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The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America
NAMED ONE OF THE “100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR” BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“An extraordinary book, I can’t recommend it highly enough.” –Whoopi Goldberg, The View
By the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Last Call —the powerful, definitive, and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America close the immigration door to “inferiors” in the 1920s.
A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.
Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “biological laws” had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later. In his characteristic style, both lively and authoritative, Okrent brings to life the rich cast of characters from this time, including Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin’s first cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who gave life to eugenics; the fabulously wealthy and profoundly bigoted Madison Grant, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and his best friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A work of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate is an important, insightful tale that painstakingly connects the American eugenicists to the rise of Nazism, and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad.
“An extraordinary book, I can’t recommend it highly enough.” –Whoopi Goldberg, The View
By the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Last Call —the powerful, definitive, and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America close the immigration door to “inferiors” in the 1920s.
A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.
Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “biological laws” had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later. In his characteristic style, both lively and authoritative, Okrent brings to life the rich cast of characters from this time, including Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin’s first cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who gave life to eugenics; the fabulously wealthy and profoundly bigoted Madison Grant, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and his best friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A work of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate is an important, insightful tale that painstakingly connects the American eugenicists to the rise of Nazism, and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad.
496 pages, Hardcover
First published May 7, 2019
About the author
Daniel Okrent
16 books74 followersDaniel Okrent's 40-year career has encompassed nearly every form of mass media. In book publishing, he was an editor at Knopf, Viking, and Harcourt. In magazines, he founded the award-winning New England Monthly and was chief editor of the monthly Life. In newspapers, he was the first public editor of the New York Times. On television, he has appeared as an expert commentator on many network shows, and talked more than any other talking head in Ken Burns's Baseball. In film, he was featured in the documentaries Wordplay and Silly Little Game, appeared in a speaking role in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown, and had what he calls "a mumbling role" in Lasse Hallstrom's The Hoax. Online, he headed Time Inc.'s internet efforts in the late 1990's, and has recently given in to the dubious charms of Facebook.
But all that, he says, was either preparation for (or distraction from) what he most wanted to do: write books. Beginning with Nine Innings in 1985, and proceeding through the 2010 publication of Last Call, Okrent has been (wrote novelist Kevin Baker in Publishers Weekly) "one of our most interesting and eclectic writers of nonfiction over the past 25 years." In addition to the books featured on this site, he was also co-author with Steve Wulf of Baseball Anecdotes (Oxford University Press, 1987), and author of The Way We Were: New England Then, New England Now (Grove Weidenfeld, 1989), currently out-of-print.
But all that, he says, was either preparation for (or distraction from) what he most wanted to do: write books. Beginning with Nine Innings in 1985, and proceeding through the 2010 publication of Last Call, Okrent has been (wrote novelist Kevin Baker in Publishers Weekly) "one of our most interesting and eclectic writers of nonfiction over the past 25 years." In addition to the books featured on this site, he was also co-author with Steve Wulf of Baseball Anecdotes (Oxford University Press, 1987), and author of The Way We Were: New England Then, New England Now (Grove Weidenfeld, 1989), currently out-of-print.
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October 16, 2022
Daniel Okrent’s The Guarded Gate is a dropping study of the anti-immigration movement in early 20th Century America. Okrent (Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition) describes the Progressive Era’s obsession with creating an ideal nation, and how these impulses took shape in the odious movement of “scientific” racism. Thus conservatives like Henry Cabot Lodge (who spent three decades trying to pass stricter immigration laws) found common cause with progressive activists and intellectuals in pushing to defend Anglo-Saxon America against lazy, shiftless foreign criminals. The targets of this wave of nativism were largely, by modern standards, white: Eastern Europeans, Italians and Jews. Most of these groups fled war, political unrest or oppression elsewhere, only to be deemed criminals, anarchists and otherwise undesirable by their adopted country. A sociologist might find the array of outmoded racial slurs (Italians as “short, sober musical rapists,” Greeks as “banana vendors,” "Jewish peddlers" and so forth) fascinating in showing the lengths to which humans will go to otherize outsiders - or else, merely disgusting. The massive bloodletting of World War I, and the outbreak of strikes and race riots afterwards, only reinforced the idea that American racial hygiene needed protection.
Most unsettling, though, is how readily intellectuals and other respectable figures glommed on to the movement. Okrent presents a shameful roll call of prominent Americans: Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge; Lodge and Albert Johnson, Congressmen who drafted anti-immigrant legislation; Edward A. Ross, a writer who advanced fears of “racial suicide”; H. Fairfield Osborn, who bastardized Darwin’s Theory of Evolution to justify eugenics policies; Maxwell Perkins, the urbane, well-connected book publisher who encouraged eugenics writers to publish through Scribner, ensuring a wide audience; Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer who formed alliances with racist organizations; millionaires Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Mary Harriman; Albert Edward Wiggan, who assured religious Americans that Jesus "would have been President of the First Eugenics Congress"; and sociologists Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, who penned fearmongering books about “the rising tide of color.” All provided intellectual cover to those reactionaries seeking to keep America white, as well as inspiration for racists (including Adolf Hitler) abroad. In America it culminated in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which slowed immigration from these countries to a trickle…though it did little to curb crime and social unrest in America, or to still existing resentments. All in all, this is a frightening, perceptive and well-written portrait of American xenophobia that, needless to say, feels unsettlingly relevant.
Most unsettling, though, is how readily intellectuals and other respectable figures glommed on to the movement. Okrent presents a shameful roll call of prominent Americans: Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge; Lodge and Albert Johnson, Congressmen who drafted anti-immigrant legislation; Edward A. Ross, a writer who advanced fears of “racial suicide”; H. Fairfield Osborn, who bastardized Darwin’s Theory of Evolution to justify eugenics policies; Maxwell Perkins, the urbane, well-connected book publisher who encouraged eugenics writers to publish through Scribner, ensuring a wide audience; Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer who formed alliances with racist organizations; millionaires Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Mary Harriman; Albert Edward Wiggan, who assured religious Americans that Jesus "would have been President of the First Eugenics Congress"; and sociologists Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, who penned fearmongering books about “the rising tide of color.” All provided intellectual cover to those reactionaries seeking to keep America white, as well as inspiration for racists (including Adolf Hitler) abroad. In America it culminated in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which slowed immigration from these countries to a trickle…though it did little to curb crime and social unrest in America, or to still existing resentments. All in all, this is a frightening, perceptive and well-written portrait of American xenophobia that, needless to say, feels unsettlingly relevant.
March 4, 2020
This is a major work describing the immigration debates of a century ago. Names not now much remembered made a life work of “guarding” US gates against those deemed “unfit” through their own “biological laws”. Jews and Italians were the main targets in that order and sometimes reversed.
Wealthy gentlemen in England noted the outstanding achieving men in their privileged station. They made lists of those whom they perceived as brilliant. Using Darwin’s theory they developed a “science” of the fittest which became eugenics. It got planted in the US by a similarly privileged class. Daniel Okrent documents the widespread acceptance of eugenics in the US and how it informed US immigration policy.
Okrent describes organizations, publications, donors and prestigious advocates of the research (eugenic) and political (anti-immigration) communities. Unlike today’s focus group tested names these groups were called "The German Society for Racial Hygiene", the "American Breeders Association", and "The American Purity Federation". Members use terms like “genetic fitness” and “racial suicide” (the result of interethnic marriage), “infected stock” and “mongrel races”. They hold conferences such as “The First International Hygienic Conference on Racial Betterment” and produce publications such as “The Rising Tide of Color against the White World-Supremacy”, “The Passing of the Great Race” and “The Right to be Born Well”.
The science is laughable. For instance they pose that the Italian Renaissance resulted from the invasion of Nordic people and that from his portraits it is clear that Christopher Columbus was of Nordic descent. A peer reviewed article concluded that Jewish noses were “distinctive due to overuse of the quadrates muscle” which is used to express (p. 147) “contempt, disdain … scorn, acknowledging guilt”. Harvard zoologist, Charles Davenport is quoted (also p. 147) “The oft repeated story that Abraham Lincoln was descended on his mother’s side from Chief Justice John Marshall of Virginia, whether it is true or not, illustrates the possibility of the origin of great traits through two obscure parents.” Derived from this and more pseudo-science was the premise that opening the US to the unachieving poor would mean a future of “…more crimes, larceny, kidnapping, assault…”
The movement attracted a surprising following among former abolitionists, supporters of women’s suffrage, conservationists and a founder of the ACLU. Margaret Zanger may have used the movement to get support for birth control. Booker T. Washington and Samuel Gompers saw immigrants as driving down wages and opportunities. Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Bernard Shaw, Andrew Carnegie, Calvin Coolidge and Woodrow Wilson, John D. Rockefeller and many others were supporters in overt and behind the scenes ways. Sen Henry Cabot Lodge (grandfather to Nixon’s running mate of the same name) was a lifelong supporter of the anti-immigrant cause.
Allied against the anti-immigrant activists were shipping lines which profited from passengers in both cabins and steerage. Successful Jews from earlier migrations formed influential groups. As immigrants and their children attained citizenship and voting age, they became a growing voter block. Two US presidents, Grover Cleveland and William Taft vetoed anti-immigration legislation that contained a highly contentious literacy test.
The big success for the anti-immigrationists came after World War I. There was support in the popular media (The Saturday Evening Post; Scribners - interestingly the publisher of this book - books edited by Maxwell Perkins, The Museum of Natural History events etc) and Academics (Presidents of Princeton, Harvard and many others). Scholars, business leaders and politicians again praised (p.317) studies that “showed” Romanians to be 41% more likely that the US population to be criminal and that Italians are 57% more likely to be insane.
The result was quota legislation in 1921. The number was set at 3% of a country’s 1910 US population, meaning higher quotas for the desired “Nordic” immigrants. Interestingly, Central and South Americans had no quota because their labor was needed for agriculture. The Supreme Court’s Thind decision ruled that citizenship as only available to white and black races and women marrying Asians will lose their US citizenship. While the second part of this was repealed to allow repatriation of a woman who divorced or left the Asian man, how the Asian citizenship ruling changed is not covered, nor is how Asian immigration continued without a quota.
After the 1924 Act which reduced quotas beyond the dreams of the early activists, the movement changed to advocacy for a purer (white) race. It had some success in forced sterilization at the state level. Activists promoted “better families” and “fitter families” through literature in churches and schools, essay contests, awards at county fairs, etc..
In seems that real scientists took note too late. They challenged the IQ test (sample questions on p.249) which gave 4 choices for ads in which Velvet Joe appeared or where the Overland car was made. They noted the biased sample sizes and the basic premises of eugenic research.
What did in both political and research movements was the horror of the Nazis who took their ideas to their logical conclusion. Hitler's Mein Kamph and the later Nuremberg defenses cited the work of the Americans. Some eugenicists enjoyed praise by the Nazis and traveling to Germany to meet important leaders. Most researchers and advocated faded away and minimized their past.
The above history is presented with detail, yet the prose is very readable. The Acknowledgement shows how the author scouted out and studied widely scattered info. If you are interested in this topic or this era this is a must read.
Wealthy gentlemen in England noted the outstanding achieving men in their privileged station. They made lists of those whom they perceived as brilliant. Using Darwin’s theory they developed a “science” of the fittest which became eugenics. It got planted in the US by a similarly privileged class. Daniel Okrent documents the widespread acceptance of eugenics in the US and how it informed US immigration policy.
Okrent describes organizations, publications, donors and prestigious advocates of the research (eugenic) and political (anti-immigration) communities. Unlike today’s focus group tested names these groups were called "The German Society for Racial Hygiene", the "American Breeders Association", and "The American Purity Federation". Members use terms like “genetic fitness” and “racial suicide” (the result of interethnic marriage), “infected stock” and “mongrel races”. They hold conferences such as “The First International Hygienic Conference on Racial Betterment” and produce publications such as “The Rising Tide of Color against the White World-Supremacy”, “The Passing of the Great Race” and “The Right to be Born Well”.
