The Sketch Book of Nick DeLuca

In early December, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officials made national headlines when they canceled citizenship ceremonies for naturalized Americans at Faneuil Hall in Boston. According to reports, the people “were asked to step out of line” at the event “just before taking the final step of the US naturalization process” for which they had “fulfilled every requirement.” The USCIS cancellations were part of the Trump administration’s national crackdown on immigration from 19 countries deemed “high risk.” 

As a ranger for the National Parks of Boston at Faneuil Hall for three seasons, I met many naturalized Americans who returned to Faneuil Hall to reminisce about when they became US citizens in the place where it happened. These moments are powerful. We rangers feel the emotions accompanying these memories.

The USCIS cancellations provoked such heated pushback from Bostonians because of the historical gravity of US citizenship and Faneuil Hall. For centuries, Bostonians and visitors have invested complex symbolic meaning in the building and the traditions people practice there. This wasn’t just the standard cancellation of a public event; it was the attempted erasure of a civic rite that weaves together the power of place with American custom. Through its indifference to this history, USCIS caused emotional injury to American citizens and institutional injury to the concept of citizenship.

American citizenship has historically been shaped not only by law, but by place, ritual, and public participation. Indeed, over the course of hundreds of years, advocates and activists helped focus the tenets of US citizenship at Faneuil Hall. During the American Revolution, rebel patriots at Faneuil Hall outlined the virtues of the prototypical American citizen. Throughout the 1800s, abolitionists and suffragists at Faneuil Hall widened the scope of who could be included in the citizenry; and in the early twentieth-century, Americans braided together ritual and place to establish the tradition of Americans actively entering into citizenship at Faneuil Hall.

By exploring the complex historical connections between US citizenship and Faneuil Hall, we can better understand the origins of this intimate relationship in Boston, why the cancellations generated such fervent hostility from Bostonians, and why Massachusetts politicians have taken steps to codify naturalization protections into law.

What is an American Citizen?

Faneuil Hall has been the center of Boston political action since it was constructed in 1742. It’s where eligible voters participated in local government and practiced customs that affirmed their allegiance to the monarchy; in 1760, for example, Bostonians celebrated the coronation of King George III at Faneuil Hall.

“Civic zeal seems to me to be inseparable from the exercise of political rights.” 

With the American Revolution, Faneuil Hall transformed from a gathering place for colonial British subjects to a forum for active participation in republican government. The debates, orations, and social turmoil of the revolution helped round out the contours of the prototypical American citizen. In 1764, Samuel Adams warned against British tyranny at Faneuil Hall and called for colonists to mobilize in defense of their liberties and to guard them jealously. In 1775, Joseph Warren commemorated the Boston Massacre at Faneuil Hall, urging resistance against authoritarian overreach. It was the duty of the American colonist to stand up for their countrymen’s social, political, and economic rights. “Or,” he warned, “perish in the glorious attempt.”

This kind of revolutionary rhetoric at Faneuil Hall rippled across Massachusetts Bay Colony. The revolutionaries insisted that their countrymen be informed, engaged, and willing to sacrifice for the common good. 

Active and energetic participation in representative government was the foundation of the civic-minded American citizen. Alexis de Tocqueville observed this civic culture during his visit to the United States in 1831, writing in Democracy in America that “civic zeal seems to me to be inseparable from the exercise of political rights.” 

This was the essence of US citizenship.

Who is an American citizen?

By the mid-1800s, debates in Faneuil Hall and across the country shifted from the building and maintaining of a sovereign nation to determining who belonged in it. As the socio-political hub of Boston, Faneuil Hall served as the venue for advancing reforms aimed at expanding citizenship, notably to women and Black Americans.

Frederick Douglass was no stranger to the Faneuil Hall stage. Over the course of his career, Douglass spoke there at least a dozen times in favor of the full integration of Black Americans into the national body politic. In 1849, Frederick Douglass addressed the American Colonization Society at Faneuil Hall, rejecting proposals to remove formerly enslaved people from the United States and resettle them in Africa.

At Faneuil Hall, Douglass asserted that as a free American he was entitled to the full privileges of citizenship. “Wherever I go,” he declared, “I shall go as a man, and not as a slave.” He argued that Black Americans embodied the same civic virtues championed by the Revolutionary generation. “I shall always aim to be courteous and mild in deportment,” Douglass said, “while firmly and constantly endeavoring to assert my equal right as a man and a brother.” 

Likewise, women used Faneuil Hall to resist their exclusion from the liberties of citizenship. Women worked, owned property, and paid taxes but had no voice in government. On December 15, 1873, almost 100-years to the day after the Boston Tea Party, Lucy Stone and the New England Woman Suffrage Association hosted the New England Woman’s Tea Party at Faneuil Hall. They strung up banners that read “Taxation without representation is tyranny,” and “Governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed.”

Conjuring the revolutionary spirit of the founding generation, the suffragists used the same logical arguments as their forebears to draw attention to the oppression they lived every single day. Women like Stone passed away before they attained the right to vote but their efforts were critical to advancing the movement that eventually led to the passage of the 19th Amendment. 

The 1800s in the US was a time of turbulent change. As the young nation matured, the population grew and diversified. Social reformers mounted pressure to broaden access to citizenship. Political action at Faneuil Hall helped accelerate that expansion, extending the promise of US citizenship to groups long barred from it.

Naturalization Ceremonies at Faneuil Hall

Social unrest continued into the twentieth-century, particularly in American port cities shaped by mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Immigrants sought citizenship as a means of security, inclusion, and opportunity. They wanted to work hard, become citizens, and enjoy the full benefits of protections that citizenship promised.

“Immigrants and their immediate descendants have proved themselves as loyal as any citizens of the country. Liberty has knit us closely together as Americans.”

Waves of immigration fueled nativist sentiments among established Anglo-Americans and calls for a more formalized naturalization process. Pro-immigration Bostonians began to pair patriotic ritual with civic inclusion to standardize the citizenship process.

In 1915, The Boston Evening Transcript reported that part of the local Fourth of July celebrations at Faneuil Hall would include extending “the grip of fellowship” to newly naturalized citizens, adding that “the need, in these disrupted times, is imperative.” The Springfield Union praised the same event for imbuing naturalization with meaning beyond “the perfunctory character” that had too often accompanied it. 

Hosting naturalization ceremonies at Faneuil Hall transformed the relationship between the place and the institution of American citizenship. The hall was no longer merely a place to debate ideals; it became a site where people formally entered into the status of citizen. Citizenship was no longer just discussed; it was enacted.

Before taking his seat as a justice of the Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis underscored this transformation as part of these same Fourth of July celebrations at Faneuil Hall. Brandeis delivered a speech emphasizing the strength the US derived from the diverse ranks of its citizenry.

“Immigrants and their immediate descendants,” he said, “have proved themselves as loyal as any citizens of the country. Liberty has knit us closely together as Americans.” By fusing Fourth of July celebrations and traditions with naturalization, Brandeis helped establish citizenship ceremonies at Faneuil Hall as a legitimate American tradition.

Today, those naturalized at Faneuil Hall stand beneath portraits and busts of figures such as Douglass and Stone, John Adams and George Washington, Charles Sumner and Abraham Lincoln. They follow in the footsteps of those who struggled and aspired, who embraced their liberties amid centuries of civic action.

By interfering with naturalization ceremonies at Faneuil Hall and denying individuals the final step into citizenship, USCIS officials obstructed a deeply rooted American tradition. In doing so, they dismissed both the ideals of participatory citizenship and the long struggle of diverse Americans to enjoy its protections.