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Americans Abroad and the Uses of Citizenship: Paris, 1914-1940

Author(s): Nancy L. Green

Source: Journal of American Ethnic History , Vol. 31, No. 3 (Spring 2012), pp. 5-32

Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Immigration & Ethnic History Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerethnhist.31.3.0005

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Americans Abroad and the Uses of Citizenship: Paris, 1914–1940

NANCY L. GREEN

AMERICANS, QUINTESSENTIALLY described as belonging to a nation of immigrants, are rarely seen as emigrants. Yet large numbers of American citizens have settled abroad, increasingly so since World War II. Today, the Association of Americans Resident Overseas estimates that over five million Americans live outside of the United States. A transatlantic flow eastward began in the nineteenth century and picked up with earnest after the Civil War. Paris was one of the prime destinations for those who went to Europe for work or play, and by the late nineteenth century, Americans had created a large resident “colony,” as they called it, the largest group of Americans abroad.1 Although Americans abroad have never considered themselves immigrants and do not fall under our usual conception of the immigrant and ethnic history of the North American people (the Journal of American Ethnic History’s raison d’être), they are a fitting topic for im- migration historians in several ways. First, they push us to think of ourselves as we think of others who have come to American shores. The history of Americans in Paris, with their clubs and churches, is a study of community formation and interaction with the locals that is familiar to all historians of immigration. But the experience of those who left the United States may also, in turn, be used to ask questions about immigrants to the United States (and elsewhere). In particular, by focusing on their relation to the consulate, we can ask new questions about citizenship and transnationalism. To what extent do citizens abroad call upon their home states in time of need? By looking at the U.S. Consulate in Paris and examining a particularly insistent transnational use of citizenship from afar, we can suggest the importance for more comparative historic research on the consular intersection for other nationals within the United States or elsewhere.2

Americans abroad are not your average immigrant largely because of the way we have defined immigrants as impoverished workers.3 Those Ameri- cans who go abroad for substantial periods of time, from months to years to a lifetime, may be called elite emigrants, a category that in itself deserves

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6 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2012

more attention. Beyond the well-known expatriate writers and artists of the 1920s, the large American colony in Paris that ultimately set the stage for the increasing number of American expats after World War II grew to some forty thousand by the mid-1920s, not to mention the steady stream of hundreds of thousands who also came to Paris as tourists and shoppers. Nine-tenths of the settled Americans were not the more well-known writ- ers or artists but rather rentiers, bankers, and businessmen there to sell American commercialism rather than criticize it.4 The Americans in Paris created institutions ranging from two major churches to a hospital and a library, all of which still exist today. They saw themselves as a community; the American Chamber of Commerce in France published a yearly four- hundred-plus-page volume of Americans in France during the interwar years that proved it. Businessmen, lawyers, but also American countesses (legatees married to impecunious European aristocrats) and poor students peopled the American community. While many intermarried and melded into the Parisian boiseries (woodwork), many others brought their goods and their methods with them and arguably set the stage for the already contested forms of “Americanization.” And those who showed up at the consulate for help clearly considered their American identity a performative category. Migration studies have focused largely on immigration, yet as I have argued elsewhere, the perspective of emigration and the role of the state of origin and the way in which it has conceptualized aided, abetted, or impeded those who leave is equally important.5 Here I would like to return to this relationship of emigration by examining the ties of the home state to the citizen abroad, not just from the perspective of the state, but from that of the citizen. Allegiance is reciprocal. While we can ask about the ways in which the state relates to its citizens abroad, we can also ask about the ways in which citizens overseas turn to their home country for aid and use that tie, both in times of war and in times of peace. The new citizenship studies since the 1990s have, understandably and fruitfully, focused on the state and the ways in which its various meanings of citizenship have excluded large groups of people within the United States from “social citizenship”: immigrants, women, blacks, Native Americans.6 However, little historical work has looked at the protective function of citizenship and how individu- als may draw upon it as social practice. This article proposes to shift the focus in three ways. First, by looking at Americans abroad, I aim to extend U.S. citizenship studies from within the country’s boundaries to without, from a focus on immigrants to one on emigrants. While it is important to understand the exclusions inherent in the

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state’s practice of citizenship, as citizenship follows citizens across borders, the interactions of citizens with their home state can shed light on the ways in which, for those lucky enough to have it, citizenship rights can be mustered, demanded, and used by those who have left home. Americans abroad have been seen at times as functional ambassadors, carrying American cultural models or goods to outlying markets. They have also been seen as ungrate- ful expatriates, or ex-patriots, for having left the homeland. In either case, citizens abroad provide a test case on the limits of what the state can do for them and thus furnish a particularly interesting example of how “thin” ties of citizenship can become “thick” when a problem is at hand.7 Consulates play a key role in this respect, and questions about Americans abroad may usefully rebound to questions about other immigrants’ practices at their consulates in the United States. Second, this means looking at citizenship from the perspective of the “included” rather than the excluded. Indeed, to what extent is this use of citizenship the mark of the privileged, using citizenship as a resource? This means turning the (important) excluded-from-citizenship research on its head in order to look at how demanding American citizens outside of the U.S., fully convinced of their rights, could draw upon their citizenship vo- ciferously. Most are motivated by personal problems, but many argued that their individual case implied a defense of the value of American citizenship as a whole. When e.e. cummings was arrested in France during World War I, his father—admittedly a well-connected Harvard professor—beseeched Woodrow Wilson to “do something to make American citizenship as sa- cred in the eyes of Frenchmen as Roman citizenship was in the eyes of the ancient world.”8

Third, I would like to shift the focus from the state to the individual, to look at the social uses of citizenship by individuals rather than how the government has excluded groups from “social citizenship.” This means looking at citizenship as a personal tie. While scholars often have made the distinction between functional and affective citizenship, the first describing the tie to the state and the second to a sense of nation, I prefer what legal scholar Kim Barry called a “practiced identity,” as distinct from legal status.9 This quotidian use of citizenship, as I call it, raises more general questions about emigrants’ transnational relationships not just to home and family but to their government. Americans abroad may turn to the state in a very personal exercise of citizenship rights. Passport-wielding individuals can be found in consulates around the world demanding a variety of services, from helping them do business to safeguarding their possessions to getting out of

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8 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2012

town during wartime or out of prison at other times. In good or sometimes bad faith, many people made an insistent use of the U.S. Consulate to help them get out of scrapes of various sorts. These largely elite migrants are a useful starting point to see how those who have left home may call in their citizenship chips when needed.

PROTECTION OF CITIZENS ABROAD

Consulates are an externalized borderland where foreigners seek admit- tance (the site of “remote control” of immigration policy, as Aristide Zolberg has put it10), but they are also places where citizens seek protection. For the latter, consulates are the institutional intersection point between the indi- vidual and the state. They should also be at the historiographic crossroads of citizenship and migration studies.11 We have ignored consulates undoubtedly due to a more general emphasis on immigration than on emigration, but also due to the assumption that citizens abroad steer clear of them. And perhaps they do. Most immigrants and emigrants do not go to their consulate unless necessary. Political refugees avoid or fear their embassies altogether. The celebrated interwar fugitive from the Teapot Dome Scandal, Harry Blackmer, who spent twenty-five years in exile overseas (“lightened by a second mar- riage and some high living in France”), spent much of his time avoiding the U.S. Consulate in Paris. So much so that the famous U.S. Supreme Court case Blackmer v. United States reiterated the power of consulates to subpoena citizens abroad.12 The social contract of citizenship was supposed to work both ways. What interests me here, however, are not those individuals sum- moned to their consulates but those who went there voluntarily to mobilize it as the flag bearer of identity and as a strategic site of help. Consulates predate embassies as forms of representation abroad, and the young United States continued this custom by first appointing unpaid consuls in foreign lands. The main function of consulates in the early days of the Republic was to protect American shipping and commerce along with American citizens. They were instituted to generate “a sense of security and confidence conducive to foreign trade, travel and residence in foreign lands.”13 Seamen and shipping disputes were a major focus of their early activities. The link between consulates and the promotion and protection of trade was clear from the outset. Consular posts were initially given to merchants residing abroad who continued their own businesses. Throughout the nineteenth century, various attempts were made to reform the system. Two acts of 1855 and 1856 regulating the service stipulated that the consuls