The science is laughable. For instance they pose that the Italian Renaissance resulted from the invasion of Nordic people and that from his portraits it is clear that Christopher Columbus was of Nordic descent. A peer reviewed article concluded that Jewish noses were “distinctive due to overuse of the quadrates muscle” which is used to express (p. 147) “contempt, disdain … scorn, acknowledging guilt”. Harvard zoologist, Charles Davenport is quoted (also p. 147) “The oft repeated story that Abraham Lincoln was descended on his mother’s side from Chief Justice John Marshall of Virginia, whether it is true or not, illustrates the possibility of the origin of great traits through two obscure parents.” Derived from this and more pseudo-science was the premise that opening the US to the unachieving poor would mean a future of “…more crimes, larceny, kidnapping, assault…”
The movement attracted a surprising following among former abolitionists, supporters of women’s suffrage, conservationists and a founder of the ACLU. Margaret Zanger may have used the movement to get support for birth control. Booker T. Washington and Samuel Gompers saw immigrants as driving down wages and opportunities. Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Bernard Shaw, Andrew Carnegie, Calvin Coolidge and Woodrow Wilson, John D. Rockefeller and many others were supporters in overt and behind the scenes ways. Sen Henry Cabot Lodge (grandfather to Nixon’s running mate of the same name) was a lifelong supporter of the anti-immigrant cause.
Allied against the anti-immigrant activists were shipping lines which profited from passengers in both cabins and steerage. Successful Jews from earlier migrations formed influential groups. As immigrants and their children attained citizenship and voting age, they became a growing voter block. Two US presidents, Grover Cleveland and William Taft vetoed anti-immigration legislation that contained a highly contentious literacy test.
The big success for the anti-immigrationists came after World War I. There was support in the popular media (The Saturday Evening Post; Scribners - interestingly the publisher of this book - books edited by Maxwell Perkins, The Museum of Natural History events etc) and Academics (Presidents of Princeton, Harvard and many others). Scholars, business leaders and politicians again praised (p.317) studies that “showed” Romanians to be 41% more likely that the US population to be criminal and that Italians are 57% more likely to be insane.
The result was quota legislation in 1921. The number was set at 3% of a country’s 1910 US population, meaning higher quotas for the desired “Nordic” immigrants. Interestingly, Central and South Americans had no quota because their labor was needed for agriculture. The Supreme Court’s Thind decision ruled that citizenship as only available to white and black races and women marrying Asians will lose their US citizenship. While the second part of this was repealed to allow repatriation of a woman who divorced or left the Asian man, how the Asian citizenship ruling changed is not covered, nor is how Asian immigration continued without a quota.
After the 1924 Act which reduced quotas beyond the dreams of the early activists, the movement changed to advocacy for a purer (white) race. It had some success in forced sterilization at the state level. Activists promoted “better families” and “fitter families” through literature in churches and schools, essay contests, awards at county fairs, etc..
In seems that real scientists took note too late. They challenged the IQ test (sample questions on p.249) which gave 4 choices for ads in which Velvet Joe appeared or where the Overland car was made. They noted the biased sample sizes and the basic premises of eugenic research.
What did in both political and research movements was the horror of the Nazis who took their ideas to their logical conclusion. Hitler's Mein Kamph and the later Nuremberg defenses cited the work of the Americans. Some eugenicists enjoyed praise by the Nazis and traveling to Germany to meet important leaders. Most researchers and advocated faded away and minimized their past.
The above history is presented with detail, yet the prose is very readable. The Acknowledgement shows how the author scouted out and studied widely scattered info. If you are interested in this topic or this era this is a must read.
June 22, 2019
Recently I learned that the Trump administration finally concluded a tariff deal with Mexico which had a number of components related to illegal immigration into the United States. Apart from Trump’s stupefying rhetoric surrounding his “wall” and other asinine comments like, “why are we having so many people from these shithole countries come here,” immigration and race have become litmus tests for certain politicians. This political atmosphere in the United States makes Daniel Okrent’s new book, THE GUARDED GATE: BIGOTRY, EUGENICS, AND THE LAW THAT KEPT TWO GENERATIONS OF JEWS, ITALIANS, AND OTHER EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS OUT OF AMERICA an important contribution to the background history of our current views of people who are trying to escape tyranny and poverty and come to the United States. Okrent focuses on what he describes as the “perverse form of ‘science’ [that] gave respectability to the drastic limits Imposed on the number of Jews, Italians, Greeks, Poles, and various other eastern or southern Europeans seeking to come to America between 1924 and 1965.” It is during this period that some of the arguments and attitudes concerning immigration were formed that still impact us today.
Okrent’s narrative is scary as it points to the pseudo-science and ignorance employed from the late 19th century that is still exists today. His history of the eugenics movement and its role in passing the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 is very disconcerting as it reflects the racism and bigotry that dominated American thought throughout the period, including historical figures ranging from Margaret Sanger to Woodrow Wilson. Okrent points out that the key to the development of these ideas was the growing belief that the United States was being overrun by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who brought certain traits and attitudes that would blend negatively with the American population. As millions poured into the United States between 1890 and 1910 politicians like Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the epitome of Brahmin superiority led the fight to keep these people from entering the United States through legislation that featured literacy tests and other obstacles. This movement which fostered the Immigration Restrictive League (IRL) which came about in 1894 rested on the works of other Boston types who would come up short in passing their agenda until after World War I. Once the war ended fears of these immigrants centered on labor union unrest, political radicalism, and racial conflict. In the end it was Senator Albert Johnson with the assistance of eugenics and anti-immigration elements who was able to gain the passage of restrictive legislation in 1924 that would stem the tide.
In providing a general history of the eugenics movement and its marriage to immigration restriction from 1890 onward, Okrent zeroes in on the development of their convoluted ideas and the diverse personalities who came to be at the forefront of the movement. A number of individuals emerge that moved the process forward. In addition to politicians like Lodge who stoked American xenophobia from the 1890s onward as he took on the role of evangelist and propagandist from anti-immigration forces, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson also became proponents of many of the racial theories related to Hungarians, Italians, Jews, Poles and others that were propagated.
What is fascinating is how people bought into these ideas and concepts of racial breeding and how the United States was committing “racial suicide” by allowing these ethnic groups to enter. Okrent’s narrative provides a who’s who of those who advocated the selective breeding of human populations to improve their genetic composition. Okrent reviews the ideas of Francis Galton who coined the term eugenics in 1883, Charles Darwin, the French anti-Semite Count Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain a proponent of Aryan superiority, and William Z. Ripley, all popular authors in the late 19th century.
Okrent takes it further as he traces the further development of these ideas through the works and ideas of Charles Davenport, a prominent biologist and leading spokesperson for the eugenics movement who set up his “racial laboratory” in Cold Harbor, NY, funded at the outset by Mary Harriman, the heir to the railroad fortune. In addition, +he focuses on James H. Pattern, an effective congressional lobbyist for the IRL; Edward A. Ross, the author of THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW that merged eugenics and xenophobia doubling down on the inferiority of Slavs; Madison Grant, zoologist, lawyer and author of THE RACIAL BASIS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY; Henry Goddard’s famed Kallikak study convinced thirty states to pass legislation to impose forced sterilization on the “feebleminded;” and lastly Harry H. Laughlin who directed the Eugenics Records Office who advocated for the “involuntary sterilization of defectives.”
What is even more disconcerting is the list of the pillars of society Okrent uncovers that supported these ideas. The reputable publishing company, Charles A. Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins helped publish the works of a coterie of eugenicists that included Lothrop Stoddard’s THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR AGAINST WHITE WORLD SUPEREMACY, that became a best seller and went through fifteen reprints (interestingly Scribner’s published Okrent’s history). Samuel Gompers the head of the American Federation of Labor. The Saturday Evening Posts editor George Horace Lorimer published stories of the pariahs that threatened American society, even Eleanor Roosevelt, reflecting her aristocratic origins held negative racial views until she grew more intellectually mature and worldly.
Okrent’s work is punctuated with documentary excerpts of the work of prominent eugenicists and their opponents. He has drilled down in his analysis of their “quackery” and has a firm handle on his source material. The narrative is excellent considering the topic, particularly how the Johnson-Reed Act became law, especially Johnson and company manipulated census and immigration figures to create quotas and the resulting impact on American history for decades to the detriment of millions. Historian, Linda Gordon writes; “previous immigration restrictions targeted particular groups — notably people from Asia — but this comprehensive law aimed not just to limit immigration but to preserve white Protestant dominance in America. It assigned a quota to each nation, ranging from 51,000 for Germany to 2,000 for Russia to 1,100 for the entire African continent.” (New York Times, “The Last Time a Wall Went Up to Keep Out Immigrants,” by Linda Gordon, May 20, 2019)
What is shocking throughout the book is Okrent’s ability to explore the ideology of eugenics providing primary evidence of their views. For example, Fairfield H. Osborn, paleontologist and teacher of Mary Harriman told delegates to the National Immigration Conference held in New York City in 1923 that army testing of soldiers during World War I showed 6,346,856 immigrants were “inferior or very inferior.” He commented further that “if the army tests served to show clearly to our people the lack of intelligence in our country, and the degrees of intelligence of different races who are coming to us [then] I believe those tests were worth what the war cost, even in human life.” Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz, the authors of the definitive text on German eugenics, HUMAN HEREDITY AND RACE HYGIENE argued further that the “Nordic race marches in the vanguard of mankind.” Interestingly in 1924 Adolf Hitler, then an inmate at Landsberg Prison in Bavaria found the book useful “jailhouse reading.” (322)
The title of Okrent’s narrative, THE GUARDED GATE was inspired by an 1895 poem by the Boston patrician Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a leading restrictionist. Aldrich would have none of Emma Lazarus’s words, chiseled into the Statue of Liberty, welcoming “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Writing in a mode more like Donald Trump, Aldrich warned:
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them passes a wild motley throng . . .
O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well
To leave the gates unguarded? (Washington Post, “When the Government Used Bad Science to Restrict Immigration,” by David Hollinger, May 24, 2019)
Okrent has taken on an important historical topic as George Santayana has warned “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It took the rise and fall of Nazi Germany discredit eugenics in the United States, but even in 1952 with the McCarran-Walter Act Washington continued to show its preference for people from northwestern Europe. It would take until 1965 to drop that preference. With a president who calls for the immigration of whites from countries like Norway as opposed to Hispanic types one must wonder where American immigration is headed for today – is race still the major qualification?
Okrent’s narrative is scary as it points to the pseudo-science and ignorance employed from the late 19th century that is still exists today. His history of the eugenics movement and its role in passing the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 is very disconcerting as it reflects the racism and bigotry that dominated American thought throughout the period, including historical figures ranging from Margaret Sanger to Woodrow Wilson. Okrent points out that the key to the development of these ideas was the growing belief that the United States was being overrun by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who brought certain traits and attitudes that would blend negatively with the American population. As millions poured into the United States between 1890 and 1910 politicians like Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the epitome of Brahmin superiority led the fight to keep these people from entering the United States through legislation that featured literacy tests and other obstacles. This movement which fostered the Immigration Restrictive League (IRL) which came about in 1894 rested on the works of other Boston types who would come up short in passing their agenda until after World War I. Once the war ended fears of these immigrants centered on labor union unrest, political radicalism, and racial conflict. In the end it was Senator Albert Johnson with the assistance of eugenics and anti-immigration elements who was able to gain the passage of restrictive legislation in 1924 that would stem the tide.
In providing a general history of the eugenics movement and its marriage to immigration restriction from 1890 onward, Okrent zeroes in on the development of their convoluted ideas and the diverse personalities who came to be at the forefront of the movement. A number of individuals emerge that moved the process forward. In addition to politicians like Lodge who stoked American xenophobia from the 1890s onward as he took on the role of evangelist and propagandist from anti-immigration forces, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson also became proponents of many of the racial theories related to Hungarians, Italians, Jews, Poles and others that were propagated.
What is fascinating is how people bought into these ideas and concepts of racial breeding and how the United States was committing “racial suicide” by allowing these ethnic groups to enter. Okrent’s narrative provides a who’s who of those who advocated the selective breeding of human populations to improve their genetic composition. Okrent reviews the ideas of Francis Galton who coined the term eugenics in 1883, Charles Darwin, the French anti-Semite Count Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain a proponent of Aryan superiority, and William Z. Ripley, all popular authors in the late 19th century.
