The acceptance of banknotes, their circulation amongst strangers, therefore, demanded the acknowledgment of a new model of communication.With over five thousand different state bank notes circulating during the course of the nineteenth century, this was a useful skill to acquire.25 It was made all the more crucial given the claim by one newspaper that in 1862 counterfeits existed of notes issued by all but 253 of the 1,389 state banks.26 Aside from what people could find out from the trial and error of personal use, numerous newspaper articles and political tracts were written to help in the quick recognition of telltale signs of a counterfeit note.The federal government, like a bank owner, was in some ways a stranger in the lives of its citizens, even if only to the extent to which hostility to centralized power continued to exist.The government employed a variety of strategies to impose order over the historically chaotic circulation of paper money.These changes had increased the variety of notes in circulation, making it harder to recognize a counterfeit bill.The passport followed a similar gradual path to becoming a standardized document.The increasingly standardized appearance of the passport, as with currency, had the negative effect of increasing the possibility of fraud.Another tactic was to alter a legitimate passport either purchased or obtained through theft, and in the case of purported Bolsheviks from passports issued to American citizens sympathetic to the cause.35By the 1930s the State Department regularly prepared detailed internal reports on techniques used to illegally produce or alter its passports.Passports issued abroad were often loosely constructed, thus producing a potentially fragile identification document.In the late 1920s the State Department still had to send reprimands to consuls for issuing passports with unclear seals or for attaching passport photographs with metal clips.39 The consul in Panama was also asked to stop using a typewriter to fill in passports.Such a request makes clear the ongoing negotiation over standardization in terms of conflicting understandings of trust in its more traditional personal and newer impersonal form.Shipley proved to be surprisingly successful in this campaign, considering that no federal law prohibited the reproduction of the passport, in part or whole, for nonfraudulent use.41 Offenders used the image of a passport in print advertisements and window displays.The Passport Division’s monopoly on the production of passports had only recently been challenged in any significant way through fraud.2NameIn 1885 an attorney wrote to the State Department arguing his client should not need to get a new naturalization certificate issued to support his passport application.The department had rejected the application because the name on the naturalization certificate was spelled differently than the name on the application and other accompanying documents.The attorney argued that there are so many ways of spelling names that this mistake can easily occur, each one thinks his way is the proper one, the Clerk thinks John Schaffer is right I think John Schaffeur [?] is right and still others may have their way of spelling this name and all believe they are right.1 Irrespective of his motivation, the attorney’s argument for discounting the misspelling of his client’s name on a naturalization certificate is only plausible in an environment in which a person’s written name is not standardized and where an individual is not identified consistently in and through documents.A person was known and recognized through the dependability of his or her presence and appearance.Consistent with such identification practices, John S__’s attorney tried to use his local knowledge as evidence to support the passport application.He stated that he was present in the courtroom at the time of his client’s naturalization.While there is no record of a response to this letter, it is doubtful either of these arguments brought the attorney or his client any success.In official identification this became the belief that to know and subsequently recognize its citizens the government of the United States needed to fix or stabilize an identity.While a personal name composed of a first or baptismal name and a family name was an established custom in the United States, the bureaucratic demand for consistent spelling to assist in the articulation of identity and information was less accepted.These instructions included a new requirement that the signature to the application and oath of allegiance should conform in orthography to that in the naturalization paper. The ongoing need for such a directive is evident in the above letter, which arrived in the department twelve years after this instruction appeared.2That the State Department had to issue such an instruction in the last quarter of the nineteenth century may seem odd nowadays when the obvious necessity of the personal name for daily social interactions tends to naturalize its function as an identification technology.While the stabilization of the name followed different legal paths in Germany than in France, it did so as part of the ongoing development of registration and identity cards.In contrast, in England the personal name was understood to be a matter of common law, not the domain of written law.This English tradition carried over to the United States, where the legal stabilization of the personal name developed not through specific laws but by way of customs and uses, and through the doctrines implicit in court decisions based on them.The small size and scope of the federal government relative to those of European states also produced a context in which the administrative reach of the federal government remained limited regardless of any official desire to more fully know the population.Therefore, in the United States the stabilization of surnames came later than in most European states.This affects the nature of the move from the customary stabilization to the legal immutability of names.In an attempt to enforce the complicated identity categories used in the legislation that excluded some but not all Chinese, the Immigration Bureau came to see the need for a comprehensive system to record Chinese names consistently.In one case officials could not issue a certificate to an applicant they considered entitled to the document because they could not locate his original entry file owing to the multiple spellings of the name Louie Fong. Officials came up with four possible spellings of his name and found four possible matches, but other Chinese immigrants who had claimed the identity Louie Fong had already used those files.7 Situations like this occurred for a number of reasons.With little or no knowledge of Chinese, immigration inspectors could only approximate a spelling in English as they tried to comprehend Chinese tonal nuances.An even greater problem occurred when inspectors sought to write a name in English when the only documents provided used Chinese characters.These language barriers could be further compounded by lack of awareness of Chinese naming practices.The most frequent source of confusion involved the sequence of names.In other cases inspectors did not understand the customs that enabled an individual to claim multiple names, such as a family name and a marriage name.