The Sovereign Citizen. Patrick Weil
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of the decade with 319 cases in 1915, 184 cases in 1916, 152 cases in 1917, 154 cases in 1918, and 115 cases in 1919.
For Richard Campbell, now the Commissioner of Naturalization within the Department of Labor, this decline was too dramatic. It illustrated a new conflict between his new Bureau and the Department of Justice. On March 4, 1913, Congress had passed a law that split the Department of Labor and Commerce into two separate departments: the Department of Labor and the Department of Commerce. The act also divided up the functions of the former Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization and placed the newly created Bureau of Naturalization under the Department of Labor. Campbell was designated as Commissioner of the Bureau of Naturalization and reported directly to the Labor Secretary. Campbell understood that the 1909 Circular would limit the circumstances in which individuals who gained American citizenship prior to the passage of the 1906 Naturalization Act could be denaturalized. But he believed that the government should not be similarly constrained when dealing with individuals naturalized after 1906.3 The Department of Justice, however, sought to limit the reach of the United States’ denaturalization authority and took a stand against denaturalizing Americans who gained their citizenship after 1906 unless such proceedings were necessary for the betterment of the citizenry.
In reaction, the Naturalization Bureau initiated a new policy. Instead of using Section 15 of the 1906 Act, which required a U.S. attorney to institute denaturalization proceedings, with long and costly delays, Campbell decided to direct his naturalization examiners to informally approach judges to have them revoke their naturalization decisions on the grounds of illegally procured evidence.4 Many judges cooperated. In 1913, half the cancellation cases were handled without the involvement of U.S. attorneys, and in 1914, that proportion rose to two-thirds of cases. Yet some judges refused to cooperate and requested that the Bureau of Naturalization go through normal adversarial proceedings.
When in 1915 the Department of Justice submitted a revised version of the 1909 Circular that explicitly applied its restrictions on denaturalization to individuals granted citizenship after 1906,5 Richard Campbell protested:
There are more than two thousand courts engaged in admitting aliens to citizenship. There is a great diversity of opinion in regard to what the law means in its various details. . . . There are many reasons, too numerous to state within the compass of this memorandum, which lead to varying and contradictory decisions of courts of coordinate jurisdiction all over the United States on many points of the law. In actual practice, therefore, the law is not uniform in its operation throughout the United States. . . . Since the Department of Justice has held that there is no review by the ordinary processes resorted to in contested cases, there remains as a means of correcting errors of law, or at least of unifying the constructions of the law by the various courts, the proceeding to cancel.6
But on June 1, 1916, the same denaturalization circular that Wickersham had sent in 1909 was resent, unchanged, by his new replacement Attorney General T. W. Gregory, to all U.S. attorneys, keeping alive the clashing interpretations between the Bureau of Naturalization and the Justice Department.
Commissioner Campbell reacted aggressively. In addition to continuing the Bureau of Naturalization’s policy of asking courts directly for cancellation, thereby bypassing the U.S. attorneys, in 1914 Campbell requested that Congress give the Bureau independent legal authority to bring denaturalization proceedings. 7 Three years later Campbell pleaded, in a 1917 report, that “the practical result of the situation was an absence of uniformity in the rules of naturalization, the discouragement of the examiners in their efforts to secure the correction of palpable errors in the granting of certificates, and the loss of much time that was spent in the fruitless endeavor to bring cases of such error within the administrative ruling referred to.”8 He also emphasized the contradictory standards for naturalization that had emerged: “We have the Supreme Court [in Johannessen v. United States,]9 saying in effect to alien candidates for citizenship ‘at your risk, you must comply with all the requirements of the law; otherwise your certificate is worthless,’ while the administrative ruling says ‘unless you are personally unfit to be an American citizen, your certificate shall not be questioned, although you may not have complied in all respects with the law.’ ”10 For Campbell, in the end, “the obvious remedy for this condition is to place the control of this provision of the law in this bureau.”11
Congress heard Campbell’s pleas—in part because, since 1914, his Bureau of Naturalization had become increasingly popular as a facet of the Americanization campaign developing across the country through the efforts of various civil society organizations.12 Raymond Crist, the Deputy Commissioner of the Naturalization Bureau, endorsed with enthusiasm the idea of Clarence N. Goodwin, a naturalization judge from Chicago, to provide applicants for citizenship with civic education and training. Woodrow Wilson agreed to preside over the first national large-scale Americanization event on May 10, 1915, in Philadelphia, attended by more than fifteen thousand people. Building on the momentum of this event, the Bureau contracted with state and local governments, schools, and organizations to provide them with civic education resources. By linking itself with a national citizenship education program, the Bureau was able to gain greater public legitimacy while also promoting its goals of standardizing and enforcing the uniform Federal naturalization application process. Congress backed the Bureau and increased its appropriation so that it could better fulfill its new patriotic tasks. And on May 9, 1918, Congress passed a bill giving the Commissioner of the Bureau of Naturalization his long-sought-after concurrent authority with U.S. attorneys to institute proceedings to cancel certificates of citizenship.13
The Bureau of Naturalization had triumphed. Twelve years after the passage of the 1906 Act, “by successive steps full authority commensurate with its responsibility has been conferred upon one administrative officer, under the supervision of one department, to supervise and administer the ‘uniform’ rule of naturalization authorized by our organic law, the Federal Constitution.”14 Back in 1905, the Purdy Commission had proposed to preserve the competence of the courts for naturalization, not because it was the best method for minting new citizens (“experience has shown that they are a very defective machinery for the purpose”),15 but because no preferable alternatives were available. Campbell’s ambition had been to build that missing institution, and he was succeeding.
In addition, since 1906, the courts had endorsed the denaturalization provisions of the 1906 Naturalization Act almost entirely without reservation. The courts cast aside challenges to the Act’s constitutionality that alleged that it operated as retroactive or ex post facto legislation and deprived defendants of their right to a trial by jury.16 In United States v. Mansour in 1908,17 for instance, a federal judge found that denaturalization cases were considered to lie in “equity” rather than to constitute civil or criminal legal proceedings. Therefore, they were not covered by the Constitution’s Sixth and Seventh Amendment guarantees of the availability of jury trials.18
Just four years later, the Supreme Court held, in Johannessen v. United States,19 that Congress could authorize the government to bring a separate suit attacking the validity of a naturalized American’s citizenship. Because naturalization proceedings were, before 1906, “ex parte”—involving only a judge and an individual seeking citizenship—no legal principles prevented the government from bringing an adversarial suit later in order to revoke the original judgment granting citizenship. The Johannessen Court also rejected the argument that the 1906 Naturalization Act was an unconstitutional ex post facto law, finding that the statute “makes nothing fraudulent or unlawful that was honest and lawful when it was done.” A certificate of citizenship, the Court found, should be considered an instrument conferring certain political privileges that could be revoked, like grants of public land, in situations where it was unlawfully or fraudulently obtained.
The Court confirmed the Johannessen ruling in the 1917 case United States v. Ness for naturalizations obtained after 1906.20 In Ness the Court decided that the presence of a U.S. attorney as a party to a naturalization proceeding (under Section 11 of the Naturalization Act) did not prevent the United States from initiating a separate denaturalization proceeding (under Section 15), when an individual’s citizenship