The Sovereign Citizen. Patrick Weil
Although the former provision would later be repealed,2 the Nationality Act passed in 1940 expanded the automatic loss of citizenship to include several new categories of American-born citizens, including those who engaged in foreign military service, voted in foreign elections, or were convicted of treason or of desertion from the armed forces of the United States.
While American-born citizens could lose their citizenship in limited circumstances, naturalized foreign-born Americans were at special risk because they could be deprived of their citizenship, or denaturalized, for a wide variety of reasons. It might come as no surprise that the citizenship of the naturalized could be revoked if their naturalization application was tainted by fraud or other illegal acts. But foreign-born Americans could also be denaturalized: if they spoke out or took action against the U.S. government during wartime or were otherwise involved in “radical” organizations; if they belonged to ethnic or political groups that were perceived as “un-American”; or if they resided abroad, in any country around the world, regardless of how many years they had been American citizens. Although denaturalization had similar consequences for the individual as another phenomenon called denationalization, the two are distinct: denationalization denotes a loss of citizenship, whereas, in theory, a denaturalized person has never been a citizen.3
During the course of the twentieth century, more than twenty-two thousand Americans were denaturalized. Even decades after becoming Americans, the foreign-born risked losing their citizenship in denaturalization proceedings initiated by the executive branch and tried in the courts. This book tells the unique story of these Americans for the very first time.
Denaturalization and denationalization are most often associated with twentieth-century authoritarian regimes. The Soviet Union revoked the citizenship of 1.5 million individuals. The Nazi regime denaturalized forty thousand people and revoked the citizenship of another forty thousand native-born citizens. In France, between 1940 and 1944, the Vichy regime denaturalized fifteen thousand people and stripped the citizenship of five hundred native-born French nationals.
But denaturalization existed in democracies as well. The United States first established the practice through the Naturalization Act of 1906. Only three years later, in 1909, Emma Goldman became the first American denaturalized for political reasons. Following the United States, the United Kingdom introduced denaturalization in 1914, and further reinforced its procedures in 1918. France temporarily installed a denaturalization policy in 1915, for the duration of World War I, and made the practice permanent through legislation passed in 1927.4 Many other countries followed suit.
In 1933, twenty-four years after having been deprived of her citizenship, Goldman would write of the trend:
To have a country implies, first of all, the possession of a certain guarantee of security, the assurance of having some spot you can call your own and that no one can alienate from you. That is the essential significance of the idea of country, of citizenship. Divested of that, it becomes sheer mockery.
Up to the World War citizenship actually did stand for such a guarantee. . . . But the War has entirely changed the situation. Together with countless lives, it also destroyed the fundamental right to be, to exist in a given place with any degree of security. . . . Citizenship has become bankrupt: it has lost its essential meaning, its one-time guarantee. Deprivation of citizenship, exile and deportation are practiced by every government; they have been established and accepted methods. . . . Yet, for all their “legality,” denaturalization and expatriation are of the most primitive and cruel inhumanity.5
The majority of denaturalizations in France and the United Kingdom can be connected to the two world wars and their consequences—the proceedings were performed to protect national security and in response to perceived acts of treason and disloyalty. Yet in the United States, only 1 percent (approximately two hundred) of the twenty-two thousand denaturalizations conducted during the twentieth century were connected to wars. These few “political” acts of denaturalization have been the subject of valuable studies,6 but the vast majority of the denaturalizations in the United States reflect an exceptional and much more complex history.7
This study of denaturalization examines, but also searches beyond, the personal ordeals and destinies of the denaturalized by casting light on neglected dimensions of America’s understandings of citizenship. The institution of denaturalization, from its first appearance in America in 1906, made a quiet yet major contribution to the transformation of contemporary American citizenship in at least two ways. The first of these was in the federalization of the naturalization process. Today a foreign resident who wants to become an American citizen looks for the nearest federal office—and not to the local and state courts. This was not always the case. The second of denaturalization’s contributions is the role it played in a series of twentieth-century Supreme Court decisions that would redefine the country’s understanding of sovereignty and citizenship.
In 1790, Congress established, for the first time, a uniform rule of naturalization.8 Despite legislative tinkering with the naturalization process in 1798, 1802, and 1906,9 it remained the case from the Founding until 1930 that the majority of new Americans were naturalized in state courts. The state judiciary, however, did not always respect citizenship requirements set by federal law.
In the first part of the nineteenth century, the federal government fought for its sovereignty on several fronts, against states of the Union that challenged the supremacy of federal citizenship—culminating in the bloody and hard-fought Civil War—and against foreign countries that contested the power of the United States to naturalize their former citizens. But by 1868 these early battles were over. One day before Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, which unified American citizenship and proclaimed the precedence of federal citizenship over state citizenship, it also passed the Expatriation Act of 1868. This Act proclaimed the right of American citizens to expatriate, or acquire a foreign nationality, and the equal right of all naturalized citizens to travel abroad under the protection of the United States. The latter was made possible only by the Bancroft Treaties—signed with Prussia in 1868, the United Kingdom in 1870, and later with almost three dozen other countries—according to which countries of origin would recognize the American nationality of their own expatriated citizens.10 It was only then, when American citizenship became “paramount and dominant instead of being subordinate and derivative,” that the old issue of fraud in the naturalization processes was tackled at the federal level.11
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the U.S. government was determined to crack down on fraud to ensure the dignity of the naturalization procedure in courts and to protect the sacrosanct status of American citizenship.12 In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed, “We poison the sources of our national character and strength at the fountain, if the privilege is claimed and exercised without right, and by means of fraud and corruption.” “The body politic,” Roosevelt explained, “cannot be sound and healthy if many of its constituent members claim their standing through the prostitution of the high right and calling of citizenship.”13 The Naturalization Act of 1906 responded to these concerns by introducing denaturalization as a new instrument for deterring any fraud and illegality that might occur during the naturalization process.14
Denaturalization, however, would also serve another purpose. Buoyed by a growing public discourse in favor of purifying America’s citizenry, denaturalization became a tool for the expulsion of those deemed to possess “un-American” characteristics. The U.S. government targeted those new citizens who were later discovered to be of “un-American” opinion, race, or residence and stripped them of their citizenship. Foreign-born Americans were not the only ones at risk. When denaturalization became a central part of the government’s national security policy during World War II, the 1940 Nationality Act also expanded the number of American-born citizens subject to automatic loss of citizenship. American citizenship had become conditional.
This was precisely when the Supreme Court inserted itself into the denaturalization debate. Although intensely divided, the Court progressively reduced the scope of the federal government’s authority to revoke American citizenship. It did so, in part, by upholding free speech and procedural guarantees for foreign-born Americans. But the most significant limits