The Passport in America: The History of a Document (5 page)

The “dumb” twentieth century passport developed within a documentary regime of verification that emerged when fallibility in identification practices was increasingly attributed to the use of local practices of self-verification or personal knowledge. The development of technologies of verification such as “smart cards,” digital fingerprinting, or retina scans represents attempts to produce increasingly less fallible forms of identification in the form of a digital regime of verification. From this perspective identification is understood as a process of comparison at the level of technologies as well as usage, such
that verification procedures tend to be added to preexisting practice. But whether documents or biometrics are used, the identity that experts claim these technologies verify remains an official identity made conceivable and practicable within an archival problematization of identity. This rethinking of identity was, and is still, considered to return certainty to identification by stabilizing identity as a fixed object—or more precisely, stabilizing the parameters of a new form of identity that continues to define what constitutes “accuracy” in official identification practices. With the history of the passport not well known our contemporary acceptance of the claim that identity can be documented naturalizes the passport’s function as an identification document. Investigating the production, recording and usages of identity and identification by American officials and the public challenges this naturalization. This particular history illustrates that “identity” and “identification” in the sense embodied by the passport are not pre-existing facts, but were developed through specific historical processes.

Part One: Assembling the Passport

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Document

In 1911 the American Jewish Committee orchestrated a campaign against the Russian policy not to accept U.S. passports presented by Jews, thus denying them entry to Russia. More precisely, the campaign was the culmination of dissatisfaction with a 1907 State Department decision not to issue passports to Jews to travel to Russia unless they had written assurance from Russian authorities that they would receive a visa. In response to this campaign at the end of 1911 the U.S. government decided to formally and publicly annul the treaty Russia had used to justify its actions.
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The campaign had focused on the argument that adherence to the Russian policy dishonored the equality that organizers considered grounded U.S. citizenship. But due to its success the efforts of the American Jewish Committee granted the passport an unprecedented degree of public recognition as a certificate of citizenship and a national symbol. Newspapers labeled the controversy “the passport question.” During the campaign, newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst told a public meeting at Carnegie Hall,

The point at issue, plainly stated, is simply whether the seal and signature of the United States upon a certificate of citizenship render it valid and acceptable at its face value or subject to discount in [any]… country that chooses to depreciate it. This is a point vital to the honor and integrity of this Nation. It brings up the question of whether the United States is politically solvent, whether its guarantee is good.

At the same meeting another speaker proclaimed,

The great seal of our country affixed to that passport is represented by an American eagle holding in one outstretched talon an olive branch, denoting peace and friendship, and in the other a quiver of arrows, denoting majesty and power and implying that every resource of the Nation will be employed for the protection of the citizen who holds and rightfully uses that passport.
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In outlining a perceived threat to U.S. authority, the rhetorical flourishes both speakers employed indicate how a particular kind of authority can be represented in a document. To their eyes, in agreeing to the Russian practice the State Department was in fact turning a blind eye to the symbols it placed on its passport. Therefore, the speakers isolated the techniques used to imbue a piece of paper with authority to express the message they believed a passport communicated. Officials had long used signatures and seals, along with dates and artistic ornamentation, to legitimate claims on paper.
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However, the early history of the passport in the United States indicates that the application of these techniques to a new kind of document initiated a renegotiation of their acceptance as signs of authority. As with the almost parallel development of paper money and national currency, this was largely because these symbols of authority appeared on a document intended for mass communication, not on documents intended for the records or archives of a governing institution.
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With both paper money and the passport the authority read into these symbols had to be read anew, as standardization and the mass production of documents became critical to the transmission of a centralized authority.

