1931 U.S. citizens spent $570 million abroad. However, an English newspaper did note a perceived change in the spending patterns of the Depression-era tourist in Europe:

The average American tourist this year, particularly the student and teacher type, is seeing Europe at the roc-bottom [
sic
] price. Many are taking their meals in tea-shops and chain restaurants. Even in the fashionable hotels and restaurants, the more affluent Yankees have shown such tightwad tendencies when tipping that the waiters have come to the conclusion that lavish spenders of American nationality are now extinct.
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It is not clear to what extent the French government would have noticed this, as U.S. citizens spent almost one-fifth of their money abroad in France, the $110 million equaling five times what the French government paid on its war debt in 1931.
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Although travelers seemed to spend money abroad eagerly, the passport nuisance referred in part to anger at the need to pay visa fees for each European country, anger fueled through a campaign orchestrated by national business associations.

The passport nuisance was vociferously articulated in newspapers and magazines through complaints about the visas required to travel through the new Europe, which, as one businessman complained, had “been split into a number of small countries” subsequent to the war.
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The rubber-stamp era became
a nuisance when travelers realized they had to pay a $10 visa fee for every country they visited, both the old big ones and the new small ones. European states had increased visa fees for U.S. citizens in retaliation for the United States introducing a $10 visa fee in 1920. The same act also raised the cost of a U.S. passport to $10 from the nominal $1 fee that had been charged since 1888. The attempt to take money from citizens for a document historically considered a courtesy outraged many. In the midst of complaints about the $10 passport fee, one disgruntled citizen complained that, “considering what real protection I could buy from some mutual accident insurance company for that sum I would say that this charge seems to be… both exorbitant and unnecessary.”
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The cost was also challenged by citizens living abroad who, contrary to the wishes of the State Department, continued to use a passport to verify their citizenship. One newspaper calculated that because of the need to begin a passport renewal every eighteen months, it now cost citizens living abroad “2 cents every day, to afford the absolute necessity of an American Passport.”
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In both cases, it forced public recognition that a passport, with its popular association as a claim to official protection, was no longer issued primarily for the benefit of citizens, but had become a document of use by governments not only for security but also for revenue.

However, it was the new $10 visa fee that became a greater concern, because it had a more tangible effect—the retaliatory fee increases raised the cost of travel, especially for budget-conscious travelers in Europe. The $10 U.S. visa fee was arguably the result of a mixture of budgetary and security reasons. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the chair of the Senate Immigration Committee, stated simply that visas were required to produce revenue for government departments, but his opponents argued that the restrictionist senator saw the visa system as a way to indirectly limit immigration by making it too expensive to acquire the required visa.
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However, in contrast to many other countries, which had separate visas for tourists and immigrants, the $10 fee applied to the only visa the State Department issued. Therefore, the fee increase affected not only immigrants, but also tourists traveling to the United States—hence the retaliation of European governments in the form of high visa fees for all U.S. travelers.

The new European visa fees particularly angered businessmen traveling abroad. The New York Merchants Association and the New York Board of Trade instigated a national campaign against the visa fee charged by the U.S. government, on the assumption that a decrease in the U.S. visa cost would result in a reciprocal decrease in the fees other countries charged.
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Subsequently
joined by other local and national merchant and trade organizations, the campaign directed its efforts at newspapers and magazines, the State Department, and congressmen.
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It found allies within all these targets. The editorial pages of major newspapers offered strong criticism of the passport system, regularly summarizing the campaign’s literature. While publicly stating that passport and visa fees were a matter for Congress, privately, State Department and Division of Passport Control officials remained sympathetic to the campaign’s position, and occasionally forwarded supporting information to sympathetic congressmen.
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These congressmen introduced bills to reduce visa and passport fees.
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The main argument businessmen had against the visa fee was that it lessened the competitiveness of U.S. businessmen in international trade. In this manner, they presented the businessman abroad as a commercial representative of the nation-state. Business organizations offered numerous comparisons in arguing that the cost of visas put their members at a disadvantage compared to foreign competitors. Individual European countries did not have uniform visa fees for all foreigners. For example, in 1921 a U.S. businessman who traveled from Germany to Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Hungry paid three hundred times more in visa fees than his English equivalent, and one thousand times more than a French businessman.
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Endorsing one of the main complaints, a newspaper editorial argued that visa fees were “an irritating small check upon that international intercourse and trade which the United States is supposed to be so eager to promote”; or, as a letter writer supporting the editorial stated, the high fee for a U.S. visa was an “indictment of the common sense of those who seek to promote our foreign trade to the best of their ability.”
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In this way, the commercial campaign against visa costs tapped into the pervasive belief that the developing postwar prosperity depended on businessmen having a free reign both at home and abroad.

A second argument presented visa and passport fees as a form of taxation. Through this claim the disgruntled businessmen and merchants actively sought to link themselves to noncommercial travelers, their fellow citizens, on vacation in Europe, who also had to pay the $10 fee. As an example of the negative effect on vacationers, opponents regularly offered the $100 in visa fees U.S. citizens had to pay if they traveled from England to Turkey on the Orient Express.
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These visa fees, along with the $10 a U.S. citizen paid for a passport, were both referred to as “passport fees,” or submerged within complaints about “the passport business” and “passport nuisance”; the majority of letters to newspapers complaining about “passport fees”
were in fact about visa fees. This slippage and the successful articulation of European visa fees as retaliatory allowed both sets of fees to be positioned as taxes that were the fault of the U.S. government. For one disgruntled citizen, the fees “put the nation itself in the class of grafters and extortioners [
sic
].”
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In a 1921 internal memo, the State Department solicitor agreed. He labeled the passport fee “an extraordinary tax, which bears equally upon rich and poor and probably prevents many persons of small means, especially school teachers from traveling abroad.”
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However, publicly the State Department followed a strategy of merely agreeing that the passport system, while necessary, definitely “causes delays and inconveniences.”
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In reply to these public and private criticisms, Senator Lodge did not dispute the labeling of the fees as taxes. He positioned them, along with amusement taxes and the automobile tax, as luxury taxes on activities that were not necessities. For Lodge it was not a question of mobility but travel. While it could be argued that the former was part of a freedom of movement, the latter for him was indisputably an “unnecessary” leisure activity.
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In its rhetoric, the campaign against visa fees challenged the association of travel with leisure. Instead, travel was an educational activity to enhance citizenship. Named after the popular guide book, the introduction of so-called Cooks tourists traveling tourist third after 1924 gave complaints about the debilitating cost of visa fees wider currency. The vacation of a less well-off tourist was frequently presented as an unusual, once-in-a-lifetime event that provided the average person with important and necessary knowledge of the world. For such people who planned to travel on a package tour paying $250 or less, it was argued, every dollar had been carefully saved and precisely budgeted. Therefore, an additional $10 passport fee and $50 in visa fees could deny them their dream and its educational benefits.
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A teacher, with an average salary of $1,500, provided the most potentially sympathetic example of this low-budget tourist. By traveling to benefit “her students,” a teacher made explicit the link between the educational benefits of travel and the good of the nation.
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Although in the mid-1920s the exact number of teachers who traveled abroad remained unknown, the attempt to link travel and education provided the anti–fee campaign with one of its first successes, albeit one that was of little use to businessmen. In 1926 Congress allowed teachers to renew their passports without an additional fee for an extra two-year period beyond the maximum two-year period of validity of the passports of other U.S. citizens; the passport fee remained $10, as did the fee for a U.S. visa.