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Introduction

Present-day Americans feel secure in their citizenship. They are free to speak up for any cause and to oppose their government, to marry a person of any nationality, and to live wherever they decide, in the United States or abroad. Many Americans consider their citizenship the most “cherished” status in the world.¹ This is why most foreign-born U.S. residents look forward to the day they can apply for citizenship, once the required five-year waiting period has passed. For many, the day they pledge allegiance to the United States will be one of the most memorable of their lives.

Yet there was a time, not long ago, when the American government expatriated—or forcibly stripped the citizenship of—certain American citizens. Beginning in 1907, American women marrying foreign husbands, as well as previously naturalized Americans who later moved abroad, could lose their citizenship. Although the former provision would later be repealed,² the Nationality Act passed in 1940 expanded the automatic loss of citizenship to include several new categories of American-born citizens, including those who engaged in foreign military service, voted in foreign elections, or were convicted of treason or of desertion from the armed forces of the United States.

While American-born citizens could lose their citizenship in limited circumstances, naturalized foreign-born Americans were at special risk because they could be deprived of their citizenship, or denaturalized, for a wide variety of reasons. It might come as no surprise that the citizenship of the naturalized could be revoked if their naturalization application was tainted by fraud or other illegal acts. But foreign-born Americans could also be denaturalized: if they spoke out or took action against the U.S. government during wartime or were otherwise involved in “radical” organizations; if they belonged to ethnic or political groups that were perceived as “un-American”; or if they resided abroad, in any country around the world, regardless of how many years they had been American citizens. Although denaturalization had similar consequences for the individual as another phenomenon called denationalization, the two are distinct: denationalization denotes a loss of citizenship, whereas, in theory, a denaturalized person has never been a citizen.³

During the course of the twentieth century, more than twenty-two thousand Americans were denaturalized. Even decades after becoming Americans, the foreign-born risked losing their citizenship in denaturalization proceedings initiated by the executive branch and tried in the courts. This book tells the unique story of these Americans for the very first time.

Denaturalization and denationalization are most often associated with twentieth-century authoritarian regimes. The Soviet Union revoked the citizenship of 1.5 million individuals. The Nazi regime denaturalized forty thousand people and revoked the citizenship of another forty thousand native-born citizens. In France, between 1940 and 1944, the Vichy regime denaturalized fifteen thousand people and stripped the citizenship of five hundred native-born French nationals.

But denaturalization existed in democracies as well. The United States first established the practice through the Naturalization Act of 1906. Only three years later, in 1909, Emma Goldman became the first American denaturalized for political reasons. Following the United States, the United Kingdom introduced denaturalization in 1914, and further reinforced its procedures in 1918. France temporarily installed a denaturalization policy in 1915, for the duration of World War I, and made the practice permanent through legislation passed in 1927.⁴ Many other countries followed suit.

In 1933, twenty-four years after having been deprived of her citizenship, Goldman would write of the trend:

To have a country implies, first of all, the possession of a certain guarantee of security, the assurance of having some spot you can call your own and that no one can alienate from you. That is the essential significance of the idea of country, of citizenship. Divested of that, it becomes sheer mockery.

Up to the World War citizenship actually did stand for such a guarantee. . . . But the War has entirely changed the situation. Together with countless lives, it also destroyed the fundamental right to be, to exist in a given place with any degree of security. . . . Citizenship has become bankrupt: it has lost its essential meaning, its one-time guarantee. Deprivation of citizenship, exile and deportation are practiced by every government; they have been established and accepted methods. . . . Yet, for all their “legality,” denaturalization and expatriation are of the most primitive and cruel inhumanity.⁵

The majority of denaturalizations in France and the United Kingdom can be connected to the two world wars and their consequences—the proceedings were performed to protect national security and in response to perceived acts of treason and disloyalty. Yet in the United States, only 1 percent (approximately two hundred) of the twenty-two thousand denaturalizations conducted during the twentieth century were connected to wars. These few “political” acts of denaturalization have been the subject of valuable studies,⁶ but the vast majority of the denaturalizations in the United States reflect an exceptional and much more complex history.⁷

This study of denaturalization examines, but also searches beyond, the personal ordeals and destinies of the denaturalized by casting light on neglected dimensions of America’s understandings of citizenship. The institution of denaturalization, from its first appearance in America in 1906, made a quiet yet major contribution to the transformation of contemporary American citizenship in at least two ways. The first of these was in the federalization of the naturalization process. Today a foreign resident who wants to become an American citizen looks for the nearest federal office—and not to the local and state courts. This was not always the case. The second of denaturalization’s contributions is the role it played in a series of twentieth-century Supreme Court decisions that would redefine the country’s understanding of sovereignty and citizenship.

