Abstract
For many Americans, the birth certificate is a valuable document, but only for the purposes of obtaining other “official” documents (driver's license, passport, marriage license, etc.). Most of us rarely look at our birth certificates, but keep it protected as it is “proof” that we exist and deserve consideration by our government. Citizenship rests upon the birth certificate, and yet citizenship is also constructed within the birth certificate, with each box and space filled with purportedly objective information. Susan J. Pearson's newest book, The Birth Certificate: An American History reveals the fraught history of this simple document. She examines how the birth certificate has always been about who qualifies as “American” and who does not. What many social groups and political agencies portray as a simple representation of the truth of one's existence and identity is instead, in Pearson's work, a complex, layered, and contentious system of categorizing individuals into a country of valuable and valueless groups. Pearson illustrates that over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “The more birth certificates came to serve as proof of identity, the less stable their ‘facts’ became.” (124)
Pearson set out to trace the creation, development, and challenges to the American birth certificate and did so with admirable depth, creating a book very rich in sources. She opens on mid-nineteenth-century Boston where statistician and public health reformer Lemuel Shattuck presented his plan for systematized and universal vital registration in his state in the 1850s. Like many other white men of influence at this time, Shattuck believed that with enough data and the right numbers, populational health, strength, and value could be determined. Linking vital registration to the changes in childbirth, racial anxieties, and colonialism, Pearson investigates the myriad individuals and organizations in the last half of the nineteenth century who advocated for “accurate” birth recording of some kind. Pearson is able to add another important consideration to the commonly known narrative about the shift in birthing attendants in the United States from midwives to male physicians over the course of the nineteenth century, as birth certificates favored educated males over women who had less access to literacy and official avenues of paper bureaucracy.
As states moved to pass birth registration laws, supporters found that convincing doctors, midwives, families, and others who might be involved in a birth to shift their practices accordingly was more difficult than they supposed. The United States Children's Bureau, formed in 1912, stepped in to fill this role and worked tirelessly to spread the gospel of birth registration across the nation. As popular concerns of Progressive-Era club women, public health officials, and physicians striving to gain a professional monopoly, infant survival and child welfare emerged as problems to be solved by the state. The Children's Bureau viewed accurate birth registration as crucial to these solutions. They could not ascertain the true threat of infant mortality (especially divided along racial lines) without knowing how many infants were born. They could not propel legislation against child labor without having a true measure of the age of each child. The Children's Bureau was joined by many other organizations involved in decreasing both infant death and child labor (such as the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association), but all of them relied on birth registration to provide the necessary facts of birth, death, and age.
In Part II of the book, Pearson dives into the utilities of birth registration, as well as questions both raised and answered by this new system of surveillance. She claims that in the early twentieth century, the birth certificate “increasingly came to function as a latch to open and close the gates of modern childhood as defined by the state.” (124) As many early resisters feared, birth registration brought previously private and spiritual matters, such as the death of an infant, into the public sphere. But others soon saw great value in the information that birth registration could provide. Vital registration highlighted the dangers of urban living and artificial feeding; for the Office of Indian Affairs, it helped to legitimate long-held notions of the poor health of Natives and revealed the “fact” that Indigenous groups needed white aid in order to survive modernity. In the end, by convincing citizens and communities of the birth certificate’s value, visiting nurses and public health agencies not only increased the collection of birth information, but centralized that knowledge in state organizations, creating state data and archives of the science of living.
In some of her more compelling research, Pearson examines the utility of the birth certificate for state agencies seeking to understand and control particular populations: Native Americans and Black Americas. The Office of Indian affairs was an immediate supporter of birth registration, seeing great value in keeping track of Native fertility and population numbers as the federal government sought such information for national security, removal, and allotment purposes. By the close of the nineteenth century, birth registration became one of the many Anglo-European practices viewed as necessary for the assimilation of Native Americans.