Okrent takes it further as he traces the further development of these ideas through the works and ideas of Charles Davenport, a prominent biologist and leading spokesperson for the eugenics movement who set up his “racial laboratory” in Cold Harbor, NY, funded at the outset by Mary Harriman, the heir to the railroad fortune. In addition, +he focuses on James H. Pattern, an effective congressional lobbyist for the IRL; Edward A. Ross, the author of THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW that merged eugenics and xenophobia doubling down on the inferiority of Slavs; Madison Grant, zoologist, lawyer and author of THE RACIAL BASIS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY; Henry Goddard’s famed Kallikak study convinced thirty states to pass legislation to impose forced sterilization on the “feebleminded;” and lastly Harry H. Laughlin who directed the Eugenics Records Office who advocated for the “involuntary sterilization of defectives.”
What is even more disconcerting is the list of the pillars of society Okrent uncovers that supported these ideas. The reputable publishing company, Charles A. Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins helped publish the works of a coterie of eugenicists that included Lothrop Stoddard’s THE RISING TIDE OF COLOR AGAINST WHITE WORLD SUPEREMACY, that became a best seller and went through fifteen reprints (interestingly Scribner’s published Okrent’s history). Samuel Gompers the head of the American Federation of Labor. The Saturday Evening Posts editor George Horace Lorimer published stories of the pariahs that threatened American society, even Eleanor Roosevelt, reflecting her aristocratic origins held negative racial views until she grew more intellectually mature and worldly.
Okrent’s work is punctuated with documentary excerpts of the work of prominent eugenicists and their opponents. He has drilled down in his analysis of their “quackery” and has a firm handle on his source material. The narrative is excellent considering the topic, particularly how the Johnson-Reed Act became law, especially Johnson and company manipulated census and immigration figures to create quotas and the resulting impact on American history for decades to the detriment of millions. Historian, Linda Gordon writes; “previous immigration restrictions targeted particular groups — notably people from Asia — but this comprehensive law aimed not just to limit immigration but to preserve white Protestant dominance in America. It assigned a quota to each nation, ranging from 51,000 for Germany to 2,000 for Russia to 1,100 for the entire African continent.” (New York Times, “The Last Time a Wall Went Up to Keep Out Immigrants,” by Linda Gordon, May 20, 2019)
What is shocking throughout the book is Okrent’s ability to explore the ideology of eugenics providing primary evidence of their views. For example, Fairfield H. Osborn, paleontologist and teacher of Mary Harriman told delegates to the National Immigration Conference held in New York City in 1923 that army testing of soldiers during World War I showed 6,346,856 immigrants were “inferior or very inferior.” He commented further that “if the army tests served to show clearly to our people the lack of intelligence in our country, and the degrees of intelligence of different races who are coming to us [then] I believe those tests were worth what the war cost, even in human life.” Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz, the authors of the definitive text on German eugenics, HUMAN HEREDITY AND RACE HYGIENE argued further that the “Nordic race marches in the vanguard of mankind.” Interestingly in 1924 Adolf Hitler, then an inmate at Landsberg Prison in Bavaria found the book useful “jailhouse reading.” (322)
The title of Okrent’s narrative, THE GUARDED GATE was inspired by an 1895 poem by the Boston patrician Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a leading restrictionist. Aldrich would have none of Emma Lazarus’s words, chiseled into the Statue of Liberty, welcoming “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Writing in a mode more like Donald Trump, Aldrich warned:
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them passes a wild motley throng . . .
O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well
To leave the gates unguarded? (Washington Post, “When the Government Used Bad Science to Restrict Immigration,” by David Hollinger, May 24, 2019)
Okrent has taken on an important historical topic as George Santayana has warned “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It took the rise and fall of Nazi Germany discredit eugenics in the United States, but even in 1952 with the McCarran-Walter Act Washington continued to show its preference for people from northwestern Europe. It would take until 1965 to drop that preference. With a president who calls for the immigration of whites from countries like Norway as opposed to Hispanic types one must wonder where American immigration is headed for today – is race still the major qualification?
June 6, 2020
Since the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 the incoming population had changed to conform to a very specific American image. Just four years earlier, 76% of all immigrants had come from Southern and Eastern Europe – from Russia, Greece, Italy, Poland, and other Mediterranean and Baltic countries. Now the same nations were reduced to a scant 11% percent of the newcomers.
In 1925, the immigrant were supposed to be “of a better kind” than those who had come ashore on Ellis Island over the previous two decades.
Only four years earlier, a major national figure, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, had confirmed: “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.” And he was not alone in his apprehension. The editors of the nation’s most popular magazine warned that continued immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe would compel America “to join the lowly ranks of the mongrel races.” Even the chairman of the congressional committee who drafted the new law was direct: if the former argument for immigration restriction had been economic, now it was “fundamentally biological”.
Daniel Okrent creates an impressive account of that idea, which gained credence for years, supported by some of the nation’s leading scientific institutions, amplified by political activists both progressive and reactionary, and soon embedded in the public consciousness.
Longtime hatreds, and the present political exigencies, had assured that a version of the Immigration Act of 1924 would pass. But the “biological laws” imported form England and then popularized in the States had made the arguments in support of it respectable. The newcomers of the years to come would be “the kind the USA are glad to welcome”.
The Guarded Gate is an outstanding study of this forgotten chapter in US History. Thoroughly researched and compellingly written, it tells the whole story from its beginning in 1890s. Daniel Okrent supplies his book with wonderfully well sketched portraits of some of the most significant for the anti-immigrant campaign figures, such as Henry Cabot Lodge and the Bostonian Brahmins, Silent Cal, Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a contributive compliment to her birth-control campaign, as well as Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, the extraordinary man who developed the theory that intelligence, talent, and even morality were bequeathed biologically.
After the brilliant Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, I was absolutely sure that I would enjoy The Guarded Gate, and Daniel Okrent didn’t let my expectations down. Five stars.
In 1925, the immigrant were supposed to be “of a better kind” than those who had come ashore on Ellis Island over the previous two decades.
Only four years earlier, a major national figure, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, had confirmed: “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.” And he was not alone in his apprehension. The editors of the nation’s most popular magazine warned that continued immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe would compel America “to join the lowly ranks of the mongrel races.” Even the chairman of the congressional committee who drafted the new law was direct: if the former argument for immigration restriction had been economic, now it was “fundamentally biological”.
Daniel Okrent creates an impressive account of that idea, which gained credence for years, supported by some of the nation’s leading scientific institutions, amplified by political activists both progressive and reactionary, and soon embedded in the public consciousness.
Longtime hatreds, and the present political exigencies, had assured that a version of the Immigration Act of 1924 would pass. But the “biological laws” imported form England and then popularized in the States had made the arguments in support of it respectable. The newcomers of the years to come would be “the kind the USA are glad to welcome”.
The Guarded Gate is an outstanding study of this forgotten chapter in US History. Thoroughly researched and compellingly written, it tells the whole story from its beginning in 1890s. Daniel Okrent supplies his book with wonderfully well sketched portraits of some of the most significant for the anti-immigrant campaign figures, such as Henry Cabot Lodge and the Bostonian Brahmins, Silent Cal, Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a contributive compliment to her birth-control campaign, as well as Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, the extraordinary man who developed the theory that intelligence, talent, and even morality were bequeathed biologically.
After the brilliant Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, I was absolutely sure that I would enjoy The Guarded Gate, and Daniel Okrent didn’t let my expectations down. Five stars.
July 7, 2019
Must read book for immigration advocates and lawyers. Exposes the “intellectual” forebears of today’s restrictionists. Most shocking fact for me: The US Government allowed these “scientific” racists to “test” more than a million US Army recruits so that they could use the “test results” to “prove” that immigrants were inherently inferior to native-born Americans. The “intelligence” test was an English language current events test, not an “intelligence” test, but the fact that the test made no sense apparently escaped the notice of Army leadership.
August 25, 2019
I have just read this astonishing book, “The Guarded Gate.” Daniel Okrent traces the long history in the United States scientists using “intellectual justification” to promote incredibly harsh immigration laws.
Much of this was accomplished by upper-class Bostonians and New Yorkers, who led a staunch anti-immigration eugenics movement. They mainly focused on Jews and Italians, but included all Chinese, Africans and other sub-human groups.
In 1864, Abraham Lincoln pursed Congress to increase immigration due to the tight labor market during the Civil War. However, by 1882, race hatred led to the Chinese Exclusion Act to halt the large number of immigrants during the 1849 gold rush.
The increased focus of eugenics grew out of a concern for increased immigration.
To stem immigration, wealthy politicians fought to implement a literacy test for immigrants, and in 1906 pushed for a head tax.
There actually was a push to implement a breeding program for man, similar to that for animals.
This push for the science of eugenics “failed to see that sons of ‘eminent’ men were likely to enjoy careers that benefitted from their fathers’ privileged positions. Heredity certainly played a large part in determining an individual’s makeup, but to discount the influence of wealth, and educational opportunity, and social connections, and access to resources—this was preposterous.”
This is a partial list of eugenics proponents: John Murray Forbes, one of Boston’s wealthiest man, made his money in the Chinese opium trade; Madison Grant, the profoundly bigoted founder of the Bronx Zoo; H. Fairfield Osborn, the aggressively anti-Semitic director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, saw eugenics a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign—a way to keep “defective” individuals from reproducing.
The list of undesirables included “anarchists, epileptics, polygamists, lunatics, people with poor physique, people with contagious diseases (trachoma, tuberculosis), loathsome diseases (syphilis, gonorrhea, leprosy),and people deemed so incompetent and so impoverished they were likely to become a public charge.”
When this was not enough to stem the tide of immigrants, there was a push to implement quotas. Northern European countries were assigned large numbers (Great Britain 77,342 in 1921; 122 for all of Africa). This led to the 1939 rejection of the ship SS St. Louis, with 900 refugees because Germany’s slots were already filled. Poland and Russia had far smaller quotas with dire results.
The American people may not have connected Nazi race policies to the eugenic arguments, but American organizations and institutions connected to eugenics. Beginning shortly after Hitler’s ascension in the 1930s American organizations withdrew from the American Eugenic Society, withdrew funding and broke with proponents.
Eugenics was the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion of its doctrines by the Nazis.
Much of this was accomplished by upper-class Bostonians and New Yorkers, who led a staunch anti-immigration eugenics movement. They mainly focused on Jews and Italians, but included all Chinese, Africans and other sub-human groups.
In 1864, Abraham Lincoln pursed Congress to increase immigration due to the tight labor market during the Civil War. However, by 1882, race hatred led to the Chinese Exclusion Act to halt the large number of immigrants during the 1849 gold rush.
The increased focus of eugenics grew out of a concern for increased immigration.
To stem immigration, wealthy politicians fought to implement a literacy test for immigrants, and in 1906 pushed for a head tax.
There actually was a push to implement a breeding program for man, similar to that for animals.
This push for the science of eugenics “failed to see that sons of ‘eminent’ men were likely to enjoy careers that benefitted from their fathers’ privileged positions. Heredity certainly played a large part in determining an individual’s makeup, but to discount the influence of wealth, and educational opportunity, and social connections, and access to resources—this was preposterous.”
This is a partial list of eugenics proponents: John Murray Forbes, one of Boston’s wealthiest man, made his money in the Chinese opium trade; Madison Grant, the profoundly bigoted founder of the Bronx Zoo; H. Fairfield Osborn, the aggressively anti-Semitic director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, saw eugenics a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign—a way to keep “defective” individuals from reproducing.
The list of undesirables included “anarchists, epileptics, polygamists, lunatics, people with poor physique, people with contagious diseases (trachoma, tuberculosis), loathsome diseases (syphilis, gonorrhea, leprosy),and people deemed so incompetent and so impoverished they were likely to become a public charge.”
When this was not enough to stem the tide of immigrants, there was a push to implement quotas. Northern European countries were assigned large numbers (Great Britain 77,342 in 1921; 122 for all of Africa). This led to the 1939 rejection of the ship SS St. Louis, with 900 refugees because Germany’s slots were already filled. Poland and Russia had far smaller quotas with dire results.
