Mr. MASON. I admit that your method of handing out derivative citizenship proof is to get one, although it is rather difficult in many instances, to meet the requirements to receive one. This bill simply provides that the officer of the court shall take the records of the court, and if the record shows that the parent of this person has received a certificate of citizenship, all he does then is to make out a copy of that certificate and give it to that child. He does not certify that the child is the legal child of the father; he does not certify that the parents were married, and therefore, and so forth, and so on. He does not certify to anything like that, but he does certify to the fact that the father was made a citizen in this court as shown by the records on page so and so, and hands that copy to the person applying, provided, of course, that he proves that he is the person entitled to the certificate. That is all this bill does, and I do not see that it conflicts at all with the requirements for derivative citizenship.

Mr. SHOEMAKER. May I say this, in answer to that?

Mr. MASON. Yes.

Mr. SHOEMAKER. That is a fact, but it would not be any the less evidence of citizenship. It bears no identification marks, and to all intents and purposes, when a person produces such a paper signed by the clerk of the court, it is accepted for all general purposes. Mr. MASON. And should be.

Mr. SHOEMAKER. No, sir. I do not think so.

Mr. RAMSAY. Why should you not go there and get a copy? Mr. SHOEMAKER. It opens an awful field for fraud, I should say. Mr. RAMSAY. Let me ask you. Where the court granted the papers, isn't the court more likely to know who the persons are? The clerk in most instances knows these people and has been raised with them. You do not know them at all. You know it is a little ways from over Columbus to come to Washington and get a paper to show that he is actually a citizen. If you are going to do that, you ought to let the courts in the community handle it, so that these people will have an opportunity or a chance.

Usually a man only gets up against that when a registrar comes around. Maybe he has not been around for 20 years, and then the registrar will come along and say, "What have you to show that you have any papers?" "I have not got anything. I have been registered for 20 years here and everybody knows me." "Then I cannot register you," and then he has to come over here, and before he gets through that process the election is over and another one is on.

Mr. SHOEMAKER. In answer to that, I should say this, that no one should come to Washington to get a derivative citizenship.

Mr. ALLEN. I would like to have Mr. Shoemaker tell us in a nutshell just how much trouble it is.

Mr. SHOEMAKER. Let us take a child who claims to have derived citizenship through his father. One of the things that we ask him to do is to produce a birth certificate. If he is not able to secure. a birth certificate, and frequently he is not, we accept secondary evidence for that, and that runs along this line. If the parents be living we secure a statement from them, and if neither person is living, we secure it from the older brothers and sisters, and if he had an honorable discharge certificate in a foreign army, we accept that,

but in any event we always have in mind the purpose of the derivative citizenship law, and we try to give him evidence if it is possible, but we are not going to give him evidence if we are not satisfied. Mr. ALLEN. But does he not have to come here?

Mr. SHOEMAKER. He does not have to come here.

Mr. ALLEN. And he does not have to hire a lawyer?

Mr. SHOEMAKER. He does not have to hire a lawyer. Our examiners attend to all matters of that sort for him. Those cases are handled through examiners.

Mr. BECKWORTH. What weight would you give to one of these clerks of a court?

Mr. SHOEMAKER. I have been here in the Department for many years and know the clerks are not in a position to judge citizenship. and I would not give it any weight at all, but that is my personal opinion.

Mr. RAMSAY. Why would not the clerk be in a better position than the clerks of the Federal courts?

Mr. SHOEMAKER. Because he is not in a position to know.

Mr. RAMSAY. He is every day in a court, and he is very much more qualified than the Commissioner or a notary public, yet he can do all of these things, and it is all right, but you say a clerk cannot do it, and the clerk perhaps knows more law than many lawyers that come into his court.

Mr. PHEIFFER. As a practical proposition, Mr. Shoemaker, don't you think that the chance of fraud or independent error would be minimized by having the clerk, who is in a position to personally interview each of these applicants, and see the color of their eyes, and in many cases he has known them all of their lives, to pass on that, rather than to have it passed on by correspondence between the applicant and the Department here in Washington?

Mr. SHOEMAKER. There is no case that is passed on by correspondence. Each one of these persons is interviewed personally by our examiners. There is no certificate issued without that.

