The Passport in America: The History of a Document (50 page)

22
. Shawn Michelle Smith,
American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

23
. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 11.

24
. For an example of the popular application of this see Cara A Finnegan, “Recognizing Lincoln: Image Vernaculars in NineteenthCentury Visual Culture,”
Rhetoric and Public Affairs
8:1 (2005), 31–58.

25
. Lawrence M. Friedman,
Crime and Punishment in American History
(New York: Basic Books, 1993), 12–13, 193–210.

26
. John F. Kasson,
Rudeness and Civility: Manners in NineteenthCentury Urban America
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 109. See also Karen Halttunen,
Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).

27
. Kasson,
Rudeness and Civility
, 116.

28
. Rachel Hall,
Wanted: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2009), 65–69; Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema,” in
Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life
, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 24.

29
. Richard Franklin Bensel,
The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 134–35, 140.

30
. Estelle T. Lau,
Paper Families: Identity, Immigration Administration, and Chinese Exclusion
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 99.

31
. For the emergence of the category of “distinguishing marks” on identification papers from the fifteenth century, see Valentin Groebner,
Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe
, trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck (Brooklyn, NY: Zone, 2007), 95–116.

32
. Hunt,
American Passport
, 78; U.S. Passport Office,
The United States Passport
, 61.

33
. U.S. Passport Office,
The United States Passport
, 80. The category of “occupation remained on passports until 1961.

C
HAPTER
5

1
. President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order outlining the requirements in more detail on February 1, 1915 (U.S. Passport Office,
The United States Passport: Past, Present, Future
[Washington, DC: GPO, 1976], 80).

2
. For a discussion of the wartime addition of photographs to Australian passports that parallels the U.S. history see Jane Doulman and David Lee,
Every Assistance & Protection: A History of the Australian Passport
(Sydney: Federation, 2008), 55–57.

3
.
New York Times
, “Hint Official Here is in Passport Plot,” January 6, 1915; Carr to Consul General, Cairo, February 12, 1915, RG 59 138/68, National Archives.

4
. U.S. Passport Office,
The United States Passport: Past, Present, Future
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1976), 85.

5
. Ibid., 80.

6
.
New York Times
, “Must Have Passport Photo Despite Religious Scruples,” May 26, 1921.

7
. U.S. Passport Office,
The United States Passport
, 80.

8
. Diplomatic & Consular Circular, March 7, 1924, RG 59 138/1857a, National Archives; Shipley to Consul General, Bucharest, August 4, 1928, RG 59 138/2422 Box 600, National Archives.

9
.
New York Times
, “No Respecter of Persons,” September 19, 1930.

10
. Ibid.

11
. John Tagg,
The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 42–43.

12
. See the seminal works of John Tagg and Allan Sekula: Tagg,
The Burden of Representation
; Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,”
October
39, no. 3 (1986), 3–64.

13
. Shawn Michelle Smith,
American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 56–61.

14
. Ibid.

15
. Alan Trachtenberg, “Likeness as Identity: Reflections on the Daguerrean Mystique,” in
The Portrait in Photography
, ed. Graham Clarke (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), 187.

16
. Suren Lalvani, “Photography, Epistemology and the Body,”
Cultural Studies
7 (1998): 448. See also Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 8–9.

17
. Smith,
American Archives
, 165.

18
. Tom Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema,” in
Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life
, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 24.

19
. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 5–7.

20
. Lalvani, “Photography, Epistemology and the Body,” 449.

21
. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 40–55.

22
. Tagg,
The Burden of Representation
, 11.

23
. This paragraph draws from Daston and Galison’s insightful and provocative article (Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,”
Representations
40 [1992]: 81–128).

24
. This discussion is based on Jennifer Mnookin’s arguments about the emergence of the photograph as legal evidence (Jennifer L. Mnookin, “The Image of Truth: Photographic Evidence and the Power of Analogy,”
Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities
10 [1998]: 1–74).

25
. Quoted in ibid., 16.

26
. Ibid., 50.

27
. Anna Pegler-Gordon, “In Sight of America: Photography and U.S. Immigration Policy, 1880–1930” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2002), 5. Pegler-Gordon’s innovative research on this subject adds an important new dimension to arguments about the contestation involved in photographic representation. See also Anna Pegler-Gordon, “Chinese Exclusion, Photography, and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy,”
American Quarterly
58 (2006): 51–77.

28
. Pegler-Gordon, “In Sight of America,” 117.

29
. Ibid., 86.

30
. Ibid., 90–91.

31
. Ibid., 120.

32
.
Outlook
, “Why Passports?,” September 22, 1926, 105.

33
.
New York Times
, “No Respecter of Persons,” September 19, 1930.

34
. Ibid.

35
. U.S. Passport Office,
The United States Passport
, 64.

36
. Gunning, “Tracing the Individual Body,” 29–30.

37
. Diplomatic and Consular Memo, March 7, 1924, RG 59 138/1857a, National Archives.

38
. W. Castle Jr to Diplomatic and Consular Service, October 24, 1930, RG 59 138/2905a, National Archives.

