No. 599.
Mr. Porter
to Mr. Lothrop.
Washington, June 30, 1887.
Sir: Your No. 122, of the 6th instant, stating that you had declined to issue a passport to Mr. Emil Stucker, has been received, and your course in the matter is approved. The fact that Stacker’s father had resided over twenty years abroad after his naturalization, and died there last April without having returned to the United States, and the further [Page 968] circumstance that the son has always resided and even been in business in Europe, without any apparent intention of ever residing in the United States, are quite sufficient ground for questioning the son’s bona fides as an American citizen, and for refusing to acknowledge him as such by issuing him a passport, the more especially as he admits having obtained British protection temporarily in Bremen. His reason for doing so, namely, that he had not time to go to Paris for an American passport, is insufficient on the face of it, as a passport can be procured by an American citizen in Bremen from Berlin, without leaving Bremen, on application to our consul there. It would be well in all such cases of refusal to forward a duplicate of the applicant’s sworn statement in the prescribed form to the Department.
I am, etc.,