Читать книгу The Sovereign Citizen - Patrick Weil - Страница 10

CHAPTER 2

The Installment of the Bureau of Naturalization, 1909–1926

The chief examiner of the Naturalization Service, Morris Bevington, described the pre-1906 naturalization process in St. Louis as follows: “Before elections, the ward leaders would drum up all the alien residents of their particular districts, and herd them together before some one of the courts, and have naturalization papers issued to them, usually ‘minor papers.’ They were entirely innocent of any wrongdoing and more often secured naturalization against their own will, and most reluctantly. They were simply coerced by American citizens, who wanted their votes and who had a stronger will power than they themselves possessed.”¹

As the 1909 circular made clear it was this kind of person that the Naturalization Bureau and the new attorney general, George Wickersham, no longer wanted to pursue. The consequence of Wickersham’s instruction was that, only when cases transmitted by the State Department, the Civil Service Commission, or the Steamboat Inspection Service showed fraud or a will to deceive the court, would proceedings be initiated to revoke citizenship. Otherwise, “when the holders of illegally obtained papers were themselves the victims of deception, and not guilty of any design to break the law,” no action would be taken by the Division of Naturalization. In addition, the Division would continue to use cancellation proceedings as a means for protecting the proper functioning of the naturalization process: for instance, when the courts that naturalized immigrants lacked proper jurisdiction, when the naturalization applications were found to have been completed on incorrect forms, or when a court clerk was indicted for corruption.²

The impact of Wickersham’s 1909 instruction was clear and immediate. The number of citizens who were denaturalized dropped from a high of 921 in 1909 to 397 in 1910. From there, the numbers continued to fall: to 225 in 1911 and to 212 in 1912. The trend in St. Paul, Minnesota, was typical. Between July and November 1908, thirty certificates of naturalization were cancelled on various grounds including: false declarations concerning the place of residence or age of naturalized citizens, naturalization petitions signed on the day of the hearing, and witnesses who themselves lacked American citizenship. But within two years the number of denaturalization cases plunged. In 1910 the only denaturalization case in St. Paul concerned Johann Penner, a naturalized American citizen who had since moved back to his native Canada. After a short-lived surge in 1914 (to 414 denaturalization cases), the numbers remained low throughout the rest of the decade with 319 cases in 1915, 184 cases in 1916, 152 cases in 1917, 154 cases in 1918, and 115 cases in 1919.

For Richard Campbell, now the Commissioner of Naturalization within the Department of Labor, this decline was too dramatic. It illustrated a new conflict between his new Bureau and the Department of Justice. On March 4, 1913, Congress had passed a law that split the Department of Labor and Commerce into two separate departments: the Department of Labor and the Department of Commerce. The act also divided up the functions of the former Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization and placed the newly created Bureau of Naturalization under the Department of Labor. Campbell was designated as Commissioner of the Bureau of Naturalization and reported directly to the Labor Secretary. Campbell understood that the 1909 Circular would limit the circumstances in which individuals who gained American citizenship prior to the passage of the 1906 Naturalization Act could be denaturalized. But he believed that the government should not be similarly constrained when dealing with individuals naturalized after 1906.³ The Department of Justice, however, sought to limit the reach of the United States’ denaturalization authority and took a stand against denaturalizing Americans who gained their citizenship after 1906 unless such proceedings were necessary for the betterment of the citizenry.

In reaction, the Naturalization Bureau initiated a new policy. Instead of using Section 15 of the 1906 Act, which required a U.S. attorney to institute denaturalization proceedings, with long and costly delays, Campbell decided to direct his naturalization examiners to informally approach judges to have them revoke their naturalization decisions on the grounds of illegally procured evidence.⁴ Many judges cooperated. In 1913, half the cancellation cases were handled without the involvement of U.S. attorneys, and in 1914, that proportion rose to two-thirds of cases. Yet some judges refused to cooperate and requested that the Bureau of Naturalization go through normal adversarial proceedings.

