work: “This particular provision has made it possible for the machinery of the law to operate with the minimum of friction.”38
But the Naturalization Bureau’s satisfaction was short-lived. After 1918, the number of declaration of intentions and naturalizations rose to double their previous levels. At the same time, in the years following the war, the Bureau of Naturalization was forced to process these under a significantly reduce budget.39 Eventually, the Bureau staff began to examine the documents of many candidates for naturalization by correspondence.40 In such instances, an alien would file a petition for naturalization before a clerk of a court who would contact the Bureau so that it could send the applicant a questionnaire through the mail. Each applicant’s witnesses also received by mail a written questionnaire that asked them about their knowledge of the applicant. Largely on the basis of these written statements, “made ex parte of course, the court [would] admit[] that man to citizenship,” after he appeared in person.41
In 1922, of the 170,000 aliens applying for citizenship, 29,000 mailed in applications. In areas where it lacked offices, mainly in the western part of the country, the Bureau found that, “We do not have the force to go and investigate those cases as they should be investigated, and as a consequence we must adopt this expedient.” The Bureau of Naturalization found this new mail-based process “totally and entirely unsatisfactory,”42 carrying with it considerable risks: “Now, with all the isms rampant as they are, it seems to me that at a time like this we should stop that sort of practice.” At the beginning of 1923, the Bureau launched a program to extend its preliminary investigation process to every court with naturalization authority around the country. In order to implement the expanded program, Bureau officials tried to convince “the more than 2,000 clerks of courts . . .engaged in naturalization transactions” to require each applicant to establish contact with the naturalization examiner “before he files his naturalization petition.”43 But in large cities, where the Bureau of Naturalization had existing agreements with the courts to investigate applicants, examiners were overwhelmed with a flood of applications. In 1925, only 20 percent of all the naturalization papers were fully completed in the presence of a naturalization examiner.44
In response, the Bureau pursued a successful strategy of increasing its authority—and budget—by tapping into the currents of political paranoia and anticommunism. It urged Congress to allocate more resources, and insisted that, without that increase, it could not prevent a growing tide of “reds” from becoming American citizens: “There are reports showing that socialist organizations are urging their members to become naturalized. We cannot withstand that action without funds. If they have funds, as they seem to have, from abroad and other sources, to carry on their propaganda work, in 90 days you will have them coming into citizenship.”45
To prevent the naturalization of Communists, the Bureau cooperated with civil society organizations, which it used to feed it with information: “the Americanization societies . . .and the American Legion are pointing out to our men daily cases—I should not say daily, perhaps, but cases which require more careful investigation, all of which necessarily takes time.”46 Raymond Crist, who in 1923 was selected as the new Commissioner of the Bureau of Naturalization, also strove to develop strong ties with industry, “so that we can arrange to get reports from employers about their employees who are coming into citizenship.” But he pleaded that relying on outside groups was plainly insufficient and that the Bureau required additional funds to recruit new examiners to investigate so “that we can not only know what the candidates for citizenship are doing in the day time, but we can know the associates they keep, the societies they attend, and the character of thought which they express.”47 Congress’ eventual decision to increase the Bureau’s budget allocation allowed it to reduce the number of naturalization investigations handled through correspondence from twenty-nine thousand in 1922 to fifteen thousand within only two years.48
But there was another problem, present since 1906 but growing more serious over time. Section 13 of the 1906 Naturalization Act prescribed the duties of naturalization court clerks: making, filing, and docketing naturalization papers and collecting fees. Yet state court clerks, often elected for a limited term, typically entered office lacking experience in performing the complex and demanding tasks required by their naturalization responsibilities.49 Furthermore, the fees they could collect under the 1906 Act from any single applicant were not high—five dollars for a full naturalization procedure.50 The clerks were authorized to retain only half of these fees, not to exceed $3,000 per year.51 The other half, and all additional fees collected beyond the maximum, had to be sent to the Bureau of Naturalization for deposit in the U.S. Treasury.52 Even if the entirety of naturalization fees could be used to supplement clerk salaries (rather than, as is more likely, used to satisfy expenses incident to the naturalization process),53 clerks were receiving little additional compensation in exchange for taking on substantial responsibilities. James Farrell, the Chief Naturalization Examiner in the naturalization district of Boston, summed up the situation in 1922:
In those outside courts, the matter is unwelcome, at least, in many of them, and especially where they have but little of it, because every case that comes before a clerk is a burden on him. He is unfamiliar with the law, and in every case he has to make an inquiry, de novo; he has to look up the requirements and he groans and in some places he says to the petitioner—this actually so—“I will give you $4 if you would go somewhere else and file this.” It is a burden in that way because you are only giving that man half the fees and because of the time it takes, especially in those country courts; he is not recompensed or compensated for the efforts he makes. It is in the big centers that there is money for the clerk and there you try to shut him off with $3,000.54
Naturally, this system encouraged clerks, once they reached the statutory limit of $6,000 in total fees collected, to virtually refuse to entertain additional naturalization business.55 Additional appropriations had permitted the Bureau, since 1909, to pay some assistants to facilitate the work of the clerks in the cities where collection typically exceeded $6,000.56 In 1919, however, “Congress changed the method of compensation of the United States court clerks from emoluments to the salary basis” and prohibited “the allotment of any money” from the Naturalization Bureau budget for the compensation of assistants to clerks of the U.S. courts.57
In 1924 the naturalization work of the Bronx, Kings, and New York City county courts collapsed. Given the critical location of the failure, an alternative means for processing naturalization applications had to be created as quickly as possible. The New York state court clerks’ funding was halted and applicants were redirected to naturalization examiners recruited by the Bureau of Naturalization. Within a few days, the work performed previously by thirty-seven county clerks and their assistants58 was now completed by eight clerks working directly under the supervision of the district director of naturalization in New York City. Once their applications were treated, future naturalized citizens were sent to the two U.S. district courts in New York City, which handled 8,885 declarations and petitions per month in 1924, compared to 1,758 the previous year.59
The crisis, despite its challenges, produced an example that the Bureau of Naturalization wanted to expand nationally. But the Democrats did not like the reform implemented in New York and did not want to eliminate state courts from the naturalization business. The Democratic members of the Committee on Appropriations persuaded the House, over the protests of the Commissioner of Naturalization to allocate $370,000 for payments to state court clerks. However, a Republican representative from New York, Ogden Mills, succeeded in having the Senate strike the appropriation language from the bill, and final appropriations were left to the discretion of the secretary of the Department of Labor. Following that decision, on February 28, 1925, Mills wrote a draft letter to President Calvin Coolidge and enjoined him to pass it along to the secretary of labor. Coolidge did so just a few days later on March 2, 1925. “It seems to me,” the letter read, “that, in view of the fact that the Bureau of Naturalization is able to do the work more cheaply and more efficiently