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were to be salaried and that they were to turn fees over to the U.S. Trea- sury. In the meantime, a consular convention had been signed between the United States and France in 1853, giving the U.S. consuls the right to act informally on behalf of American citizens vis-à-vis the French authorities, a convention still in force during the interwar period.14

In spite of the 1855 and 1856 acts, the organization of the consular service was still often criticized, and other attempts at reform were engaged from the early twentieth century on in order to professionalize the function (includ- ing the requirement of knowing at least one other modern language besides English) and raise salaries. The rank of ambassador was created in 1893, and after the Spanish-American War, the expansion of the Diplomatic Service and its professionalization increased as part of the recognition of America’s growing presence in foreign trade and investment worldwide. The consular reform bill of 1906, but especially the Rogers Act of 1924, emphasizing merit rather than politics as a prerequisite for the job, led to the combina- tion of the Diplomatic and Consular Services into a unified Foreign Service creating a permanent and professional corps of career officers.15 The U.S. Consular Regulations are explicit about the ways in which consular officers may promote the national economic interest: creating a situation favorable for the importation of American goods; submitting frequent economic and commercial reports to assess market opportunities; and lending aid and advising American citizens with regard to commercial and industrial mat- ters.16 They are also the sites where citizens in good standing may demand that the other part of the citizenship bargain be enforced: protection. “Among the most varied and interesting functions of a consular officer,” “frequently arduous and unnoticed,” according to Graham H. Stuart, includes the protection of citizens.17 Initially envisaged to help stranded seamen or to retrieve deserters, the protective function grew along with the number of U.S. civilians abroad over the nineteenth century. Besides looking out for American business interests, consular officials came to take care of everyone from the impecunious and stranded to the mentally deranged, and they helped those who had accidents, handled funerals, and even performed marriages in some locales. But already in 1877, John Russell Young commented on “the tendency of the American mind to seek his minister upon all occasions when he is overcharged for candles, when he has lost his baggage, when he is homesick, and . . . when the right gloves have not come home from the bazaar.”18 Young theorized that, as taxpayers, Americans had a “sense of possession in dealing with ministers and consuls,” so much so that it was just as well, he thought, that the legation be not too convenient of access.19

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10 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2012

At the turn of the twentieth century, as rising numbers of Americans went overseas, the protection of civilians abroad became of increasing interest to the state and to international law. In an early paean to globalization, the former secretary of state Elihu Root turned to the importance of expand- ing trade and commerce in a 1910 address on “The Basis of Protection to Citizens Residing Abroad,”20 while Edwin M. Borchard devoted an entire volume to The Diplomatic Protection of Citizens Abroad in 1915. “The drawing together of the world by increased facilities of travel and com- munication,” he wrote, justified the new attention to the matter.21 Early- twentieth-century U.S. policy generally deemed the consul duty bound to accord protection once citizenship was unquestionably established.22 Help, however, was always constrained by limited funds and three provisos: proof of citizenship is required; the U.S. govern ment does not intervene in purely private matters—a list of American lawyers was always ready to be passed on, with the caveat that the consulate assumed no responsibility for their services; and all available local legal remedies have to be pursued first. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, American citizens abroad and worried families at home turned to the State Department and the Paris consulate for everything from investigating the whereabouts of wan- dering Americans to retrieving forgotten purses or lost luggage. (“Americans are notably careless about their luggage,”23 according to Stuart.) Not all requests were treated with perfect equanimity. There was the category of “ridiculous requests,” some of which had nothing to do with emigration, as when a California writer sent in a lengthy, detailed list of questions for a book he was writing on France.24 The consuls’ patience could be sorely tried, but the consular correspondence is impressive in showing both the number and variety of Americans who turned to the consulate for help and the level of help that the consular officers of the time were willing and able to give.

HELP IN TIME OF WAR

Wartime requests by citizens away from home are undoubtedly the most obvious moments for people to appeal for aid. At the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, the U.S. Legation in Paris issued passports to some 3,300 American residents and tourists and provided “protection papers” for Americans to post on their property in the hope that American be- longings could be safeguarded from the invader’s grasp.25 (At the time, Americans did not need passports to leave the United States or to enter

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France.)26 Similarly, at the outbreak of World War I, thousands of Ameri- cans abroad converged on their embassies. As the ambassador in London described it, “crazy men and weeping women were imploring and curs- ing and demanding—God knows it was bedlam turned loose.”27 At the U.S. Embassy in Paris, there was even a distraught retired major trying to leave with his pet bird.28 Ambassador Myron T. Herrick stayed on in Paris even after the French government left for Bordeaux, and the embassy’s tasks quadrupled with the need to issue emergency passports and help arrange letters of credit and transportation. Approximately five thousand Americans registered with the embassy, either by letter or in person. The embassy set up a committee of private citizens to assist it, which in turn created five subcommittees—on transportation, credit, registration, relief, and protection. The relief subcommittee advanced cash for passage against proper identification and promissory notes or other security. Leaflets were prepared in French and German, and American flags were distributed, all to be placed on American property as protection. But as the ambassador reported, “Fortunately the situation never became so serious [i.e., Paris was not occupied by the Germans (during this war)] as to warrant the posting of these notices except in one or two châteaux in outlying districts.”29 They in effect became a trial run for the placards of 1940. The two major concerns during the war were lost people and lost posses- sions. Worried Americans at home scrawled handwritten or typed letters to the secretary of state looking for relatives who had moved abroad and not kept in touch. Alice B. Toklas’s father in San Francisco traced her through the State Department, which relayed the information to the consulate in Paris, which found her. The consulate made inquiries at 27 rue de Fleurus, where Toklas lived with Gertrude Stein, and found that they had left for Palma de Mallorca the previous April. As Gertrude Stein recounted it, she and Alice had gone to the embassy to get passports before leaving for Spain, but two embassy clerks said they did not need them unless they were going to the United States; their French identification papers were sufficient. When Stein insisted, saying that a friend of hers had received one, the embarrassed official said that that was a very special case, to which she replied severely that there could be “no privilege extended to one American citizen which is not to be, given similar circumstances, accorded to any other American citizen.”30 Stein, like other demanding citizens, insisted on the democratic nature of her citizenship demands. While people turned to the government to track family members, they, like American companies, also sought to protect possessions. Companies

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12 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2012

turned to the embassy and the State Department both in hopes of getting help in procuring French government contracts during the war (such as an artificial limb company!) or for help afterward with regard to damages suf- fered.31 Individuals and companies who had settled in or set up in France but had fled to the U.S. wrote worriedly about their property in France. One American woman, caught in Connecticut at the outbreak of the hostilities, turned desperately to the State Department: “I am an American. . . . Every- thing I own in the world is there, relics, furniture, clothes, furs, everything. . . . Could you not advise the embassy there to help me?”32 A man wrote from Cleveland in 1915 enclosing a pawn ticket and money. He wondered if the embassy could please redeem a diamond ring that he had left in Paris. And the embassy did, sending it back to its owner, even specifying that the unaccompanied ring should be exempt from duty.33 In many other cases, the State Department told the consular officers to keep American property under observation.34 One did not have to have furs or diamonds to be helped, but perhaps those who did felt a greater level of entitlement and had the wherewithal (nerve?) to ask the government for help. One category of Americans in France during World War I that had particu- lar need of the embassy’s support were those with German-sounding names. Companies and individuals suspected by the French of being enemies, and thus liable to sequestration of their goods or expulsion, turned to the State Department to prove their American credentials to the French. The Singer Manufacturing Co. was attacked in an anonymous leaflet campaign and by an overly zealous French senator, who showed photos of its manufactur- ing plant on the Elbe as proof of its being German. The Singer Company requested the secretary of state to contact the embassy to take up the matter with the French government.35 The fur firm of Joseph Ullmann pleaded with the State Department for help in getting back its Russian Colinsky furs and Russian Squirrel Backs that had been confiscated by the French govern- ment. Ullmann protested that his grandfather, who had founded the firm in 1854, was an Alsatian who had become a naturalized U.S. citizen, and that the current owners had all been born in the United States. The firm and all of its branches “are absolutely American, have always been American and the partners are all born Americans.” After checking their credentials, the State Department agreed to accord all possible protection to the firm’s furs in France.36 Even American lead pencils came under suspicion, so that one of their traveling salesmen, Leon Dreyfus, pleaded to the head office in the U.S. to write to the State Department to transmit to the consul in Paris proof that the company was indeed producing all-American pencils as defined