Mr. PHEIFFER. I have in mind this hypothetical case. Suppose you have some applicant who writes in, he lives in a town where there is no examiner, it would work a hardship on him even to have to travel to another county seat or to the State capital to see the examiner; it would cost the Government money to send the examiner to see him. In those cases, how would you arrange for him to be seen?

Mr. SHOEMAKER. If the man lives away from the county seat, our man frequently drops over and takes the statements of the individuals involved, and that frequently refers to the mother and father and other persons, as I referred to a few minutes ago.

Mr. MASON. Let me tell you of a real case, and not a hypothetical case, which has now been settled, I believe. It is a case of a boy who has passed through schools and has always been voting, and he is a skilled mechanic in one of the factories in Detroit where they are engaged on war orders. He was called in, and they said, "We want proof of your citizenship." He could not give the proof. He tried to get from the county records a copy of his father's certificate of citizenship, which made him automatically a citizen. He was denied, because they said they did not have the power to issue a copy. He applied for this derivative citizenship, and in the meantime his job

and position were held in abeyance. He was told he would have to provide not only his birth certificate from Italy, but the marriage certificate of his parents. He wrote to Italy to get them. That was 8 or 9 months ago. He received it just this last week, so I was notified, which he now has filed and evidently will be cleared.

But there was 9 months in which he was held up in the air, afraid because of his job being at stake. He now has three or four children depending on him, and that could all have been simplified if, in the first place, the court officer had the power just to issue a duplicate copy of his father's papers.

Mr. ALLEN. Will the gentleman yield right there?

Mr. MASON. That is an actual case that has come to my attention. All this provides is to issue a duplicate copy of the father's papers. Mr. ALLEN. This goes further than that.

Mr. REES. Yes; it does.

Mr. MASON. That is all there is to it.

Mr. ALLEN. If you will read it you will see that it goes all the way. Mr. MASON. All the way to what? Just simply gives the officer of the court the power to issue a duplicate copy of the father's papers. That is all the bill does. It does not even certify that he is a citizen, or anything else.

Mr. REES. May I ask a question or make a comment?

The CHAIRMAN. Yes.

Mr. REES. Do you think that a man who just happened to have a copy of a certificate in some court, under the name of Mason, that that ought to identify him and give him citizenship? You do not think that?

Mr. MASON. That certainly would be accepted as proof of his citizenship.

Mr. PHEIFFER. It is like a certified copy of a marriage license. It is accepted as prima facie proof of the marriage.

Mr. MASON. Just a minute. I carry my father's certificate of citizenship. I have no proof that my father and mother were married; they were married back in Wales. I have no record of that. I could not prove that I was the child of that father and mother, if it came down to real proof, but I did live with them as their child for over 50 years. And there is the point. These technicalities, they accept my father's certificate just as they would accept a duplicate copy, if sworn to by the officer of the court, and authorized by the court on page so and so, volume so and so. There is a record which says that Mason, senior, was given citizenship in the year 1896.

Mr. RAMSAY. And all of the people in your community know you have lived there.

Why should a citizen of the United States spend 2 or 3 years to get a copy of his papers when the very clerk right where he lives now knew him as a boy and knows that he is entitled to those papers? Why should he be put to all of this trouble?

Mr. ALLEN. You do not say that he shall apply to the clerk where he lives, but he shall apply where the papers were issued.

Mr. MASON. That is the only place he can apply.

Mr. ALLEN. Suppose the record was in New York and the man lives in Texas, and he goes to New York, and you contend that the clerk knows him?

Mr. RAMSEY. That is true. No one has said that the clerk knows all of them. I do not suppose he knows all of them, but you take a city of four or five thousand inhabitants, and he does know all of them.

The CHAIRMAN. Suppose that this bill became a law, it would not interfere with the law as it now exists, would it?

Mr. SHOEMAKER. I should say not the slightest.
The CHAIRMAN. One is independent of the other.
Mr. MASON. One is in addition to the other.

Mr. SHOEMAKER. The thought that we had in mind, that we felt should be communicated to the committee, was this, that this is one of the features which is usually taken care of in connection with an application for a derivative certificate, and, to all intents and purposes, if that certificate was issued by the clerk of the court, it would carry weight or evidence that such individual is a citizen.

