The Sovereign Citizen. Patrick Weil

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      The Installment of the Bureau of Naturalization, 1909–1926

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Congress heard Campbell’s pleas—in part because, since 1914, his Bureau of Naturalization had become increasingly popular as a facet of the Americanization campaign developing across the country through the efforts of various civil society organizations.¹² Raymond Crist, the Deputy Commissioner of the Naturalization Bureau, endorsed with enthusiasm the idea of Clarence N. Goodwin, a naturalization judge from Chicago, to provide applicants for citizenship with civic education and training. Woodrow Wilson agreed to preside over the first national large-scale Americanization event on May 10, 1915, in СКАЧАТЬ