The Passport in America: The History of a Document (review)

Some years ago, the distinguished scholar of migration processes Aristide Zolberg averred that we need "a history of paperwork." We have in recent years come to have more and more work that fits this demand—research on the history of censuses, birth certificates, naming practices, vital statistics record-keeping, and the like. Craig Robertson's The Passport in America constitutes a signal contribution to this growing and valuable body of work.

Robertson begins from the premise that the passport needs to be understood less as a document used for the purpose of regulating movement and more as a document for identifying persons. His chief claim is that, during the period from roughly the late nineteenth century until the first quarter of the twentieth century, a new "documentary regime of verification" came to supplant the more familiar practices of identification rooted in local, personal confirmation of the identities of persons. In the process, he argues, documents came to stabilize the identities of those persons in ways not necessarily consistent with the way in which they were known in the everyday contexts in which they actually lived, or with the ways they saw themselves. Fixing identities also involved the application of techniques such as photographs and "Bertillonage" that frequently provoked resistance from many of those forced to undergo these rigors. The trend toward bureaucratization was also a trend toward democratization; persons of higher status used to moving around freely on the basis of their social standing were forced to accept the taint of association with criminal elements, of whom it had long been taken for granted that they were required to produce documents to substantiate their claims to being who they said they were. "[T]he passport," Robertson writes, "is an example of a contested move from the excessive documentation of 'the other' to the inclusion of an entire population in a regime of documentation" (68). All of this added up to the "passport nuisance" that annoyed ever-growing numbers of travelers until at least the 1930s, by which time, according to Robertson, people had come to accept passports and other such documents as an inescapable part of modern life—whether they liked it or not.

It is a notable fact about this book that, despite its very limited references to the writings of Max Weber, its arguments illustrate in striking ways his prescient analyses about the role of "bureaucratization" in the era around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. Weber argued at the time that life was becoming increasingly characterized by the dominance of officialdom and its characteristic ways of operating. These methods were "rational" in the sense that they involved systematic efforts to solve admininstrative challenges according to impersonal rules. He understood that bureaucratic administration was more efficient than the available alternatives but, at the same time, promoted the advance of impersonal forces in human life. There is a reason that he and Kafka were contemporaries.

Robertson shows in copious and occasionally excruciating detail how people came to create and participate in the emerging culture of documentary identification. He demonstrates, for example, the ways in which the passport came to be transformed from what was essentially a letter of introduction from one elite official to another to a standardized, mass-produced affirmation of the holder's identity that nonetheless retained some of the features of the documentary ancien regime (such as the request from the Secretary of State, still to be found in today's passports, that all concerned afford the bearer of the document all due assistance while abroad). Robertson stresses that the shift from one to the other demanded an enormous socio-cultural "learning process." That is, ordinary (and not-so-ordinary) people had to learn that passports were now required for them to move across certain spaces; "boundaries" had been transformed in this period into "borders." Citizenship came to matter more than it had previously, and hence so did "nationality."

Still, the officials charged...