Mr. Mason referred to the case of an individual. I could refer to plenty of cases. I recall during the last war, for instance, that certificates were issued somewhat along this line by the clerk of the United States Federal court at Philadelphia. They carried no particular remarks as to the individual. Í happened to be the officer in charge of that district at the time. Many of these people were working in the munitions plants in and around Philadelphia, and there were instances where the plants were blown up, and as I say, I was in charge of that Philadelphia office at that time, and I was interviewed by more than one Government agent who was particularly concerned with individuals who got citizenship certificates and would go into the plant and work their own will. That is what we are afraid of.

The CHAIRMAN. Suppose A, the father, became a citizen, and had children under the age of 21. One of the children, let us assume, is 30 years of age today. All he wants to prove is that his father was a citizen, that he was under the age of 21 at the time that his father became naturalized, and that he was a legal resident in the country; what escape could there be for the clerk of that court to issue a certificate that John Brown was a citizen? Would there be any?

Mr. SHOEMAKER. There would be no difficulty so far as you are concerned. There would be no difficulty so far as the immigration and naturalization was concerned, and there would be no difficulty so far as the clerk of the court was concerned. And in many other instances that evidence is accepted.

The CHAIRMAN. By whom is it accepted?

Mr. SHOEMAKER. By individuals as evidence of citizenship.

Mr. MASON. That is what the person wants it for.

Mr. SHOEMAKER. I understand, and that is the thing we fear, because to the person who accepts that there is no indication or certainty that such person is a citizen. Frequently he is not, although he claims to be.

Mr. RAMSEY. That would be true of a man who has papers. Mr. SHOEMAKER. No, because that is a certificate which imports verity. That would not be so in such a case.

Mr. RAMSAY. A man goes to be registered maybe a month before the election. He has voted for years as a citizen. He gets in an

altercation about it, and he has got to come to your Department in Washington, and it is probably 6 months before he gets it, and he would not have a chance to vote.

Mr. SHOEMAKER. I can answer that if you wish me to.
Mr. RAMSAY. Go ahead.

Mr. SHOEMAKER. I say that cases of that kind are very infrequent, and there should not be any difficulty at all. Suppose, for instance, someone challenges my vote. That matter can very easily be taken to the court and the court can decide that without the issuance of a certificate of citizenship.

Mr. RAMSAY. That is what I am trying to do, to avoid putting American citizens to that kind of trouble. I do not think that he should be obliged to go before a court and do this and that and the other in order to prove citizenship.

Mr. SHOEMAKER. Would not that apply to me, who was born in the United States?

Mr. RAMSAY. You would never be challenged as a citizen.

Mr. SHOEMAKER. I might be. I cannot produce a certificate of birth, and I would be challenged the same as in the case you refer to.

Mr. PHEIFFER. Would this observation or comment help any at all? Of course, I am mindful of the fact that the Department is very scrupulous, as it should be, in issuing proof of derivative citizenship, but under any law such as this, which calls for administrative processes, could not the Department get out an instruction sheet to your clerks of court, every clerk in the country of courts having jurisdiction over naturalization matters, and say the proof that is acceptable is as follows: You should inquire into their identity first; you should inquire into their residence; you should have the cooperative proof of one or two reputable citizens of the community, and so forth and so on. In that way the clerk is put on notice, and he is further, by the terms of the act itself, given notice that if he, knowing the facts, is a party to the issuance of any false certificate, he is going to be facing the court and that there is a penalty provided for that.

I am very much impressed with the argument that the proper place to receive a copy is from the source from which it originally issues. There is the fountainhead of the whole thing, and, of course, there is no sure method of preventing fraud from creeping into any function of our Government. We are going to have that; we always have had it, but I think it is just a mere infinitesimal precaution as compared to the general picture, and I just believe that this matter is right in principle to facilitate the issuance of this proof.

Mr. REES. If we all follow your argument, then the least you can do would be to have the judge of the court to pass on it-he is the one who granted it. The clerk did the clerical work, and then the least you can do is to have the judge of the court pass on it after having some kind of a hearing. I suggested that the other day, but it did not seem to strike approval.

Mr. LESINSKI. May I ask a question?

The CHAIRMAN. Surely.

Mr. LESINSKI. Isn't it a fact that in the particular towns and districts where you have surveys, that they have better records than you yourself have in Washington, say from 1880 to 1890?

Mr. SHOEMAKER. I would say prior to the time we took administrative control, prior to 1896; yes.