When in 1915 the Department of Justice submitted a revised version of the 1909 Circular that explicitly applied its restrictions on denaturalization to individuals granted citizenship after 1906,⁵ Richard Campbell protested:

There are more than two thousand courts engaged in admitting aliens to citizenship. There is a great diversity of opinion in regard to what the law means in its various details. . . . There are many reasons, too numerous to state within the compass of this memorandum, which lead to varying and contradictory decisions of courts of coordinate jurisdiction all over the United States on many points of the law. In actual practice, therefore, the law is not uniform in its operation throughout the United States. . . . Since the Department of Justice has held that there is no review by the ordinary processes resorted to in contested cases, there remains as a means of correcting errors of law, or at least of unifying the constructions of the law by the various courts, the proceeding to cancel.⁶

But on June 1, 1916, the same denaturalization circular that Wickersham had sent in 1909 was resent, unchanged, by his new replacement Attorney General T. W. Gregory, to all U.S. attorneys, keeping alive the clashing interpretations between the Bureau of Naturalization and the Justice Department.

Commissioner Campbell reacted aggressively. In addition to continuing the Bureau of Naturalization’s policy of asking courts directly for cancellation, thereby bypassing the U.S. attorneys, in 1914 Campbell requested that Congress give the Bureau independent legal authority to bring denaturalization proceedings. ⁷ Three years later Campbell pleaded, in a 1917 report, that “the practical result of the situation was an absence of uniformity in the rules of naturalization, the discouragement of the examiners in their efforts to secure the correction of palpable errors in the granting of certificates, and the loss of much time that was spent in the fruitless endeavor to bring cases of such error within the administrative ruling referred to.”⁸ He also emphasized the contradictory standards for naturalization that had emerged: “We have the Supreme Court [in Johannessen v. United States,]⁹ saying in effect to alien candidates for citizenship ‘at your risk, you must comply with all the requirements of the law; otherwise your certificate is worthless,’ while the administrative ruling says ‘unless you are personally unfit to be an American citizen, your certificate shall not be questioned, although you may not have complied in all respects with the law.’ ”¹⁰ For Campbell, in the end, “the obvious remedy for this condition is to place the control of this provision of the law in this bureau.”¹¹

Congress heard Campbell’s pleas—in part because, since 1914, his Bureau of Naturalization had become increasingly popular as a facet of the Americanization campaign developing across the country through the efforts of various civil society organizations.¹² Raymond Crist, the Deputy Commissioner of the Naturalization Bureau, endorsed with enthusiasm the idea of Clarence N. Goodwin, a naturalization judge from Chicago, to provide applicants for citizenship with civic education and training. Woodrow Wilson agreed to preside over the first national large-scale Americanization event on May 10, 1915, in Philadelphia, attended by more than fifteen thousand people. Building on the momentum of this event, the Bureau contracted with state and local governments, schools, and organizations to provide them with civic education resources. By linking itself with a national citizenship education program, the Bureau was able to gain greater public legitimacy while also promoting its goals of standardizing and enforcing the uniform Federal naturalization application process. Congress backed the Bureau and increased its appropriation so that it could better fulfill its new patriotic tasks. And on May 9, 1918, Congress passed a bill giving the Commissioner of the Bureau of Naturalization his long-sought-after concurrent authority with U.S. attorneys to institute proceedings to cancel certificates of citizenship.¹³

The Bureau of Naturalization had triumphed. Twelve years after the passage of the 1906 Act, “by successive steps full authority commensurate with its responsibility has been conferred upon one administrative officer, under the supervision of one department, to supervise and administer the ‘uniform’ rule of naturalization authorized by our organic law, the Federal Constitution.”¹⁴ Back in 1905, the Purdy Commission had proposed to preserve the competence of the courts for naturalization, not because it was the best method for minting new citizens (“experience has shown that they are a very defective machinery for the purpose”),¹⁵ but because no preferable alternatives were available. Campbell’s ambition had been to build that missing institution, and he was succeeding.

