grounds previously raised by Theodore Roosevelt in response to the common practice of newly naturalized returning to their native countries as soon as they secured U.S. citizenship.
The Naturalization Act went into effect on September 27, 1906. The newly established Division of Naturalization, responsible for overseeing the implementation of the law, settled into the Munsey Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Twenty-five hundred square feet of office space was rented to house seventeen people, including fourteen clerks.38 Within several months, the chief of the new division, Richard Campbell, expressed his satisfaction: “That something has been accomplished in the direction of reducing the notorious and long-continued abuses in conferring citizenship by naturalization is palpable.” He noted that the new regime’s success was reflected in a number of new trends: “First the greatly reduced number of naturalizations, and, second, the high grade of the petitioners, as stated by the U.S. attorneys, and partly shown by the small portion of denials. . . . The number of cancellations, secured or pending, of certificates improperly issued is another evidence of the practical value of the new law as a reform measure.”39
Indeed, in the years following its passage, the effect of the 1906 Act was immediate and quantifiable. Before 1906, the number of naturalizations was estimated at 100,000 per year. In 1907, however, the number of certificates issued plummeted to 7,953. Just one year later, in 1908, the number of naturalizations had tripled, to 25,963, and in 1909, it rose to 38,372.40 But it would be several years before the pace of naturalization again reached pre-1906 levels.
The courts and assistant U.S. attorneys did not share Campbell’s contentment with the effects of the broad reforms and felt overwhelmed by their new tasks. Part of the problem was that the Naturalization Act cut in half the number of courts offering naturalization proceedings. Under the old system, nearly 5,160 different state and federal courts were qualified to conduct naturalization procedures.41 Under the new criteria fixed by the 1906 Act, even though there were upward of 3,000 courts vested with the authority to conduct naturalizations,42 the number of courts actually offering naturalizations settled at around 2,200 and 90 percent of these were state courts. And while the courts remained in charge of receiving and registering applications for naturalization and of delivering the oath of citizenship, they now also had to fulfill new legal requirements, which increased their workload. Court clerks were obligated to shoulder these additional burdens despite a decline in resources. Some came to the conclusion that the financial benefit of offering naturalization service was not worth the additional work required and decided to abandon the naturalization process altogether.43
In addition, the new naturalization process was cumbersome, with numerous actors tasked with participating across four distinct stages. First, a naturalization application had to be filed with a competent court, most often in a clerk’s office. Second, in the three months following the application, the court or the federal government could investigate the facts alleged by the applicant and the applicant’s two witnesses. Third, the naturalization hearing would then take place in open court, and the government could intervene if it felt it necessary. Fourth, at any time after the successful completion of the naturalization process, a U.S. attorney could institute proceedings for the cancellation of the naturalization on the grounds of fraud or illegality.
The new scheme did not clearly delineate the authority and responsibilities of the various interested parties and opened the ground for conflicts between the courts—federal and state—and between the Division of Naturalization and the Department of Justice. For example, the new law permitted the executive to intervene at stages 2, 3 and 4 of the naturalization process. But if the law was clear in assigning to the U.S. attorneys the tasks of instituting cancellation procedures, no mention was made of which department was in charge of intervening in open court at the naturalization proceeding itself, and, prior to it, in the examination of the application.
Figure 1. U.S. Naturalization Process, 1906–1926
At first, in 1906 and 1907, the Department of Justice was able to represent the executive branch’s interests in the naturalization process because, as noted earlier, the number of naturalization proceedings was very low in the first year after the passage of the Naturalization Act. Moreover, in order to support its new responsibilities, the Department of Justice received an appropriation of $100,000.44 With this new funding source, a number of assistant U.S. attorneys were appointed to work at headquarters in large cities around the country.45 Additionally, in order to relieve these assistant attorneys of the eventual enormous volume of naturalization-related issues, Alford W. Cooley, assistant attorney general, recruited a “considerable number of examiners”—forty to fifty—who were dispatched to the same principal cities as the new attorneys.46 These examiners were authorized to initiate the preliminary naturalization examination, check applications, correct minor errors, turn away individuals who were clearly unable to meet the requirements of the new law, and transmit contested cases to assistant U.S. attorneys.47
Campbell, the primary architect of the Department of Commerce and Labor’s naturalization machinery, viewed with disfavor the development of a new administration within the Department of Justice, under the supervision of Cooley. But in 1907 Campbell’s small new division did not possess sufficient resources to fulfill his goal of managing a uniform and centralized naturalization process without additional help. Soon after the Naturalization Act’s passage, Congress had rebuffed Campbell’s request to form a new team of examiners, choosing to allocate to the Department of Justice responsibility for naturalization attorneys and examiners.48
With the drafting of a uniform application form, responsibility for overseeing denaturalization proceedings was the only real power given to Campbell’s Division of Naturalization. It was not much. But creative use of denaturalization authority would gradually but radically reinforce the new Division’s central role in transforming American citizenship.
As described above, under Section 15 of the new law, U.S. attorneys were obligated to institute proceedings for the cancellation of naturalization certificates upon affidavit showing that a certificate had at any time been illegally or fraudulently procured. Once informed of an instance of illegality or fraud, they could not refuse to act.
In the years just following the passage of 1906 Act, evidence supporting denaturalization typically originated from a few common sources. Interestingly, the majority of denaturalization cases arose when witnesses for new citizens were required to produce their own certificates of naturalization. While ascertaining the competence of these witnesses, examiners and judges would often uncover fraud or illegality in a witness’s naturalization proceeding. Confronted with contradictory information and documents relating to a witness’s declaration of intention or date of arrival in the United States, it might become clear that a witness’s citizenship had been illegally procured.49
The Civil Service Commission was another source of denaturalization proceedings due to legal requirements restricting classified civil service positions to American citizens. The Commission required that foreign-born applicants for these positions submit their naturalization certificates, which it would then check.50 Counterfeit certificates were promptly reported. Similarly, denaturalization cases would even arise when the certificates of naturalized persons applying for licenses to serve as officers of steam vessels, a position reserved for citizens of the United States, were investigated. Of the 415 applicants in 1908 for such positions, 59 became the subjects of cancellation proceedings.51 A number of denaturalization cases were also passed along from the State Department,52 which sometimes discovered illegality or fraud when naturalized citizens submitted passport requests.
One year after it was established by the 1906 Act, the new naturalization system was in crisis. U.S. attorneys were overwhelmed by their responsibility for intervening in open court—the third stage of the naturalization process.
