A further instance of the desire for additional powers, which characterizes the “personal equation” of the Naturalization Bureau, appears in a bill which was before Congress in the winter of 1919–20,[93] introduced by Representative Johnson of the state of Washington, which would have provided, among other things:
Sec. 4. That the promotion of the public schools in the training and instruction of candidates for citizenship, now being carried on by the Division of Citizenship Training of the Bureau of Naturalization, is hereby extended to include all persons of the age of eighteen years and upward, who shall attend classes of instruction conducted or maintained by any civic, educational, community, religious, racial, or other organization, under the supervision of the public-school authorities, and the provisions of the ninth subdivision of Section 4 of said Act are hereby made applicable to this added authority. In discharging this additional authority the Director of Citizenship is also authorized to disseminate information regarding the institutions of the United States government in such manner as will best stimulate loyalty to those institutions, making use of the means heretofore provided, and through the use of motion pictures. The motion pictures and motion-picture negatives in the possession of the various branches of the government shall also be available for these purposes. In this work the aid of civic, educational, community, religious, racial, and other organizations may be secured by the Division of Citizenship Training, in which statistical information shall be compiled as to aliens in their relation to citizenship. The foregoing shall apply to the residents of the Panama Canal Zone.
ENORMOUS ARREARAGE IN BUREAU’S WORK
From the very beginning of the activities of the Bureau, it has complained of its inability properly to perform its functions because of lack of clerical force; at the same time pointing out very appropriately that it was a good deal better than self-sustaining from the financial point of view.
Commissioner Campbell, in his annual report to the Secretary of Labor, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1911, said:
At all times the clerical force has been insufficient, even with the aid of temporary assignments from other offices of the Department, to keep up with current work. This has resulted in large undisposed accumulations of official papers; mortifying delays in making responses to letters from private individuals and public officials, the continuous exaction of labor from the clerks for long periods after the conclusion of the ordinary official hours, on holidays, and even on Sundays; and, consequently, impaired the accuracy and quality of the work actually accomplished.
The report for 1913 declares that such increase of personnel as had been allowed had “not been sufficient to accomplish anything in the way of bringing up the arrearages which have been steadily accumulating ever since the service was organized in 1907.” These arrearages were described as consisting of “unindexed and unexamined certificates of naturalization and declarations of intention,” and this condition prevailed, notwithstanding an average daily overtime estimate in hours, as equivalent to full time, of more than two persons (2.36). The report for 1914 acknowledged an increase of nine clerks, but stated that “the arrearages of work continued to increase.” So it goes on, the following report (1915) disclosing an arrearage of 346,762 declarations of intention and 395,719 certificates of naturalization unindexed, and thousands more of each unexamined. In the following year’s report is acknowledged the “elimination of the practice heretofore pursued of indexing separately the declarations, petitions, and certificates,” it having been found impossible, even with four more clerks, “to reduce the work that has fallen into arrears.” Yet in that same year’s report begin the ecstatic descriptions of a very wide expansion of activities in the field of education.
The seriousness of this curtailment of records at Washington—all but fatal to the individual alien who wants to prove something about his naturalization case by reference to such records—took on a public aspect with the operation of the Selective Service Act (the so-called “draft law”) when aliens, desiring exemption as such, began to assert to the local exemption boards that they never had declared intention to become American citizens. “The assistance of the Bureau is constantly invoked by the draft boards throughout the country for official report on the claims to exemption from military service by aliens who profess to have made no declaration of intention to become citizens,” says the opening page of the Commissioner’s report of July 1, 1918, notwithstanding the more ingenuous—not to say more truthful—confession of a year before that “The unavoidable abandonment of indexing declarations has made it impracticable to furnish information sought in regard to aliens claiming exemption from military service.”[94]
At the date of that report, there were, unexamined, in the Washington office 247,373 declarations and 480,553 certificates; one year later—owing, perhaps, largely to the vast and sudden addition of alien soldiers naturalized, and the business incidental thereto, if not quite as much to the absorption of the Bureau in its increasingly ambitious educational campaign—the arrearages had passed the half-million mark, with 628,713 declarations and 578,944 certificates of naturalization unexamined.
Not even by means of a complete, current, and up-to-date index of declarations could the Naturalization Bureau have proved whether or not any given alien ever had filed a declaration whose existence would indubitably entitle the United States to his military service, unless it included the absolutely impossible feature of a reference to every old, as well as new-law declaration. But such an index as might have been kept of declarations under the “new law” would have helped enormously. As it was the field force did its best, and ran down many cases through the records in the district offices and local courts.