39
. Shipley to American Consul, Curaco, Netherland West Indies, June 19, 1935, RG 59 138/3403 Box 602, National Archives.

40
.
New York Times
, “Curb Photo Trickery,” January 7, 1932;
New York Times
, “Costly Passport Photographs,” June 23, 1930.

41
. W. Castle Jr to Diplomatic and Consular Service, October 24, 1930, RG 59 138/2905a, National Archives.

42
. Menken to Stimson, July 23, 1930, RG 59 111.28 NY/63, Box 225, National Archives.

43
. Consul General, London, to Secretary of State, January 13, 1934, RG 59 138.81 London/6, National Archives.

44
. Trachtenberg, “Likeness as Identity,” 178.

45
. The idea of state rule and “simplification” is from James Scott,
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 3, 80.

46
. Carson Hathaway, “Woman to Head Passport Bureau,”
New York Times
, May 20, 1928.

C
HAPTER
6

1
. John Bassett Moore,
A Digest of International Law
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1906), 3:899–901.

2
. U.S. Passport Office,
The United States Passport: Past, Present, Future
(Washington, DC: Department of State, 1976), 141; Gaillard Hunt,
The American Passport: Its History And A Digest Of Laws, Rulings, And Regulations Governing Its Issuance By The Department Of State
(Washington, DC: GPO, 1898), 45.

3
. McKenzie to Department of State, July 18, 1897, RG 59 MLR 509, Box 99, National Archives.

4
. As a woman not born in the U.S. her citizenship status remained contingent on her father or husband. Virginia Sapiro, “Women, Citizenship, and Nationality: Immigration and Naturalization Policies in the United States,”
Politics and Society
13 (1984): 8. Nancy F. Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830–1934,”
American Historical Review
103 (1988): 1456–61.

5
. McKenzie to Department of State, July 18, 1897, RG 59 MLR 509, Box 99, National Archives.

6
. Moore,
A Digest of International Law
, 3:918–19.

7
. For examples of discussion of the passport fee, see
New York Times
, [no title] December 19, 1873, 4; Evarts to Christiancy, July 22, 1880, RG 59 Department of State, Diplomatic Instructions, Peru M77 R131: 456, National Archives; [Passport Clerk] to Shipley, March 21, 1885, RG59, Entry 509 Box 79, National Archives.

8
. Pamela Sankar, “State Power and Record-Keeping: The History of Individualized Surveillance in the United States, 1790–1935” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1992), 5, 22. As noted, Sankar’s groundbreaking work remains the definitive statement on the development of federal record keeping in the United States.

9
. Documents emerged as part of voting with the arrival of absentee ballots during the Civil War, to enable soldiers to vote. The gradual acceptance of absentee ballots brought into focus the new form of impersonal interaction that emerged within the changing scalar dynamics of the NineteenthCentury state. It depersonalized the understanding and comprehension of “the public” that lay at the heart of democracy. For the largely Democratic opponents of absentee voting, public trust constituted the act of voting; the community became the primary grantor. The right to vote only emerged in the presence of the community–it had to be witnessed; in this sense it was not a permanent attribute of an individual. The predominantly Republican supporters argued that because the right to vote was inherent in the individual, it could be successfully preserved in its written record. In this argument the act of voting was located in the counting of the vote, not
the physical gesture of voting, that required a witness. See Jennifer Horner, “The 1864 Union Soldier Vote: Historical-critical perspectives on Public Space and the Public Sphere” (paper, annual meeting of the International Communication Association, San Francisco, May 24, 2007).

10
. Richard Franklin Bensel,
The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 20, 90–92.

11
. Richard Bensel, “The American Ballot Box: Law, Identity, and the Polling Place in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,”
Studies in American Political Development
17, no. 1 (Spring 2003), 10 n. 31.

12
. Matt K. Matsuda,
The Memory of the Modern
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 133.

13
. For an insightful discussion of the tension between centralized administration and local respectability (albeit outside of the U.S.), see Bruce Curtis, “Administrative Infrastructure and Social Enquiry: Finding the Facts about Agriculture in Quebec, 1853–4,”
Journal of Social History
32 (1998): 324–25.

14
. Hunt,
The American Passport
, 46–48.

15
. Ibid., 49.

16
. The oath required from 1861 to 1888 was borrowed from one introduced during the Civil War for civil service employees: “I, ___, do solemnly swear that I will support, protect, and defend the Constitution and Government of the United States against all enemies, whether domestic or foreign; and that I will bear true faith, allegiance, and loyalty to the same, any ordinance, resolution, or law of any State, convention or legislature to the contrary notwithstanding; and further, that I do this with a full determination, pledge, and purpose, without any mental reservation or evasion whatever; and, further, that I will well and faithfully perform all the duties which may be required of me by law. So help me God.” In 1888 this oath was changed to reflect the new oath passed in 1884 for civil servants: “Further, I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion. So help me God.” Quoted in ibid., 69–70. The requirement for an oath of allegiance remained in force until 1973 (U.S. Passport Office,
The United States Passport
, 169).