The American people may not have connected Nazi race policies to the eugenic arguments, but American organizations and institutions connected to eugenics. Beginning shortly after Hitler’s ascension in the 1930s American organizations withdrew from the American Eugenic Society, withdrew funding and broke with proponents.
Eugenics was the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion of its doctrines by the Nazis.
July 2, 2019
Rating: 3.5
The Guarded Gate tells the story of the enactment of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which severely limited immigration to the United States from Italy and other southern and eastern European countries by imposing strict and small quotas based on nationality. In addition to the impact on Italians (who were in disfavor with elites in the US at that point) the law particularly impacted Jews in Russia and Poland, as well as German Jews. Author Okrent is especially concerned with the 30-year run-up to the passage of the law, during which time Darwin's theories and Gregor Mendel's genetic discoveries mutated into an "applied science," eugenics, which argued that genetics was racial as well as individual. Proponents identified three European "races": Nordic (the good guys - good=-looking , smart, organized, hard-working), Mediterranean (artistic but lazy and dumb), and Alpine (somewhere in between). The political argument tied these races to particular countries, and contended that admitting them to the US would result in amalgamation (race-mixing) and dilution of "native American's (they didn't mean American Indians!) superior Nordic genetics. Antisemitism and other ethically biased arguments regarding Africans and Asians were advanced by eugenicists as well and over the period from the late 1890s to 1920 spread beyond the academics who propounded them (based mostly on anecdotal evidence supported by a strong confirmation bias) to the population at large. Anti-immigration bias in this country is not new.
Okrent clearly regards eugenics and its sister theory, "scientific racism," as so much hogwash. At the time, however, they were adopted as gospel by a number of politically influential white men who saw benefit in limiting the influx of immigrants -- among them Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, and Calvin Coolidge, all of whom participated in creating immigration policy based on eugenic arguments. The policy enacted in 1924 was not repealed until 1965. Its impact is most clearly seen in the restriction of Jewish immigration as Hitler came to power in Germany.
The book is interesting but reads long, and during the discussion of the development of various eugenic theories and the creation of various organizations supporting them, I had trouble telling both the rich white guys who were propounding the theories and their clubs and publications apart. That section of the book covered more than 200 pages. Perhaps additional editing could have helped.
The Guarded Gate tells the story of the enactment of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which severely limited immigration to the United States from Italy and other southern and eastern European countries by imposing strict and small quotas based on nationality. In addition to the impact on Italians (who were in disfavor with elites in the US at that point) the law particularly impacted Jews in Russia and Poland, as well as German Jews. Author Okrent is especially concerned with the 30-year run-up to the passage of the law, during which time Darwin's theories and Gregor Mendel's genetic discoveries mutated into an "applied science," eugenics, which argued that genetics was racial as well as individual. Proponents identified three European "races": Nordic (the good guys - good=-looking , smart, organized, hard-working), Mediterranean (artistic but lazy and dumb), and Alpine (somewhere in between). The political argument tied these races to particular countries, and contended that admitting them to the US would result in amalgamation (race-mixing) and dilution of "native American's (they didn't mean American Indians!) superior Nordic genetics. Antisemitism and other ethically biased arguments regarding Africans and Asians were advanced by eugenicists as well and over the period from the late 1890s to 1920 spread beyond the academics who propounded them (based mostly on anecdotal evidence supported by a strong confirmation bias) to the population at large. Anti-immigration bias in this country is not new.
Okrent clearly regards eugenics and its sister theory, "scientific racism," as so much hogwash. At the time, however, they were adopted as gospel by a number of politically influential white men who saw benefit in limiting the influx of immigrants -- among them Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, and Calvin Coolidge, all of whom participated in creating immigration policy based on eugenic arguments. The policy enacted in 1924 was not repealed until 1965. Its impact is most clearly seen in the restriction of Jewish immigration as Hitler came to power in Germany.
The book is interesting but reads long, and during the discussion of the development of various eugenic theories and the creation of various organizations supporting them, I had trouble telling both the rich white guys who were propounding the theories and their clubs and publications apart. That section of the book covered more than 200 pages. Perhaps additional editing could have helped.
August 25, 2019
This is one of those books that will make you feel bad. It is the truth of how much of the racial hate and prejudice powered this country from the 1890s thru WWII. How this country led the way from welcoming immigration to closing the doors on it effectively from 1921 thru the 1950s.
How the myths of racial purity not only did we turn into a science: eugenics but how the Nazis not only saw it as a justification for their own evil but our American scientists and institutions were use in the defense after the war!
If you have ancestry other than Northern European read this book and get mad.
You will also realize why the president when talking about his ancestry around his inauguration claimed Swedish and more importantly Nordic. He was using code words. Specially "Nordic"!
How the myths of racial purity not only did we turn into a science: eugenics but how the Nazis not only saw it as a justification for their own evil but our American scientists and institutions were use in the defense after the war!
If you have ancestry other than Northern European read this book and get mad.
You will also realize why the president when talking about his ancestry around his inauguration claimed Swedish and more importantly Nordic. He was using code words. Specially "Nordic"!
March 2, 2020
For anyone interested in the history of the immigration debate in the United States, The Guarded Gate is a must-read book. Daniel Okrent painstakingly describes the history of the immigration restriction movement that began in the late 19th century and culminated with the Immigration Act of 1924 (otherwise known as the Johnson-Reed Act). That Act imposed drastic quotas on immigrants from specific countries that were not removed until the 1960s.
The anti-immigration effort was bolstered by the rise of the eugenics movement, which started as a fairly respectable scientific outgrowth of genetic research but soon devolved into pseudo-scientific racism. As it developed, this "scientific racism" was a classic case of facts being massaged to support pre-existing conclusions, or even, in some cases, using barely credible assumptions if the actual facts weren't favorable to the cause. One noteworthy example was a study of Army recruits that purported to show not only that undesirable traits like "feeblemindedness" were more prevalent among soldiers of "non-native" stock, but also that those traits were inherited. By any modern scientific standard, the methodology used for the study was severely flawed if not fraudulent, and its conclusions were worthless.
Nonetheless, as the anti-immigrant flames were being fanned (by, among others, some of America's most prominent citizens), the restriction movement took on a cachet of science. Traits of immigrants that could be perceived as negative were not just cultural (or temporary)—they were unalterably determined by biology. But for many if not most of the restrictionists, the "science" was masking a darker motive. As Okrent describes the debate on the 1924 Act, "it was all a hyperinflated display of presumed expertise on the part of men who were not experts, preaching the lessons of a science that was not science, justifying prejudices too ugly to be acknowledged."
It is very clear how Okrent feels about all this. He doesn't mince words. A sample of the adjectives that he uses to describe the work of the "scientific racists" includes: questionable, bizarre, risible, grievously inaccurate, dishonest, pernicious. He lays out a convincing case that it was all this and more. It is hard to come away from this book without appreciating how dark and shameful this aspect of America's past is. And seeing so many echoes of it in the current Administration's immigration policy is even more disheartening.
The anti-immigration effort was bolstered by the rise of the eugenics movement, which started as a fairly respectable scientific outgrowth of genetic research but soon devolved into pseudo-scientific racism. As it developed, this "scientific racism" was a classic case of facts being massaged to support pre-existing conclusions, or even, in some cases, using barely credible assumptions if the actual facts weren't favorable to the cause. One noteworthy example was a study of Army recruits that purported to show not only that undesirable traits like "feeblemindedness" were more prevalent among soldiers of "non-native" stock, but also that those traits were inherited. By any modern scientific standard, the methodology used for the study was severely flawed if not fraudulent, and its conclusions were worthless.
Nonetheless, as the anti-immigrant flames were being fanned (by, among others, some of America's most prominent citizens), the restriction movement took on a cachet of science. Traits of immigrants that could be perceived as negative were not just cultural (or temporary)—they were unalterably determined by biology. But for many if not most of the restrictionists, the "science" was masking a darker motive. As Okrent describes the debate on the 1924 Act, "it was all a hyperinflated display of presumed expertise on the part of men who were not experts, preaching the lessons of a science that was not science, justifying prejudices too ugly to be acknowledged."
It is very clear how Okrent feels about all this. He doesn't mince words. A sample of the adjectives that he uses to describe the work of the "scientific racists" includes: questionable, bizarre, risible, grievously inaccurate, dishonest, pernicious. He lays out a convincing case that it was all this and more. It is hard to come away from this book without appreciating how dark and shameful this aspect of America's past is. And seeing so many echoes of it in the current Administration's immigration policy is even more disheartening.
December 22, 2021
Interesting book which discussed aspects of American history I was totally unaware of until recently. The misuse of science is one reason people today reject science. Eugenics was considered a legitimate science 100 years ago. It was used to limit immigration to this country. Italians, eastern Europeans and Jews were considered "inferior" and there were concerns from the white Nordic types that our country would become "polluted" with inferior stock. All Asians were denied entry into this country.
Results? The United States refused entry to Jewish refugees, residents of Slavic countries as well as the Greeks during the 1930's. How many people could have been saved during World War II if they had somewhere to flee?
Eugenics and the ideas promoted by American scientists were used by the Nazis in their purge of the Jews and other "inferior" peoples. In fact, there were many American Eugenic scientists who supported the Nazis and that shocked me.
I would have given 5 stars to the book, but there was too much information to absorb and too many characters to remember. I will use this book in a class I will be teaching, but I will give a listing of the important characters to help them plow through many sections. The first half went back and forth in time and got confusing. In addition, some sentences were long and had to be reread. I feel the book could have been better organized and the author should have just concentrated on a few characters.
Incidentally, you will be amazed at some of the believers of Eugenics. That included men who founded the American Museum of Natural History and were Presidents of the United States.
Results? The United States refused entry to Jewish refugees, residents of Slavic countries as well as the Greeks during the 1930's. How many people could have been saved during World War II if they had somewhere to flee?
Eugenics and the ideas promoted by American scientists were used by the Nazis in their purge of the Jews and other "inferior" peoples. In fact, there were many American Eugenic scientists who supported the Nazis and that shocked me.
I would have given 5 stars to the book, but there was too much information to absorb and too many characters to remember. I will use this book in a class I will be teaching, but I will give a listing of the important characters to help them plow through many sections. The first half went back and forth in time and got confusing. In addition, some sentences were long and had to be reread. I feel the book could have been better organized and the author should have just concentrated on a few characters.
Incidentally, you will be amazed at some of the believers of Eugenics. That included men who founded the American Museum of Natural History and were Presidents of the United States.
March 7, 2020
I considered describing "The Guarded Gate" as brilliantly written and mind-blowing and even devastating. Yet none of those adjectives is anywhere near strong enough to describe my appreciation for Okrent's deeply disturbing book. It's an absolute must read!
July 5, 2019
This is a well-written and easy-to-read history of the immigration restriction movement from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
It begins with a bunch of Boston Brahmins who were horrified to find their lovely little Boston infested with all these Italians and Jews. They form their own group, the Immigration Restriction League. It had support from upper crust intellectuals and politicians. It was never a mass movement, but it had support from, well, from the right sort of people you might say. But they couldn't get their stuff passed. They pushed for a Literacy Test to limit immigration, and they couldn't get it over the finish line. From Pres. Cleveland onward, it would get vetoed. Or killed in committee in Congress.
Eventually, the movement aligned with eugenics, the pseudo-science that spoke of improving the racial stock of a society. This gave it new life. For instance, they never had any support from southern congressmen to restrict immigration (it didn't concern them at all). But adding race to the mix won them broader support down there - as well as up north. By the 1910s, the movement was on the offensive, and finally got that literacy test passed.
By then, they were aiming for bigger game than any literacy test. They wanted actual restriction. They wanted the quota acts. And they got it. Those passed with pretty easy majorities in the 1920s. It was their high tide.
But maybe my favorite part of the book comes with what came next. Initially, the eugenics movement was still strong, but that wouldn't last forever. In the 1920s, many leading academics associated with it backed away, or came out against it completely. This could really hurt the movement's credibility - if that really mattered much. (But the support was more about racial fears than anything intellectual). So restriction was still easily the law of the land.