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both by the company’s shareholders and by the fact that its products were all manufactured with American materials in Hoboken.37

Individuals mustered a variety of arguments to prove their U.S. citizen- ship, first to the American consulate, but with the final destination of the information being the French government. Gustav Adolph Trube, head of Westinghouse Air Brake’s French company, had lived in France since 1912, but he was expelled during World War I as a supposed enemy national. He explained to the embassy that his father had been born in Germany only because his grandfather, an American citizen, had been traveling there; his father became naturalized in the U.S. upon coming of age; his mother was American-born; and, he added, her ancestors had fought in the Ameri- can Revolutionary War. Trube’s employer and his friends at the exclusive Noonday Club, who, on behalf of the “Colonie Américaine à Paris,” signed a petition, all vouched for him to the embassy, which in turn vouched for him to the French government.38 Mr. Emil/Emile Supper, a German-born naturalized U.S. citizen, had even worse luck. He had lived for twenty years in Lyon and was “known and considered” as an American citizen there, although the consul was somewhat miffed that he had never contacted the office before. In his case, he was turned down by the State Department for help. He had overstayed the 1907 Expatriation Law’s presumption of a five- year limit of residence abroad for naturalized citizens. He reverted to being German in both American and French eyes with disastrous consequences: his private and business goods were confiscated, and Supper was interned in a French concentration camp.39

While professional jealousies may have brought businessmen to the at- tention of the French authorities, other forms of denunciation could lead American civilians to turn to the U.S. government for identification during the war. One woman had been denounced as German by a discharged French cook who, “in her ignarance [sic] has not known the difference between a Holland Lady and a German Woman!!” Mrs. Haeften-Hatch wrote heatedly to the secretary of state from Cannes in 1916, arguing stridently that the American government should protect “American innocent citizens from the callomnious [sic] statements of infurated [sic] servants” and more gen- erally the “infuriated lower classes.” She brought all of her ancestry and connections to bear on the matter, from the fact that, born in Holland, she was well known by Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch minister currently in Washington, to her more important U.S. citizenship connection, her hus- band, Mr. Charles P. Hatch, a Rough Rider known to “Mr. Rooseveldt” [sic] himself.40

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14 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2012

Later, with the outbreak of World War II, thousands of Americans would flock again to the U.S. Consulate in Paris. Some sought help leaving. Others, who planned to stay, requested embassy certificates to post on their doors. By identifying the inhabitants as U.S. citizens, these protective talismans were intended to keep the enemy at bay and prevent the Germans from ap- propriating the belongings of (for the moment) neutral individuals. After 1941 and the U.S. entry into the war, it behooved those Americans still left in France to take the certificates down quickly. But in the meantime, Ameri- cans abroad, full of fear (of Germans) and trust (in the U.S. government), contacted the embassy and filled out detailed descriptions of the contents of their apartments, houses, or châteaux down to the last asparagus holder.41

Questions of citizenship and its proof were paramount, as will be dis- cussed below, but both American-born and naturalized Americans drew upon a variety of logics and proof as they requested or demanded protec- tion. Genealogies, friends, connections, and public reputation all became definitions of one’s American credentials in order to exercise the citizen’s right to protection. This would be true in time of peace as in time of war.

HELP IN TIME OF PEACE

Missing persons queries persisted throughout the interwar period. At the same time, citizens overseas turned to the government for more mundane matters, requesting help in recovering everything from missing hats to lost handbags. To locate wandering Americans, the consulate acted as a veritable detective agency, checking records, sending circulars to all of the French prefects, writing to local mayors, visiting addresses in Paris, and talking to concierges while also inquiring at the American Red Cross or the American Express Co., or putting advertisements in the American papers in Paris: “letter waiting at the consulate-general.” Whereabouts inquiries could begin with a handwritten letter from a woman in Kansas addressed directly to the secretary of state that would be transferred from the State Department in Washington to the embassy in Paris and to the consulate-general there or to one of the consulates in the provinces, which made inquiries and responded via the embassy to the State Department back to Kansas reassuring her that her son was safe and sound, just not much of a correspondent. The “missing” in France could simply be laggard letter writers; and some Americans, once found, were happy to answer, via the consulate: “please send money, I’ve been too embarrassed to ask.” But a good number of Americans settled abroad did not want to be found and did not want to be

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known to the U.S. officials. A company carrying a life insurance policy on a former employee tried to find him via the State Department; his wife thought him dead and presumably wanted to collect. The consulate found Mr. Jones all right; however, he was apparently reluctant to go home.42 When eighteen-year-old Miss Gladys F. Brown fled toward France in 1913, she had no intention of calling in at the consulate. She had run off with Mr. George H. Dutting, approximately forty years old, and it was her parents who used the government to track her down. Once the SS Kaiserin Auguste Victoria arrived in Cherbourg, consular agent Osborne went on board and “made an earnest appeal to her sense of propriety, decency, filial affection, and expediency.” Gladys absolutely refused to debark, and Dutting swore that he was not married, as her parents assumed, and that he intended to marry Miss Brown. In the end, a letter from the father thanked the State Department for its help, and reported: “As the persons connected in this case are now married, everything has turned out for the best.”43 Once fer- reted out, some Americans abroad requested that no further action be taken or that their address be withheld. The reverse was also true. Sometimes Americans in France asked the consulate to find their nearest of kin in the U.S.; yet families who had bid good riddance to troublesome relatives did not necessarily want to be reached either or simply had no funds to help. In all of these cases, the initial assumption was that the government could be mobilized for aid. Sometimes timidly, often with temerity, Americans turned to the consulate for everything from custody cases to lost jewelry. In one case, Mr. Fulton, an upstanding resident of the American community in Paris, asked for help in contacting the U.S. Consulate in Florence, where his divorced wife had taken his four children. She had apparently abandoned them with a governess but no rent money, while she left for the United States with a “young Italian Prince.” The children and the governess were repatriated to Paris. In another case, it was the mother who, after having initially left her three small children with family in Paris, had been able to have two of them join her in London, but she asked the consulate to help her find the third child who had been “spirited away by its uncle.”44

The consulate could also be called upon to serve in loco parentis. Wor- ried parents sent frantic letters to the State Department, and the consulate replied: the hospitalized Boy Scout only had a bad cold with a slight in- flammation of the eardrums.45 More seriously, the Department was called upon for runaways, such as Gladys. Yet unhappy teens who had left the U.S. not so much to leave their country as to leave their family could also turn to their country’s representatives, especially when their money ran

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16 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2012

out. In 1910, sixteen-year-old Warner Miller had run away from home with his violin and forty dollars and had shown up at the Paris consulate cold, hungry, and sans violin—he had had to sell it en route. Both he and his father used the consulate to negotiate his future. The American consul general, Frank H. Mason, had taken the young Warner under his wing, lending him an overcoat and some cash and finding a spot for him at an inexpensive boarding house in the Latin Quarter. The now-repentant father, no longer determined to make a college student and businessman out of his artistically inclined son, sent word that Warner could stay in Paris to take violin lessons and that he would send him twenty-five dollars per month. But he also sent along rather detailed instructions via Mason to make sure that his son had “good but not expensive clothing. I want him to live in a clean place, but not in an expensive manner.” The boy should report weekly to the consulate for proper protection and a judicious disbursement of the allowance. “In view of the youth and inexperience of the young man,” the State Department agreed to have the consul comply, and Mason, who had clearly taken a liking to the “plucky and courageous” young man, was happy to keep him under observation.46

