New from Penn Press:
Patrick Weil,
The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic. It is part of the
Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism Series, edited by Rogers M. Smith and Mary Dudziak.
Here's a description, cribbed from the Press's
website:
Present-day Americans feel secure in their citizenship: they are free
to speak up for any cause, oppose their government, marry a person of
any background, and live where they choose—at home or abroad.
Denaturalization and denationalization are more often associated with
twentieth-century authoritarian regimes. But there was a time when
American-born and naturalized foreign-born individuals in the United
States could be deprived of their citizenship and its associated rights.
Patrick Weil examines the twentieth-century legal procedures, causes,
and enforcement of denaturalization to illuminate an important but
neglected dimension of Americans' understanding of sovereignty and
federal authority: a citizen is defined, in part, by the parameters that
could be used to revoke that same citizenship.
The Sovereign Citizen
begins with the Naturalization Act of 1906, which was intended to
prevent realization of citizenship through fraudulent or illegal means.
Denaturalization—a process provided for by one clause of the act—became
the main instrument for the transfer of naturalization authority from
states and local courts to the federal government. Alongside the
federalization of naturalization, a conditionality of citizenship
emerged: for the first half of the twentieth century, naturalized
individuals could be stripped of their citizenship not only for fraud
but also for affiliations with activities or organizations that were
perceived as un-American. (Emma Goldman's case was the first and perhaps
best-known denaturalization on political grounds, in 1909.) By
midcentury the Supreme Court was fiercely debating cases and challenged
the constitutionality of denaturalization and denationalization. This
internal battle lasted almost thirty years. The Warren Court's eventual
decision to uphold the sovereignty of the citizen—not the
state—secures our national order to this day. Weil's account of this
transformation, and the political battles fought by its advocates and
critics, reshapes our understanding of American citizenship.
And a few blurbs:
"One of the world's leading experts on nationality brilliantly
explores past campaigns to strip Americans of their citizenship. Patrick
Weil reveals how both bureaucratic rigor and national security zeal
threatened citizenship rights, and points to important lessons for
twenty-first century debates."—Gerald Neuman
"In
this masterful and timely book, Patrick Weil plunges deep into rarely
used archives to write a new history of the shaping of American identity
in the twentieth century, all the more important as we now debate the
reform of immigration law. This story of belonging and exile has its
heroes —defenders of civil liberties who deserve to be better known—and
its scoundrels. Unlike many histories, it has a heartening conclusion."
—Linda K. Kerber
The TOC is available
here.