In addition, since 1906, the courts had endorsed the denaturalization provisions of the 1906 Naturalization Act almost entirely without reservation. The courts cast aside challenges to the Act’s constitutionality that alleged that it operated as retroactive or ex post facto legislation and deprived defendants of their right to a trial by jury.¹⁶ In United States v. Mansour in 1908,¹⁷ for instance, a federal judge found that denaturalization cases were considered to lie in “equity” rather than to constitute civil or criminal legal proceedings. Therefore, they were not covered by the Constitution’s Sixth and Seventh Amendment guarantees of the availability of jury trials.¹⁸

Just four years later, the Supreme Court held, in Johannessen v. United States,¹⁹ that Congress could authorize the government to bring a separate suit attacking the validity of a naturalized American’s citizenship. Because naturalization proceedings were, before 1906, “ex parte”—involving only a judge and an individual seeking citizenship—no legal principles prevented the government from bringing an adversarial suit later in order to revoke the original judgment granting citizenship. The Johannessen Court also rejected the argument that the 1906 Naturalization Act was an unconstitutional ex post facto law, finding that the statute “makes nothing fraudulent or unlawful that was honest and lawful when it was done.” A certificate of citizenship, the Court found, should be considered an instrument conferring certain political privileges that could be revoked, like grants of public land, in situations where it was unlawfully or fraudulently obtained.

The Court confirmed the Johannessen ruling in the 1917 case United States v. Ness for naturalizations obtained after 1906.²⁰ In Ness the Court decided that the presence of a U.S. attorney as a party to a naturalization proceeding (under Section 11 of the Naturalization Act) did not prevent the United States from initiating a separate denaturalization proceeding (under Section 15), when an individual’s citizenship was “illegally procured.”²¹ Justice Louis Brandeis, who delivered the opinion of the Court, asserted that “section 11 and section 15 were designated to afford cumulative protection against fraudulent or illegal naturalization.”²²

In 1926, in Tutun v. United States, the Supreme Court finally decided that a naturalization proceeding in a federal court was a case within the meaning of the Constitution, the Judicial Code, and the act establishing the Court of Appeals.²³ The Court ruled that the cancellation proceedings authorized by section 15 of the 1906 act were not a denial of the usual method of pursuing appeals in courts. In the matter of contesting naturalization, the United States was given another “cumulative remedy”:²⁴ it could both appeal a naturalization decision and start a suit to attack the same decision for having been “illegally procured.” For the Naturalization Bureau, the separate denaturalization procedure still had some clear advantages: the right to appeal decided in Tutun by the Supreme Court did not concern naturalization by state courts,²⁵ and there was no time limit for denaturalization proceedings.²⁶

In addition, the Supreme Court had interpreted “illegally procured” based on the doctrine of jurisdictional fact.²⁷ To be legally naturalized, an alien had to:

1. fulfill certain procedural requirements such as filing a certificate of arrival, a declaration of intention, or a petition for naturalization; or obtain the decree of naturalization in open court,

2. be “racially” eligible, either black or white;

3. be able to speak English;

4. have established permanent residence in the United States for five years and have waited two years between the day of the declaration of intention and of the application for naturalization;

5. be of “good moral character”;

6. be attached to the “principles of the Constitution” and to organized government in general;

7. take an oath of allegiance to the United States.²⁸

Any decree of naturalization that had not been obtained in full compliance with the letter of the law could be revoked. Under the pressure of an increasingly burdensome number of tasks, courts seemed increasingly agreeable to transfer their power to treat the first stage of the naturalization application. In 1909, naturalization examiners began using a creative interpretation of the 1906 Act as authority to conduct interviews with applicants for citizenship before they appeared in court.²⁹ When a large number of petitions for naturalization began being filed each year, one federal district court decided to formally require that citizenship candidates and witnesses meet with a naturalization examiner in advance of appearing before the clerk of court.³⁰ In other jurisdictions, however, pre-court interviews were used without this formal recognition.³¹

