FORMS OF PETTY GRAFT
This sort of thing leads also to another evil, inevitable in such an atmosphere. Petty officers of the court, policemen and others having the run of the building, will tyrannize over the crowds of aliens awaiting attention, and will pretend to have, or actually will exercise, the power to put one person ahead of another or otherwise effect an unfair discrimination in favor of those who will pay something for the advantage. In one court there was found a definite arrangement with a neighboring saloonkeeper, who collected the bribes for a guard in the Federal building. The Naturalization Service has been assiduous in its discouragement of this sort of thing, and has had a good measure of success upon the minor grafters; but as the law reads at present it can use only moral suasion upon the clerks of courts to induce them to spend the retained share of the fees for the purpose for which the retention obviously was authorized—the bona-fide employment of the extra clerical force needed to handle the naturalization business.
The “moral suasion” business, however, has its limitations. While the chief naturalization examiners, in charge of the districts in the field, usually are on cordial terms with the clerks of their various courts, the relations between the clerks and the office of the bureau at Washington, maintained almost exclusively by correspondence, with that correspondence almost invariably growing out of some complaint or dereliction on the part of the clerk, are not always so happy. The clerk has to send to Washington for all his supplies of blanks and other stationery used in the naturalization business. In one of the largest cities in the country there was a delay of weeks in getting certain supplies from Washington, and the petitioners suffered accordingly. The whole naturalization service is habitually short-handed and correspondingly overworked; but the penalty for the delays falls upon the head of the petitioner for naturalization. When a clerk of a small court, or a large one, has not on hand the blank forms upon which his declaration or petition must be written in order to be valid, the alien, who may have traveled with his witnesses scores of miles to file his paper, must return to his home and wait some more. This is an occurrence by no means infrequent.
Penalties are provided by law against clerks who fail to send punctually to Washington the required periodical reports and duplicates of papers. The Naturalization Bureau has been reluctant to attempt enforcement of these penalties—it is a bit drastic to fine a clerk $25 for a little delay in transmitting papers—and usually has been content to send an examiner to the court to get the material. But the correspondence growing out of such delays, and out of the effort to induce clerks to spend their retained share of the fees for clerical assistance, has added acerbity in many instances to the irksomeness of a task “not appurtenant to the office of clerk of court.”
Small irritations also add friction. For example, the clerk is required to send his reports and papers by registered mail; there is no provision to reimburse him for this; he can put in an expense bill—and maybe get it after a long delay. This is exasperating, whether one’s annual share of fees in a small office amounts to $10 or $3,000. There was a clerk in California who declined to answer letters or have anything further to do with the Bureau after he thought he had been badly treated in some such matter; he induced the judge of his court to relinquish naturalization jurisdiction, and then wrote to the Bureau that it could have the records in his custody if it would send for them. The Bureau has a highly detached, impersonal style of correspondence, admirably adapted to alienate human sentiment and blight human interest.