Wong Kim Ark
By 
With birthright citizenship on the Supreme Court docket in the case Trump v. Barbara, the largely unexplored history of popular discourse on this topic is especially—if perhaps surprisingly—relevant. The focus in legal arguments has been around the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although constitutional experts and other scholars have relied on the amendment’s legal history to show that birthright citizenship has been the law without exception for well more than a century, newspaper archives offer another useful trove of evidence. These archives reveal that the Trump administration is not challenging some “woke” legal interpretation, but a settled consensus that has been reinforced across American law and culture, including through the quotidian mechanism of the popular newspaper, since the late 19th century.
Newspapers in the era before the internet and Wikipedia served as clearinghouses for information, efficiently sharing expertise with the general population. Advice columns and letters-to-the-editor pages became key sites for the circulation of knowledge.
In column after column, from the late 19th century onward, writers and editors treated questions about the citizenship status of the children of unnaturalized parents as a no-brainer. “Every child born in the United States is a citizen. Whether his parents were naturalized or not cuts no figure,” an editorial item reads in the Tecumseh, Oklahoma, County Democrat from 1904. In quite a few cases, the answers were monosyllabic, as was the case when someone from Orofino, Idaho, wrote to the Service Department section of the Spokane, Washington, Spokesman-Review in June 1937 to ask, “If the father was not a citizen of the United States will his children born here be American citizens?” The editor’s laconic response—“Yes”—indicated that this was not a complicated question.
Newspapers welcomed the give-and-take with their readers. “You can get an answer to any question of fact or information by writing to The Questions Editor,” a journalist at The Modesto Bee wrote in 1926, introducing the “Questions and Answers” column. On that day, following a question about whether women had more ribs than men and a query about the richest people in the world (the answers, respectively: “No” and “Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon”), a reader inquired, “Of what nationality is a person born in the United States of Polish parents?” The answer: “A child born in the United States is a citizen thereof, regardless of the citizenship of the parents.”Expounding further, the editor noted, “The child in question would be an American of Polish descent.” Newspapers, then and now, have not always gotten things right. But it’s revealing that so many papers, across regions and decades, were straightforwardly in agreement on this issue.
Unlike those engaged in congressional debate or the adversarial legal system, newspaper columnists (or the experts to whom they turned) were not forced to take seriously arguments that they found absurd, and so they reproduced through repetition a powerful common sense. In the case of birthright citizenship, conventional and legal wisdom thus converged on the belief that the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment was crystal clear. Reflecting this, in 1940 the Ask section of The Minneapolis Times-Tribune offered space to O. S. Remington, the assistant district director of the local immigration office, to respond to a question about the American-born children of a “foreign-born person.” Remington, paraphrasing the Fourteenth Amendment, wrote, “Yes, as the law states ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States or subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens.’” Twenty-five years earlier, in a 1915 column, “Are You a Citizen?,” The Marquette Tribune began by noting that “the U.S. Naturalization Examiner” had requested “that we call sharp and pointed attention to the laws concerning naturalization.” Among those that the columnist highlighted was that “children born here are citizens.”
It’s good to have historians to push back on bullshit arguments in the present.