1929 US Passport Fees: Hanna’s $10 Revenue Critique
The Price of a US Passport in 1929: Ten Dollars and the Making of a Class Divide
Summary: In 1929, The Atlantic published a scathing essay by John Hanna titled “Passports for Revenue Only.” I keep coming back to this piece because it captures something collectors of this era rarely see spelled out so plainly: the moment the American passport stopped being a courtesy and became a toll booth. Hanna’s argument, stripped to its core, is that the United States had turned a government service into a tax on curiosity itself.
A young American graduate in 1929, freshly out of college and holding a modest gift from a relative, wanted to see Westminster Abbey, Montmartre, and the Roman Forum. Before he could set foot on a ship, his own government charged him ten dollars just to confirm who he was. Then Britain, France, and Italy each charged him ten dollars more to let him in. That is the scene John Hanna opens with in his 1929 Atlantic essay, and it is worth sitting with, because it is not really a story about travel. It is a story about who got to travel.
When a Passport Was a Letter of Trust
A century before Hanna wrote his essay, an American passport cost nothing and carried the weight of a personal introduction. When John Quincy Adams served as Secretary of State, he issued passports as a courtesy rather than a transaction, and one surviving example from his tenure reads less like a bureaucratic form and more like a letter of recommendation:
To all to whom these Presents shall come, Greeting: The Bearer hereof Luther Bradish, Esq., being about to visit different foreign countries with a view of gratifying a commendable curiosity, and of obtaining useful information, These are therefore, in a special manner, to request all whom it may concern, particularly all foreign States, Powers, or Potentates, and their officers, to permit the said Luther Bradish to pass freely without molestation, in going, staying, or returning, and to give him all friendly aid and protection, as these United States would do in like cases. In faith, etc., done, etc., 15th day of April 1820. (Signed) JOHN QUINCY ADAMS Secretary of State
That document, dated to the era of the Monroe Doctrine, is the baseline Hanna measures 1929 against. No fee, no application, just a Secretary of State vouching for a citizen’s “commendable curiosity.”
Ten Dollars for Permission to Be Yourself
By 1929, that same commendable curiosity cost real money at every border. Hanna uses Bradish’s fictional great-grandson to make the comparison concrete: an American graduate wanting to visit Britain, France, and Italy paid ten dollars to his own State Department for a passport, then ten dollars each to the British, French, and Italian governments for visas. The payoff for that forty-dollar outlay was an American passport valid for two years, British and Italian visas good for a year, and a French visa good for just two months.
Forty Dollars to Leave the Land of the Free
An American in 1929 paid roughly five times what a German citizen paid to see the same countries. Hanna lays the comparison out nation by nation, and the gap is stark. A German passport, valid for two years and renewable annually for three more at seventy-two cents a year, cost $1.20. British, French, and Italian visas ran $2.00 each for a German traveler, or as little as forty cents for an Italian visa if the applicant qualified as indigent. A British citizen’s passport cost $1.80 and lasted five years, renewable for a second five-year term at twenty-four cents annually. A Canadian passport cost $5.00 for five years, with a second five-year renewal at $2.00. French citizens paid $1.40 for a one-year passport, Italians $2.00.
Add it up and an American’s minimum passport and visa cost to visit the principal Allied and Associated Powers came to $40.00. A German covering the same ground, visiting the very countries that had been his wartime enemies a decade earlier, spent less than $8.00. Hanna even cites a Rhodes Scholar he knew personally, who spent $230.00 on passports and visas over three years at Oxford. A German Rhodes Scholar making the identical trip, Hanna calculates, would have spent about $25.00.
Stamped and Taxed: How the Passport Became a Revenue Tool
The State Department did not always charge for passports, and tracing when that changed tells you exactly how the fee became policy rather than accident. Passports were free until 1856, when a one-dollar charge appeared for passports issued abroad. By 1888, following a wartime spike to $5.00 during part of the Civil War and the inflationary years after, the standard fee had settled back to $1.00. A separate one-dollar application fee was added in 1917. Then, in 1920, the whole structure jumped to $10.00, split between a $1.00 application fee and $9.00 for the passport itself. Since 1926, the Secretary of State had discretion to extend the standard two-year passport for bona fide teachers at no extra cost, a narrow exception in an otherwise flat fee.