The extent of consular help to worried parents and citizens in distress may have depended on the temperament, energy, and resources of the men on the job. If Vice Consul John R. Wood’s 1925 report is any indication, he continued in Mason’s energetic steps as growing numbers of U.S. citizens turned to the Paris consulate for help.47 By Wood’s own count, 1925 was a record year for visits, and dealing with customs agents and shopkeepers was one of the main activities of the consulate’s protective role. Of the thirty- nine cases Wood reported, there were several of true duress due to accident or arrest. The Misses Moy and Connors of Boston had been in a serious car accident on their way to visit the battlefields; the consulate helped arrange their hospitalization, transportation, and the negotiation of their insurance claims. Ameri cans accused of smuggling also turned to Wood’s office. They generally protested that they did not know enough French to understand the limitations on importing tobacco or exporting cash. Consular officials parleyed lesser fines and the return of impounded goods. Requests to the U.S. government for help in dealing with dire health is- sues, custody cases, or customs officials seem, from an early-twenty-first- century perspective, to be logical expectations for state intervention. More surprising is how individual citizens called upon the powers of citizenship to help them with travel arrangements, missing luggage, and difficult dress- makers. Yet Wood reports with equanimity, indeed with satisfaction, how

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the consulate helped find and forward luggage, settle refunds, get reim- bursements, or even recover a lost pocketbook from a taxi or a forgotten tie stickpin from a hotel room—not to mention the book manuscript recovered for a Mr. Smith from a literary agent who was no longer answering Smith’s letters. When Miss Perkins, after a “gay and expensive life,” pawned her jewelry to pay her way home, the consulate helped her recover the jewelry by finding the gentleman who held the pawn ticket. But above all, since Americans came to Paris (then as now) to shop, a surprising number of Americans turned to the consulate for help with dressmakers. The vice con- sul himself described one couple’s dispute with the clothing establishment A La Reine d’Angleterre as “a very interesting and deserving case” in which he helped the Banghofs get justice for a defective lambskin coat. And when the stout Mrs. Beardslee, disappointed with a specially made coat, accused the dressmaker of fraud, a consular official personally accompanied her to the shop, and a new coat was made. As Americans in Paris turned to the consulate for help in tracking people and protecting possessions, the early-twentieth-century consular officer seems to have played the role of chivalrous savior, charging off to right wrongs for the citizens in his care, negotiating first in a friendly manner, then firmly when necessary. Apparently, as citizens hoped, the official muscle of Uncle Sam helped convince reluctant insurance agencies, hotel owners, and coat makers to reimburse sums or articles due. Not one case reported by Wood was unsuccessful. Indeed, the vice consul’s report is full of pride as he detailed his efforts to his bosses at the State Department, including excerpts from thankful notes from grateful citizens.48

PROVING CITIZENSHIP

There is, of course, a prerequisite for getting help from the government: proving citizenship. U.S.-born Americans and foreign-born naturalized citi- zens alike came explicitly under the protective cloak of U.S. citizenship, although some categories of citizens were at particular risk abroad. During World War I, the government advised young American men of French heri- tage that it behooved them not to travel to France lest the French government claim them for conscription.49 Naturalized citizens could lose their U.S. citi- zenship if they stayed abroad too long (two years in their country of origin or five years in any other foreign state), as with Mr. Supper, above. And, as has been well documented, American women who married foreigners lost their U.S. citizenship between 1907 and 1922.50

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18 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2012

Yet for those who felt firm in their citizenship status, or even some who brazenly tried to use a right they did not have, the question turned around a double level of proving. People first had to convince the U.S. government. When in doubt, the consulate checked out an individual’s status before giv- ing help. But the ultimate purpose of that proof was often to help Americans verify their credentials to the French authorities. The consulate and the State Department certified or helped produce birth certificates, passports, or af- fidavits. Passports have been studied of late as part of the means by which states exercise both sovereignty and surveillance. But they are not just controls on movement. They also function as a protective device, as proof of one’s presumed right to aid, both vis-à-vis one’s own home country and for help in facing a foreign government. In this regard, they are two-faced: identifying citizens to their home state but also identifying them to other governments. Yet in the interwar years, while the format of passports was becoming more standardized, they were not an absolute necessity for leaving the U.S. or for entering France. Indeed, throughout much of the 1920s and 1930s, they were considered a nuisance or even an affront to the respectability of the “better classes,” who considered such I.D. only necessary for criminals.51 Further- more, although a 1907 Registration Law (itself a sign of the growing num- ber of Americans overseas) put into place registration for American citizens abroad, then, as now, the vast majority never signed in at the consulate. Americans abroad thus used a variety of papers and arguments to prove their citizenship and their Americanness to the ambassador or the secretary of state. They referred to their passport number when they had one but also to their ancestry—“my ancestors were among the founders of the Dutch Colony in America”52—and they garnered supporting letters from American friends to attest to their bona fide American ness and general reputation. One American settled in the south of France who was accused of manufacturing fake wine had seven Texas friends submit an affidavit that he had served on jury duty and had become second assistant postmaster of the town where he had lived.53 Another man stressed his American credentials by pointing out that not only was he a native-born citizen but he kept almost all of his fortune in the U.S., where he traveled frequently and where his bankers and business partners were located. He concluded by arguing that his particu- lar problem had consequences for all American citizens doing business in France and thus for all American interests there.54

The fact is that many Americans living in France were illegal aliens, and they turned to the U.S. government for help in regularizing their situation. Many had simply never bothered to register with the French authorities,

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but—especially as job opportunities for foreigners dried up due to restric- tive anti-immigrant labor laws in the 1930s—Americans who had worked off the books began turning to American lawyers and the consulate for help in getting or renewing their French residence or work permits. The French government was not giving work permits to foreigners unless they had resided in France for ten years, and the consulate could help provide proof of that residence.55 Miss Grace V. Carpenter, who had lived in France since 1924 but had let her French residence permit lapse in 1927, turned to the U.S. government in 1938 with an eight-page handwritten hard luck story. She found she could no longer work without French papers, and in asking the State Department for help in getting them renewed, she added that she had been hospitalized for anemia—railing against both the French woman at her apartment and the consulate for not helping her at that time—and that she was now without money, without luggage (it had been sent on ahead), and furthermore that she had not bought a new dress in fifteen years, and so on.56 Other Americans drew upon their connections, and one woman wrote directly to the White House when, in July 1939, French authorities refused to renew her identity card. Mildred Arden Blandy sent a telegram to Edwin Watson, an old friend in the U.S., asking that he “act at once for AULD LANG SYNE.” He in turn wrote to “Dear Summy,” George T. Sum- merlin, chief of protocol, explaining that Mildred Arden, daughter of a very famous American actor, had married his roommate from West Point. The Department of State sent a telegram to the embassy, which looked into the matter and responded that her French I.D. card had been withheld because of a disputed 1933 hotel bill; she was now liable for about $125 in fines and possible imprisonment and expulsion for having failed to regularize her situation.57 As restrictive laws tightened, a soldier turned chauffeur, a manufacturer’s representative, but also musicians, actors, and dancers asked the consulate for help to renew or get working papers.58 But there were also those Americans who asked the consulate to write to the Service de la main-d’oeuvre étrangère to help them get working permits for their Italian chauffeur, Yugoslavian valet, or Japanese domestic.59

American citizenship was indeed considered to be such a good defense by persons abroad that some people appealed to the consulate whether they were bona fide citizens or not. Two cases of questionable identity show how the symbolic power of U.S. citizenship could be mobilized for the very con- crete purpose of getting out of jail. Thirty-some-year-old Raymond Roy (or Rolfe) Swoboda, who crossed the Atlantic eastward accompanied by five commercial trunks, was arrested and interned in France during World War I