In 1790, Congress established, for the first time, a uniform rule of naturalization.⁸ Despite legislative tinkering with the naturalization process in 1798, 1802, and 1906,⁹ it remained the case from the Founding until 1930 that the majority of new Americans were naturalized in state courts. The state judiciary, however, did not always respect citizenship requirements set by federal law.

In the first part of the nineteenth century, the federal government fought for its sovereignty on several fronts, against states of the Union that challenged the supremacy of federal citizenship—culminating in the bloody and hard-fought Civil War—and against foreign countries that contested the power of the United States to naturalize their former citizens. But by 1868 these early battles were over. One day before Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, which unified American citizenship and proclaimed the precedence of federal citizenship over state citizenship, it also passed the Expatriation Act of 1868. This Act proclaimed the right of American citizens to expatriate, or acquire a foreign nationality, and the equal right of all naturalized citizens to travel abroad under the protection of the United States. The latter was made possible only by the Bancroft Treaties—signed with Prussia in 1868, the United Kingdom in 1870, and later with almost three dozen other countries—according to which countries of origin would recognize the American nationality of their own expatriated citizens.¹⁰ It was only then, when American citizenship became “paramount and dominant instead of being subordinate and derivative,” that the old issue of fraud in the naturalization processes was tackled at the federal level.¹¹

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the U.S. government was determined to crack down on fraud to ensure the dignity of the naturalization procedure in courts and to protect the sacrosanct status of American citizenship.¹² In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed, “We poison the sources of our national character and strength at the fountain, if the privilege is claimed and exercised without right, and by means of fraud and corruption.” “The body politic,” Roosevelt explained, “cannot be sound and healthy if many of its constituent members claim their standing through the prostitution of the high right and calling of citizenship.”¹³ The Naturalization Act of 1906 responded to these concerns by introducing denaturalization as a new instrument for deterring any fraud and illegality that might occur during the naturalization process.¹⁴

Denaturalization, however, would also serve another purpose. Buoyed by a growing public discourse in favor of purifying America’s citizenry, denaturalization became a tool for the expulsion of those deemed to possess “un-American” characteristics. The U.S. government targeted those new citizens who were later discovered to be of “un-American” opinion, race, or residence and stripped them of their citizenship. Foreign-born Americans were not the only ones at risk. When denaturalization became a central part of the government’s national security policy during World War II, the 1940 Nationality Act also expanded the number of American-born citizens subject to automatic loss of citizenship. American citizenship had become conditional.

This was precisely when the Supreme Court inserted itself into the denaturalization debate. Although intensely divided, the Court progressively reduced the scope of the federal government’s authority to revoke American citizenship. It did so, in part, by upholding free speech and procedural guarantees for foreign-born Americans. But the most significant limits on the scope of the federal government’s denaturalization authority came later, in the middle of the 1960s, when the Supreme Court began to grapple with and question the constitutionality of denationalizing native-born Americans.

The result of these rulings was nothing short of a revolution in the definition of American citizenship—one brought about by a reversal of the traditional concept of sovereignty. There is no better way to understand how this new definition of citizenship emerged than to follow the battles that broke out on the Supreme Court, first over denaturalization, and then over denationalization. During the first half of the twentieth century, citizenship was still defined as a constellation of rights contingent on the satisfaction of certain obligations, a regime in which the law could say: “if you act this way, you will lose your citizenship.” Yet as this book reveals in great detail, through a series of fascinating and sometimes rancorous clashes between the justices of the Supreme Court, a new definition of citizenship was slowly forged. The citizen was no longer required to submit to a sovereign power able to change and nullify his or her status. American citizens, naturalized and native-born, were redefined as possessing sovereignty themselves. Citizenship had moved from an era when it was provisional, qualified, and unsecure to one in which it was nearly unconditionally guaranteed.

