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 than the County Clerks, that . . .the policy should be continued and you should not return to that policy abandoned by your Department a year ago.”60
In 1925 four different sets of naturalization procedures were being used in parallel. In larger cities, the Bureau of Naturalization concluded agreements directly with the courts to have applicants meet with a naturalization examiner immediately before (1) or after (2) registering with the clerk of court. Outside of the cities, state courts staff were subsidized by the federal government to perform the task of filing and checking applications in place of the naturalization examiners (3). Finally, applicants and witnesses were investigated through the postal system (4).
The naturalization examiners needed to be well trained to deal with the complexities of the system: they were required to possess a law degree or to pass, under the supervision of the Civil Service Commission, an examination on the relevant laws.61 They also needed a background in typewriting and stenography, as they had clerical as well as legal responsibilities.62 Despite their expertise, the examiners were often overwhelmed by their various tasks. They worked “overtime constantly,” often on weekends and during vacations.63
For the Bureau of Naturalization, the lack of standardized naturalization practices and the impossibility of appealing judicial decisions conferring citizenship made denaturalization the last chance for creating and maintaining the “uniformity of rule” that Campbell had originally envisioned. A single procedure is “of the utmost practical importance in maintaining the uniformity of the rule of naturalization required by the Constitution,” Campbell noted, “It stops other courts of original jurisdiction from applying a contrary view of law and authoritatively advises the public, the administrative officers and the courts as to what the law is, for their information and guidance, thus making the rule of naturalization uniform in operation, as intended.”64
Yet if, in the early years following the 1918 Act, many more denaturalization cases were directly managed by the Bureau of Naturalization than funneled through the U.S. attorneys, by the middle of the next decade, the situation was reversed. In 1919 the U.S. attorneys received 13 cases, while 135 were handled by the commissioner of naturalization; and in 1921 U.S. attorneys managed 11, and the commissioner of naturalization 65. But in 1923, 640 cases were referred to the U.S. attorneys while only 96 were handled by the Bureau of Naturalization.65
Campbell had fought hard to secure authority to institute denaturalization proceedings, but five years after having obtained it in 1918, he was forced to abandon it. There were several reasons for Campbell’s reversal. First, U.S. attorneys and naturalization examiners weren’t accustomed to working within the new framework. For example, it took more than three years for the Bureau of Naturalization to obtain a decision in the case of Georges Dumas, a native of Canada, naturalized in 1900, who had returned to live permanently in Canada in 1901. In April 1919, a petition to cancel his certificate was filed in the name of the commissioner of naturalization by a naturalization examiner.The case had been originally referred by the Minneapolis U.S. attorney’s office, but the judge refused to receive the petition for denaturalization on the grounds that, apart from the U.S attorney, only the commissioner of naturalization or his deputy possessed concurrent authority in the matter of cancellation. After multiple exchanges of letters, Campbell refiled the petition himself and obtained a court decision on November 13, 1922.66 These troubles were not isolated to the Dumas case. As a result, on February 28, 1923, the solicitor of the Department of Labor reminded naturalization examiners that cases for denaturalization should be submitted first to the Commissioner for him to decide to institute proceedings for cancellation, or to refer the case to the appropriate U.S. attorney.67
Second, the absence of any separation of powers between the handling of naturalization and denaturalization cases encouraged fraud.