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20 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2012

as a German spy.60 When he tried to extend his passport, which had expired while he was in prison, the State Department granted that the expiration, at least, was not his fault, but it was skeptical about his citizenship. Swoboda claimed that he was American, having been born in San Francisco, but he had no birth certifi cate because of the 1906 fire. After his parents separated when he was young, he had traveled all over Europe with his mother, but he had lived in France for the last decade. His peripatetic life did not simplify his citizenship status, and the State Department considered any number of points in Swoboda’s tale questionable. (Blaming the San Francisco fire for lost papers was a common tactic.) He nonetheless had affidavits from his American business contacts, complete with lists of manufacturers who had provided him samples. Swoboda was dealing in goods needed in war- time France, and one backer (who wanted his samples back) suggested that Swoboda had been framed by irate French jobbers who would lose their exorbitant profits since Swoboda had been commissioned by a French group that sought to deal directly with U.S. manufacturers.61 Whether or not Swoboda was a legitimate manufacturers’ representative, a crook, or a spy, the U.S. Legation officer in Switzerland, where he went after being let out of French prison, was doubtful about his citizenship. The official peppered his appraisal of Swoboda with a number of observations about his lifestyle: living with a woman “whom he claims to be his wife”; “his mother has been a wanderer” and, it was believed, “an adventuress or woman of irregular life.” Perhaps worst of all, Swoboda’s accent was deemed distinctly German and his idioms not those “ordinarily used by native Americans, no matter how long they may have resided abroad.”62 Swoboda defended his ac cent by saying that he spoke four languages, all with a slight accent.63 This did not prevent his U.S. passport from being taken away from him and his being arrested again, in Switzerland, for espionage in 1917. In spite of his good English, forty-three-year-old Emil Baum’s citizenship was also questioned by the U.S. consular officer who visited him in a French prison. A former furrier, salesman, and more recently, unemployed, Baum was arrested in Paris for passing counterfeit one-hundred-dollar Federal Reserve notes in Paris hotels.64 Although Baum, like Swoboda, claimed that he was born in San Francisco, in his case of parents born in Russia who had taken him back to Kiev as a young boy before finally returning to the U.S., consular officer Murphy asked the State Department to confirm his citizenship. The FBI found three sets of fingerprints on file that matched Baum’s, those of one Sam Simon, born in New York City and arrested by police in Detroit in April 1924, charged as a fugitive and a fur thief; of one

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Harry B. Davis, arrested in New York on forgery charges in 1929; and indeed of one Emile Baum, fingerprinted in France in March 1936. When Baum was released from prison in 1937 and wanted to return to the United States, the State Department refused, still not satisfied as regards his citizenship. Protection of citizens is contingent on citizenship, and Americans abroad learned at their peril that letting proof lapse could be dangerous. The State Department found it “a very vexatious task” in having to determine whom to protect.65 Some government officials were more suspicious than others in determining good faith. Consular officials could question the veracity of belonging, comment on accents, or be critical of lifestyles. Yet the im- portance of American citizenship while abroad could have very tangible benefits from help with the recovery of mislaid jewelry to finding a job to warding off expulsion.

IRATE CITIZENS AND THE LIMITS OF HELP

Citizens abroad and their concerned families at home were very grateful when they got help from the government and wrote to say so: “My dear Mr. Hull, . . . I can not begin to tell you how deeply I appreciate the effort you made and the interest you and your Department showed in locating my son. . . . You not only relieved a worried mother but you have given me and many others, a new, deep respect and confidence in our country and in your Department.”66 Or, as one of Mr. Wood’s protégées wrote: “It makes one truly proud of being an American citizen to receive such help as you rendered.”67 Citizens had their patriotism renewed when the protective func- tion worked. The “splendid attention and sympathetic care” rendered by consular officers induced thanks and pride in one’s country: “It is a matter of pride to be able to let our people know that in the event one of them is found in a distressful condition in foreign lands, there is one of their own who can and will cheerfully and competently lend the aid of this strong arm of our national government.”68

Others, however, railed with irate disappointment. The government’s protective function was limited, as we have seen, by limited funds, proof of citizenship, and first recourse to local remedies. When, for any of these reasons, help was not forthcoming, indignation and anger against the gov- ernment was often as great as the (dashed) expectations of the flag’s help. One man, brushed off by the U.S. Consulate in Bordeaux in 1918, com- plained bitterly about injured citizenship: “The consul sent word out to me that he could not help me, and also that he did not have time to talk to me.

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22 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2012

It certainly was a surprise as well as an insult to me to be treated like this in a foreign country, especially an allied country, and when I had papers proving my birth and sailing under an American flag.”69 Other Americans hounded the U.S. consulates and every French official possible. Even the amiable consul general Frank Mason could be exasperated at insistent de- mands by self-righteous and bona fide citizens:

[Carey seems] to have been under the very common delusion that “as an American citizen” he had some peculiar rights and privileges and should have been tried by American rather than by French laws. Men of this class are also apt to suppose that when under arrest in this country it is within the power of the Embassy or Consulate, by simply making a formal de- mand, to secure their immediate release. The fact is, however, that . . . any injudicious interference in [sic] behalf of an American citizen on trial or under sentence for crime committed in this country may be resented and aggravate rather than ameliorate the case of the accused.70

Americans could be unruly, insulting, irate, and downright difficult in their demands, insisting “that the Consul shall wave the starry flag” to settle local disputes.71 Trying to use the symbolic force of their citizenship and the actual intervention of the consulate to escape prison or debt, citizens addressed U.S. officials with a mixture of gratitude, insistence, insouciance, or outright fraud. For unhappy Americans whose citizenship was not sufficient to extricate them from their troubles in a foreign land, rhetoric escalated quickly, mak- ing a wronged individual a standard-bearer for all Americans abroad. When Mrs. Blanche M. Turner was jailed for two months in 1934 for kidnapping her granddaughter and then released, she was taken into custody again for a tampered passport; it had been altered in several places, including her birth date, and every time she had applied for a passport, she had given differ- ent dates as to her two marriages. She was furious when the consulate did not provide the help she expected. She wrote indignantly to Cordell Hull, complaining that “pathetic and frantic appeals from prison brought no aid from the U.S. Consulate.” She asked, “Will you kindly have the consulate refrain from writing me annoying letters. I am ill from this imprisonment through their negligence and their shameful after-math in trying to make an issue of the Passport of a trivial date of marriage twenty-three years ago.” But, above all, Mrs. Turner argued on behalf of all “innocent American citizens in Paris” who might come to such “tragic circumstances” and be “at the mercy of consular services and American attorneys.”72

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There were clearly limits to the consulate’s largesse and to its patience in dealing with demanding citizens overseas. Elihu Root had already noted in 1910 that “citizens abroad are too apt to complain,”73 and he commented on the greediness of some of their requests.74 Although he was referring specifically to when citizens were beaten in litigation overseas, the comment bears generalization. At times the consulate turned a deaf ear to appeals for help: “Writer seems insane. May we not simply file this?”75 Supplicants’ demands were sometimes unreasonable, and the State Department had lim- ited funds for helping Americans overseas. It was willing to make regular mail inquiries concerning whereabouts at no charge, but it drew the line at incurring telegraphic costs, which had to be reimbursed.76 Furthermore, the consulate itself had no funds for stranded Americans. After World War I, the consulate most often referred relief requests to the American Legion Paris Post (set up in 1919), which had its own Welfare Committee for veterans, or the American Aid Society of Paris (established in 1922). Furthermore, while citizens turned to their country for help, they did not always return the favor. The treasurer of the United States and the embassy carried on considerable correspondence in the months following the 1914 exodus in order to recover loans, ranging from $7 to $250, which had been extended by the wartime relief commission. After trying to hunt people down all the way to Shanghai in one case, all too often the embassy had to write back to the Treasury that the debtor could not be found. In July 1916, some seventy-three people had still not repaid their loans, some of “whose manner of living presupposes a present ability to make payment.” “All possible pressure” was to be brought on them, including tagging their file for the next time they sought to extend or amend their passports.77

“DEAR SECRETARY OF STATE”: A PECULIARLY AMERICAN PRACTICE?

