File No. 13014.
The Acting Secretary of State to the Ambassador of Austria-Hungary.
Washington, April 24, 1908.
Excellency: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your note of the 11th instant, in which you advert to correspondence between your embassy and this department in the year 1903, and especially to the department’s note of December 23 of that year relative to the method of renunciation of American citizenship by a person desirous to secure Hungarian citizenship.
Your excellency incloses a letter from this Government’s consul general at Budapest, dated October 29, 1907, to the royal Hungarian ministry of the interior asking that one Samuel Stark Meisels, who has applied for Hungarian citizenship, be required to renounce his American citizenship.
In reply, I have the honor to say that the department has given careful attention to the consul general’s letter. He requested that the Hungarian ministry of the interior take Mr. Meisels’s declaration and forward it to him in order that he might send it to this city, together with Mr. Meisels’s certificate of American naturalization. The consul general stated that, in view of the provisions of a recent law of the United States, he desired to learn the names of all Hungarians or Croatians who had secured American naturalization and had afterwards applied for Hungarian citizenship. There appears to have been some uncertainty concerning the precise nature of the consul general’s request, due, possibly, to the fact that his letter was written in the Hungarian language, he being unable, no doubt, to employ the words which would accurately describe his desires.
[Page 31]By an act passed on March 2, 1907, it is provided that an American citizen ceases to be such as soon as he secures naturalization in a foreign country. The consular officers of the United States are, accordingly, required to inform the department whenever an American citizen secures such naturalization, and to transmit proof thereof, the best proof being an official statement of the naturalization from the foreign authorities which conferred it. It is thought that the consul general was endeavoring to obtain such a statement in Mr. Meisels’s case and to arrange for securing similar information in other cases that might arise. His request that Mr. Meisels’s declaration of renuciation be furnished as soon as possible, in accordance with Article IV of the naturalization treaty, and forwarded to him, was an error on his part, as the treaty is not in any way involved in the administration of the act of March 2, 1907.
I return the consul general’s letter, as you request.
Accept, etc.,