The concept of citizenship has always enjoyed multiple and varying definitions, but three of its dimensions are invoked most frequently. First, citizenship is sometimes described as possessing an affective dimension: “the feeling that one belongs, is connected through one’s sense of emotional attachment, identification and loyalty.”¹⁵ In nation-states, this feeling is sustained by membership in an “imagined community,” constructed from official cultural frames of social belonging within a nation-state.¹⁶ The second dimension of citizenship is political and civic. In a democracy, adult citizens elect their representatives, while foreign residents and citizen minors participate in civil and political society in other ways. As political theorist Judith Shklar notes, this dimension of “American nationality has its own history of exclusions and inclusions, in which xenophobia, racism, religious bigotry, and fear of alien conspiracies have played their part.” Rogers Smith has masterfully explained that in this history of citizenship exclusion occurs from within the bounds of formal nationality, as the tales of women and the descendants of American slaves show.¹⁷

Although the affective and civic notions of citizenship will appear occasionally, it is the third, legal, dimension of citizenship that is the focus of this book. The legal dimension of citizenship reflects the formal linkage of each individual to the nation-state. It is manifested in the passports and national identification documents that confer the official status of national citizen on roughly 99 percent of all human beings. Legal citizenship exists independently of an individual’s sense of belonging or degree of participation in national and patriotic institutions.¹⁸

This book’s investigation of denaturalization may not tell the entire history of American citizenship since 1906, but it does illuminate a significant yet overlooked aspect of it. By focusing on the practice of denaturalization and applying a micro-historical approach to the laws surrounding and institution of naturalization, I was able to discover phenomena that had not previously been observed and to uncover details and broader trends that have not previously been written about. Reducing the scale of observation and engaging in an intensive study of archival materials¹⁹ allows this book to reveal what were unknown dimensions of American political development and to unearth “how, and with what effect, American citizenship has changed over time”²⁰ In doing so, this study of denaturalization sheds light on three broader social historical phenomena, which are developed, respectively, in the three sections of this book.²¹

As I describe in Part I, beginning in 1906 denaturalization provisions were established as the primary mechanism through which the government could exert control over citizenship status after it had been conferred by a court. Originally, this federal intervention in the citizen-making process served two principal purposes: deterring the fraud and illegality that could occur in naturalization and, at the same time, preserving a system for conferring American citizenship on foreigners by (mainly state) courts. But the competition for authority over the naturalization process—held simultaneously by state and federal courts as well as by various executive agencies (including the Departments of Justice and Labor), to say nothing of the specialized committees of Congress that also influenced naturalization procedures—created opportunities for changes.²²

Denaturalization became an instrument through which the Division of Naturalization (later the Immigration and Naturalization Service), created in 1906, consolidated its power. The threat of denaturalization proceedings accelerated the transfer of the management of naturalization applications from the judiciary to the Division of Naturalization. This uneven trend, which proceeded through multiple stages, accompanied the transformation over time of naturalization from an institution largely controlled at the state-level into one entirely managed by an extensive federal bureaucracy.²³ The federalization of American citizenship was fully realized when responsibility over naturalization was transferred from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice. Interestingly, the original target of these denaturalization proceedings was emphatically not the individuals being denaturalized: the denaturalized were often encouraged to reapply for citizenship. Rather, the government’s real interest was in the institution of naturalization, which it wanted to purge of fraud and illegality, and misbehaving courts, which the government wanted to force in line.

At precisely the same moment that the federal government was consolidating its authority, the use of denaturalization as a tool for ridding the American citizenry of “undesirables” surged to the forefront. This brand of denaturalization was not entirely novel: it originated in 1907 as part of a restrictive and racist immigration policy illustrating the rise of a “conditional citizenship.”²⁴ New Americans could lose their citizenship if they violated certain standards not applied to the native-born: if a naturalized citizen was Asian, spoke out against war, was a Socialist, a Communist, or a fascist, or lived abroad, she risked the loss of her American citizenship. As I describe in Part II, these grounds rapidly became the primary justifications for denaturalization. They were rooted in both the explicit wording of statutes (for example, in the case of residence abroad), as well as in extensive interpretations of the law by the executive branch and the courts as a means for assessing loyalty to the United States. These interpretations left open the possibility of an ongoing evaluation of a new citizen’s allegiance to the United States.

Yet three of the principal grounds for denaturalization—residence abroad, race, and political belief—would ignite a series of conflicts within the executive branch (among the Justice, State, and Labor Departments) and the courts, which until 1940 had limited the scope of expatriation. But when World War II broke out, denaturalization, together with Congress’s denationalization of numerous American-born citizens, moved from the margins of the U.S. government’s policy to the front and center. Under the personal supervision of Francis Biddle, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Attorney General, denaturalization became an integral part of a proactive program by the Justice Department to bolster national security against threats from America’s “enemies.”

