Citizenship

Citizenship has a range of meanings in American political culture. It can signify an individual’s legal and political standing or his or her national origin or allegiance; refer to practices regarding civic duty and political participation; specify eligibility for the benefits or responsibilities of citizens; or denote a sense of belonging and formal membership in a community. In its early history, citizenship in the United States was largely determined by state, not national, laws. State legislatures wrote the laws delineating the economic and social rights of citizens and established the rules for voting and political participation. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments changed that by asserting national rights in their provisions for equal protection, due process, and African-American suffrage. Still, the practice of citizenship was governed less by rules than by informal customs and practices until the 20th century.

For most of the nation’s history, native-born white men had broad legal rights of property and contract and almost

Universal access to the ballot. Women and minority and immigrant men, in contrast, had fewer political and economic rights and almost no political standing. While the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship expanded in the first three decades of the 20th century to include not only legal and political rights but access to social entitlements, women and minority men gained access to these rights only as a result of persistent political agitation and protest. For immigrant men and women, however, the history of citizenship over the same 30 years was especially volatile. Immigration had been largely unrestricted, with the exception of the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882. With the establishment of the Immigration Restriction League in 1894, however, campaigns to reduce immigration and narrow the grounds for citizenship met with growing success. New immigration laws, such as the Anarchist Immigration Act (1903), and the Immigration Act oe 1917 changed the rules about who was allowed to enter the United States. Asian immigration was formally barred; alien radicals were subject to deportation, and the Immigration Act of 1917 created a literacy test for those wishing to relocate in the United States. Efforts to redirect and reduce immigration culminated in the passage of the 1921 Quota Act and the 1924 National Origins Act, which severely restricted the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and reinforced older bans on Asian immigration. Along with the tightening of regulations for immigration, there were changes in naturalization laws and more rigorous scrutiny when resident aliens applied for citizenship.

Political citizenship in terms of the right to vote was fairly informal and open to white men of most communities prior to 1900. The rules regarding who was allowed to vote were more notable in their broad exclusions (of women, for example) than for how voters should register or record their ballots. Voting began to change in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when, in the South, legislatures passed voting laws that newly excluded African Americans and poor white men, by means of poll taxes, literacy tests, and infamous “grandfather clauses,” which prohibited anyone who had not voted in the 1860 election and their linear descendents from voting. Such restrictions were not unique to the South, although it had, by far, the most racially restrictive public laws. Legal segregation in public transportation and services underwrote the second-class citizenship of African Americans in the region, and laws that severely restricted voting only confirmed their status. By the 1890s, many northern state legislatures also revised rules and procedures for voting, introducing the Australian, or secret, ballot on the one hand but also new restrictions of voter eligibility on the other. Partially as a result of these new laws, voter participation among men dropped precipitously in the early 20th century. At the same time, these were the decades during which the long battle for WOMAN SUFFRAGE finally achieved its objective.

Political participation through voting and political office was and is only one aspect of citizenship. Being a citizen, especially a male citizen, meant not only rights but obligations to pay taxes and perform jury duty and service in the militia. By the 20th century, state militias were chiefly voluntary; but the coming of World War I brought military conscription for men. In response to President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of war, Congress passed the Selective Service Act of 1917. Military service became a means for the Americanization of young immigrant and ethnic men; it also stirred demands for greater equality among African Americans in the aftermath of the war. Veterans of the war demanded more from their governments on returning home than they had before their service, and veterans’ organizations such as the American Legion played an increasing role in government foreign policy as well.

The charged political atmosphere during the war focused on the continued presence and influence of “hyphenated Americans” and radical aliens in the country. Pressure to conform to American standards, to bar or confine the teaching and use of languages other than American English, and to either reorganize or disband ethnic organizations in the name of national unity led to new efforts to assimilate those immigrants already in the United States. Americanization campaigns and local Americanization committees sought to influence and transform school curricula, pressure resident aliens to take citizenship papers or to leave the country, and influence employers to provide programs to educate immigrant workers. The Red Scare that followed the war sought to control public opinion, suppress radical organization, and promote conservative patriotism as the true expression of citizenship.

The years from 1900 to 1930 slowly expanded the definition of citizenship by creating new rights and entitlements. Social citizenship in the United States, however, lagged behind European nations in how the nation provided for the unemployed, sick, and injured. New government programs, most organized at the state level, such as mothers’ pensions and workmen’s compensation, addressed a specific population and severely restricted eligibility. The only national program in place during the Progressive Era was the system of Civil War pensions. World War I veterans, in contrast, only became eligible for a future Soldiers’ Bonus with the passage of the Soldiers’ Adjusted Compensation Act in 1924.

Along with the reform of election and immigration laws, the long-awaited granting of woman suffrage and the reform of laws concerning married women’s citizenship in the Cable Act rationalized the eligibility for and content of American citizenship. While the new laws excluded specific groups from entry into the country and/or eligibility for national citizenship, immigration law now clarified the barriers to entry and participation. Moreover, the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote removed the single most important exclusion from equal citizenship in a democracy. State laws and local ordinances continued to regulate and restrict political and economic participation by minority groups, but the overall impact of the Progressive Era legislation was to formalize the laws governing citizenship and to expand its meaning in economic and political life.

See also civil liberties; elections; politics;

Race and racial conflict.

Further reading: Martha Gardner, The Quali-ties of a Citizen: Women, Immigration and Citizenship, 1870-1965 (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Derek Heater, A Brief History of Citizenship (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Immigrants and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).