By 1914, the Division of Naturalization could claim that 50,000 of the 123,000 applicants for citizenship sat through a preexamination interview conducted by a naturalization examiner. It was easier for citizenship applicants to appear before examiners because the Bureau’s district headquarters were located in many of the United States’ largest cities and in close proximity to the courts (sometimes even in the same building). This system saved the clerks time and permitted the examiners to review the greatest number of cases, “all at a far less expense and embarrassment to the applicants for citizenship.”³² The eleven chief examiners running the country’s eleven naturalization districts performed the work, assisted by forty-eight assistant examiners and fourteen clerks.³³

In addition, the outbreak of World War I and America’s eventual military involvement drove the creation of a special new procedure permitting aliens who volunteered for the armed forces to be naturalized rapidly without meeting many requirements of the 1906 Act—including the normally required delay of ninety days. Under the wartime measure passed on May 9, 1918, before filing a naturalization petition, aliens who enlisted in the armed forces of the United States could pass a preliminary examination and appear with two witnesses before a representative of the Bureau of Naturalization. In order to operate the new system, which made official the centrality of the Bureau’s role in the naturalization process, new examiners were recruited and trained by more experienced naturalization officers. By the end of June 1918, 63,993 foreigners serving in the military were naturalized.³⁴ One year later, on June 30, 1919, the total number had reached 128,335³⁵ and rose still further to 244,300 by the end of 1920.³⁶ At the same time, the Bureau’s force of examiners increased, and its appropriations doubled from $305,000 in 1918 to $675,000 in 1919.³⁷ The Bureau of Naturalization was able to take satisfaction in demonstrating that the administrative naturalization process could work: “This particular provision has made it possible for the machinery of the law to operate with the minimum of friction.”³⁸

But the Naturalization Bureau’s satisfaction was short-lived. After 1918, the number of declaration of intentions and naturalizations rose to double their previous levels. At the same time, in the years following the war, the Bureau of Naturalization was forced to process these under a significantly reduce budget.³⁹ Eventually, the Bureau staff began to examine the documents of many candidates for naturalization by correspondence.⁴⁰ In such instances, an alien would file a petition for naturalization before a clerk of a court who would contact the Bureau so that it could send the applicant a questionnaire through the mail. Each applicant’s witnesses also received by mail a written questionnaire that asked them about their knowledge of the applicant. Largely on the basis of these written statements, “made ex parte of course, the court [would] admit[] that man to citizenship,” after he appeared in person.⁴¹

In 1922, of the 170,000 aliens applying for citizenship, 29,000 mailed in applications. In areas where it lacked offices, mainly in the western part of the country, the Bureau found that, “We do not have the force to go and investigate those cases as they should be investigated, and as a consequence we must adopt this expedient.” The Bureau of Naturalization found this new mail-based process “totally and entirely unsatisfactory,”⁴² carrying with it considerable risks: “Now, with all the isms rampant as they are, it seems to me that at a time like this we should stop that sort of practice.” At the beginning of 1923, the Bureau launched a program to extend its preliminary investigation process to every court with naturalization authority around the country. In order to implement the expanded program, Bureau officials tried to convince “the more than 2,000 clerks of courts . . .engaged in naturalization transactions” to require each applicant to establish contact with the naturalization examiner “before he files his naturalization petition.”⁴³ But in large cities, where the Bureau of Naturalization had existing agreements with the courts to investigate applicants, examiners were overwhelmed with a flood of applications. In 1925, only 20 percent of all the naturalization papers were fully completed in the presence of a naturalization examiner.⁴⁴

In response, the Bureau pursued a successful strategy of increasing its authority—and budget—by tapping into the currents of political paranoia and anticommunism. It urged Congress to allocate more resources, and insisted that, without that increase, it could not prevent a growing tide of “reds” from becoming American citizens: “There are reports showing that socialist organizations are urging their members to become naturalized. We cannot withstand that action without funds. If they have funds, as they seem to have, from abroad and other sources, to carry on their propaganda work, in 90 days you will have them coming into citizenship.”⁴⁵