The basic conundrum of citizens abroad has to do with the ways in which ordinary citizens, after leaving their homeland, may turn to it in times of need. Citizenship may be a gift handed out or limited by the home state. But it can also be a resource or a strategy, mobilized by mobile citizens in order to deal with the state where they have settled. The stories from the State Department in the first half of the century are testimony to the expectations of citizens and the responses of the home state. The “Dear Secretary of State” letter may be but a transnational variation on the American belief in the power of writing to one’s congressman. But these letters and the calling

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24 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2012

in at the consulate raise three sets of questions. To what extent are these practices specific to U.S. citizens, to the time period, or to social class? First, the example of Americans in Paris may be unique due to the sym- bolic power of the United States and the presumption of its rather elite migrants that they can draw upon that power. Are U.S. citizens particularly prone to pester their government officials, with the hubris of the strong arm of Uncle Sam behind them? Do Americans abroad call on their embassy more frequently than other emigrants-cum-immigrants? Or do not all im- migrants turn insistently to their consulates for help, assuming that a state has greater power than an individual? Among Americans in Paris alone, there was a diversity of practices undoubtedly true for any immigrant group. A multitude of U.S. citizens in Paris never had the need or the desire to call upon their government representative. The Left Bank crowd who went abroad to escape America apparently only crossed the river to the embassy on the Right Bank of the Seine under duress, or as Samuel Putnam put it: “At times . . . we would find ourselves alarmingly low in funds and faced with the bleak prospect of having to throw ourselves on the nearest American consul.”78 The quotidian use of citizenship is complex, but it needs to be examined comparatively and may show both similar and dissimilar char- acteristics from one group of immigrants to another. Second, is this use of the American consulate temporally specific to the state of consular affairs in the first half of the twentieth century? The early- twenty-first-century historian has to admit to a certain amazement at how many Americans turned confidently, insistently, to their government for help for sometimes the slightest of slights, while at the same time the consular officers seem to have had the time and the energy to follow up on a vast number of very diverse inquiries in the period before World War II. This is certainly testimony to a period in which the ratio of officers to citizens abroad was undoubtedly much greater than it is today. Since World War II, aid to citizens has shifted to ensuring due process (only), and decreased bud- gets limit the amount of moral and material aid available, although searches for missing persons still abound.79 Two related questions, then, have to do with what is missing in the archive and to what extent we are prisoners of the government’s own representation of its work. People who stormed out peeved at not being helped left few traces, not to mention those who never even thought to ask. In any case, another comparative question would have to do with consular activity then and now, whether American or other. Third, to what degree, then, were the demands of Americans abroad a privilege of the entitled, of an elite among immigrants or even an elite among

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American citizens? Is there a class bias to the sample of those who even dare ask for help? Do elite migrants go to their consulate with a greater sense of entitlement that we could call the arrogance of inclusion? We only know about those who showed up at the gate, and we can speculate that there were those who, due to class or race, did not feel that they could exercise their citizenship rights in this manner. There are few explicit traces in the consular files of protection cases relating to African Americans.80 Names may be no indication however; we do not know for sure that the young Miller or Gladys Brown were white rather than black citizens. However, just as African Americans’ relationship to America was fraught with trouble in the United States itself, it seems plausible that their relationship with official- dom abroad could be more complex than Stein’s insistence on a passport. Yet at the same time, more than one petitioner admonished the govern- ment that what was good for one American had to be good for all. This could be a simple rhetorical device. But the democratization of travel and the increased variety of American residents abroad after World War I, when many of the soldiers stayed on, means that a good number of supplicants were apparently ordinary folks. The hard-luck stories related in many of the letters attest that it was not just the rich who turned to the consulate for help. This reiterates the question as to the extent to which other immigrants, from other countries, at other consulates, in the United States or elsewhere, have also turned to their home country for help in matters ranging from the petty to the serious. Nevertheless, the many privileged among the Americans abroad seem to account for the more surprising part of the sample concerning shopping complaints and other seemingly frivolous uses of citizenship. We may as- sume that certain categories of problems—with dressmakers, for example— were the province of a particularly self-entitled white American woman. The use of networks is telling. The written requests of ordinary citizens were on occasion mediated by friends, lawyers, prominent local citizens at home, or a local company there with connections abroad. Well-connected citizens drew upon an even fuller panoply of pull. When a mother and daughter were arrested for shoplifting at a Parisian department store, they had affidavits sent on their behalf from the governor, a judge, a senator, and a U.S. representative, all attesting to the honesty, integrity, and moral qualities of the family (“highest type of American citizenship”) and their “highest standing in banking and social circles” in Oklahoma City. (The two women eventually got off with a fine and a one-month suspended sentence.)81 When, in 1927, one woman got into a dispute with her American landlord

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26 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2012

in Paris—over storage space in the basement and the emptying of garbage bins—she sent a telegram to her brother in New York, who was the New York State comptroller. She asked him to get the governor, Alfred Smith, to write a letter to the prefect of Paris asking for protection, and indeed the New York governor’s office wrote to the State Department, which forwarded the information to the consulate in Paris, which promised to help.82 Eight years later, Mrs. Benjamin (now living several blocks away in the same posh neighborhood) turned again to the New York governor, this time for help with her French taxes. Again he sent a query to the State Department that relayed the request to the embassy. Ambassador Jesse Isidor Straus wrote directly to “Dear Herbert” (Lehman) “with kindest regards” and wrote a formal letter to Pierre Laval, prime minister and minister of foreign affairs. But he confided to Lehman that he doubted there would be a French ruling in Mrs. Benjamin’s favor, since she had failed to file the proper income tax declaration in France.83 The most elite of elite emigrants could clearly draw upon their social connections to strengthen the bond of their citizenship claims and try to use those connections as a shield overseas. The symbolic power of the United States, the particular period when con- sular officers seem to have had more time for petty complaints, and the privilege of class may all mean that the experience of Americans at the Paris consulate during the interwar years may be a peculiarly American use of citizenship from afar. Nonetheless, this cannot be known without a system- atic comparison with other consulates (American and other) in other places and other periods. These practices thus raise questions about the function of citizenship while abroad that can be asked of any emigrant-immigrant group. As countries of origin today (e.g., Mexico, the Philippines) step up their out- reach to their citizens in the United States, the story of Americans abroad in the first half of the twentieth century can encourage us to look historically at the relation of other citizens abroad to their consulates over time. Citizenship abroad can be used as a mantle, cloak, or shield—the most frequent metaphors for its protective function. American supplicants sought and insisted on its use, stressing their Americanness, using their relations and connections, and pledging their patriotism. We usually do not know whether the appeal to the government was part of a last-ditch attempt or whether it was part of a more all-encompassing strategy for redress. What is striking is the tone of expectation and the belief in the right of being able to call upon one’s government from abroad and the assumption that it will protect all citizens no matter where they are and however obstreperous. As one American chasing down an inheritance in France put it rather bluntly,

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“The protection of the interests of an American citizen is the reason for the Department of State I take it.”84 To what extent have other emigrants done the same? For some Americans abroad who may not have frequented any other American institution in town, the consulate was “theirs” by virtue of birth or naturalization and remained the ultimate source of help in disputes with the natives. This use of citizenship from afar tells us as much about the citizens as it does about the state. Americans in Paris may have been expatriates by residence. They were decidedly citizens by acclamation and as expressed via their vigorous demands.

NOTES

1. Being an American in Paris was not like being an American in Mexico or China, where colonial relations and extraterritorial jurisdiction were more transparent. See Eileen Scully, Bargaining with the State from Afar: American Citizenship in Treaty Port China, 1844–1942 (New York, 2001), 59, who argues that the U.S. had three tiers of attitudes towards Americans abroad, depending on whether they were in Western Europe, Latin America, or non-Western countries. More explicitly neocolonial situations pertained in Mexico, China, and elsewhere. See John Mason Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley, CA, 2002); Lester D. Langley and Thomas Schoonover, The Banana Men: American Mercenaries and Entrepreneurs in Central America, 1880–1930 (Lexington, KY, 1994); and William Schell Jr., Integral Outsiders: The American Colony in Mexico City, 1876–1911 (Wilmington, DE, 2001). 2. All of the examples below, unless specified, will refer to the U.S. Consulate-General in Paris, designated hereafter as the “Paris consulate.” There were other U.S. consulates in France in Marseille (a consulate-general), Bordeaux, and elsewhere. 3. See, however, e.g., Mae Ngai’s recent work on interpreters as immigrant brokers: “‘A Slight Knowledge of the Barbarian Language’: Chinese Interpreters in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American Ethnic History 30, no. 2 (January 2011): 5–32; and The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (Boston, 2010). 4. Warren Irving Susman, “Pilgrimage to Paris: The Backgrounds of American Expa-Warren Irving Susman, “Pilgrimage to Paris: The Backgrounds of American Expa- triation, 1920–1934” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1957), 165, citing the Chicago Tribune, European Edition. Cf. American Women’s Club in Paris, Bulletin 4, no. 2 (February 1926), 119. See also Harvey Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago, 1998); Harvey Levenstein, We’ll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France since 1930 (Chicago, 2004); and Brooke Blower, Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars (New York, 2011). 5. Nancy L. Green, “The Politics of Exit: Reversing the Immigration Paradigm,” Journal of Modern History 77, no. 2 (June 2005): 263–89; Nancy L. Green and François Weil, eds., Citizenship and Those Who Leave (Urbana, IL, 2007). 6. T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge, UK, 1950), 1–85; Linda Kerber, “The Meanings of Citizenship,” Journal of American History 84, no. 3