However, as I detail in Part III, even as the United States was caught in the upheaval of World War II, the Supreme Court intervened and began to reduce the scope of the federal government’s denaturalization authority. Before the outbreak of war, the Supreme Court had backed the authority of the executive to pursue the denaturalization of new Americans for failing to adhere to a myriad of legal minutiae, from the form of naturalization applications, to the duration of U.S. residence, to the age of their arrival in the United States. After 1943, however, the Supreme Court reversed course and began protecting denaturalized individuals. The first of these trailblazing new decisions was issued in 1943, in favor of William Schneiderman, the Secretary of the Communist Party in California. It was followed in 1944 by an even more surprising ruling to save Hugo Baumgartner, a former German citizen accused of harboring Nazi sympathies, from losing his American citizenship.

The Schneiderman and Baumgartner decisions put an end to America’s World War II denaturalization program. Yet denaturalization remained available on a number of grounds. The scope of the government’s denaturalization power would not be further reduced until the Supreme Court later intervened in cases involving the stripping of citizenship from native-born Americans. On the eve of the war, only American-born citizens acquiring another nationality risked losing their citizenship. But in 1940, a new law extended the denationalization power to include those Americans who had evaded the draft, joined a foreign army, or participated in foreign elections.

The Supreme Court reacted over a sixteen-year period from 1955 until 1971 by splitting on several occasions over the question of the constitutionality of forced denationalization provisions. About half of the Court, depending on the particulars of a given case, continued to uphold the authority of Congress to deprive naturalized and native Americans alike of their citizenship. As the basis for its decisions, the Court asserted judicial restraint and the exclusive authority of the elected branches over foreign affairs. The other half of the Court, however, invoked a number of constitutional rights in support of striking down and restricting laws permitting denaturalization and expatriation.

Denaturalization had provoked a fierce debate on the Supreme Court between these two factions. And, eventually, the practice of denaturalization was sharply restricted. Nevertheless, a nearly unanimous Court permitted—and still permits, in narrow circumstances—a naturalized citizen to lose her American citizenship.²⁵

But for the native-born, the situation was different. Some justices were aghast at the possibility of forced denationalization of American-born citizens. “I am convinced that such a suggestion would have been shocking to the Founding Fathers and the American people and it should still be shocking,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren at the beginning of 1958 on a stenography pad found in his personal archives.²⁶ At that moment Warren was in the middle of a fight with his brethren on the Court over that very issue in the Perez v. Brownell case and lacked a majority supporting his views. But thanks to Justice Hugo Black and with the help of his clerk, Jon Newman, Warren was in the process of developing a reasoned criticism of expatriation that was rooted in the language of the Constitution. Several members of the Court, principally Justices Felix Frankfurter and Tom Clark, invoked the war powers, the exclusive authority of the elected branches to manage foreign affairs, and the sovereignty of the state with respect to its citizens to limit judicial intervention. Warren replied to them that, on the basis of the founding principles of the American Republic crystallized in the Fourteenth Amendment, American sovereignty was derived not only from the state but belonged to citizens themselves. At the time, Warren’s view was in the minority, and his approach was detailed only in a dissenting opinion. Eventually, however, Justice Warren and his allies on the Court were able to marshal several other constitutional provisions in support of their view that the denationalization of Americans was unconstitutional, including the Eighth Amendment (which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment) and the Fifth Amendment (which protects due process). The road was a bumpy one, however, and Warren’s rough coalition would lose some cases before winning several others.

It was only in 1967, in Afroyim v. Rusk, that Justice Black was finally able to outline an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that secured for all—native-born and naturalized—the full set of privileges entailed in American citizenship. American citizenship was no longer a contingent benefit conferred by a sovereign state in exchange for its citizens’ respect for the laws. As Justice Warren put it in his Perez dissent, “their citizenship is not subject to the general powers of their government.” Citizens themselves were now a fount of sovereignty.

Contrary to the definition of citizenship as “the right to have rights,” the concept of citizenship as the source of sovereignty could cover and protect all citizens, including those with dual citizenship and the foreign-born. By the time Perez was reversed in 1967 in the Afroyim decision, the concept of citizen sovereignty had become the jurisprudence of the land. And what is more, it had achieved, without much notice, a revolution in the definition of American citizenship.

The evolution of denaturalization in twentieth-century America carries us from the edges to the very heart of the American story by revealing the transformation of Americans’ understanding of citizenship. Changes in America’s management of naturalization and denaturalization reflect larger structural phenomena such as the rise of the state and the growing recognition of basic civil and human rights, but these changes were not the inevitable product of broader forces.

