The Passport in America: The History of a Document (44 page)

The passport application as a somewhat public investigation of people was apparent in the counter interview that so angered Mary Greer. The interview at the counter turned the application into a visible and audible public performance of an interaction between state and citizen. The comments of another passport agency official provide a useful example of the perceived unnecessary and awkward nature of this interview, but in a way that genders the issues of respectability and privacy Greer raised. In 1926 the
New York Telegram
published an interview with Beulah Baer, a long-term passport-agency employee, the occasion being the first trip abroad for a woman who had helped so many others travel (
figure 11.1
). In soliciting Baer’s opinions on her job, the article offers an example of how the request for an individual’s age annoyed many female applicants, a request that seems to indicate the regular absence of the birth certificate in applications, or its exclusive role as evidence of citizenship, not personal identity. Baer acknowledged that women reluctantly give their age, informing the clerk only because they are impressed with the “seriousness of dealing with the federal government.” She clarified that “we do not accept the ‘over twenty-one’ reply. I think it would be a gracious thing to do, though, because youth is one the greatest of feminine assets, and being as young as we look, it would be less embarrassing for sensitive women not to be compelled to record the difference between appearance and fact.”
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Of course, the emergence of demands for documentary verification, as well as the importance of the accurate identification of an individual, depended on eliminating any difference between appearance and fact. But Baer endorses a practice where the very purpose of identification practices as technologies of verification (to produce an “accurate” connection between appearance and fact) could be negated. This suggests that even in official circles, albeit at the margins occupied by minor officials, there existed a lingering contention that the passport should function less as a document to clarify any doubts as to an individual’s identity, and more as a courtesy to allow an individual to travel unhindered.

Baer noted that while women gave their age, many “shade it by a few years,” and some women “might whisper their age.”
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The tendency to “whisper” information to a clerk brings into relief the negotiation of public and private that occurred in passport applications. The seriousness of interacting with the federal government did not mitigate a concern with someone else needing to know a fact. The tactic of whispering one’s age apparently worked to create a

Figure 11.1. Newspaper article on New York Passport Agency employee Beulah Baer (National Archives)

space for the applicant that would hopefully be kept private from the strangers in line behind her. However, this private space was created in order to pass on facts that would subsequently appear on a document intended to publicly distribute this information to strangers, albeit “official strangers.” To whisper one’s age, therefore, functioned as a performance of the uncertainty associated
with the passport nuisance: What right did the state have to “intimately” know its citizens? What would happen to such information?

The articulation of age and privacy in the context of these questions appeared again in a series of letters to the
New York Times
in 1934. The letters responded to the suggestion of a “well known authority on travel” that birth dates be excluded from passports on the grounds that age is a personal matter, especially for women, and of no value to the identification of a citizen. For one letter writer (obviously well-traveled both as a child and adult), the inclusion of her age on her passport had been a “life-long source of embarrassment and annoyance.”
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For another woman, it appeared to provide no assistance in “the one thing a passport does… identify the bearer,” a possible deference to the equally unflattering passport photograph as the only necessary source of identity.
¹⁰²
“Forty Plus” argued that

when one is obviously not an escaped babe from the cradle, what possible difference can one’s age make to the law and order of any country? After dropping ten years off of life by an ocean crossing, why must we be rudely reminded? It is bad enough having to carry about with you a little book with the history of your unromantic name and place of birth, not to mention color of eyes, but why that ‘when born’?”
¹⁰³