To prevent the naturalization of Communists, the Bureau cooperated with civil society organizations, which it used to feed it with information: “the Americanization societies . . .and the American Legion are pointing out to our men daily cases—I should not say daily, perhaps, but cases which require more careful investigation, all of which necessarily takes time.”⁴⁶ Raymond Crist, who in 1923 was selected as the new Commissioner of the Bureau of Naturalization, also strove to develop strong ties with industry, “so that we can arrange to get reports from employers about their employees who are coming into citizenship.” But he pleaded that relying on outside groups was plainly insufficient and that the Bureau required additional funds to recruit new examiners to investigate so “that we can not only know what the candidates for citizenship are doing in the day time, but we can know the associates they keep, the societies they attend, and the character of thought which they express.”⁴⁷ Congress’ eventual decision to increase the Bureau’s budget allocation allowed it to reduce the number of naturalization investigations handled through correspondence from twenty-nine thousand in 1922 to fifteen thousand within only two years.⁴⁸

But there was another problem, present since 1906 but growing more serious over time. Section 13 of the 1906 Naturalization Act prescribed the duties of naturalization court clerks: making, filing, and docketing naturalization papers and collecting fees. Yet state court clerks, often elected for a limited term, typically entered office lacking experience in performing the complex and demanding tasks required by their naturalization responsibilities.⁴⁹ Furthermore, the fees they could collect under the 1906 Act from any single applicant were not high—five dollars for a full naturalization procedure.⁵⁰ The clerks were authorized to retain only half of these fees, not to exceed $3,000 per year.⁵¹ The other half, and all additional fees collected beyond the maximum, had to be sent to the Bureau of Naturalization for deposit in the U.S. Treasury.⁵² Even if the entirety of naturalization fees could be used to supplement clerk salaries (rather than, as is more likely, used to satisfy expenses incident to the naturalization process),⁵³ clerks were receiving little additional compensation in exchange for taking on substantial responsibilities. James Farrell, the Chief Naturalization Examiner in the naturalization district of Boston, summed up the situation in 1922:

In those outside courts, the matter is unwelcome, at least, in many of them, and especially where they have but little of it, because every case that comes before a clerk is a burden on him. He is unfamiliar with the law, and in every case he has to make an inquiry, de novo; he has to look up the requirements and he groans and in some places he says to the petitioner—this actually so—“I will give you $4 if you would go somewhere else and file this.” It is a burden in that way because you are only giving that man half the fees and because of the time it takes, especially in those country courts; he is not recompensed or compensated for the efforts he makes. It is in the big centers that there is money for the clerk and there you try to shut him off with $3,000.⁵⁴

Naturally, this system encouraged clerks, once they reached the statutory limit of $6,000 in total fees collected, to virtually refuse to entertain additional naturalization business.⁵⁵ Additional appropriations had permitted the Bureau, since 1909, to pay some assistants to facilitate the work of the clerks in the cities where collection typically exceeded $6,000.⁵⁶ In 1919, however, “Congress changed the method of compensation of the United States court clerks from emoluments to the salary basis” and prohibited “the allotment of any money” from the Naturalization Bureau budget for the compensation of assistants to clerks of the U.S. courts.⁵⁷

In 1924 the naturalization work of the Bronx, Kings, and New York City county courts collapsed. Given the critical location of the failure, an alternative means for processing naturalization applications had to be created as quickly as possible. The New York state court clerks’ funding was halted and applicants were redirected to naturalization examiners recruited by the Bureau of Naturalization. Within a few days, the work performed previously by thirty-seven county clerks and their assistants⁵⁸ was now completed by eight clerks working directly under the supervision of the district director of naturalization in New York City. Once their applications were treated, future naturalized citizens were sent to the two U.S. district courts in New York City, which handled 8,885 declarations and petitions per month in 1924, compared to 1,758 the previous year.⁵⁹

