The Passport in America: The History of a Document (9 page)

The tension between the official fixing of names and the cultural specificity of naming practices was initially apparent at U.S. borders in the effort to
implement the Chinese Exclusion Act after 1882. In an attempt to enforce the complicated identity categories used in the legislation that excluded some but not all Chinese, the Immigration Bureau came to see the need for a comprehensive system to record Chinese names consistently. In one case officials could not issue a certificate to an applicant they considered entitled to the document because they could not locate his original entry file owing to the multiple spellings of the name “Louie Fong.” Officials came up with four possible spellings of his name and found four possible matches, but other Chinese immigrants who had claimed the identity “Louie Fong” had already used those files.
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Situations like this occurred for a number of reasons. With little or no knowledge of Chinese, immigration inspectors could only approximate a spelling in English as they tried to comprehend Chinese tonal nuances. An even greater problem occurred when inspectors sought to write a name in English when the only documents provided used Chinese characters. These language barriers could be further compounded by lack of awareness of Chinese naming practices. The most frequent source of confusion involved the sequence of names. In other cases inspectors did not understand the customs that enabled an individual to claim multiple names, such as a family name and a marriage name. The limited knowledge of Chinese culture was even more apparent when officials understood forms of address or marital status such as “Ah” and “Shee” to be actual personal and family names and identified Chinese on documents and files using these “names.”
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For all these reasons it was often difficult for officials to link a person to a file, and thus for the state to remember him or her. The initial confusion over naming practices and the spelling of names frequently limited the subsequent retrieval of information. If a person had been recorded under their marriage name or marital status this presented difficulties for a system in which family relationship provided a basis for a claim of exemption to exclusion. While documents were meant to allay some of the official skepticism regarding the trustworthiness of Chinese immigrants, they often furthered it through these problems or even when a name was inconsistently spelled within the same case file.

The enforcement of Chinese Exclusion Acts provides an important insight into the problems associated with documentation that continued to exist when passports extended the world of documents from marginal populations to people not used to having their identity questioned. The difficulties encountered by officials illustrates that anything learned from experience with Chinese immigrants did not spread beyond the specific world of the
Exclusion Acts. As with the Immigration Bureau, the State Department’s attitude to an applicant’s name makes explicit the growing realization that official documentation required administrative control over both an individual’s claim to express his or her own identity, and a local community’s claim to verify an individual’s identity. However, this awareness encountered a world where not only Chinese names were alien but the rigor required for efficient documentation was equally foreign. In the initial encounters between a local culture of multiple interpretations and the uniformity of an embryonic administrative culture, the discrepancy in spellings of a personal name across documents grew out of a number of circumstances: a clerical error at the time of naturalization, the subsequent formal or informal changing of a name, limited literacy on the part of the applicant, or as noted, sloppiness on the part of the notary or attorney overseeing the application.
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While the inability to read and write was one cause, all these circumstances stemmed from a limited literacy in documentation. This was accentuated by the fact that officials were initially more concerned with the documentation of “the other”—with the usefulness of documents like the passport in the management of difference. Therefore, most attempts to rigorously verify citizenship occurred with naturalized citizens. The attempts to translate these claims to citizenship into a standardized official identity occurred with individuals whose names also required an act of translation to be recognizable, to become names that could be useful identification tools, not “ill adapted for pronouncing and writing by the majority of Americans,” as one Chicago judge commented in 1917.
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The importance of names to the relationship between citizenship and control makes clear one function of a personal name—as a symbol of national membership.
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Assimilation to Anglo-American norms through the formal or informal changing of names was a frequent occurrence in the United States through the middle of the twentieth century. In the mid-1920s an expert on naming estimated that about one-third of Americans with English or Welsh surnames had taken them on after arriving in the United States; in the case of the most popular family name only about half the Smiths in the United States were thought to be of British origin.
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While the changing of family names could be a choice, on occasion it occurred through the actions of officials either upon an immigrant’s arrival or at the time of naturalization. In an unusually explicit example of Anglicizing, the aforementioned Chicago judge refused to naturalize certain applicants unless they took “simpler names than those brought with them from abroad.” However, in a society
where common law allowed individuals to choose to change their names, this explicit renaming of an individual offended the sensibilities of the editors of the
New York Times
. They argued that the “varying fancies and prejudices of Judges should not be determinative in a matter so purely personal as the family name.”
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The judge’s comments, while lacking in subtlety, illustrated the consequences of the gradual move of the family name into the world of official identification. Although people could change personal names without special legal proceedings, identification understood through bureaucratic procedure privileged an official identity that could only exist in documents; therefore any change ideally had to be explained through documents. This was represented in the logic that emerged through passport-policy decisions that increasingly came to prioritize an identity articulated through a series of appropriately issued and hence apparently “truthful” documents. Thus as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth century a set of rules to standardize identity coalesced in the actions of passport clerks. These rules worked to dramatically reduce the number of occasions in which officials issued a passport on an undocumented leap of faith. As a result, the gradual development of documentation led to a situation in which a person’s conscious attempt to assimilate to their new nation prevented the state from certifying membership in their new nation-state. Taking on an Anglicized version of their name represented a conscious effort on the part of individuals to adopt a new national culture via its official language, possibly for a combination of patriotic and pragmatic reasons. However, if their U.S. passport application arrived with two different names and no legal document linking the two names the application would more than likely be rejected.
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This tension between the different membership expectations of the nation and of the state and the role of official identity documents in managing this could still arise even if documents were presented. In one such case, a departmental official informed an applicant with affidavits establishing the relationship between his two names that he did “not feel authorized to omit the name by which you were naturalized.” The department issued the passport to “Juda Osiel commonly known as Leon Osiel.”
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The passport, therefore, somewhat oddly (and possibly illegally) functioned as an official record of the name change.