What changed everything was what happened in Nazi Germany. The Nazis came to power and their racial thoughts echoed the eugenic movement - and that wasn't just some coincidence. Some of the leading supporters of eugenics were still alive and associated with the German scientists favored by the Nazis. Those eugenic supporters rarely themselves changed their tune - but they found a lot less support. Businessmen who underwrote them backed away. Politicians stopped backing them. The crassness of Nazi racism discredited eugenics in the US even before WWII began.
It's easy to see history of foreordained. What happened was always going to happen. But it's worth noting that it was events external to the US that caused the nation to shift away so strongly from immigration restriction and the racist false science that underlay it.
Good book overall.
It begins with a bunch of Boston Brahmins who were horrified to find their lovely little Boston infested with all these Italians and Jews. They form their own group, the Immigration Restriction League. It had support from upper crust intellectuals and politicians. It was never a mass movement, but it had support from, well, from the right sort of people you might say. But they couldn't get their stuff passed. They pushed for a Literacy Test to limit immigration, and they couldn't get it over the finish line. From Pres. Cleveland onward, it would get vetoed. Or killed in committee in Congress.
Eventually, the movement aligned with eugenics, the pseudo-science that spoke of improving the racial stock of a society. This gave it new life. For instance, they never had any support from southern congressmen to restrict immigration (it didn't concern them at all). But adding race to the mix won them broader support down there - as well as up north. By the 1910s, the movement was on the offensive, and finally got that literacy test passed.
By then, they were aiming for bigger game than any literacy test. They wanted actual restriction. They wanted the quota acts. And they got it. Those passed with pretty easy majorities in the 1920s. It was their high tide.
But maybe my favorite part of the book comes with what came next. Initially, the eugenics movement was still strong, but that wouldn't last forever. In the 1920s, many leading academics associated with it backed away, or came out against it completely. This could really hurt the movement's credibility - if that really mattered much. (But the support was more about racial fears than anything intellectual). So restriction was still easily the law of the land.
What changed everything was what happened in Nazi Germany. The Nazis came to power and their racial thoughts echoed the eugenic movement - and that wasn't just some coincidence. Some of the leading supporters of eugenics were still alive and associated with the German scientists favored by the Nazis. Those eugenic supporters rarely themselves changed their tune - but they found a lot less support. Businessmen who underwrote them backed away. Politicians stopped backing them. The crassness of Nazi racism discredited eugenics in the US even before WWII began.
It's easy to see history of foreordained. What happened was always going to happen. But it's worth noting that it was events external to the US that caused the nation to shift away so strongly from immigration restriction and the racist false science that underlay it.
Good book overall.
February 17, 2021
The tides of otherism have ebbed and flowed throughout five centuries of American history. Racism. Antisemitism. Xenophobia. From the genocide of the continent’s native peoples, to the enslavement of millions of transplanted Africans, to the Know-Nothing fury toward Irish immigrants and Catholics, to the racist violence and perversions of justice under Jim Crow, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the exclusionary policies of the Trump Administration, the fear, ignorance, and insecurity that give rise to otherism have always been with us. Now, in The Guarded Gate, Daniel Okrent surveys one slice of this sad history by examining the racist movement that effectively halted immigration a century ago. He does so with lucid prose and a meticulous appraisal of the facts.
America has always been “a nation of immigrants”
John F. Kennedy elevated the familiar phrase into public discourse with the title of his final book. It is, of course, true by definition that only a vanishingly small proportion of the American people are descended from natives—and even they emigrated to North America some twelve to fourteen thousand years ago. But immigrants have come to the United States in waves. Germans and Irish in the middle of the nineteenth century. Southern and Eastern Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Latinx and Asians beginning later in the twentieth century and accelerating since the 1970s. But the wave of new Americans who set off the backlash that is Daniel Okrent’s subject in The Guarded Gate arrived during the period 1892 to 1924.
During those three decades, the immigrant tide became a flood. And, as Okrent notes, “in 1882 fewer than 15 percent of European immigrants came from the regions east of Germany and south of present-day Austria. Then everything changed.” For example, “by 1900 more than 400,000 Bostonians, out of a population of 560,000, had at least one foreign-born parent.” And the overwhelming majority of those parents were Italians, Russian or Polish Jews, or others from the eastern and southern reaches of Europe.
An in-depth study of the Immigration Act of 1924
The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, known as the Johnson-Reed Act, was the culmination of the three-decade history that Daniel Okrent surveys in this probing study. His story begins in 1892, when Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924) introduced the first of his many attempts to insert a literacy test into the requirements for admission to the United States. Despite Lodge’s fanatic persistence from 1892 to 1920, and the obsessive and well-funded arguments by others in the northeastern Protestant establishment, the literacy test was rejected by four Presidents, three of them Republicans like Lodge. William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft all vetoed any bill that came to their desks if it contained the literacy test, as did Democrat Woodrow Wilson after them.
But the decades-long struggle over the literacy test proved to be a warmup act. The passions unleashed by the First World War and the rising influence of “scientific racism” enabled something much worse: the near-total prohibition of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe that the Johnson-Reed Act required. Sadly, the movement also succeeded in enacting into law in many states the practice “of involuntary vasectomy or tubal ligation of prisoners, mental asylum inmates, and others ‘under state control.'” Sterilization, in other words.
The racist movement was grounded in eugenics
Eugenics, the “science” in “scientific racism,” was a perversion of Mendel’s findings on genetics and Darwin’s theory of evolution. It originated in early twentieth-century England but found its full flowering in the United States—and later in Nazi Germany. By elevating anecdotal and impressionistic observations into “data” and drawing foregone conclusions from them, the proponents of eugenics argued that Italian and Eastern European immigrants were inferior to what at the time were called “native Americans.” To “improve the genetic quality” of the American population, they insisted, it was necessary to bar admission to people from those regions. They got their wish in 1924. And the bill they forced through Congress was not repealed until 1965. (The Chinese Exclusion Act was revoked in 1943, when China fought as a US ally in World War II.)
Pseudoscience?
Calling eugenics a pseudoscience is much too polite. Its practitioners and advocates were far from polite when they used such phrases as “vast masses of filth . . . living like swine,” “the scum, the offal, and the excrescence of the earth,” and “morons” to describe the people they were so eager to exclude from the United States. But this was not crackpot science out on the fringe of respectable society. It was crackpot science cradled within the bosom of the American scientific establishment. And this overtly racist movement was championed by the American Federation of Labor, the influential Saturday Evening Post and the editorial page of the New York Times, and many of the country’s leading citizens, including Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and Walter Lippman (1889-1974).
Wishful thinking spurred on by racism
Researchers whose meticulous studies of genetic variations in fruit flies and poultry would win them generous grants and awards, including the Nobel Prize, wandered off into the Never-Neverland of conjecture and wishful thinking spurred on by racist convictions. They possessed all the intellectual integrity of today’s Right-Wing talk radio hosts and online conspiracy theorists. Some of the “research” on which the eugenicists’ arguments were based consisted of administering written intelligence tests in English to illiterate Italian and Eastern European immigrants who had never before in their lives held a pencil in their hands.
How, then, could the members of the House and Senate be swayed by their arguments? Okrent explains that “‘facts’ gathered by [their] methods were readily available, and no matter how irrelevant or misconstrued or flimsy they were, they could make a for a sturdy edifice when presented by a credentialed expert brandishing seemingly authoritative data.”
Three influential European forebears for America’s racist movement
Three Europeans laid the foundation for the “science” on which American xenophobia was based. The English polymath Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), a pioneer of eugenics—he coined the term, shared a grandfather with Charles Darwin. French novelist Arthur de Gobineau developed the theory of the Aryan master race. And British-born German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) was the author of work that later influenced the antisemitism of Nazi racial policy.
The chief American actors
Okrent traces the strength of the anti-immigration movement during this period to the work of a handful of individuals, Senator Lodge among them, and to the publication of several influential books. Among the key individuals, many of them Boston Brahmins like Lodge, were:
** Prescott F. Hall (1868-1921) was one of the founders and first secretary of the Immigration Restriction League, today considered the first anti-immigrant think tank in the United States. “Over time,” Okrent writes, Hall “would probably devote more hours, more effort, and more complete conviction to stopping immigration than any other individual.”
** Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1835-1907) actively urged on the rising tide of anger directed toward immigrants in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, which he edited.
** Joe Lee (1901-91) was a prominent Boston philanthropist and Democratic politician who founded the playground movement in America and generously supported charities throughout his home town but also bankrolled the racist anti-immigration movement.
** Biologist Charles Davenport (1866-1944) sheltered pseudoscientific “research” at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he founded the Eugenics Record Office in 1910.
** Madison Grant (1865-1937)’s 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, fueled the anti-immigrant wave a century ago and, sadly, is still cited today as an inspiration by racists who may never have actually read it.
** Paleontologist Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935) served as president of the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years. There, he hosted many of the most important meetings of the elite activists who directed the anti-immigrant movement.
Okrent’s account of the growth of xenophobic sentiment in the runup to the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act is richly textured and abounds with fascinating, often confounding personalities. It’s a deeply moving study of how sometimes highly intelligent and well-educated men and women could veer off into fantasy under the influence of deep-seated prejudice and peer pressure. And it demonstrates just how pervasive racism has been in the long and often tragic history of the United States.
About the author
Daniel Okrent (born 1948) was the first public editor of The New York Times. He has been an editor at publishing houses and magazines as well as the Times during most of his career. He is the author, co-author, or editor of eight books but may be best known (to some) as the inventor of the most popular form of fantasy baseball.
America has always been “a nation of immigrants”
John F. Kennedy elevated the familiar phrase into public discourse with the title of his final book. It is, of course, true by definition that only a vanishingly small proportion of the American people are descended from natives—and even they emigrated to North America some twelve to fourteen thousand years ago. But immigrants have come to the United States in waves. Germans and Irish in the middle of the nineteenth century. Southern and Eastern Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Latinx and Asians beginning later in the twentieth century and accelerating since the 1970s. But the wave of new Americans who set off the backlash that is Daniel Okrent’s subject in The Guarded Gate arrived during the period 1892 to 1924.
During those three decades, the immigrant tide became a flood. And, as Okrent notes, “in 1882 fewer than 15 percent of European immigrants came from the regions east of Germany and south of present-day Austria. Then everything changed.” For example, “by 1900 more than 400,000 Bostonians, out of a population of 560,000, had at least one foreign-born parent.” And the overwhelming majority of those parents were Italians, Russian or Polish Jews, or others from the eastern and southern reaches of Europe.
An in-depth study of the Immigration Act of 1924
The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, known as the Johnson-Reed Act, was the culmination of the three-decade history that Daniel Okrent surveys in this probing study. His story begins in 1892, when Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924) introduced the first of his many attempts to insert a literacy test into the requirements for admission to the United States. Despite Lodge’s fanatic persistence from 1892 to 1920, and the obsessive and well-funded arguments by others in the northeastern Protestant establishment, the literacy test was rejected by four Presidents, three of them Republicans like Lodge. William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft all vetoed any bill that came to their desks if it contained the literacy test, as did Democrat Woodrow Wilson after them.
But the decades-long struggle over the literacy test proved to be a warmup act. The passions unleashed by the First World War and the rising influence of “scientific racism” enabled something much worse: the near-total prohibition of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe that the Johnson-Reed Act required. Sadly, the movement also succeeded in enacting into law in many states the practice “of involuntary vasectomy or tubal ligation of prisoners, mental asylum inmates, and others ‘under state control.'” Sterilization, in other words.
The racist movement was grounded in eugenics
Eugenics, the “science” in “scientific racism,” was a perversion of Mendel’s findings on genetics and Darwin’s theory of evolution. It originated in early twentieth-century England but found its full flowering in the United States—and later in Nazi Germany. By elevating anecdotal and impressionistic observations into “data” and drawing foregone conclusions from them, the proponents of eugenics argued that Italian and Eastern European immigrants were inferior to what at the time were called “native Americans.” To “improve the genetic quality” of the American population, they insisted, it was necessary to bar admission to people from those regions. They got their wish in 1924. And the bill they forced through Congress was not repealed until 1965. (The Chinese Exclusion Act was revoked in 1943, when China fought as a US ally in World War II.)
Pseudoscience?