The crisis, despite its challenges, produced an example that the Bureau of Naturalization wanted to expand nationally. But the Democrats did not like the reform implemented in New York and did not want to eliminate state courts from the naturalization business. The Democratic members of the Committee on Appropriations persuaded the House, over the protests of the Commissioner of Naturalization to allocate $370,000 for payments to state court clerks. However, a Republican representative from New York, Ogden Mills, succeeded in having the Senate strike the appropriation language from the bill, and final appropriations were left to the discretion of the secretary of the Department of Labor. Following that decision, on February 28, 1925, Mills wrote a draft letter to President Calvin Coolidge and enjoined him to pass it along to the secretary of labor. Coolidge did so just a few days later on March 2, 1925. “It seems to me,” the letter read, “that, in view of the fact that the Bureau of Naturalization is able to do the work more cheaply and more efficiently than the County Clerks, that . . .the policy should be continued and you should not return to that policy abandoned by your Department a year ago.”⁶⁰

In 1925 four different sets of naturalization procedures were being used in parallel. In larger cities, the Bureau of Naturalization concluded agreements directly with the courts to have applicants meet with a naturalization examiner immediately before (1) or after (2) registering with the clerk of court. Outside of the cities, state courts staff were subsidized by the federal government to perform the task of filing and checking applications in place of the naturalization examiners (3). Finally, applicants and witnesses were investigated through the postal system (4).

The naturalization examiners needed to be well trained to deal with the complexities of the system: they were required to possess a law degree or to pass, under the supervision of the Civil Service Commission, an examination on the relevant laws.⁶¹ They also needed a background in typewriting and stenography, as they had clerical as well as legal responsibilities.⁶² Despite their expertise, the examiners were often overwhelmed by their various tasks. They worked “overtime constantly,” often on weekends and during vacations.⁶³

For the Bureau of Naturalization, the lack of standardized naturalization practices and the impossibility of appealing judicial decisions conferring citizenship made denaturalization the last chance for creating and maintaining the “uniformity of rule” that Campbell had originally envisioned. A single procedure is “of the utmost practical importance in maintaining the uniformity of the rule of naturalization required by the Constitution,” Campbell noted, “It stops other courts of original jurisdiction from applying a contrary view of law and authoritatively advises the public, the administrative officers and the courts as to what the law is, for their information and guidance, thus making the rule of naturalization uniform in operation, as intended.”⁶⁴

Yet if, in the early years following the 1918 Act, many more denaturalization cases were directly managed by the Bureau of Naturalization than funneled through the U.S. attorneys, by the middle of the next decade, the situation was reversed. In 1919 the U.S. attorneys received 13 cases, while 135 were handled by the commissioner of naturalization; and in 1921 U.S. attorneys managed 11, and the commissioner of naturalization 65. But in 1923, 640 cases were referred to the U.S. attorneys while only 96 were handled by the Bureau of Naturalization.⁶⁵

Campbell had fought hard to secure authority to institute denaturalization proceedings, but five years after having obtained it in 1918, he was forced to abandon it. There were several reasons for Campbell’s reversal. First, U.S. attorneys and naturalization examiners weren’t accustomed to working within the new framework. For example, it took more than three years for the Bureau of Naturalization to obtain a decision in the case of Georges Dumas, a native of Canada, naturalized in 1900, who had returned to live permanently in Canada in 1901. In April 1919, a petition to cancel his certificate was filed in the name of the commissioner of naturalization by a naturalization examiner.The case had been originally referred by the Minneapolis U.S. attorney’s office, but the judge refused to receive the petition for denaturalization on the grounds that, apart from the U.S attorney, only the commissioner of naturalization or his deputy possessed concurrent authority in the matter of cancellation. After multiple exchanges of letters, Campbell refiled the petition himself and obtained a court decision on November 13, 1922.⁶⁶ These troubles were not isolated to the Dumas case. As a result, on February 28, 1923, the solicitor of the Department of Labor reminded naturalization examiners that cases for denaturalization should be submitted first to the Commissioner for him to decide to institute proceedings for cancellation, or to refer the case to the appropriate U.S. attorney.⁶⁷

Second, the absence of any separation of powers between the handling of naturalization and denaturalization cases encouraged fraud. In San Francisco, for instance, a scandal exploded involving the complicity of a naturalization examiner in the issuing of fraudulent naturalization certificates.⁶⁸ Ultimately, cases that resulted in twenty-seven denaturalizations and five criminal prosecutions were handled by the Department of Justice. The district director of naturalization who had manifested a “lack of interest” in ordering an investigation, was eventually replaced, but not before he attempted to implicate the commissioner of naturalization in the charges of corruption.⁶⁹

