innocent pleasures naturally take them through the regular channels, while the frontier elsewhere is inadequately guarded.This is wholly wrong, illogical, wasteful and dangerous.62 His frustration grew when he saw a role for the passport in targeting the actions of disloyal citizens who sought to cross the border for what he considered was not innocent pleasure.After the introduction of Prohibition, Berkshire sought permission to deny passports and other necessary documents to citizens who wanted to travel to Tijuana to drink.The passport and visa applications and their potential use as records of the movement of citizens and aliens are examples of a modern form of government based on more complete knowledge of the population and society.This could be used not only in the logic of wartime surveillance, but also as the basis of statistics that could inform practices of governing.Prior to the war the limited collection and analysis of information meant that the government did not know with any accuracy facts that became critical to mobilization such as the country’s net financial reserves, total industrial production, and the potential combined transportation capability.64 In reaction to the outbreak of war in Europe, mobilization saw the importation of the management logic that had developed in major industries into parts of the federal government.65 After President Wilson sanctioned the Civilian Advisory Commission for the collection of information, centralized agencies concerned with specific economic sectors were created, such as for food and fuel, that prioritized systematic gathering of data and centralized administration.66 While it is not clear if any government official explicitly articulated the passport to this project, the war showed how identification documents could manage difference, not simply through the documentation of identification categories, but more astutely through the knowledge of the individuals who comprised these categories, and the production of more precise identification categories, a role that immigration and passport policies in the 1920s would increasingly make apparent.Beyond attempts to document the identity of aliens and citizens entering and leaving the country, the federal government instituted surveillance practices to monitor what it considered suspect populations within the country in the context of this increasingly pervasive project to collect information.These early attempts to gather knowledge on specific individuals within the United States illustrated the potential of a systematic administrative structure for the acquisition of information about people rather than more benign objects such as the growth of corn or the production of automobiles.Although not necessarily thought of as such the Selective Service Act functioned to register, and thus collect information about, citizens eligible for military service.Created in 1908, it had gained a semblance of responsibility following the passage of the Mann Act in 1910, in which Congress utilized the federal government’s right to control interstate commerce to make it a federal offense to transport a woman across interstate lines for immoral purposes.It also employed agents, largely recruited from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, to investigate both suspected German spies and radical agitators.The Selective Service Act was in fact implemented through volunteer groups, befitting the purportedly voluntary nature of the draft, but more practically, an acknowledgment that the federal government was not the massive bureaucracy such an act required.Volunteers staffed draft boards in smaller towns, with President Wilson appointing prominent local citizens to boards in larger cities.71 In contrast, the registration of Germans made use of existing state apparatus.Germans had to report to a local police station or post office to fill out detailed forms, supply several photographs, and give fingerprints.They were then issued an identification card with their name, address, photograph, and thumbprint, which they were required to carry at all times.This new form of state and its relationship to citizens and aliens also included immigration offices and passport agencies.73
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