The Passport in America: The History of a Document (12 page)

In 1905, with an increasing number of passports in circulation, the State Department received a series of complaints from U.S. citizens. These expressed the concern that European border guards treated their passports with suspicion because the secretary of state’s signature was stamped onto the passport. Secretary of State Elihu Root seemed to agree with the logic
implicit in these complaints, acknowledging in a memo, “Passports are more valuable if signed by the pen than if signed by the stamp.”
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The use of a stamped signature likely challenged the authority of a document in two ways. The suspicious foreign officials possibly sought authority in the personal imprint of the issuer, an expectation encouraged by the representation of the passport as a letter. That is, the officials more than likely read into a handwritten signature a personalized token of authenticity. In appearance a handwritten signature had potentially greater value as a sign of individual identity than a stamped signature; the strokes of the pen linked the secretary personally to the document, he had to be present at its creation, and therefore performing the function of personal knowledge traditionally associated with identification. On a more practical level, also possibly in line with Root’s comments, foreign suspicion of the U.S. passport could have been a direct result of concerns about authenticity in the more narrow terms of fraud—a stamp could be stolen or easily copied.

These concerns foreground the changing notions of the relationship between replication and authenticity in mass-produced documents. The signature was intended to verify the authenticity of the passport through the uniqueness of the script and the consistent replication of that script. Following this logic, a stamp, or some other way of reproducing a standardized signature, would be more desirable than a handwritten signature as it is virtually impossible to consistently repeat exactly the same signature. However, the cultural assumptions behind the signature as a graphic symbol of authenticity and legitimacy made clear Root’s belief that a document is “more valuable if signed by the pen than if signed by the stamp.”
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A handwritten signature gave the passport authenticity through an assumed relationship between body, pen, and paper. A stamped signature gave the passport authenticity through a logic of standardization.

Despite Root’s acknowledgment of the significance of a handwritten signature, the State Department’s response to these complaints about the lack of a personal touch in its passport moved the passport further in the direction of a standardized document and thus towards its emergence as a modern identification document. Department officials stopped stamping signatures onto the passport, instead, a facsimile of the secretary’s signature was engraved on the plate used to print the passport. While this continued to ensure that people did not have to sign fifteen-thousand passports by hand annually, it further clarified that a passport derived its authenticity from its standardization. This change is part of the gradual move away from
a culture of identification in which authority derived from the implication or assumption of knowledge of one person by another person.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the passport preserved the form of a letter, complete with salutation and signature. However, the official authority of the passport did not come from an attempt to represent a personal relationship or even to imply that each document was produced with the personal knowledge of the secretary of state, but increasingly from uniform appearance (although the passport still identified the bearer through a name, physical description, and signature, all applied to the passport by hand). In an era of mechanical reproduction authenticity continued to be thought of in terms of a singular, unique object. This was still based in the idea of an original. But because this singular object was the engraved plate from which passports were printed it articulated a new understanding of “original,” albeit one that was still unique to a particular place.
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The possibility for authenticity to be understood in terms of repeatability was thus achieved through its articulation to a technologically derived understanding of standardization.
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Trust in the reliability of identification became trust in the impersonal standardized form of a document, rather than in the personal knowledge of a reputable person. The impersonal authority was represented in the very nature of the standardized document. A facsimile of the secretary’s signature being added to the engraved plate indicates the authority of the passport would not come from the signature of an individual authenticating and authorizing the document to which it was appended but from people recognizing the entire document as a passport issued by “the state.” This increasing reliance on uniformity and standardization as the measure of authenticity and reliability also affected how a document such as the passport came to verify the physical appearance of the bearer, much to the concern of those citizens who considered their behavior, background, and appearance to be more than socially acceptable.

4
Physical Description

The perceived absurdity that people of an “acceptable” class, behavior, and background would have to carry an identification document is nicely captured in a piece from
Punch
(a useful reminder of the international nature of the anxiety over passports), reprinted in several U.S. magazines. Published soon after the outbreak of World War I made the passport a required document for most international travel, it recounted the attempts of an English gentleman to fill out the physical description on his passport application. He asks his wife for help on the grounds that he rarely sees himself. When she asks who needs to know what he looks like, her husband replies with the personal name of the foreign secretary, not the British Foreign Office. The personalization of the request locates, intentionally or otherwise, an understanding of “society” in which knowledge of personal identity does not involve interaction with institutions. The novelty, or indeed inappropriateness, of institutional intrusion sets the scene for what follows. His wife describes his nose as fine and substantial. He replies that he will only agree if fine means delicate and substantial means handsome, offering instead “Roman.” When she disagrees, he fills in the appropriate blank with “non-Roman.” The color of his eyes is described as green-grey (a compromise), to which he adds “gentle.” However, much to the relief of his wife, he mistakenly enters this information as the description for his hair—she had never known how to describe his hair. Thus for “eyes” he writes, “see hair.” His wife rejects “fair” as a description of his complexion, so he describes it as “normal,” having observed that “most people who fill up blank spaces
always use the word “normal” at least once.” Now waiting for his passport to be sent to him, he concludes by taking “this opportunity to warn the French authorities that within a few days a gentleman with a non-Roman nose, grey-green and gentle hair, see-hair eyes and a normal complexion may be seeking admission to their country.”
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Trivializing the need for certain people to have a passport in this manner also celebrates the absurdity associated with the inherently subjective nature of attempts to describe the body, itself an example of the difficulty of translating the visual into words. When describing someone, what physical features does one focus on? How does one describe someone’s face or nose? And can everyone be expected to describe (i.e. see) the same nose as common, the same eyes as green? The emergence of a standardized physical description was an initial attempt to increase accuracy by limiting this discretion. The development and use of a physical description on the passport, therefore, provides further insights into both the contested transition of documentation from marginal groups to the population as a whole, and the importance (and novelty) of standardization in documentation.

