century the answer to these questions changed, as State Department staff increased in size and adopted administrative practices that can be recognized as bureaucratic.These changes were typical for government departments in this period.However, their consequences for the passport were significant.The standardization of the personal name, signature, physical description, photograph, application, and appearance of the passport can all be viewed as a consequence of the broader development of bureaucracy.The changing designations of the clerks and officials responsible for the passport further illustrate how a developing bureaucracy was utilized in an attempt to improve the processing of the document.1 Before 1806, it appears that the chief clerk issued passports.In 1818 an executive order was issued that specifically stated the duties and salaries of a number of clerks.The production of all credentials and certificates, including the few hundred passports issued annually now became the responsibility of a junior clerk.Bureaus and divisions were established in 1833 in response to an increase in the number of clerks in the State Department to a dozen.In this structure, the Translating and Miscellaneous Bureau initially issued passports, before the Home Bureau took responsibility for what in the 1830s was an annual average of close to a thousand passports.Over the next two decades the number of clerks in the State Department continued to increase.The same bureau continued to issue passports until 1898, when the passport clerks were moved to the Bureau of Accounts when it became responsible for collecting passport fees.In 1902, with the State Department receiving over ten thousand applications annually the issuance of passports became the responsibility of a separate bureau with multiple staff members.While bureaucracy increases control by improving the capability to process information, rationalization increases control through decreasing the amount of information to be processed.3 The dependence on standardized documents, along with the policing of the personal name, signature, physical description, and photograph, are all ways in which the passport was altered to produce a more rational identity.In this manner the reliability of identification that came to depend on a belief in the objectivity and neutrality of bureaucratic procedures over the subjectivity and discretion of individual action was directed not only at applicants but also officials.Bureaucratic rationality was the logic that, consciously or not, drove the transformation of the passport into a modern identification document.This new form of identity made it possible for people to think that it could in fact be documented accurately.While attempts were made to standardize identification techniques to assist in the verification of identity, bureaucratic rationality was equally important in the rethinking of identity as the collection of information, if not more so.Therefore, a fuller appreciation of the novelty of the assumption that identity could be documented requires locating the passport within the equally novel and contested introduction and implementation of bureaucracy in the second half of the nineteenth century.Bureaucracies of some sort had existed in a variety of forms in the West from at least Roman times, but they lacked the distinct structures and specialization of tasks that came to characterize the modern form of bureaucracy that emerged to organize and administer commerce and government in the era of industrialization.5 The reorganization of the State Department into bureaus in the 1830s is an example of how a more modern bureaucratic practice began to appear in the federal government.The move in little over a decade from a junior clerk with multiple responsibilities to different bureaus signaled an attempt to create a more clearly defined administrative structure to process information.Previously, the creation of documents was arranged around the act of writing, but with the introduction of bureaus the content of documents became the formal organizing principle that determined which clerk prepared a document.6 This was a response to the increasing size of government and with it the number of documents produced.However, while the federal government increased in size in the early decades of the nineteenth century in 1831 only 665 civilians ran all three branches of government in the nation’s capital.The dramatic increase in size occurred throughout the rest of the century.By the 1880s there were approximately thirteen thousand civilian employees, and twice that number a decade later, although a majority of those worked outside of the capital in the postal service.7 By this point the growth of government offices had prompted experimentation with more bureaucratic methods of administration and evaluation.However, a few years after the passage of this reform, work within departments and bureaus remained sufficiently fluid that the majority of those in charge could not tell a select committee exactly what duties each worker performed.11The State Department fits into this hesitant adoption of bureaucratic methods and new office technologies that were intended to facilitate an efficient, modern office environment.Hunter became second assistant secretary of state in 1853, a position formerly known as chief clerk that had been changed with the creation of the position of assistant secretary of state.Adee, appointed to a temporary position in the State Department in 1877, succeeded Hunter and remained in that position until his death.Adee took on a similarly crucial role, described in 1915 by a colleague as the anchor of the State Department.15 His importance to the daily functioning of the department was recognized in the establishment of an Office of Coordination and Review in the