Vital documents, Pearson claims, were attractive to “architects of a racial order,” (190) and fit in neatly in the eugenic thinking pervasive throughout the twentieth century. As proof of how “Indian” some citizens were or of how not-white enough others were, the fictions of the birth certificate created the seemingly stable categories of race. The one-drop rule and blood quantum were only fantasies of proponents of white supremacy without the “facts” spelled out by the birth certificate. Diving deep into the case of Virginia's Racial Integrity Act, passed in 1924, Pearson is able to tease out the numerous ways the birth certificate was weaponized against Black Americans and erased Virginia's Native inhabitants. She shows that birth registration was used to “police racial lines [and impose] a Black-white binary on a complex history of intermarriage and kinship between descendants of Africans, Native Americans, and white from the colonial era forward.” (219)
In the final part of the book Pearson investigates how just as the birth certificate seemed codified as a neutral record of biological facts, it became a contested document and one shaped by public pressure. Multiple challenges to the sanctity of the birth certificate emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, each testing the power of birth registration to create meaningful facts about individuals and populations. The first such challenge came in the guise of the meaning of illegitimacy. As birth certificates became required for more and more life stages, such as schooling or employment, reformers grappled with how revealing one's illegitimacy to a prospective employer would harm the individual. While states still insisted on the value of knowing how many illegitimate children were born each year, protecting a child from the poor decisions of the parents was to many Americans a laudable cause. Many reformers, including the Children's Bureau, argued that adopted children or children whose parents married after their birth should be granted new birth certificates, creating a new, more appealing origin story for the individual. Vital statisticians fought back, arguing that such tampering with the facts would put the legal status of birth registration in jeopardy.
World War II provided another challenge to the authority of the birth certificate. With so many Americans needing proof of citizenship, both to obtain defense jobs and to prove loyalty to their home country, the government learned just how many Americans had slipped through the many cracks of “universal” birth registration. Pearson deftly untangles the chaos of both wartime delayed birth registration and competing interests in registering illegitimacy, exhibiting the very social meanings of and social forces upon the birth certificate. The challenges continued in post-war America; civil rights organizations viewed the birth certificate as a tool of white supremacy and as a problem to solve. African Americans and Native Americans had less access to obtaining birth certificates. When they did possess them, the “fact” of their race created obstacles to employment, marriage, and voting rights. Due to pressure brought by multiple groups, including the NAACP, in 1968 the Census Bureau agreed to move “race/color” to a section of the birth certificate that remains, to this day, confidential state information. Pearson reveals the simultaneous meanings of race as a “fact” of the population and a construction that can bring harm to individuals.
With these challenges to the birth certificate's claim to truth by individuals and groups harmed by its growing authority over individual identity and populational policies, Pearson is easily able to bring this long history up to the current wave of “bathroom bills” and other legislation used to empower the facts of the birth control over the autonomy of trans-Americans to live their lives as their authentic selves. Both the state and private citizens have used birth certificates to discriminate against multiple groups in US history, but Pearson shows us that those discriminated against also have a history of action and agency in reshaping the birth certificate. In the closing of the book, Pearson lauds the flexibility of the fixed document that is the birth certificate: “If our documents are meant to say who we are, then we ought to have a say in our documents.” (292)
Pearson is only able to craft this sweeping narrative of a complex, powerful document over 150 years with exhausting research. Or at least, research that appears in her notes as exhaustion-inducing (I cannot speak for her frame of mind or level of energy at the end of the project). By my count, Pearson visited eleven different archives in nine different states to dig through papers of both government agencies (such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Children's Bureau) and individuals at the center of birth registration debates (such as Lemuel Shattuck and Grace Abbott). Juggling personal correspondence, government reports, and newspaper articles (to name just a few source types) Pearson exhibits her dexterity and care as a researcher. Historians interested in any number of topics in twentieth-century America could find new research paths just with a close reading of her footnotes.
In the end, Pearson crafts one of those fascinating histories of an entity of all our lives that has always seemed inevitable in the progress of American culture. When I teach graduate students about how to come up with a research question, I ask them to practice by just looking around them and asking: “why is that?” Pearson asked, “why is that?” about one of the most meaningful documents in the country and answered with an original and captivating story that forces us all, historian and American alike, to reconsider our understandings of the facts of our own births. The birth certificate marks all of us, from the very moment we arrive in the world, as belonging or not, and as valuable or not. It creates the fiction that we all naturally fit within socially constructed categories like gender, race, lineage, and developmental age.
Pearson is deftly able to create a narrative that appeals to, and should be read by, historians in multiple fields. Weaving together narratives of politics, race, gender, health, and family, Pearson has produced a manuscript with chapters that instructors can easily use to teach US History or any range of more specialized classes. An important historiographical intervention into the links between state surveillance, public health, and constructions of race, The Birth Certificate is a timely and eye-opening book.