The First Political Denaturalization: Emma Goldman

      In the evolution of its purpose and interpretation, the 1906 denaturalization clause took American citizenship in a new direction. Immigration from Europe was at its peak in 1907 with 1,285,349 entries.¹ The dramatic reaction to this surge—restrictionist and racist—was reinforced later in the context of World War I and the rise of revolutionary ideologies. One of the primary objectives of the immigration and naturalization policies was to detect and prevent “un-American” immigration and to exclude and deport those who had succeeded in settling in the country. “Un-Americanism” was defined politically and encompassed opinions, acts, practices, or simply ethnicity.

      In the context of the creation of the Dillingham Commission by the Immigration Act of February 20, 1907,² whose report led to the adoption of the literacy test in 1917, and to the quota laws of 1921 and 1924,³ loyalty became an important concern of the government.

      This trend resulted in the creation of a conditional citizenship for some categories of citizens. The Expatriation Act of March 2, 1907, promoted the goal of “reducing the number of Americans who, in the eyes of the federal government, have compromised their status as citizens by maintaining or establishing foreign liaisons of a certain type.”⁴ The quasi-simultaneity of the 1906 Naturalization Act, designed to create a standard on naturalization and to combat fraud and illegality, and the 1907 Expatriation Act, which created this conditional citizenship, is deceptive: one concerns mainly procedural fraud, the other xenophobia and fear of foreign and radical ideologies. While the 1906 act was the culmination of a legislative debate on fraud that had started in the 1840s, the 1907 act began a period of fear and paranoia that would greatly expand by 1940.

      This conditional citizenship applied in 1907 to different categories of native-born Americans: women marrying foreigners and Americans acquiring another nationality. Even though the provision concerning American women was by then obsolete,⁵ in 1940 the scope of conditionality would expand to include American-born citizens evading the draft, joining a foreign army, or participating in foreign elections. But naturalized citizens remained the main target of crusaders against un-Americanism. If they were residing abroad, they were the object of both the 1906 and 1907 laws. The latter expanded the scope of the former to include naturalized citizens living two years in their country of origin or five years in any foreign country at any time after their naturalization.

      New Americans living in the United States could also lose their citizenship if they violated certain standards. Let’s put aside the “criminals.” Today all democracies provide for the possibility of voiding a citizenship recently granted if a naturalized person is found to have lied about a criminal record prior to accession to citizenship. That provision was more expansive in the interwar period than it is today. It included in the scope of bad moral character, for example, cases involving extramarital relations, defense or advocacy of free love, the practice of plural marriage or polygamy,⁶ the possession and sale of intoxicating liquor in violation of the National Prohibition Act of 1922,⁷ or working as a pimp.⁸ These restrictions reflected the values and social norms of the time. Yet additional restrictions—based on race and politics—rose after 1906. A naturalized person who was Asian, spoke out against the war, or was a socialist, a communist, or a fascist risked the loss of his American citizenship.

      Citizenship could be lost by acts or speech now considered basic rights. But this conditionality of the status of naturalized citizen would provoke conflicts within the executive branch—between the Justice and the State departments—and with and between the courts. Conditionality of citizenship was rooted in both the explicit language of the statute (for the naturalized citizen moving and living abroad) as well as in more expansive interpretations of the law’s intent. For instance words pronounced or acts committed after naturalization could serve as a post facto indication of a mental reservation, a lack of attachment to the U.S. Constitution at the moment of or before the naturalization. Sometimes an illegality committed before naturalization—like an error or a lie on the date of arrival in the United States—could serve as a pretext for a denaturalization for political reasons. This is how it started for Emma Goldman, the subject of the first political denaturalization in the United States in 1909.

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      Goldman was born in 1869 in Lithuania, where she was introduced to anarchist principles at the factory where she worked. She emigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen and married fellow Russian-born factory worker Jacob Kersner, through whom she acquired American citizenship. The two separated not long thereafter, and subsequently divorced.

      Goldman eventually became the “most prominent anarchist of the era” and was known by most Americans of the time as “Red Emma” and the “High Priestess of Anarchism.”⁹ Her involvement as a revolutionary grew in the aftermath of the Haymarket Riot in 1886, where a bomb had been thrown at police during a protest in favor of a shorter workday. The subsequent execution of several anarchists in connection with the attack galvanized many American anarchists, including Goldman. Six years later, Goldman is believed to have participated in the attempted assassination of factory owner and future philanthropist Henry Clay Frick. Goldman’s