As with the use of the bearer’s signature, a physical description had been included on some U.S. passports issued abroad in the late eighteenth century, but not on passports issued in the United States.
²
This was the result of the actions of U.S. government representatives who issued passports that adhered to the format of the states in which they were appointed. The extant examples of U.S. passports issued abroad are from Europe when, in the last decade of the eighteenth century and first decade of the nineteenth, numerous states at certain times required passports of aliens and residents.
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The introduction of physical descriptors on passports transformed the passport into a document that sought to establish the “unambiguous identity” of the bearer; that is, it pushed the passport in the direction of a modern identification document.
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These passports were an administrative response to the increased rights associated with citizenship in an era in which individuals had begun to move around states and territories more frequently. Increased mobility is a common explanation for the emergence of state-issued identity documents; simply put, movement beyond one’s community introduces the need for the proof of identity. It is important to note that the novelty of mobility meant no great distance had to be traveled for documentation to be required; in 1809 the Kingdom of Westphalia required that anyone who was more than eight miles from his or her home had to have what was labeled a passport.
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By the second decade of the nineteenth century, passports from the State Department did contain a space for the physical description of the bearer (
figure 7.1
). This followed the greeting from the secretary of state, and preceded his request for free and safe passage. Written in the form of a paragraph, blank spaces were preceded by descriptors: name, age, height (in feet and inches), complexion, hair, eyes, and a space of approximately two lines which was used to describe any distinguishing physical marks or features (such as scars and tattoos). In the 1820s, as the format of the passport changed once more, a more comprehensive physical description was added: age (years), stature (feet, “inches Eng.”), forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, chin, hair, complexion, and face. Officials also relocated the description; it now appeared as a vertical list of categories down the left side of the document; the State Department kept this format until the first booklet passport was issued in 1926 (see
figure 4.1
).
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Although the State Department added a physical description of the bearer to the passport relatively early, the development of the U.S. passport as a source of “unambiguous identity” was not consistently recognized as a goal by all officials or members of the public. The addition of a physical description, along with the signature of the bearer, formalized the move away from a passport’s original role as a diplomatic communication. However, in a society with no tradition of registering citizens, it was not guaranteed that a passport would be thought of primarily as a document to prove identity; in fact, the demand to prove identity through a passport could still be greeted with shock. We have already encountered one such example—the
Atlantic Monthly
editor, T. B. Aldrich’s adventures with “his wife” and the Russian bureaucracy of the early 1880s, recounted thirty years later in the
New York Times
in the midst of the dispute over the Russian refusal to accept U.S. passports from Jews. In Russia the required passport was most definitely intended to clearly and specifically identify an individual within a larger system of registration and identification. In this context a passport was understood to be an identification document that verified facts about both personal identity and legal identity. A physical description of the bearer played a vital role in ensuring the system of identification documents could be counted on to keep the government accurately informed about the movement of people within its territory. A traveler to Russia required “an identification paper setting forth name, nationality, age, height, color of eyes and hair, shape of nose and chin and other such personal peculiarities as would definitely connect the document with the bearer and thus prevent illegal substitution

Figure 4.1. Passport issued in 1854 following the format introduced in the 1820s. It is issued to the named bearer “and his wife” (National Archives, College Park, MD).

and transfer.”
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Here the physical description has a specific purpose, one that locates the passport as an identification document in an environment where it is acknowledged that its legal necessity produces the possibility it could be fraudulently used. In contrast the U.S. passport was generally issued on the assumption that it was an optional document, and it was trusted that it would be used as intended, that is, “legally” in the most general sense.
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This is not to say that people did not attempt to illegally acquire U.S. passports in the nineteenth century, but that no rigorous system was set up to prevent it—this did not occur until the outbreak of World War I turned the passport into an important tool for ensuring national security.