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28 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2012

(December 1997): 833–54; James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978); Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote (New York, 2000); Gerald L. Neuman, Strangers to the Constitution: Immigrants, Borders, and Fundamental Law (Princeton, NJ, 1996); Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, MA, 1991); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT, 1997); Aristide Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA, 2006). As for immigrants protesting their exclusion, see, e.g., Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995); and Hiroshi Motomura, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (Oxford, 2006). 7. Charles Tilly, “Citizenship, Identity, and Social History,” International Review of Social History 40, suppl. 3 (1995): 1–16, esp. 7–8. 8. Edward Cummings to President Woodrow Wilson, December 8, 1917, 351.112B81, General Records of the Department of State, Decimal Files, Record Group 59 (hereafter RG59), 1910–1929, National Archives at College Park, Maryland (hereafter NACP). See also e.e. cummings, The Enormous Room (1922; repr. New York, 2002), vii–ix. 9. Kim Barry, “Home and Away: The Construction of Citizenship in an Emigration Con- text,” New York University Law Review 81, no. 1 (2006): 11–59. 10. Aristide Zolberg, “The Archaeology of ‘Remote Control,’” in Migration Control in the North Atlantic World, ed. Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil (New York, 2003). 11. On the U.S. Consular Service, see William Barnes and John Heath Morgan, The Foreign Service of the United States (Washington, DC, 1961); John W. Foster, The Practice of Diplomacy as Illustrated in the Foreign Relations of the United States (Boston, 1906), 216–42; Luke T. Lee, Consular Law and Practice (London, 1961); William H. Michael, History of the Department of State of the United States (Washington, DC, 1901); John Bas- sett Moore, “Consuls,” in A Digest of International Law, vol. 5, chap. 16; Elmer Plischke, U.S. Department of State: A Reference History (Westport, CT, 1999); and Graham H. Stuart, American Diplomatic and Consular Practice (New York, 1936). The American consul- general in Paris, Frank H. Mason, gave a frank typology of those previously appointed: young men abroad while completing their education; older professional men taking a rest from previous work; invalids who chose consulates according to climate; parents whose aim was the education of their children abroad; men who had special business interests; and young men of unformed character and dissolute, idle habits whose parents wanted them far away to avoid being embarrassed by them! Frank J. Mason, “Extracts from a Letter Addressed to James C. Dubois, Esq., Department of State,” published in American Chamber of Com- merce in Paris, Bulletin, no. 46 (March 1906): 9. See also April and May 1906 issues of the Bulletin on consular reform as seen from Paris; and Mason’s reminiscences upon retirement in ibid., no. 119 (November 1913): 154–55. 12. Blackmer v. United States, 284 U.S. 421 (1932); “Exile’s Return,” Life, October 10, 1949. 13. Lee, Consular Law and Practice, 3; see also ibid., 59, 187–93. 14. Foster, Practice of Diplomacy, 216–42; Stuart, American Diplomatic and Consular Practice, 168; Plischke, U.S. Department of State, 46–51, 80–90, 140–55, 210–24, 311–24, 333–35. A 1788 treaty on consular affairs had been signed with France, which went into

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effect in 1790. Plischke, U.S. Department of State, 50. On the one hand, the Logan Act of 1799 prevented unauthorized representation of the U.S. by individuals. On the other hand, the treaty of 1853 only allowed informal representation of individuals by the consulate. See discussion of this, e.g., in 351.11/877, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP; Moore, “Consuls”; Barnes and Morgan, Foreign Service; Michael, History of the Department of State, 52. 15. The Moses-Linthicum Act of 1931 further professionalized the foreign service. Plischke, U.S. Department of State, 221, 224, 311–14. Stuart, American Diplomatic and Consular Practice, 192–94. Although eligible as of 1924 as career officers, very few women were appointed until after World War II. Plischke, U.S. Department of State, 324. 16. E.g., Stuart, American Diplomatic and Consular Practice, 351ff. 17. Ibid., 372, 379. 18. John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant (New York, 1879), 1:139. 19. Ibid. 20. Elihu Root, “The Basis of Protection to Citizens Residing Abroad,” American Journal of International Law 4 (1910): 517. 21. Edwin M. Borchard, The Diplomatic Protection of Citizens Abroad or the Law of International Claims (New York, 1915), v. 22. Lee, Consular Law, 116–18. “As to the question whether consular protection may be forced upon nationals who, for political or other reasons, refuse to have any dealings with their consuls, there is no unanimity of views.” Ibid., 119. 23. Stuart, American Diplomatic and Consular Practice, 395. 24. Ibid., 398–99. 25. Philip Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 31, 47. 26. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge, UK, 2000); Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Docu- ment (New York, 2010). For the situation in Europe, Andreas Fahrmeir, “Governments and Forgers: Passports in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton, NJ, 2001), 218–34. 27. From The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, cited in Barnes and Morgan, Foreign Service, 190. 28. See 351.11/365 [1914], RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 29. Letter and memorandum, Ambassador to Secretary of State, November 12, 1914, 351.11/512, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 30. [Thackara?], American consul-general, to Secretary of State, “Whereabouts of Miss Alice B. Toklar [sic],” September 27, 1915, 351.11/943, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP; Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933; repr. New York, 1990), 161. 31. Pacific Artificial Limb Company to Solicitor, Department of State, August 10, 1917, 351.11/1514, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP; 351.11/1575, ibid.; Arrow Tire Company to Sec- retary of State, April 8, 1921, 351.1141Ar6, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 32. L. D. Clark to State Department, August 28 [1914], 351.11/685, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 33. U.S. Embassy in Paris to Secretary of State, June 24 and June 30, 1915, 351.11/816, 351.11/821, and 351.11/838, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP.

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30 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2012