Calling eugenics a pseudoscience is much too polite. Its practitioners and advocates were far from polite when they used such phrases as “vast masses of filth . . . living like swine,” “the scum, the offal, and the excrescence of the earth,” and “morons” to describe the people they were so eager to exclude from the United States. But this was not crackpot science out on the fringe of respectable society. It was crackpot science cradled within the bosom of the American scientific establishment. And this overtly racist movement was championed by the American Federation of Labor, the influential Saturday Evening Post and the editorial page of the New York Times, and many of the country’s leading citizens, including Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and Walter Lippman (1889-1974).
Wishful thinking spurred on by racism
Researchers whose meticulous studies of genetic variations in fruit flies and poultry would win them generous grants and awards, including the Nobel Prize, wandered off into the Never-Neverland of conjecture and wishful thinking spurred on by racist convictions. They possessed all the intellectual integrity of today’s Right-Wing talk radio hosts and online conspiracy theorists. Some of the “research” on which the eugenicists’ arguments were based consisted of administering written intelligence tests in English to illiterate Italian and Eastern European immigrants who had never before in their lives held a pencil in their hands.
How, then, could the members of the House and Senate be swayed by their arguments? Okrent explains that “‘facts’ gathered by [their] methods were readily available, and no matter how irrelevant or misconstrued or flimsy they were, they could make a for a sturdy edifice when presented by a credentialed expert brandishing seemingly authoritative data.”
Three influential European forebears for America’s racist movement
Three Europeans laid the foundation for the “science” on which American xenophobia was based. The English polymath Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), a pioneer of eugenics—he coined the term, shared a grandfather with Charles Darwin. French novelist Arthur de Gobineau developed the theory of the Aryan master race. And British-born German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) was the author of work that later influenced the antisemitism of Nazi racial policy.
The chief American actors
Okrent traces the strength of the anti-immigration movement during this period to the work of a handful of individuals, Senator Lodge among them, and to the publication of several influential books. Among the key individuals, many of them Boston Brahmins like Lodge, were:
** Prescott F. Hall (1868-1921) was one of the founders and first secretary of the Immigration Restriction League, today considered the first anti-immigrant think tank in the United States. “Over time,” Okrent writes, Hall “would probably devote more hours, more effort, and more complete conviction to stopping immigration than any other individual.”
** Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1835-1907) actively urged on the rising tide of anger directed toward immigrants in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, which he edited.
** Joe Lee (1901-91) was a prominent Boston philanthropist and Democratic politician who founded the playground movement in America and generously supported charities throughout his home town but also bankrolled the racist anti-immigration movement.
** Biologist Charles Davenport (1866-1944) sheltered pseudoscientific “research” at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he founded the Eugenics Record Office in 1910.
** Madison Grant (1865-1937)’s 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, fueled the anti-immigrant wave a century ago and, sadly, is still cited today as an inspiration by racists who may never have actually read it.
** Paleontologist Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935) served as president of the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years. There, he hosted many of the most important meetings of the elite activists who directed the anti-immigrant movement.
Okrent’s account of the growth of xenophobic sentiment in the runup to the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act is richly textured and abounds with fascinating, often confounding personalities. It’s a deeply moving study of how sometimes highly intelligent and well-educated men and women could veer off into fantasy under the influence of deep-seated prejudice and peer pressure. And it demonstrates just how pervasive racism has been in the long and often tragic history of the United States.
About the author
Daniel Okrent (born 1948) was the first public editor of The New York Times. He has been an editor at publishing houses and magazines as well as the Times during most of his career. He is the author, co-author, or editor of eight books but may be best known (to some) as the inventor of the most popular form of fantasy baseball.
March 11, 2024
When I read Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race some years ago, I felt that I was encountering history that had been deliberately hidden. Well, here I was again, back in the dark world of eugenics, this time as it informed US immigration policy in the early 20th century. Once again, I felt that I was reading history that had long been kept secret.
Daniel Okrent’s book is detailed and meticulously researched. The poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free in Emma Lazarus’ famous poem were simply not wanted and were essentially kept out of the United States as a result of eugenics-influenced immigration restriction legislation and quotas. The consequences were devastating, particularly for Jews desperate to leave Europe as the noose of Nazism tightened.
Eugenics is nonsense, of course, and Okrent eloquently demolishes its claims to be a science. Yet the xenophobia that both fed into eugenics and was nourished by it persists to this day. This is one of the sobering truths that I took from The Guarded Gate. The other is that, with its cast of eugenics enthusiasts that included Boston Brahmins, social and physical sciences academics, and American presidents, this work reminds us that not all racists wear white hoods and attend cross-burnings.
Daniel Okrent’s book is detailed and meticulously researched. The poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free in Emma Lazarus’ famous poem were simply not wanted and were essentially kept out of the United States as a result of eugenics-influenced immigration restriction legislation and quotas. The consequences were devastating, particularly for Jews desperate to leave Europe as the noose of Nazism tightened.
Eugenics is nonsense, of course, and Okrent eloquently demolishes its claims to be a science. Yet the xenophobia that both fed into eugenics and was nourished by it persists to this day. This is one of the sobering truths that I took from The Guarded Gate. The other is that, with its cast of eugenics enthusiasts that included Boston Brahmins, social and physical sciences academics, and American presidents, this work reminds us that not all racists wear white hoods and attend cross-burnings.
May 25, 2020
An important and detailed study of the early 20th century eugenics movement led by misguided scientists and encouraged by a variety of xenophobes and immigration restrictionists and eventually resulted in the sweeping Immigration Act of 1924. A dark chapter of American history.
November 21, 2019
Eye opening and sobering analysis of the eugenics and anti immigrant movements in the US. Strong echoes heard in today’s build the wall debate.
January 4, 2022
This was super interesting, well written and engaging.
Highly recommend. 5 stars and best reads pile.
Also extremely relevant to what is happening today in politics.
Highly recommend. 5 stars and best reads pile.
Also extremely relevant to what is happening today in politics.
May 20, 2020
An engrossing, deeply researched account of the far-reaching influence the pseudoscience of eugenics had in inflaming American xenophobic sentiments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including government anti-immigration policy and legislation, and forced sterilization laws. Other books I recommend exploring similar subject matter are Edwin Black's War Against the Weak, Harry Bruinius's Better for All the World, and James Whitman's Hitler's American Model.
September 30, 2020
Daniel Okrent's The Guarded Gate is a fluid and dismaying history of the turn-of-the-century eugenics and anti-immigration movements (and how seamlessly they converged), aided and abetted by an academic establishment that provided both with a veneer of intellectual respectability.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!", Emma Lazarus' poem famously says on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Yet for many Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this was precisely the problem: an open door to a new wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe, primarily Italians and Russian Jews and largely poor and illiterate, threatened to transform the demographics of America. A racist and nativist backlash soon kicked into high gear, led by Henry Cabot Lodge in the Senate and an elite vanguard of New England Brahmins in the Immigration Restriction League that forced through tough immigration laws that were anodyne in appearance (literacy testing of immigrants doesn't seem terrible on the surface) but sinister in effect (most of the new immigrants were illiterate and thus barred from entry).
Nativists linked arms with scientific racists and eugenicists, peddlers of pseudoscientific notions of racial supremacy and improving the human race through selective "breeding" of the talented and the sterilization of the "unfit." Armed with charts, graphs, maps, and statistics, scientific racists argued that these new immigrants were "beaten men of beaten races" (in the words of MIT president Francis Walker), "vast masses of filth" (Yale Review), and “uncleanly, intemperate, quarrelsome, ignorant, priest-ridden and hard on women and children" (Tulane University professor). With laughable precision, studies were produced claiming that Romanians and Italians were 41% and 57% more likely to be criminal, respectively, than the average American; others purported to show that 83% of Jews and 80% of Hungarians were "morons" based upon totally biased and worthless "intelligence" tests that were predicated on knowledge of American culture.
Spurred on by WWI and the postwar political and social unrest, these trends reached their ghastly climax with the explicitly racist 1924 Immigration Act, which established a national origins quota system cleverly tied to the 1890 census (largely predating the southern/eastern European immigration wave). The numbers tell the story of the impact: immigration from Italy was cut from 6 to 4 figures from 1921 to 1925; Greece from roughly 40,000 in 1914 to a measly 100 a year. And as events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were to prove, the consequences were tragic and quite literally lethal. America shut its doors at the exact moment when they needed to be open for Jews and other European refugees desperate to escape Nazi clutches. Nazi barbarity, of course, was also the extreme outgrowth of the eugenics craze and their atrocities thoroughly discredited the entire project, as Okrent details in the final chapter. A movement that promised to bring humanity to its greatest heights instead helped plummet it to its lowest depths.
There are powerful themes in this book that are perfectly relevant to 21st century America. First, that the most pernicious racism of all is not from half-illiterate rednecks who wear white hoods (though we should be worried about these people), but from the people in the professional classes who coat their racism in a cosmopolitan, erudite glaze. Men like Henry Cabot Lodge, who could recite the classics, drank the finest French wine, and attended operas, but were as viciously racist as any Alabama Klansman. Beware the man who wears a bow tie, smiles at the camera, and talks about the need to restrict immigration to protect "the American way of life."
It is also remarkable just how little the basic dynamics of the immigration debate in this country have changed. Sure, the subjects of scorn and contempt have shifted, but the tropes haven't. If, as Donald Trump said, Mexico isn't sending us their best, nativists believed Europe wasn't sending America its finest either. Just as Hispanic immigrants today are assumed by some to be crime-prone, turn-of-the-century immigrants were tarred with the same brush ("musical rapists" in the words of eugenicist Charles Davenport). Nativists always find a way of disparaging the new wave of immigrants as uniquely incapable of assimilation: first the Irish and the Germans, then the Italians and the Jews as depicted in this book, and now Hispanic and Muslim immigrants.
Okrent has done a service by shining a light on the heated debates of a long forgotten, yet startlingly relevant, era. Read this book and don't let history repeat itself.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!", Emma Lazarus' poem famously says on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Yet for many Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this was precisely the problem: an open door to a new wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe, primarily Italians and Russian Jews and largely poor and illiterate, threatened to transform the demographics of America. A racist and nativist backlash soon kicked into high gear, led by Henry Cabot Lodge in the Senate and an elite vanguard of New England Brahmins in the Immigration Restriction League that forced through tough immigration laws that were anodyne in appearance (literacy testing of immigrants doesn't seem terrible on the surface) but sinister in effect (most of the new immigrants were illiterate and thus barred from entry).
Nativists linked arms with scientific racists and eugenicists, peddlers of pseudoscientific notions of racial supremacy and improving the human race through selective "breeding" of the talented and the sterilization of the "unfit." Armed with charts, graphs, maps, and statistics, scientific racists argued that these new immigrants were "beaten men of beaten races" (in the words of MIT president Francis Walker), "vast masses of filth" (Yale Review), and “uncleanly, intemperate, quarrelsome, ignorant, priest-ridden and hard on women and children" (Tulane University professor). With laughable precision, studies were produced claiming that Romanians and Italians were 41% and 57% more likely to be criminal, respectively, than the average American; others purported to show that 83% of Jews and 80% of Hungarians were "morons" based upon totally biased and worthless "intelligence" tests that were predicated on knowledge of American culture.
Spurred on by WWI and the postwar political and social unrest, these trends reached their ghastly climax with the explicitly racist 1924 Immigration Act, which established a national origins quota system cleverly tied to the 1890 census (largely predating the southern/eastern European immigration wave). The numbers tell the story of the impact: immigration from Italy was cut from 6 to 4 figures from 1921 to 1925; Greece from roughly 40,000 in 1914 to a measly 100 a year. And as events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were to prove, the consequences were tragic and quite literally lethal. America shut its doors at the exact moment when they needed to be open for Jews and other European refugees desperate to escape Nazi clutches. Nazi barbarity, of course, was also the extreme outgrowth of the eugenics craze and their atrocities thoroughly discredited the entire project, as Okrent details in the final chapter. A movement that promised to bring humanity to its greatest heights instead helped plummet it to its lowest depths.