The complicated nature of the tension between the official stabilization of a personal name and cultural practices that encouraged the changing of names is even more visible in a controversy that explicitly linked the family
name to the importance of the family within the organizational structure of the nation-state. The controversy was a response to changes in the way married women were identified on a passport. Until World War 1 State Department practice was to issue a husband and wife a “joint passport” in the full name of the husband only. These passports identified a married woman on her husband’s passport through the phrase “accompanied by his wife” or simply “and wife”; neither a wife’s name nor her physical description appeared on the passport (
figure 4.1
). This naming practice reinforced accepted gender roles that clearly located the husband as head of the household and apparently relegated his wife to a public life that ideally required his presence as a preferred chaperone. If a husband and wife decided to travel separately while abroad, only then was it expected that a wife obtain a passport from a U.S. official.

The absence of a name and description specifically identifying a married woman separate from her husband only was an issue in the nineteenth century on the odd occasion a passport was a required document—such as for visitors to Russia, where each adult traveler had to carry a passport. The need for a married woman to be an individual, subject to identification, became an even greater problem when her seeming irrelevance to her own countrymen could in fact lead to the erasure of her original documentary trace, however slight it had been. In the early 1880s when T. B. Aldrich, the editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
, prepared to travel with his wife to Russia, he sent his old passport to the State Department for renewal. Not only did no one alert Aldrich to the fact his wife needed a separate passport, but upon return of his passport he failed to notice that through a bureaucratic error the words “and wife” had been omitted. Through luck the Aldrich’s were able to enter Russia on his passport, but that luck ran out when they tried to use the passport to check into their hotel in St. Petersburg. In a subsequent retelling of their ordeal, Aldrich, the angry husband, is said to have exclaimed, “The police at the frontier let us in on one passport and then the St. Petersburg police arrest us because we haven’t got two. If we were traveling with a baby I presume they’d want a third: Item: One baby; features undeveloped; stature, knee high to a grasshopper; name not yet decided upon; occupation, tourist chaperoning his parents. But what preposterous nonsense.”
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The reduction of a married woman’s identity to that of an appendage to her husband apparent in the joint passport is made even more explicit in Aldrich’s ragings. The need for his wife to have a passport becomes equivalent to a baby having a passport—such obvious dependents would certainly not be traveling alone,
unchaperoned, especially this far from home. It seems the world of the passport was understood by Aldrich to be a public world where a man’s identity and status was all that should be necessary, and definitely the only identity that should be needed if a document was required. In this world gender was a critical component of that status. Because it was issued by the State Department the passport also framed such a gentlemen’s club in terms of citizenship. Therefore, the joint passport not only highlighted the gendered nature of identification practices, it also verified the gendered status of the identity it represented. Until 1922 a married woman’s U.S. citizenship depended on the citizenship of her husband; that is, a woman with U.S. citizenship would lose that legal identity if she married a noncitizen. And, of course, women who were U.S. citizens had only gained the right to vote in 1920.

Security concerns following the outbreak of World War 1 lead the State Department to officially stop issuing joint passports. This policy continued following the end of the war, with the additional requirement that a married woman apply for a passport with the family name of her husband. In the context of women gaining the right to vote and agitation over a married woman’s citizenship status this new demand saw the launch of a campaign to allow a married woman the option to have her passport issued in her maiden name. The National Woman’s Party (NWP) and the Lucy Stone League organized the campaign. In 1921 New York journalist Ruth Hale founded the Lucy Stone League to inform the public that a woman could legally maintain her own name after marriage. Hale did this after her attempt to use her maiden name created problems not only with a passport application, but also in other situations, including voting.
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Hale named her organization after Lucy Stone, who because of her actions in the second half of the nineteenth century was regarded as the first American woman to publicly assert her right to use her maiden name after marriage. The society was most active in the 1920s when prominent “Lucy Stoners” included Margaret Mead and Amelia Earhart. It also included a number of journalists, which may explain why the group earned newspaper coverage even though it probably only recruited a few hundred women.
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In the course of its passport campaign the group in the opinion of the assistant secretary of state also gained “considerable senatorial and other political backing.”
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In response State Department officials had to explicitly argue for their right to “fix” the personal name of certain passport applicants in order to enable their full and complete identification.

The debates the campaign generated illustrated both the difficulty in stabilizing personal names in U.S. legal culture and the gendered environment
in which it was deemed necessary to verify identity. Both sides of the debate agreed that no court ruling had ever taken away the common-law right of a married woman to retain her maiden name.
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Therefore, the NWP argued that through its enforcement of the 1920 regulation the State Department had illegally claimed the power to change the name of any married woman who had made the choice to use her maiden name; in the words of the vice president of the NWP, it forced a woman to travel under a “fictitious name.”
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The organization’s brief to the secretary of state argued that a “woman’s name signifies her identity, her personality, her capacities and her achievements.” More specifically, many of the married women who retained their maiden names “are engaged in professions or activities where their names are their trade-marks so to speak.” Thus, the rule deprived a woman “of her property without due process.”
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Supporting this point, a newspaper editorial acknowledged that the ruling also seemed to go against developments in “most progressive countries,” where a wife was no longer considered her husband’s property.
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