In 1911 the passport became a “question” within the diplomatic realm. It was understood as a document written by an official from one country to an official from another country. The passport identified the bearer as a U.S. citizen through the authority of the secretary of state in the form of a request for safe passage addressed to whomever the bearer presented the document to. While the declaration that the bearer was a citizen led not only Hearst, but also the State Department, to label a passport a certificate of citizenship, the format of a passport reflected an often awkward articulation of citizenship, protection, reciprocity, and trust. Its early history will reveal that at different moments
and places the passport functioned not only as a certificate but also as a letter, and less frequently as an identification document. The format of the passport drew its elements from these three functions. While it did have a list of physical features used to describe the bearer, a greater portion of it was devoted to establishing the authority of the document. This was achieved through identifying the author of the document—the State Department and the secretary of state, as representative of the United States of America. This identification occurred through a combination of seal, ornamentation, and signature. The personification of the United States government in the secretary of state was critical to the passport, as the text was written in the form of a request. By the twentieth century the text of the passport had taken on a standardized form, subject only to very slight tweaking (
figure 1.1
). Usually underneath a large eagle and the words “United States of America” was the document’s salutation, “To all to whom these Presents shall come, Greeting.” Beneath this the following message appeared in smaller text: “The undersigned Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby request all whom it may concern to permit safely and fairly to pass [name of bearer] a Citizen of the United States and in case of need to give him all lawful Aid and Protection.” Under this a separate paragraph indented to the right further stated and explained the authority of the document: “Given under my hand and the impression of the Seal of the Department of State at the City of Washington the [date] and in the [x] year of the Independence of these United States.”

The passport written as a letter acknowledged its origins in diplomatic correspondence as a request, not as a document to identify someone.
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The form of the passport as an official open letter from the secretary of state to other state officials meant that a citizen carried the passport as a messenger, not as the owner of the document. The State Department believed a passport’s authority rested on the issuing government maintaining a “paramount right over it.” In response to a query as to whether a passport could be used as security for the payment of personal debt, it was clarified that the fee passport applicants paid needed to be thought of as “a tax rather than a purchase price.”
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While this comment was made in the 1930s, in a world of required passports it still locates the passport in the tradition of diplomatic letters, within the realm of courtesy that had produced letters of introduction. Although the State Department claimed ultimate ownership of the U.S. passport this did not mean that only a U.S. official could alter or change the passport. The passport was designed to accommodate additions; the international system in which the passport functioned allowed the foreign officials to whom it was addressed to record their reading of it through the stamping of a visa accompanied by their

Figure 1.1. Front sheet of passport issued in 1921 (collection of author).

signature, a certification that allowed a person to enter a country, as the passport itself does not perform the function of an entry document. However, the bearer of a passport could not mark the document in any way. One frustrated citizen discovered that officials considered the “one or two notes regarding foreign exchange” he had made on his passport an act of “mutilation” that made the document invalid.
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The passport as a letter between foreign officials was a letter making a request for protection to officials of like mind and status. In the nineteenth century officials differentiated between the passport and protection papers, which were used to communicate with “barbarous or semi-civilized states” over the principle of asylum.
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That is, the passport as a letter of recognition needed to be “delivered” to a government that not only recognized the United States but was also recognized by the United States as a civilized state. By the twentieth century the State Department did not issue protection papers; nationalization of territory had become the marker of civilization. This created a problem when these unrecognized states increasingly required aliens to have passports. A dispute with Lithuania in the early 1920s illustrated how the State Department accommodated its understanding of the passport as an official letter to the requirements of the developing international passport system. After a complaint from Lithuanian representatives, the State Department agreed to issue U.S. passports for travel there without official recognition of Lithuania’s independence from Russia on the grounds that it had always issued passports to colonies of empires without “intending to recognize them as independent states.”
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In the context of the passport as correspondence between officials, the identity of the person making the request on behalf of the bearer was more important than the identity of the bearer. However, it is important not to overstate the extent to which a passport verified the identity of the authority that issued it. Officials issued early passports within a context of trust. At least that is the assumption that can be drawn from the lack of a standardized format through which to show that a document was indeed a passport issued by the appropriate authority, along with the limited information used to identify the bearer. Created within the realm of diplomatic correspondence, these early passports were requests issued to specific travelers usually known to the writer. Therefore, when documents called passports became more widely issued, they were limited in many cases to very brief requests related to travel. In the United States this was the case with so-called passports that authorized travel through Native American or foreign-held territory in the years immediately before and after the declaration of independence.
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Outside
of slave passes these appear to be the only documents formally required for travel in the United States. As with similar documents in Europe, there was not a sufficient infrastructure to enforce regulations. Although treaties required them to be issued by military agents or “Indian agents,” governors also issued them, though people frequently traveled through the designated territories without them. Handwritten documents, they usually announced permission to enter and/or pass through territory. While these documents sometimes explained the point of the visit, the piece of paper offered no declaration of identity or citizenship. In contrast, the passports issued by the State Department at the same time did contain more information, and this difference, along with the changes in format through the nineteenth and early twentieth century, provides one insight into the contested transformation of the passport from a travel pass into an identification document.