20 Decisions That Created The Modern Passport

In the 5th century BCE, King Artaxerxes I of Persia had a Jewish cupbearer in Susa named Nehemiah. When Nehemiah asked to go back to Jerusalem to rebuild the walls there, Artaxerxes granted his request and gave him letters instructing the governors along the way to grant him safe passage. Nehemiah had neither a card nor a booklet, just a king’s word, extended to one trusted official. This is the earliest known predecessor of a travel credential.

Henry V was the English king in the early 1400s, during the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. In 1414, Parliament made it high treason against the king for anyone to rob, assault, or murder someone with a ‘safe conduct.’ A safe conduct was a document that allowed a traveler to cross the kingdom safely, issued by the Crown to a particular individual, typically a foreign merchant, scholar, or envoy, or to an English subject traveling abroad. Now, travel protection was written into law.

In 1791, France’s National Assembly abolished passports as a relic of feudalism. Soon after, though, authorities feared that émigrés might organize foreign forces to suppress the revolution. On March 28, 1792, the Legislative Assembly passed a law requiring both citizens and aliens to have an official passport to travel within France and abroad. It became the first country to establish passports as a universal, government-regulated requirement.

William Pitt the Younger, the British prime minister, worried about agitators from the French Revolution sneaking into Britain by passing themselves off as refugees. In January 1793, he got the British Parliament to pass the Aliens Act, which required anyone entering Britain at its ports to provide customs officials with their names, professions, and papers, surrender any documents showing they had traveled abroad, and obtain a certificate from a local official before proceeding further inland. The act applied only to aliens. British citizens returning to Britain weren’t subject to such inspection.

Prior to 1856, an American planning a trip overseas could secure a passport from a mayor, a governor, a notary, or a local court, which left foreign authorities confused about what they should accept. Congress passed the Passport Act in 1856, declaring that the Secretary of State had exclusive power to issue U.S. passports and that no state or local official could issue them. The act did not mandate that Americans carry passports when traveling, however. That was left until the First World War.

In January 1858, an Italian revolutionary, Felice Orsini, attempted to assassinate the French emperor, Napoleon III, with homemade English bombs while traveling in France with a British passport issued to a foreign national. This scandal toppled the government of British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston. In April 1858, the new government’s foreign secretary, Lord Malmesbury, introduced several reforms. These reduced the cost of a passport, introduced a single standardized form, insisted on supporting letters of recommendation, and restricted passports exclusively to British nationals who could prove their status.

Otto von Bismarck led a coalition of German states called the North German Confederation. In October 1867, the confederation’s parliament voted to eliminate passports for internal migration during peacetime. The aim was to facilitate commerce and migration. When Germany was unified in 1871, this new country adopted the passport-free policy of the North German Confederation. It remained until World War I.

Under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers living in the United States were issued a federal “Certificate of Return,” which allowed them to go to China for a time and return. On Oct. 1, 1888, President Grover Cleveland signed into law the Scott Act, which nullified all certificates and banned laborers from reentering, leaving around 20,000 stranded overseas or on ships. The Supreme Court endorsed the law the following year, saying that the government had the right to revoke travel documents whenever it wanted, making their exile permanent.

The 1907 “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” an informal exchange of diplomatic notes that was not ratified as a treaty, resolved the threat of a diplomatic conflict over the San Francisco school board’s decision to require the segregation of classrooms by race after a wave of anti-Japanese agitation in California. Japan’s foreign minister Hayashi Tadasu promised to halt the issuance of passports to laborers bound for the United States, and President Theodore Roosevelt promised to get the order of segregation rescinded. Passport offices in Japan would become centers of exclusion.

The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 led the British prime minister Herbert Asquith’s government to fear that German agents were sneaking into the country on false or stolen documents. The Foreign Office immediately moved to replace flat, paper passport passes with a folded version that required a mounted photograph as well as details such as eye color and nose shape. It cost five shillings. By 1915, it had become a bound paper booklet, making Britain the first major power to require a photograph on every national passport.

It wasn’t until World War I that the federal government claimed authority over its citizens’ international travel. Congress passed the Passport Control Act in May 1918, and President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order in August prohibiting citizens from leaving or reentering the country without a State Department passport. Framed as a wartime emergency measure, it set a precedent for executive control over citizen travel that outlasted the war.

It was only in 1920, at an international conference in Paris, that passport dimensions were standardized at 32 pages, bound in cardboard with a country’s coat of arms on the cover and printed in French and the national language. The resolution was nonbinding, just a recommendation, but everyone took the hint. And the shape held fast.

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and its subsequent civil war, the Soviet regime revoked the citizenship of over a million expatriate Russians, making them effectively unclaimed by any nation. In 1922, Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations’ high commissioner for refugees, convened a conference in Geneva that established a “Nansen passport,” an identity and travel document accepted by scores of nations, allowing the stateless to travel legally but not receive citizenship.

Prior to 1924, most foreign travelers to the U.S. would just hop a boat and be screened upon arrival at a place like Ellis Island. That changed when President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924 into law, effective that July, stipulating that all foreign arrivals must possess a valid passport bearing a U.S. consular visa affixed before their journey left their home country, as well as establishing quotas for how many people from each country could immigrate. The screening now happened at the embassy rather than the dock.

Swiss Federal Police chief Heinrich Rothmund wanted a way for the Germans to flag Jewish refugees at the border, other than requiring visas from all Germans. On Oct. 5, 1938, Germany’s Interior Ministry replied that all German passports held by Jews were no longer valid. Passports would have to be turned in to the police and replaced by passports which on the first page bore a large red letter “J” about three centimeters high. It was a simple way for Jews to be singled out at European borders.

In 1945, millions of displaced persons, concentration camp survivors, and stateless refugees had nowhere to go. They had no passports, and no countries existed to issue them. The International Committee of the Red Cross, led by its president Max Huber, created passports that the Allies accepted. These Red Cross passports allowed more than 500,000 refugees to find homes in other countries. The same porous border controls also allowed a few escaped Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, to obtain papers under false names.

In March 1947, the International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN agency created to regulate civil aviation, published a fresh set of regulations, “Annex 9,” that standardized airport passenger clearance procedures, passport checks, and transit visa applications worldwide from 1949 onwards. In short, the centuries-old system of plodding inspection in ports was replaced by standards designed for a world in which aircraft, rather than vessels, were the primary carriers of international passengers.

In drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in Paris on December 10, 1948, a committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, the former U.S. First Lady, partly responded to the totalitarian travel bans and persecution of the Nazi era. Article 13 says that “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” It made no provision for enforcing that right. The Soviet-bloc states abstained from the vote partly over that clause.

On July 28, 1951, diplomats in Geneva finalized the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to assist those rendered stateless by WWII. Article 28 stipulated that signatory states would provide a blue booklet, or passport, to legal refugees within their jurisdiction so they would not have to request permission from their former persecutors to leave the country. In contrast to Nansen’s 1922 scheme, the refugees themselves could demand that the host government uphold its end of the agreement.

The American artist Rockwell Kent applied for a U.S. passport, but was denied one because he wouldn’t fill out a document asking if he was a Communist. Kent took his case to court, suing the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. In 1958, the Supreme Court held, 5-4, that freedom to travel overseas is included within the “liberty” guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. Justice William O. Douglas wrote that Congress had never empowered the government to deny a passport on the basis of political belief. Kent received his passport.

This content was created with the help of AI.