There are powerful themes in this book that are perfectly relevant to 21st century America. First, that the most pernicious racism of all is not from half-illiterate rednecks who wear white hoods (though we should be worried about these people), but from the people in the professional classes who coat their racism in a cosmopolitan, erudite glaze. Men like Henry Cabot Lodge, who could recite the classics, drank the finest French wine, and attended operas, but were as viciously racist as any Alabama Klansman. Beware the man who wears a bow tie, smiles at the camera, and talks about the need to restrict immigration to protect "the American way of life."
It is also remarkable just how little the basic dynamics of the immigration debate in this country have changed. Sure, the subjects of scorn and contempt have shifted, but the tropes haven't. If, as Donald Trump said, Mexico isn't sending us their best, nativists believed Europe wasn't sending America its finest either. Just as Hispanic immigrants today are assumed by some to be crime-prone, turn-of-the-century immigrants were tarred with the same brush ("musical rapists" in the words of eugenicist Charles Davenport). Nativists always find a way of disparaging the new wave of immigrants as uniquely incapable of assimilation: first the Irish and the Germans, then the Italians and the Jews as depicted in this book, and now Hispanic and Muslim immigrants.
Okrent has done a service by shining a light on the heated debates of a long forgotten, yet startlingly relevant, era. Read this book and don't let history repeat itself.
May 15, 2019
Okrent has provided us with an exhaustive – and some might say exhausting – study of how science was enlisted by American politicians, academics and public figures to serve bigotry and racism in the early twentieth century. It is a revealing look at American politics and society from even colonial times. The venerated Benjamin Franklin thought immigrants were the most stupid of their birth society, and he feared being outnumbered by them (they were mostly German).
From the mid-nineteenth century to 1890, immigration from Europe increased many-fold, and much of it was of the “undesirable” groups – Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe. The aristocratic grandees of Boston and New York felt threatened by being outnumbered by them, and eventually (in 1916) firmly joined forces with the growing junk science of eugenics in order to justify keeping lesser “races” out of America. Books justifying national origins-based immigration restriction written by scholars and academics flooded the market and were enormously popular. Three population groups of Europe, Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean, were identified, and the last two were deemed deficient in culture. Nordic was the preferred. The others had to be kept out or to a minimum. When literacy laws were proposed, fear grew that the school systems in Italy, Poland and Greece, for example, would improve, and literacy tests then would not keep them out. Other methods had to be found.
Immigration restrictions were proposed based on how many of each “race” were already in America. Since English, and to a lesser degree, Germans had been in America for 150+ years, they had the advantage in any percentage system that was based on national origins. Eventually, restrictions were based on the Census of 1890, since that was the year Nordic immigration was still strong, and as George Lorimer put it, “low-grade stuff hadn’t begun to come to us in volume.” Twenty years later there was “volume.”
The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 slammed the gate shut for most of southern and eastern Europe, reducing immigration to a trickle and making a ghost town of Ellis Island. Okrent maintains that Johnson-Reed keep 18 million Europeans from American shores. Even more shocking is that American eugenics was cited by some defendants at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals in 1946: they were not “following orders,” but following the American model. The Act was not repealed until 1965.
Okrent has written a remarkable social history of a most troubling era of the American experience. It is copiously back-noted and bibliographed. He has identified those who made this era possible, from Boston Brahmins to prestigious university presidents, to junk scientists. Unfortunately, his work has too much currency.
From the mid-nineteenth century to 1890, immigration from Europe increased many-fold, and much of it was of the “undesirable” groups – Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe. The aristocratic grandees of Boston and New York felt threatened by being outnumbered by them, and eventually (in 1916) firmly joined forces with the growing junk science of eugenics in order to justify keeping lesser “races” out of America. Books justifying national origins-based immigration restriction written by scholars and academics flooded the market and were enormously popular. Three population groups of Europe, Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean, were identified, and the last two were deemed deficient in culture. Nordic was the preferred. The others had to be kept out or to a minimum. When literacy laws were proposed, fear grew that the school systems in Italy, Poland and Greece, for example, would improve, and literacy tests then would not keep them out. Other methods had to be found.
Immigration restrictions were proposed based on how many of each “race” were already in America. Since English, and to a lesser degree, Germans had been in America for 150+ years, they had the advantage in any percentage system that was based on national origins. Eventually, restrictions were based on the Census of 1890, since that was the year Nordic immigration was still strong, and as George Lorimer put it, “low-grade stuff hadn’t begun to come to us in volume.” Twenty years later there was “volume.”
The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 slammed the gate shut for most of southern and eastern Europe, reducing immigration to a trickle and making a ghost town of Ellis Island. Okrent maintains that Johnson-Reed keep 18 million Europeans from American shores. Even more shocking is that American eugenics was cited by some defendants at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals in 1946: they were not “following orders,” but following the American model. The Act was not repealed until 1965.
Okrent has written a remarkable social history of a most troubling era of the American experience. It is copiously back-noted and bibliographed. He has identified those who made this era possible, from Boston Brahmins to prestigious university presidents, to junk scientists. Unfortunately, his work has too much currency.
February 29, 2020
With the longest subtitle I think I've ever seen, Daniel Okrent has written an important book that echoes far too much today. He seems a bit tentative in the opening chapter or two. Is he focusing on the "scientific racism" of eugenics or the issue of American immigration restriction? The two are certainly related, but I think he needed to be more confident in laying out the point and direction of the book. Having gotten that out of the way, this is still an amazing, sometimes discouraging book that examines the people behind the effort to limit immigration to just the countries we want people from - what they called the Nordic countries, which included Britain with other parts of northern Europe. They weren't as blunt as our current president who railed against "sh**-hole countries," but they made it clear who they wanted and didn't want in the U.S. I think it is safe to say that you will be surprised to learn the identities of some of the advocates of eugenics. I won't spoil it for you. The legislation they managed to pass severely restricted immigration from 1924 to 1965 and was a major factor in the U.S. refusal to offer sanctuary to Jews fleeing Europe in the run up to WWII. Not one of our nation's finest moments, and certainly not one we should repeat.
August 1, 2019
A well-written examination of the people and forces, driven in large part by bigotry and racial hatred, that promoted immigration restrictions in the first part of 20th century United States. The author effectively makes the point that, while eugenics theory originated in science, it came to be used in distorted ways for political ends, ultimately harming not only hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were not "preferred" in the U.S. by those in power (because they were not of the right heritage) but, ultimately, millions of people who were eliminated or harmed in other ways by the Nazi regime.
February 23, 2020
As with his prior works it is meticulously researched and I have no issue with the quality of his scholarship. He does address an important topic and it has resonance in the present with so much pseudo-science being promoted. However unlike his previous books it lacks smooth narrative flow. He gets lost in a world of acronyms, groups, and characters that makes for a choppy delivery. Solid but not up to Okrent's usual high standards.
February 9, 2021
This was a very interesting book that made me think a lot about science, immigration, and racism. The purpose of the book seems to be highlighting the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th century and its effect ultimate effects on immigration policy, with somewhat of a focus on Jewish immigration and anti semitism. It ultimately suggests that those policies and those people responsible for restrictionist ideas are partly to blame for the extent of the Holocaust. It seems to me as though the author believes in unrestricted immigration and that the only limitation to it should be the willingness of people to move. He seems to represent the position that people are entitled to immigrate anywhere they want to go, without any sort of regulation, and that any sort of restriction violates sone fundamental human right. I have to say, I’m not of that kind of thinking, but it has me thinking about what principles, if any, should govern it and who should decide.
I have lived in areas where illegal immigration has caused real detriment to society (the closing of a Level 1 trauma center due to the financial consequences of treating the unfunded and illegal population, people’s property routinely vandalized, destroyed, and stolen by migrating illegals, etc.) so I am of the opinion that immigration must somehow be managed, and it should be dictated by those who are likely to be impacted by that immigration. But what should be the governing principles?
Everyone seems to have an ulterior motive. The Republicans want cheap labor, the Democrats want votes from those most likely to favor the social programs they favor and from which they stand to benefit, farmers want their fields picked without the inconvenience and cost of having to comply with employment requirements, those seeking jobs or trying to upgrade their employment don’t want the competition from cheap labor, those paying higher taxes to fund social programs don’t want that burden to grow. And what about communicable diseases like Covid or even Ebola, shouldn’t some sort of screening be in place and considered reasonable to protect the existing population? So who should make the rules? If we are interested in immigrants succeeding in our country, should we create qualifications like language ability or education—things so important to achieving financial success—to try to make sure immigrants have the tools they need for success in today’s world? If those aren’t the right tools, what are? And what of the financial burden incurred by those who will be leaned on until immigrants become self-sufficient contributors to society? And how long will that take?
Many of these reasonable sounding arguments were used by various people discussed in the book to justify their racist interests to restrict immigration from various countries and groups. So even well intending people’s well-intended efforts can be hijacked and warped for nefarious purposes. It is also evidenced in the book that even the scientific minded can allow prejudice to overcome their better judgement for years at a time.
The book traces the birth of genetics, its scientific development and application, and then its misapplication and role in justifying prevailing the racial bigotry of the time to create racist immigration policy which ultimately gave rise to the Holocaust. Obviously, when put that way, it seems that it would be hard to find anything worth justifying along the way as of any value, but it’s not that simple. The book does a good job of spotlighting how it went off the rails for many with disastrous effects, but without really discussing how the initial intent held tantalizing promise of bettering human kind as well as where some of the applications had been well-intended.
For example, if traits were heritable, could we not use Darwinian selection to improve the human race? Could we not attempt to direct the the human genome towards traits of universal value and away from others that lead to pain snd suffering? After all, is has been done successfully with plants and animals to increase yields, increase shelf life, increase production, decrease disease, and in these areas has in many ways greatly benefited the world. So it seems early on that well-intending scientists hoped to harvest some of those benefits for humans as well...Unfortunately, the science was in its infancy, and those with ulterior motives hijacked the science and then began using incomplete understanding, confirmation bias, poor research, and intentional fabrication of evidence to justify racism. And those people were so zealous in their efforts to create that narrative, that their unfounded and unsubstantiated theories became so well accepted in society that even when it became clear that there was no scientific basis or reasonable justification for those ideas, it no longer mattered because the momentum generated by wealth and privilege was just too great. Only when the Nazis weapon used their ideas and applied their policies in the extreme did justification to continue evaporate.
The policies based on eugenics were ultimately abandoned, but I think the seeds of that pseudoscience still exist in the world today and are expressed as racism and intolerance. The book is a historical perspective only, but it did provide me with a lot of food fir thought.
I have lived in areas where illegal immigration has caused real detriment to society (the closing of a Level 1 trauma center due to the financial consequences of treating the unfunded and illegal population, people’s property routinely vandalized, destroyed, and stolen by migrating illegals, etc.) so I am of the opinion that immigration must somehow be managed, and it should be dictated by those who are likely to be impacted by that immigration. But what should be the governing principles?
Everyone seems to have an ulterior motive. The Republicans want cheap labor, the Democrats want votes from those most likely to favor the social programs they favor and from which they stand to benefit, farmers want their fields picked without the inconvenience and cost of having to comply with employment requirements, those seeking jobs or trying to upgrade their employment don’t want the competition from cheap labor, those paying higher taxes to fund social programs don’t want that burden to grow. And what about communicable diseases like Covid or even Ebola, shouldn’t some sort of screening be in place and considered reasonable to protect the existing population? So who should make the rules? If we are interested in immigrants succeeding in our country, should we create qualifications like language ability or education—things so important to achieving financial success—to try to make sure immigrants have the tools they need for success in today’s world? If those aren’t the right tools, what are? And what of the financial burden incurred by those who will be leaned on until immigrants become self-sufficient contributors to society? And how long will that take?
Many of these reasonable sounding arguments were used by various people discussed in the book to justify their racist interests to restrict immigration from various countries and groups. So even well intending people’s well-intended efforts can be hijacked and warped for nefarious purposes. It is also evidenced in the book that even the scientific minded can allow prejudice to overcome their better judgement for years at a time.
The book traces the birth of genetics, its scientific development and application, and then its misapplication and role in justifying prevailing the racial bigotry of the time to create racist immigration policy which ultimately gave rise to the Holocaust. Obviously, when put that way, it seems that it would be hard to find anything worth justifying along the way as of any value, but it’s not that simple. The book does a good job of spotlighting how it went off the rails for many with disastrous effects, but without really discussing how the initial intent held tantalizing promise of bettering human kind as well as where some of the applications had been well-intended.