As a result, between 1922 and 1926, a compromise was negotiated regarding the management of naturalization and denaturalization procedures between the Justice, Labor, and State Departments, the Supreme Court, and finally Congress. The Bureau of Naturalization agreed to accept the Department of Justice’s resumption of its leadership in denaturalization proceedings: denaturalization cases would be handled exclusively by U.S. attorneys. The decision to institute cancellation proceedings would be approved centrally by the Department of Justice before being dispatched to the appropriate U.S. attorney’s office.⁷⁰ The Department of Justice, in turn, backed the Bureau of Naturalization in its effort to attract into its sphere of competence naturalization responsibilities that had formerly been performed by the courts.

At the request of several judges, and with the strong backing of Supreme Court Chief Justice and former president William Howard Taft, Congress decided to intervene.⁷¹ At a series of hearings entitled “Relief of Judges in Naturalization Cases,” Taft pleaded for changes to be made to the naturalization process in order to relieve the federal judiciary of overly burdensome tasks and to preserve the judges from an atmosphere that threatened to soil their dignity. He quoted the complaints of Judge Augustus Hand, a renowned federal trial court judge from the Southern District of New York: “The whole courthouse is swamped with 1,800 persons a week who hang around for the purpose of being naturalized. That is not a good environment for the court. It makes the going to court very burdensome to the litigants who have to be there.” Taft advocated in favor of a new naturalization process “by which these applicants can be disposed of somewhere away from the court, and the intervention of the judges to be limited to a mere office examination of the work of some subordinate . . .who is more familiar . . .with the details of the facts, and relieve our court atmosphere of this great burden.”⁷²

In response, on June 8, 1926, Congress passed amendments to the naturalization laws authorizing federal courts to designate one or more officers of the Bureau of Naturalization to conduct preliminary hearings on petitions for naturalization and to make findings and recommendations to the courts.⁷³ If the examiner found the testimony of the witnesses satisfactory, he was given authority to exempt them from attending a final judicial hearing. Under this procedure, the petitioner was only required to appear before the court to take the oath of allegiance, “thus relieving the court of a large amount of work.”⁷⁴

The 1926 Act was of great satisfaction to the interested parties. It benefited the Bureau of Naturalization, which was now permitted to hire additional examiners and to involve itself more directly with naturalization cases handled by federal courts.⁷⁵ At the same time, the federal district courts were freed from a tedious and demanding task, even while they preserved their right under the law to exercise final authority in naturalization cases.⁷⁶

In considering the original bill, Congress also debated extending the new procedures to the various state courts. Democratic Congressman Adolph Sabath, for instance, advocated strongly for placing the state courts on an equal footing with the federal courts—this would have helped to preserve the economic windfall and the influence conferred by the naturalization business on many state courts. But, in the end, only the federal courts were permitted to partake in the benefits of the new system.⁷⁷

The passage of 1926 amendments to the Naturalization Act was a key moment in the history of the naturalization authority in the United States. Its impact was immediately measurable. Within six years, 90 percent of the federal judiciary availed itself of the new procedures permitted under the 1926 Act.⁷⁸ In those areas where state courts were still permitted to confer citizenship, the less demanding procedures available to those applying for citizenship in federal courts—requiring only appearance of witnesses and one examination for applicants, in most cases—provoked a decided shift in favor of increasing the proportion of federal court naturalizations.⁷⁹ At the same time, the allowances to clerks at state courts, already reduced more than 50 percent in 1924, faced further reductions every year between 1927 and 1930. Thereafter, many of the states’ courts surrendered naturalization jurisdiction altogether. In 1926, state courts still conducted the majority of civilian naturalizations, 79,515 of 146,239 or 54 percent. Five years later, they conducted only 34 percent (48,256 of 140,271).⁸⁰ Slowly but surely, the naturalization process was becoming federalized.