34. Secretary of State to Ambassador in Paris, September 9, 1914, 351.11/290a, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 35. Vice President, Singer Manufacturing Company, to Secretary of State, November 22, 1915, 351.11/977, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 36. Joseph Ullmann to B. D’Anglade, consul général de France, New York City, October 31, 1914; and letters to the Secretary of State and to the Director of Consular Services in Washington, DC, October 17 and 31, 1914, 351.111Ul41, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 37. The consulate did help. American Lead Pencil Company to Secretary of State, Au-The consulate did help. American Lead Pencil Company to Secretary of State, Au-American Lead Pencil Company to Secretary of State, Au- gust 9, 1916, 351.11/1220 and 351.11/1231, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP; American Lead Pencil Company to Secretary of State and to Director of Consular Services, both dated October 28, 1916, 351.11/1288 and 351.11/1290, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 38. Westinghouse Air Brake Company to Secretary of State, March 9, 1916, and related documents, including newspaper articles, 351.11/1082 and 351.11/1134 Westinghouse/ Trube, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP; Donald Harper to Secretary of State, July 31, 1918, 351.11/1788, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. The expulsion order was suspended, but he was told not to return to France before the end of the war, and in spite of repeated efforts to clear his name in France, he (and the embassy) was unsuccessful. Trube ended up staying in Pittsburgh after the war. 351.11/1307, passim, ibid.; 351.11/1899 (February 2, 1919), ibid. 39. Memorandum on the Citizenship of Mr. Emile Supper, July 27, 1915, from the Ameri- can Consulate in Lyon to the Secretary of State, Washington, 351.11/890, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. Files on Supper continue in 351.11/1105 and 351.11/1227. See discussion of the 1907 Law in Nancy L. Green, “Expatriation, Expatriates, and Expats: The American Transforma-Nancy L. Green, “Expatriation, Expatriates, and Expats: The American Transforma-“Expatriation, Expatriates, and Expats: The American Transforma- tion of a Concept,” American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (April 2009): 307–28. 40. The consulate was given instructions to provide her such assistance as might be pos- sible and proper. Office of the Solicitor to the Consular Bureau, June 5, 1916, and Mme. Jan Haeften-Hatch to Secretary of State, May 16, 1916, 351.11/1161, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 41. Protection certificates are held in Record Group 84 (RG84), Class 300—Protection of Interests—1940, NACP. 42. Lodge & Shipley Machine Tool Company, Cincinnati, to State Department, January 2, 1917 (and passim), 351.11/1347, re Harry Jones, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 43. All quotes except the last are from Osborne, American Consulate, Le Havre, to Secre- tary of State, April 7, 1913, 351.111B81, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP; last quote, Mr. Brown to Department of State, November 18, 1913, ibid. 44. All of the above are from Vice Consul John R. Wood, “Summary of Protection Cases Handled by the Consulate General at Paris, France, during the Year 1925,” February 20, 1926, 351.11/2003, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. For other custody cases, see, e.g., 351.1115/15 and 351.1115/19, RG59, 1930–1939, NACP. 45. 351.1115-Cook, Floyd H., 1930–1939, NACP. 46. Letters, telegrams, and memoranda, May 6, 1910 to April 11, 1911, 351.111M61, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 47. Wood, “Summary of Protection Cases.” 48. Ibid., 7, 16, 24. 49. See, in general, 351.117, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP, concerning men of French parentage—Frenchmen born abroad and naturalized in the U.S. or those born in the U.S. of French parents—who were considered American in the U.S. but would be considered

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French according to the Napoleonic Code and therefore liable to military service if they traveled to France. See, in particular, the case of P. A. Lelong Jr., 351.117/48, 49a, 50, 51; and Richard W. Flournoy Jr., “Problems of Dual Nationality in Time of War,” New York Times, September 12, 1915. 50. Green, “Expatriation, Expatriates, and Expats”; Candice Lewis Bredbenner, A Nation- ality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship (Berkeley, CA, 1998); Mar- tha Gardner, The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870–1965 (Princeton, NJ, 2005); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT, 1997). 51. Robertson, The Passport, 2, 152–59, and chap. 11; Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 94–96, 159–60. 52. John de Kay to Ambassador William G. Sharp, January 31, 1917, 351.114K18, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 53. Affidavit, February 25, 1908, 351.112 G93, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 54. Eli Joseph to U.S. Ambassador, August 6, 1927, 351.1156 J77, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 55. See, e.g., 850.4 Robbins, Betty Page, and 851.2 in RG84–2513, NACP. 56. Grace V. Carpenter to Ministry of Foreign Affairs [sic], Washington, DC, August 10, 1938, 351.1115-Carpenter Grace V. (Miss), RG59, 1930–1939, NACP. 57. 351.1115 Blandy, Mildred Arden, RG59, 1930–1939, NACP. 58. E.g., 850.4 Goldschmidt, Bruno (representing Meskin Brothers Fur Corporation), 1935, RG84–2513, NACP. 59. It turned out that foreign domestics following their masters who were themselves foreigners did not need work contracts. E.g., 850.4, RG84–2513, NACP. 60. 351.112Sw7, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 61. “Demands Swoboda’s Trunks,” New York Times, April 3, 1916, in 351.112Sw7, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 62. Stovall (Berne, Switzerland) to Secretary of State, December 5, 1915, 351.112Sw7, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 63. Transcript, December 18, 1915, enclosed with cover letter dated December 20, 1915, 351.112Sw7, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 64. 351.1121 Baum, Emil, RG59, 1930–1939, NACP. 65. Catheryn Seckler-Hudson, Statelessness: With Special Reference to the United States (A Study in Nationality and Conflict of Laws) (1934; New York, 1971), 102, 101; Richard W. Flournoy Jr., “Naturalization and Expatriation,” Yale Law Journal 31 (1921–1922): 702–19, and 848–68, 848, 851, 857; Borchard, Diplomatic Protection, 552–53. 66. Mrs. G. R. Wood to Secretary of State, April 10, 1938, 351.1115 Wood, Charles M./6, RG59, 1930–1939, NACP. 67. Wood, “Summary of Protection Cases,” 24. 68. Milton L. Schmitt, Attorney at Law, San Francisco, to William W. Corcoran, Ameri-68. Milton L. Schmitt, Attorney at Law, San Francisco, to William W. Corcoran, Ameri- can Vice Consul, Boulogne-sur-mer, May 19, 1925, 351.1115-Noonan, Louella, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 69. William H. Berry, Collector, to Secretary of the Treasury, September 3, 1918, report- ing on letter from Herman Birnbrauer, 351.11/1805, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 70. Frank H. Mason to Secretary of State, July 27, 1911, 351.112C18/5, RG59, 1910– 1929, NACP.

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32 Journal of American Ethnic History / Spring 2012

71. Frank Mason, farewell speech, in American Chamber of Commerce in Paris, Bulletin, no. 119 (November 1913): 155. 72. In the end, the consulate admitted that the alterations were probably “without criminal intent.” 351.1121 Turner, Blanche M., RG59, 1930–1939, NACP. 73. Root, “Basis of Protection,” 526. 74. Ibid. 75. This led to a last appeal in which the writer complained that his letters were surely being intercepted. 351.111D28, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 76. E.g., 351.1115 Bodge, Daisy Dean; and 351.11/1682, March 6, 1918, RG59, 1910– 1929, NACP. American consuls are supposed to aid citizens in distress, “short of direct cash,” and they are discouraged from extending personal loans. Lee, Consular Law and Practice, 132. 77. On loan recovery issue, see 351.11/783a, 351.11/784a, 351.11/869, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP; continuing into early 1916, see, e.g., 351.11/1056 (January 21, 1916 letter), ibid. A list of the seventy-three persons owing money to the Treasury is under letter from Embassy to Secretary of State, July 12, 1916, 351.11/1200, ibid.; and into the mid-1920s. For the Shanghai example, see 351.11/1764, 1918, ibid. 78. Samuel Putnam, Paris Was Our Mistress: Memoirs of a Lost and Found Generation (New York, 1947), 48. 79. In 1995 the State Department estimated that it responds to approximately twenty-one thousand welfare and whereabouts inquiries a year (worldwide). U.S. Department of State, 95/05/26 Fact Sheet: “US Dept. of State: Structure and Organization,” http://dosfan.lib .uic.edu/ERC/about/fact_sheets/950526str.html (accessed August 31, 2011). 80. But see, e.g., William O. Bullard to Secretary of State, August 10, 1915, quoted in Craig Lloyd, Eugene Bullard: Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris (Athens, GA, 2000), 41; and 351.1141 Mikell, Grace, RG59, 1930–1939, NACP. 81. Correspondence, 1926, 351.1115-Weitzenhoffer, Rosa and Julia Kaufman, RG59, 1910–1929, NACP. 82. November-December 1927, 351.1115 Benjamin, George H., Mrs., RG59, 1930–1939. A. Gaulin, American Consul General, to Secretary of State, December 5, 1927, 351.1115 Benjamin, George H., Mrs./4, RG59, 1930–1939, NACP. 83. Ambassador Jesse Isidor Strauss to Gov. Herbert H. Lehman, December 21, 1935, 351.1115 Benjamin, George H., Mrs./9, RG59, 1930–1939, NACP. 84. Leslie J. Miller, Young Peoples [sic] Forum, St. Petersburg, Florida, to Gentlemen, Department of State, Consular Section, undated, received August 5, 1935, 351.113 Argon, Mary M.A. D’, RG59, 1930–1939, NACP.

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