For example, if traits were heritable, could we not use Darwinian selection to improve the human race? Could we not attempt to direct the the human genome towards traits of universal value and away from others that lead to pain snd suffering? After all, is has been done successfully with plants and animals to increase yields, increase shelf life, increase production, decrease disease, and in these areas has in many ways greatly benefited the world. So it seems early on that well-intending scientists hoped to harvest some of those benefits for humans as well...Unfortunately, the science was in its infancy, and those with ulterior motives hijacked the science and then began using incomplete understanding, confirmation bias, poor research, and intentional fabrication of evidence to justify racism. And those people were so zealous in their efforts to create that narrative, that their unfounded and unsubstantiated theories became so well accepted in society that even when it became clear that there was no scientific basis or reasonable justification for those ideas, it no longer mattered because the momentum generated by wealth and privilege was just too great. Only when the Nazis weapon used their ideas and applied their policies in the extreme did justification to continue evaporate.
The policies based on eugenics were ultimately abandoned, but I think the seeds of that pseudoscience still exist in the world today and are expressed as racism and intolerance. The book is a historical perspective only, but it did provide me with a lot of food fir thought.
September 2, 2019
Fantastically written and researched, and will make you want to punch quite a few historical people! Immigration restriction based on race and other qualities is a hot topic currently but far from new, as this book illustrates so well.
March 2, 2020
This is a difficult book, to read and to realize people thought this way. However, the message is important and the book is well researched which is why I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads. The author begins in the 19th Century and looks at how native born Northern European Americans saw themselves as the ideal race. Using science (especially drawing on Darwin’s theories), they debated how they might protect the race and even improve the race. This had profound impact across the society including non-voluntary sterilization in most states. But Okrent, while acknowledging these other implications, focuses his study of this “false science” on its influence in the immigration debate in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The thrust of the book essential ends with the 1924 legislation that limited immigration at a percentage of those who ancestors came from counties as defined in the 1890 census. After the passage of this act, which remained the law until 1965, the author only briefly notes how the American debate over race and eugenics was picked up by the Nazis in Germany.
Starting with leading American families from New England, there was a rising concern about what immigration was doing to America in the late 19th Century. Leading politicians like Boston’s Henry Cabot Lodge sough a restriction in immigration but ran up against obstacles. Literacy was one of the restrictions, but as schools began to be more popular in places like Italy, educational barriers were no longer effective at reducing the influx of new populations. Immigration kept the price of labor cheap, which meant that many business leaders wanted new immigrants. Steamship companies often brought empty ships to America in order to ship American products (especially timber) to Europe found immigration to a windfall to their business. Business leaders saw that the attempts to restrict immigration kept failing. In an attempt to boost their argument, many who were against the immigrants south to support their arguments with science. The proposed there was a danger of mixing American blood (Northern European) with the blood of those deemed less desirable. It’s interesting (and frightening) how groups like the American Breeder’s Association, which had worked to improve agricultural practices such as raising healthier sheep, growing higher yielding soybeans and corn, and mildew-resistant cherries, began to debate at how to build a better “human.” Thankfully, these ideas never took a strong hold in the United States, but these ideas did catch on in Germany and even after the war, it was used as a German defense at the Nuremburg Trials, where Hitler’s “doctors” pointed to America as the source of their heinous ideas on race (see pages 392-393).
While there were many conservative and traditional politicians and business leaders drawn to such theories as a way of avoiding “racial suicide,” such as Henry Cabot Lodge and Henry Adams, this was not only an issue supported by conservatives. Those with more progressive views such as Madison Grant (of the Bronx Zoo Fame), Teddy Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt also supported such views. Okrent follows the money and intellectual trail, as he links the support of such research, the scientist involved (such as Charles Davenport and Fairfield Osborn), the leading universities, and those funding such studies (which included Rockefeller, the Harriman family, and the Carnegie Institute. Also thrown into the mix includes Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and Samuel Gompers of American Labor fame. In a way, the ideas that lead to the 1924 restrictive immigrant policies in America, drew support from leading thinkers across America. It is sobering to look back today and to see the flaws in their thinking. As Nazism began to rear its ugly head, most moved away from such theories.
Okrent notes how his own publisher (Scribner) supported such theories in the past. Madison Grant’s book, The Passing of the Great Race, and Lothrop Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color against the White World, were both published by Scribner.
While it would be nice to be reassured that such ideas that were popular in the United States in the early years of the 20th Century are no longer present as we move into the 21st Century, I’m not so sure. The recent debate over immigration and with a book like Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Culture and Civilization (2002), I wonder if there are still those who hold on to such ideas about race.
While Okrent mentions issues with Asian immigration, and early anti-Catholic immigration issues, this book primarily focuses on the attempt to limit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. I listened to this book via Audible, and then checked out the book from the library and read selections in preparation for a book group meeting where we were discussing this book.
Starting with leading American families from New England, there was a rising concern about what immigration was doing to America in the late 19th Century. Leading politicians like Boston’s Henry Cabot Lodge sough a restriction in immigration but ran up against obstacles. Literacy was one of the restrictions, but as schools began to be more popular in places like Italy, educational barriers were no longer effective at reducing the influx of new populations. Immigration kept the price of labor cheap, which meant that many business leaders wanted new immigrants. Steamship companies often brought empty ships to America in order to ship American products (especially timber) to Europe found immigration to a windfall to their business. Business leaders saw that the attempts to restrict immigration kept failing. In an attempt to boost their argument, many who were against the immigrants south to support their arguments with science. The proposed there was a danger of mixing American blood (Northern European) with the blood of those deemed less desirable. It’s interesting (and frightening) how groups like the American Breeder’s Association, which had worked to improve agricultural practices such as raising healthier sheep, growing higher yielding soybeans and corn, and mildew-resistant cherries, began to debate at how to build a better “human.” Thankfully, these ideas never took a strong hold in the United States, but these ideas did catch on in Germany and even after the war, it was used as a German defense at the Nuremburg Trials, where Hitler’s “doctors” pointed to America as the source of their heinous ideas on race (see pages 392-393).
While there were many conservative and traditional politicians and business leaders drawn to such theories as a way of avoiding “racial suicide,” such as Henry Cabot Lodge and Henry Adams, this was not only an issue supported by conservatives. Those with more progressive views such as Madison Grant (of the Bronx Zoo Fame), Teddy Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt also supported such views. Okrent follows the money and intellectual trail, as he links the support of such research, the scientist involved (such as Charles Davenport and Fairfield Osborn), the leading universities, and those funding such studies (which included Rockefeller, the Harriman family, and the Carnegie Institute. Also thrown into the mix includes Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and Samuel Gompers of American Labor fame. In a way, the ideas that lead to the 1924 restrictive immigrant policies in America, drew support from leading thinkers across America. It is sobering to look back today and to see the flaws in their thinking. As Nazism began to rear its ugly head, most moved away from such theories.
Okrent notes how his own publisher (Scribner) supported such theories in the past. Madison Grant’s book, The Passing of the Great Race, and Lothrop Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color against the White World, were both published by Scribner.
While it would be nice to be reassured that such ideas that were popular in the United States in the early years of the 20th Century are no longer present as we move into the 21st Century, I’m not so sure. The recent debate over immigration and with a book like Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Culture and Civilization (2002), I wonder if there are still those who hold on to such ideas about race.
While Okrent mentions issues with Asian immigration, and early anti-Catholic immigration issues, this book primarily focuses on the attempt to limit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. I listened to this book via Audible, and then checked out the book from the library and read selections in preparation for a book group meeting where we were discussing this book.
February 19, 2020
"History repeats... first as tragedy, then as farce."
"No one learns from history."
This is a terrifying and well-written story of how a pseudoscience motivated by racism gave racists cover for pushing for racist immigration quotas in the US to keep "non-Nordic" Europeans, Asians, and Africans from immigrating. The upshot was that several hundred thousand Jews who could have sought refuge in the US to escape the Holocaust were not able to do so and died as a result. The immigration restrictionists were unspeakably evil, and it is so very, very sad that the exact same rhetoric, fears, and ideas are rising again today. Back then, the fear was that America would crumble if we didn't keep Jews, Italians, Greeks, Eastern Europeans, and so on out, as they were subhuman compared to the great races from Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia who built the country. (Never mind, of course, that an earlier generation had spoken out against the Irish and Scandinavians, while an earlier one still spoke out against the Germans.) Today the same things are being said about people from central and South America and elsewhere. In another generation, the racists will move on to vilifying another group. Racism never changes. Maybe one day will learn that we are human beings and stories like this can stop repeating We may hope.
This is a timely and sadly necessary book.
"No one learns from history."
This is a terrifying and well-written story of how a pseudoscience motivated by racism gave racists cover for pushing for racist immigration quotas in the US to keep "non-Nordic" Europeans, Asians, and Africans from immigrating. The upshot was that several hundred thousand Jews who could have sought refuge in the US to escape the Holocaust were not able to do so and died as a result. The immigration restrictionists were unspeakably evil, and it is so very, very sad that the exact same rhetoric, fears, and ideas are rising again today. Back then, the fear was that America would crumble if we didn't keep Jews, Italians, Greeks, Eastern Europeans, and so on out, as they were subhuman compared to the great races from Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia who built the country. (Never mind, of course, that an earlier generation had spoken out against the Irish and Scandinavians, while an earlier one still spoke out against the Germans.) Today the same things are being said about people from central and South America and elsewhere. In another generation, the racists will move on to vilifying another group. Racism never changes. Maybe one day will learn that we are human beings and stories like this can stop repeating We may hope.
This is a timely and sadly necessary book.
July 1, 2022
I’m on a personal journey to understand the eugenics movement and it’s legacy on education and hoooooooly smokes people. This book is incredible. It’s about the the immigration restriction efforts and the Jackson-Reed Law (quota laws), but Okrent presents a fascinating story and history of characters. This is clearly exceptionally well researched and told as a compelling story-truly a multi-decade movement- to implement eugenics policy under threat of “race suicide.” I appreciate Okrent’s nuance and his presentation of multiple historical takes on complicated people 100+ years ago without making excuses for their narcissism, myopia, and utter stupidity (how can you make scientific claims with ZERO evidence??). Anyways, I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time and will do more research into the founder of the SAT as an early eugenicist who later revoked his support for the test and the eugenics movement.
December 10, 2021
Daniel Okrent does an excellent job of delving into the history of eugenics and immigration, treating it with a critical lens that helps enlighten the listener of not only the events of the past, but their motivations. An added bonus was that the audiobook was read by the author, and hearing the emphasis where it was meant to be always helps in these books.
There was a deep, granular exploration of many of the most influential players in anti-immigration at this time, and learning about their motivations. This is a dark chapter in American history, but one that needs to be explored by many to understand why and how the United States is what it is today.
I would highly recommend this title to anyone interested in seeing the truth in US history, however I would caution that there are in-depth discussions of honestly disgusting topics, including eugenics, scientific racism, and extreme xenophobia. It is a good book, but it's a hard read in spots.
There was a deep, granular exploration of many of the most influential players in anti-immigration at this time, and learning about their motivations. This is a dark chapter in American history, but one that needs to be explored by many to understand why and how the United States is what it is today.
I would highly recommend this title to anyone interested in seeing the truth in US history, however I would caution that there are in-depth discussions of honestly disgusting topics, including eugenics, scientific racism, and extreme xenophobia. It is a good book, but it's a hard read in spots.
October 11, 2019
This was a very hard book to read. Some portions I had to reread more than once as it was difficult to comprehend. I admit I skipped part of the notes and the bibliography as I just wanted it to be over. It was all about the Immigration Resistance League and how Eugenics played a large role in it. Hitler while imprisoned read one of the books that came out of that movement: The Passing of the Great Race, and this book, along with Mein Kampf were the inspiration for the genocide of European Jews and other groups by the Nazis during WWII. What comes to mind: "O What a Tangled Web we Weave, when we Practice to Deceive," from Sir Walter Scott. Whether the Eugenicists or IRL knew what the consequences would be or not, it is the end result that is recorded in history.
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