However, for one (male) correspondent, the answer to that question was obvious: “the age line on passports facilitates identification” by giving a more precise description of the bearer than a general category like “adult.”
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By the mid-1930s, the passport nuisance had largely dissipated. Letters to the State Department about the application process were increasingly rare, as were mentions of the passport nuisance in newspapers and magazines. However, the appearance of a debate over age on passports in 1934 indicates that, while not the nuisance it once was, the nature and function of a passport remained unclear, if not unacceptable to some. It was still not accepted that the verification of identity demanded precision in the form of a specific age, not a general category. The disappearance of the passport nuisance did not signal universal acceptance of identification or an understanding of what identification entailed. The less-vocal opposition to the passport seemed to result from the decreasing
annoyance people experienced with the application. This change in attitude points toward one possible explanation for the demise of the passport nuisance—if official identification is understood as a skill to be learned by officials and the public, then when people became literate in the practice of documentation, passport applications became less of a nuisance. In a 1928 letter praising a passport official, a company vice-president commented that, “as you are undoubtedly aware, the obtaining of a passport for the
first
time is to the average layman, a somewhat complicated matter… not withstanding the fact [the instructions] are all printed on your form.”
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While officials saw a standardized application as efficient, many members of the public initially encountered it as foreign and unproductive. However, by the 1930s the need to use such forms had rapidly become more pervasive, and “first times” were increasingly a thing of the past. People were becoming subjects of a documentary regime, as documents begat documents—for regular travelers, a passport application had become the simpler task of a renewal, and new applicants were increasingly likely to have a birth certificate or other supporting documents. Thus the disappearance of the anxiety over the demand for documents appears to possibly be a consequence of the fact people had quickly become accustomed to the documentation of individual identity and the general paperization of everyday life. As standardized forms and identification documents (drivers’ licenses and social security numbers) became more common, for many people, complying with the request for official identification, and thus with the act of compiling identity through documents, became more of a reflex.

While tracing the passport nuisance in the 1920s and 1930s is a useful way to understand the extension of practices of documentary identification, it is difficult to read this development as a failed opportunity for the power of a centralized and intrusive state to have been seriously challenged. Rather, the passport nuisance, as an almost exclusively 1920s phenomenon, provides a moment from which to try and understand the somewhat rapid acceptance of an enveloping bureaucratic state. Therefore, it can be seen to illustrate irritations that existed within an acceptance of a particular form of rule, but not something that offered strategies to challenge state authority. In this sense, coming to terms with the passport fits within sociologist Anthony Giddens’s description of the “bargain with modernity” that individuals make through the nation-state. This is a bargain “governed by specific admixtures of deference and scepticism, comfort and fear.”
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The passport as a document that verified citizenship brought with it the assumed advantages of that legal identity: to enter the United States and to claim the other rights associated with being a
certified loyal citizen. However, a passport also carried with it the recognition that the state could depersonalize that relationship as it reduced citizenship to an administrative fact that could only be verified through documents. That the passport was contested through the 1920s illustrates some people did not accept its representation of themselves and the state.

The complicated specifics of the acceptance of the official documentation of identity, and the emergence of official identification in general, is evident in a comparison with the failed campaign for universal fingerprinting that occurred contemporaneously with the demise of the passport nuisance. Both were articulated as modern forms of identification; indeed, for the
New York Times
, which advocated for fingerprinting but was critical of required passports, a “fingerprint was the cheapest kind of passport.”
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However, although originating in a similar set of concerns about making identification more reliable, critical differences emerged in public and official understandings of identification documents and fingerprints. These differences ultimately demarcated the passport as an identification technology with purposes and functions distinct from that of fingerprinting, and hence suggest reasons for its acceptance.

While the call for universal fingerprinting in the United States can be traced back to 1911, such appeals did not take on the form of a campaign until the mid-1920s.
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At that time, concerns about anarchists and Bolsheviks and the enthusiasm of the newly appointed head of the Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, saw the launch of a two-decades-long crusade that garnered the support of numerous public officials, newspapers, and magazines. President Warren Harding gave his fingerprints in 1921, and throughout the interwar period, various federal departments and agencies, and some private employers, began to fingerprint job applicants.
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In 1935 John Rockefeller headed a group of prominent businessmen who had their fingerprints taken as the New York police launched a campaign for city residents to voluntarily give their prints; the
New York Times
printed daily totals in the initial weeks of the effort.
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In 1936 city officials of Berkeley, California, organized an intensive campaign, involving community organizations and businesses, to fingerprint the entire city population.
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On a smaller scale, advocates introduced the “Thumb-o-graph” and other similar albums to “domesticate” fingerprinting alongside photographs as a way to visually remember friends and family, particularly in their “absence.” Though the difficulties fingerprint advocates encountered is captured in the headline— “Rogues Gallery in Every Home”—for a newspaper article about the plan for fingerprint albums.
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Although universal fingerprinting did not occur, in 1938 the FBI publicly recognized the one millionth person to give fingerprints—a
twelve-year-old boy.
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It cannot have been a coincidence that the FBI bestowed the “honor” on a young boy. The kidnapped child had long been one of the key figures in the argument for universal fingerprinting. After the publicity surrounding the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son in 1932, this figure surpassed the amnesiac and the unidentified dead body to become the literal “poster child” in the campaign for universal fingerprinting.