Alien Registrations, 1940

On June 14, 1940, Governor Lewis O. Barrows issued a proclamation requiring that anyone in Maine who is not an American citizen must immediately register. Over the next few months more than 30,000 people registered with state-wide municipal officers, who then sent the registrations to the Office of the Adjutant General, the overseer of the project. This collection contains the Maine registration forms and the related working papers of the Adjutant General’s office, specifically Captain Clyde W. Metcalf of the Maine National Guard infantry, Intelligence Section, who coordinated the registration project.

The registration forms are organized into folders by town in two ways - where the individual registered or where they lived - but some forms appear in town folders that do not match either the location of residence or registration. A small subset of the collection is sorted by the country of origin of the registrant (241, folders 12-16). The same towns appear multiple times throughout the collection. The information from the forms was collected in several oversized spreadsheets organizing registered aliens by current address and country of origin.

The bulk of Capt. Metcalf’s papers are correspondence between him and municipal officers, mostly requests from the towns for additional forms or questions of policy and procedure and his responses. The next largest portion of the working papers are acknowledgement of receipt forms sent in by municipal officers. Other materials relate to surveillance: suspicious activity reports from civilians, offers from civilians to help with surveillance, and the establishment of local groups to whom civilians could report suspicious activity. The remainder are criminal records, press releases, and defense preparedness information. There are also two sets of index cards: one are cards on registrants of interest and the others are contact names and information.