Naturalization fraud was not a new phenomenon in nineteenth-century America, but it reached its peak in New York City in the November 3, 1868, election that placed Ulysses S. Grant in the presidency. In October 1868 alone, fifty-four thousand foreigners were naturalized in New York City by only two judges.¹ Grant ultimately lost the state by ten thousand votes to his opponent Democrat Horatio Seymour, a New York governor. A senatorial inquiry later showed that, in addition to New York, the Democrats won three other states—New Jersey, Georgia, and Louisiana—through fraud.²

In response, the Republican leadership in Congress...

The chief examiner of the Naturalization Service, Morris Bevington, described the pre-1906 naturalization process in St. Louis as follows: “Before elections, the ward leaders would drum up all the alien residents of their particular districts, and herd them together before some one of the courts, and have naturalization papers issued to them, usually ‘minor papers.’ They were entirely innocent of any wrongdoing and more often secured naturalization against their own will, and most reluctantly. They were simply coerced by American citizens, who wanted their votes and who had a stronger will power than they themselves possessed.”²

As the 1909 circular...

Nonetheless, in the period between the 1926 amendments to the Naturalization Act and the outbreak of World War II, denaturalization was at its peak. The number of revocations of citizenship averaged about a thousand a year between 1935 and 1941, reflecting three historical phenomena.

First, the Bureau of Naturalization continued to be vigilant in ensuring that state courts respected the requirements of federal naturalization laws. Thomas Ellis Isaac, for instance, was naturalized on March 18, 1926, at the Court of Common Pleas for Clarendon County, South Carolina. But the Court of Common Pleas had not been authorized to conduct naturalizations...

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 1912, a few years after Emma Goldman’s denaturalization, Leonard Oleson was denaturalized on new legal grounds—“lack of attachment” to the U.S. Constitution. On September 21, 1910, the chief naturalization examiner in Seattle requested that the U.S. attorney institute a denaturalization proceeding.¹ During his hearing, Oleson denied that he was an anarchist or opposed to organized government. He declared himself a socialist, “willing for people to retain their money, but insisting that all the land, buildings and industrial institutions should become the common property of all the people.” Oleson declared that this object could be attained “by the power...

One provision of the 1906 Act had already addressed the issue of a naturalized citizen taking up permanent residence in another country in the five years following naturalization. This would serve “as ‘prima facie’ evidence of a lack of intention … to become a permanent citizen of the United States.”¹

At the request of the State Department, but over the objection of the majority of the Purdy Commission, which was unwilling to foster statelessness,² if newly naturalized citizens took up residence abroad within five years of becoming citizens, this would be considered evidence of a lack of intention. Many newly...

On February 12, 1918, the chief examiner of the local Bureau of Naturalization in St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote the Washington office that a judge in Wisconsin had “informed him that he had a number of cases in his circuit of naturalized Germans who were known to be disloyal,” and that he had “contemplated the practicability of making an order cancelling their naturalization on that ground.” The bureau acknowledged that “thus far [it] has had only two or three cases of this kind reported by the Chief Examiners.” Still, to the bureau, the danger was real: “Perhaps it may be of...

On June 21, 1943, three months after Dewey Balch submitted his report on internal security measures to James Rowe Jr., the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a five-to-three decision in the case of Schneiderman v. United States.¹ Born in Russia in 1905, William Schneiderman came to the United States when he was three years old. In 1922, he became a charter member of the Young Workers (later Communist) League in Los Angeles. He served as educational director of the League from 1922 to 1925 and became its official spokesman in 1928. In 1924, at the age of eighteen, Schneiderman filed...

Schneiderman v. United States was the first case in which the Supreme Court ruled on a charge that a naturalized American lacked attachment to his or her new country. The decision was a blow for the government and for the Denaturalization Program, and Dewey Balch, the head of the program within the Criminal Division, was pessimistic: “I believe that we cannot escape the fact that the Supreme Court has clearly shown a reluctance to cancel naturalization and has imposed a burden upon the government which will make it difficult, if not impossible, to prevail in a very large number of...

The Supreme Court would soon confirm that, in spite of its vastly diminished impact, denaturalization was still dividing the court. On the one end, it was still possible to be denaturalized. In 1943, the U.S. government had filed a suit against Paul Knauer, a German American member of the Bund.¹ Born in 1895, Knauer had fought for the German Empire in World War I. He came to the United States in 1925 and became a citizen in 1937, at a time when Hitler was already ruling Germany. In contrast to Baumgartner, Knauer was an active pro-Hitler leader before his naturalization....

Just when the Cold War was at its coldest, a battle exploded in the Supreme Court soon after Earl Warren was appointed chief justice.¹ In 1955, in a unanimous per curiam decision,² the Court for the first time applied to denationalization cases the heightened standard of proof required in every denaturalization case since Schneiderman.

The case concerned Daniel Gonzales, born in New Mexico in 1924 to two Mexican citizens. When he reached the age of two, Gonzales was taken by his parents to Mexico, where he lived until 1946. Although Gonzales did not remember living in America as an infant,...

There would be no break in the battle brewing on the Supreme Court. On April 7, 1958, one week after deciding Trop and Perez, the Court remanded another expatriation case—Mendoza-Martinez—for reconsideration in light of Trop.¹ Francisco Mendoza-Martinez was born in the United States in 1922 “and therefore acquired American citizenship by birth.”² Under Mexican law, he was also a Mexican citizen, and in 1942, Mendoza-Martinez moved there in order to avoid serving in the U.S. military during World War II. In November 1946, he returned to the United States, was convicted by a federal court in 1947 of...