favor of increasing the proportion of federal court naturalizations.79 At the same time, the allowances to clerks at state courts, already reduced more than 50 percent in 1924, faced further reductions every year between 1927 and 1930. Thereafter, many of the states’ courts surrendered naturalization jurisdiction altogether. In 1926, state courts still conducted the majority of civilian naturalizations, 79,515 of 146,239 or 54 percent. Five years later, they conducted only 34 percent (48,256 of 140,271).80 Slowly but surely, the naturalization process was becoming federalized.
CHAPTER 3
The Victory of the Federalization of Naturalization, 1926–1940
Nonetheless, in the period between the 1926 amendments to the Naturalization Act and the outbreak of World War II, denaturalization was at its peak. The number of revocations of citizenship averaged about a thousand a year between 1935 and 1941, reflecting three historical phenomena.
First, the Bureau of Naturalization continued to be vigilant in ensuring that state courts respected the requirements of federal naturalization laws. Thomas Ellis Isaac, for instance, was naturalized on March 18, 1926, at the Court of Common Pleas for Clarendon County, South Carolina. But the Court of Common Pleas had not been authorized to conduct naturalizations since 1911. As a result, Isaac’s certificate was annulled in 1927 for having been illegally procured.1 The Bureau eventually discovered that the Clarendon court had illegally naturalized six other people as well and decided to pursue the denaturalization of all of them.2
Just as often, however, after the Bureau targeted the courts themselves, it endeavored to protect the interests of the denaturalized. Edla Lund, a Swedish widow and music teacher born in Stockholm in 1867, arrived in the United States at the age of twenty. She had been naturalized on December 5, 1932, not using the appropriate forms. Her naturalization was cancelled on April 9, 1934, but, characteristically, the district director of naturalization was asked to assist Lund in regaining American citizenship. Others were advised to reapply for naturalization after their certificates were cancelled.3
Second, a general toughening in immigration law combined with some liberal provisions aimed at naturalizing World War I foreign combatants and seamen, encouraged fraud. Before 1921, an immigrant entering and residing in the United States illegally, who was also interested in becoming a naturalized citizen could follow an easy procedure. He could cross into Mexico or Canada and have his subsequent reentry into the United States officially recorded.4 This would serve as a record of legal entry into the country and would begin the official countdown toward citizenship.
After the Immigration Restriction Act was passed on May 19, 1921, however, immigrants to the United States had to be admitted within a national quota, with the exception of immigrants from nations in the Western Hemisphere. This meant that many immigrants could no longer “reset” the record of their arrival through a quick jaunt south of the border. Moreover, many immigrants who had arrived before 1921 could not prove their entry date—some arrived before records of arrival were kept at all ports of entry, while in other cases entry records were lost or destroyed.5 With legal methods for circumventing America’s entry requirements no longer available, some individuals seeking American citizenship used the assistance of dishonest immigration bureaucrats to modify boat records from years past.
The new system reinforced the Bureau of Naturalization’s control of the naturalization process. On August 1, 1924, the Bureau requested that the clerks of naturalization courts throughout the United States forward the declarations of intention of applicants for citizenship who had arrived in the United States after June 2, 1921. The Bureau also asked clerks to defer filing these applications with the courts until proof had been furnished that the applicants’ entry into the United States was by a permanent admission: “Large numbers of aliens who had entered the country illegally or who were unlawfully remaining in the United States after having entered the country for temporary periods of residence only were attempting to make declarations of intention.”6 Under the plan adopted by the Bureau, applications from aliens arriving after June 30, 1924, were compared with the immigration visas in the Bureau’s custody in order to defeat “attempts to become citizens by those who entered the United States in defiance of the provisions of the quota and visa restrictions of the immigration law.”7
Illegal naturalization also involved individuals who feigned inclusion in two categories of foreigners whose naturalization had been statutorily facilitated since World War I. On May 9, 1918, Congress had passed an act providing for the immediate naturalization of alien soldiers in the U.S. military, permitting them to become citizens without the typically required certificate of arrival. The same act provided that any alien who had been a member of the armed forces for three or more years could file a petition for naturalization without proof that they had met the five-year residency requirement, and that any applicant who had served during World War I was exempt from the requirement to file a declaration of intention.8 Between May 9, 1918, and June 1, 1919, a total of 128,000 foreign soldiers were naturalized under these provisions.9
In the San Francisco naturalization district, fraudulent naturalizations of “draft evaders, slackers posing as honorably discharged soldiers and sailors,” and “men claiming merchant service through forged seamen’s discharges” were cancelled in 1924.10 Over the course of 1929, proceedings for the violation of naturalization laws on similar grounds were also initiated in Pittsburgh, New York City, and Boston.11 In the middle of 1930, it was discovered that a New York City-based group was providing fraudulent naturalization documents, taking advantage of the exemptions conferred on veterans, to immigrants who had arrived after the end of World War I. Individuals typically paid between $500 and $800 for their fraudulent naturalizations. Confessions were obtained from four individuals who secured their naturalization by falsely alleging World War I service. Up to twelve other individuals were involved in the fraud.12
Third, the number of denaturalizations rose rapidly in the late 1930s and early 1940s to levels unseen in American history. Naturalizations also unexpectedly rose during this period, reaching a peak in 1940.13 This rise came despite the fact that immigration declined from 6.3 million individuals in the years between 1910 and 1919 to 4.3 million in the 1920s, dropping below 700,000 over the course of the 1930s.14 The 1936 Annual Report of the Department of Labor observed that “normally it might be expected that a decline in immigration would be followed by a corresponding decline in naturalization, but this has not been true in the past 4 years. Immigrants admitted between 1933 and 1936, inclusive, numbered 123,823 and during the same period 475,767 declarations of intention were filed. It is evident that the majority of aliens who are now seeking naturalization are not recent immigrants but have been in the country for some time”15 The era of “hostile legislation” was among the reasons invoked for this rush of hitherto indifferent aliens.
But, in actuality, the increase after 1934 in the number of aliens going through the naturalization process was primarily the product of the dramatic rise of unemployment caused by the Great Depression. The resulting response by President Roosevelt creating social programs reserved exclusively for citizens generated a strong incentive for aliens to seek naturalization. Aliens were commonly barred from employment on public works, private employers preferred hiring citizens, and only citizens could qualify for old-age pensions and other benefits under social security laws. These considerations impelled the alien to seek naturalization and the citizens to prove her citizenship. Both trends provoked a denaturalization surge.16
Two primary social benefits seem to have been particularly important to immigrants: old-age assistance and public employment programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In a 1932 article, “Is Citizenship a Fair Requirement in Old Age Assistance Acts?” sociologist Dallas Hirst points out: “All but one of the eighteen states which have