Before naturalization could become the federal institution that it is now, a foundation first had to be laid. Richard Campbell, the first Chief of the Division of Naturalization, served from 1906 to 1922. A policy entrepreneur, Campbell initially took his post with relatively few resources at his disposal, his denaturalization authority among them, but succeeded in using the minor clout of the position to his full advantage. His successes were less the result of intra-governmental competition than they were born of cooperation and the forging of bureaucratic alliances. The federalization process did not occur without resistance, but in contrast to other policy areas where units of government typically compete to exercise and extend the authority at their disposal, in the case of naturalization, many of the political stakeholders were eager to transfer power to the rising Division—and, later, Bureau—of Naturalization.²⁷

Although the executive branch and the wider public backed a vigorous and aggressive denaturalization policy, several dissenting figures played a major role in preventing hundreds of thousands of foreign-born Americans from losing their citizenship. These advocates were not prophets of a future where Americans were fully secure in their citizenship, but they were able to find in the law of the land—or, at least, in their interpretations of the law—a basis for a position that favored the preservation of citizenship.²⁸ From the end of the 1930s until the 1960s, courageous lawyers defended their clients from the trial courts all the way up to the Supreme Court. It took years before mounting judicial losses finally yielded to substantial legal gains. But without these efforts, the federal judiciary might have continued to denaturalize hundreds of American citizens for such causes as “mental reservation” at the moment of the pledge of allegiance or for “lack of attachment” to the Constitution.²⁹ Among these advocates were Harry Weinberger from New York, who represented the famed anarchist Emma Goldman; Ernie Goodman from Detroit, who defended numerous Communists during the Cold War; and their colleague from New York, Carol King, who worked on behalf of radicals like Harry Bridges and William Schneiderman. For instance, had King not possessed the audacity to ask Wendell Willkie, a former Republican presidential candidate who received nearly 45 percent of the vote in the 1940 election, to represent the communist Schneiderman in front of the Supreme Court (and had Willkie himself not summoned the courage to take on the case), the fate of many leftist activists targeted for denaturalization in the 1950s might have been quite different.

Still, perhaps the most forgotten, yet important, historical player in reducing the scope of denaturalization was George Wickersham, U.S. Attorney General under President Taft. Wickersham was skeptical of denaturalization, and immediately upon his arrival at the Justice Department in 1909, he issued an instruction called Circular 107 ordering the Department not to initiate denaturalization proceedings against new Americans who had by accident or circumstance failed to follow the letter of the law when they were naturalized. Instead, Justice Department lawyers were only to pursue denaturalization proceedings in instances where a substantial result could be achieved “in the way of the betterment of the citizenship of the country.” In this manner, Circular 107 played a major role in reducing the impact of denaturalization prior to World War II. Similarly, Wickersham fought against the State Department to prevent it from adopting a policy that would deprive naturalized citizens living abroad of their citizenship. Instead, he prevailed on the State Department to impose the much less severe consequence of loss of U.S. consulate protection. His interpretation again preserved the citizenship of thousands of naturalized Americans. Wickersham was also an early defender of a liberal approach to free speech. In 1912, outraged that a socialist union leader had been denaturalized through proceedings initiated by an assistant U.S. attorney, he ordered the attorney to work to reestablish the man’s American citizenship.³⁰

Finally, there is a serendipitous dimension to the Supreme Court’s revolutionary jurisprudence. If certain provisions permitting the forced expatriation of many categories of Americans had not been inserted in the 1940 Nationality Act at the request of the State Department and the Department of War, perhaps the Supreme Court would not have been forced to enter the fray, redefining American citizenship in the process. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for one, opposed many if not all of these provisions.³¹ Had he prevailed, American law would have permitted only the expatriation of Americans who acquired a foreign nationality—a type of expatriation that did not divide the Court as strongly.

But this is not how events unfolded. Instead, the United States greatly expanded the grounds for which Americans could be stripped of their citizenship and relied on denaturalization more often than any other democracy. This frequency was due, in part, to America’s federal system of government. In addition, owing to the United States’ heavy reliance on immigration in comparison to much older European nations, America became the home of large numbers of the foreign-born, whose differences in appearance, ethnicity, and ideas allowed denaturalization to become an instrument of racism, bigotry, and fear.

Yet today, severely limited by Supreme Court jurisprudence,³² denaturalization remains on the books less as a reflection of America’s past prejudices than as a symbol of its commitment to human rights. Nowadays, denaturalization is used primarily as a tool for targeting individuals who commit crimes against humanity, including former Nazis and others responsible for acts of genocide. This is the story of how, during the twentieth century, denaturalization evolved in tandem with fundamental assumptions about American citizenship.