The scale of what this generated is the part that turns Hanna’s essay from grievance into indictment. The State Department issued roughly 200,000 passports a year, producing about $2,000,000 in annual revenue, a sum one third larger than the entire annual appropriation for the State Department itself. The Passport Bureau’s own appropriation was $63,000. Hanna’s conclusion is blunt: if the fee was meant to cover the cost of issuing an identification document, it was extortionate, and he goes further, calling it a tax on education, since the people paying it were disproportionately students and teachers who could least absorb the cost.
Passports: A Wartime Invention That Never Went Home
The passport as a compulsory travel document is younger than most collectors assume, and Hanna traces its lineage carefully. It was essentially unknown in the ancient and medieval world, where a stranger was treated as a potential enemy by default. Roman imperial couriers carried something like a safe-conduct entitling them to public horses, and similar papers occasionally marked royal favor. Germany developed an early passport system in the fifteenth century to manage the beggars and vagabonds displaced by religious wars. Louis XIV required travelers on the main post roads to carry passports, partly for revenue and partly, through the passeport des artisans, to stop skilled craftsmen from carrying trade secrets abroad.
By 1914, passport requirements had nearly vanished across the Continent, surviving mainly in Russia. Writers on international affairs confidently predicted no modern state could maintain such a system in peacetime. Then the war revived it. France’s wartime regulations traced back to an old 1792 law, while the United States relied on the 1798 Alien Act to control the conduct of alien enemies. Two passport conferences convened under the League of Nations, one in Paris and one in Geneva, both in 1920, and a further conference in 1926 drew delegates from thirty-eight states. The United States sent no representation, official or otherwise, to that 1926 conference, even as it leaned toward keeping passport requirements while working to abolish the visa. By the late 1920s, France required no visa from the nationals of twenty-seven countries, Britain from eleven, and Italy from seventeen, a reciprocal trend the United States sat out entirely.
Five Years of Sense: Hanna’s Modest Proposal
Hanna’s fix was not radical. He proposed cutting the American passport fee to $2.00, matching the visa charge, and extending validity from two years to five, the same term Britain, its Dominions, and several other nations had already adopted. He also floated separating passport visas from immigration visas entirely, arguing that reciprocal treaties could eliminate passport visas for the roughly half a million Americans traveling abroad each year without loosening any control over immigration. He conceded the idea would likely go nowhere, since it was too easy for opponents to misrepresent it as a relaxation of immigration control rather than what it actually was.
No Country, No Passport
The essay’s sharpest section has nothing to do with fees and everything to do with a legal trap Congress created in 1922. Under the nationality law of most nations at the time, a woman took her husband’s citizenship upon marriage. The United States broke from that convention in 1922: an alien woman marrying an American no longer automatically became a citizen, yet in nearly every case she still lost her original citizenship regardless of her wishes. The result was a woman with no passport available from either country.
If she wanted to travel to Europe with her husband, she first had to obtain a return permit from the Labor Department, valid for a year at $3.00, which no foreign consul would accept as a basis for a visa on its own. She then had to execute a sworn affidavit covering her name, residence, birth details, inability to obtain a passport, physical description with photograph, and the purpose of her trip, at a cost of $2.00 through a State Department officer or whatever a notary chose to charge. Hanna describes one consul accepting the affidavit while the next demanded it be re-executed over a trivial wording change, often by a specific notary conveniently recommended by someone in the consul’s office.
Even Switzerland, generally relaxed about passports, required a visa from a stateless person. Hanna’s example is pointed: a German or American crossing into Switzerland needed no visa, but a German woman married to an American, standing beside her husband at the same border without a Swiss visa on her affidavit, would be turned back while he passed through. And on returning to the United States, she owed an $8.00 head tax regardless of how long she had lived in the country, her husband’s status, or how many times she had entered before.
A Reform Everyone Agreed On and No One Pushed
Hanna’s closing argument is really about political inertia rather than policy disagreement. He notes that almost no one actively defended the wartime-era fees or the situation facing alien wives of American citizens, yet neither problem carried enough organized pressure to force Congress into a genuine revision. His essay ends less as a demand than a plea, hoping a handful of sympathetic senators and representatives might care enough about the country’s reputation for openness to finally act.
Reading it nearly a century later, what strikes me most is how familiar the shape of the argument still feels: a fee justified as necessary revenue, applied unevenly to the people least able to organize against it, surviving mainly because no single voter found it worth the fight. The 1929 passport in your collection with its $10.00 fee stamp is not just a travel document. It is a receipt for exactly that argument.
Have you come across a 1920s American passport with the original fee documentation intact? I would like to hear about it through my contact page.
Further reading: Origins of the United States Passport: Part 6
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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