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These forms were in regular use by the 1880s and represent the move toward a more consistent enforcement of application requirements and, therefore, a more assertive attempt to claim control of the issuance of the passport.The notary public’s role as an official stranger in the application process ended with the outbreak of World War I.20 From the end of 1914 passport applications had to be executed in front of a court official before being sent to the department.Another measure that brought the application process more securely into the legal and administrative realm of the state was the postwar decision to open passport agencies in port cities.The State Department employees who staffed these agencies took passport applications and, if necessary, issued emergency passports.21 In the 1920s the department continued to actively police the individuals involved in the application and issuance of a passport.Instructions were issued to officials about evaluating the witness used in passport applications.Although notaries public were no longer involved, the process still required an individual who could verify the personal identity of the applicant and, therefore, that the applicant was indeed the person the supporting documents had established as a citizen.The witness was required to appear in person at the time of application rather than signing the form prior to the applicant going to the agency or courthouse.This regulation was intended to exclude people with a financial interest in the issuance of passports, usually either steamship company employees or lawyers.23 Similar regulations were enacted in regards to people eligible to witness an oath of allegiance.These witness requirements were relaxed in the case of passports issued abroad.Witnesses, in the form of notaries public and citizens, had been used to verify the personal identity of all applicants but only the citizenship of those who claimed birth in the United States.The birth of naturalized citizens was documented in the form of a naturalization certificate.Therefore, as the initial application requirements made clear, the claim to citizenship of a naturalized citizen called for this document instead of the affidavit demanded of people claiming citizenship through birth in the United States.For other applicants this requirement was also discriminatory, in contrast to what they perceived as the more easily satisfied demand for an affidavit from applicants claiming birth in the United States.The State Department rejected this assertion, and with it the implicit privileging of a particular understanding of whiteness and citizenship.In 1888 Secretary of State Thomas Baynard wrote, The rule of proof applied to each class of citizens is the same. He clarified that this was the legal rule, that in all cases the proof to be submitted of the existence of a fact must be the best proof of which the case is in its nature susceptible.27 For naturalized citizens the best proof was the legal record of their naturalization.In the developing practice of official documentation, the naturalization certificate also represented the ideal evidence of citizenship.As a record of the bureaucratic birth of the citizen, a naturalization certificate is produced by designated officials within the apparatus of the state.The birth could not take place outside of the state and its official record.A judge did not merely witness an event, but the event could not happen without him.Therefore, this birth was documented in court records and through a certified copy issued under the seal of the court.This pointed toward an ideal scenario in which a passport would be created exclusively from documents that were rationally and objectively produced within the administrative control of the state.The lack of a system of birth registration was far from this ideal, especially once government officials began to take the passport more seriously in the early decades of the twentieth century.While it signaled another attempt to bring the issuance of a passport closer in line with the practices of modern identification practices, the demand for a birth certificate was only a gesture towards this.The demand for a birth certificate and the ranking of the alternative evidence of citizenship indicated the importance of proximity for the reliable documentation of an event as an accepted fact.Ideally, an event would be documented close to its occurrence.A less ideal alternative was proximity to the applicant in the form of a personal relationship.In the former two cases the passport application already required a statement from the applicant and, if necessary, a baptismal certificate, thus making a document produced from them redundant.In 1926 the State Department decided not to accept any passport applications without birth certificates from the territory of Hawaii even if they included one of the affidavits allowed in lieu of a birth certificate, described to applicants in a footnote to published regulations.The specific concern over Asians drove the restrictions on Japanese immigration introduced in the early twentieth century and the passage of the first Chinese Exclusion Act two decades earlier.By the 1920s the privileging of documents issued by designated officials securely located in the state apparatus was still an emerging ideal.The development of application procedures was an attempt by the state to control an individual’s claim to be a citizen.The developing faith in documentation could still be trumped by undocumented leaps of faith.However, the issuance of a passport in the absence of supporting documents was the privilege of the state.In this situation the State Department did not share this belief.McKenzie’s mother was not known to the state either through the documents it produced or the personal knowledge of one of its trusted senior officials.However, the absence of prioritized documents could not be resolved by the mere translation of individual statements onto paper.The conditions in which documents were created had became critical to their reliability, especially who produced them.