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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 Hardcover – May 7, 2019

by Daniel Okrent (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 314 ratings
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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.
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  1. Print length
    496 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Scribner
  4. Publication date
    May 7, 2019
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 1.4 x 9 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1476798036
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1476798035
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

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“Deep and comprehensive…The Guarded Gate sharply reminds us that nativism has never been limited to its most savage enforcers like the Klan or neo-Nazis. It always has its ‘civilized’ voices, too, with lobbyists, funders, and advocates giving it respectable cover, domesticating it, putting it in Good Housekeeping rather than in Der Sturmer.” —The New York Review of Books

'“The story of this triumph of ignorance has been told before, but never more vividly than by Daniel Okrent. . . A rigorously historical work.” —The Washington Post

“[An] often surprising history. . . . The Guarded Gate is reminiscent of Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2010) in its elegant . . . prose and its focus on the unlikely alliances that converged to effect political change.” —The Boston Globe

“A frighteningly timely book about a particularly ugly period in American history, a bigotry-riddled chapter many thought was closed but that shows recent signs of reopening… One of the narrative's great strengths is the author's inclusion of dozens of minibiographies illuminating the backgrounds of the racist politicians and the promoters of phony eugenics ‘research’… [A] revelatory and necessary historical account.” —Kirkus Reviews

“[A] sweeping history.” —The New Yorker

“Engrossing… this fascinating study vividly illuminates the many injustices that the pseudoscience of eugenics inflicted on so many would-be Americans.” —Publishers Weekly

“A sobering, valuable contribution to discussions about immigration.” —Booklist

“A steely-eyed look at America’s eugenics movement.” —Library Journal

“[A] detailed, compulsively readable account . . . a must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the history of immigration in the United States—and how the past might be relevant to policy makers and citizens today.” —BookPage

“What’s so unsettling about Daniel Okrent’s spellbinding history of a previous immigration controversy is how it resonates with today’s debate. Insightful, unsparing, and totally absorbing, this book frames the discussion against a compelling historical backdrop that describes the gap between the American ideal and the American reality.” —Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower and God Save Texas

“In The Guarded Gate, Daniel Okrent has again taken a largely forgotten epoch in American history and brilliantly brought it back to life. Written with a grace that any novelist would envy, Okrent’s book tells the story of the immigration battles of the early twentieth century in a way that’s both fascinating on its own terms, but also, alas, all-too-relevant to today’s news.” —Jeffrey Toobin, CNN, author of American Heiress

“Our two oceans have protected and insulated us, but they have also helped to incubate less attractive features. Daniel Okrent artfully and faithfully records our (earlier) dismal record on immigration and how those home-grown racist and xenophobic policies metastasized into exports with horrific worldwide consequences. This is a masterful, sobering, thoughtful, and necessary book.” —Ken Burns

“The Guarded Gate delivers a timely history of anti-immigrant fever centered in the elite eugenics movement a century ago. In this masterful narrative, sprinkled with wit, Daniel Okrent shows how the lesser angels of our heritage ‘depopulated Ellis Island as if by epidemic,’ leading to cycles of disgrace and reform.” —Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63

“Daniel Okrent is a gifted social historian. In this powerful, fast-paced, and highly relevant chronicle of bad science and fearful prejudice, Okrent helps us understand how and why our country lost its way about a century ago. Read it so that history does not find new ways of repeating itself.” —Evan Thomas, author of The War Lovers

“If you think we have reached peak stupidity — that America’s per capita quantity has never been higher — there is solace, of sorts, in Daniel Okrent’s guided tour through the immigration debate that was heading toward a nasty legislative conclusion a century ago.” —George F. Will, The Washington Post

“Engrossing... It’s a grim and sordid story, but Okrent is a companionable, witty, and judicious guide.” —Commentary Magazine

“A vivid new book…jam-packed with appalling examples” of anti-immigrant passions “primarily targeted at Catholics and Jews…” —The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times, editor-at-large of Time, Inc., and managing editor of Life magazine. He worked in book publishing as an editor at Knopf and Viking, and was editor-in-chief of general books at Harcourt Brace. He was also a featured commentator on two Ken Burns series, and his books include Last Call, The Guarded Gate, and Great Fortune, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history. He lives in Manhattan and on Cape Cod with his wife, poet Rebecca Okrent.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; 1st Ed edition (May 7, 2019)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 496 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1476798036
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1476798035
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.5 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.4 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 314 ratings

About the author

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Daniel Okrent

Daniel Okrent

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Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times, editor-at-large of Time, Inc., and managing editor of Life magazine. Among his books, "Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center" was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history, and "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" was honored by the American Historical Association as 2011's best book of American history. Okrent lives in Manhattan and on Cape Cod with his wife, poet Rebecca Okrent.

Learn more at danielokrent.com.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
314 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Simeon Stylites
5.0 out of 5 stars Required Reading
Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2019
Verified Purchase
In The Guarded Gate, Daniel Okrent offers us a readable and engaging narrative about the role the eugenics movement played in the immigration debates of the 1900-1920 period, culminating with the passage of the 1924 National Origins Quota Act, which effectively ended immigration from 1925 and 1965. While many popular history texts touch upon this period, none offer a thorough examination of the eugenics movement and the ways in which it informed the debate and ultimately influenced the public and elected officials.

And, it is a timely book, given the similarities between that period and the one we are in now. Frankly, for a country that proclaims itself a "nation of immigrants," it is remarkable how few Americans know anything about immigration history, least of all our elected officials! It's all the more troubling to think that here we are, a full century later, and our debates about immigrants, while not influenced by the pseudo-science of eugenics, are nevertheless filled with the same fears: immigrants from non-Northern European countries (and non-Protestant backgrounds) can't be assimilated, immigrants are more fecund than native born whites and will ultimately replace that population, immigrants are inherently criminal and have lower intelligence than the native-born population, and so forth. It was also in this period that immigration first became a "problem" to be fixed. It is safe to say that current popular discourse on immigration is a virtual carbon copy of that had 100 years ago, using the same fears, the same worries, the same words, etc. Moreover, the same solutions proposed then are resurrected now: literacy tests, civics tests, intelligence tests, and restriction. Most Americans now, reading of the fears their early 20th century counterparts had of Italians and other Mediterranean people, Jews, Slavs, etc. would find it all hard to fathom, given these groups are thoroughly incorporated into the nation's fabric.

One wonders, could knowledge of our nation's immigration history actually inform a more meaningful debate today, or, at the very least, help us prevent history from repeating itself? Whatever the case, The Guarded Gate is a highly recommended first step for one who wants to explore the immigration debates of the early 20th century. While grounded in the primary sources and available scholarship, it is decidedly not an academic book (in contrast to Katherine Benton-Cohen's recent book on the Dillingham Commission---excellent as well, but not necessarily for popular consumption), but a lively piece of historic reporting. For those who want to explore more deeply, the references are there. For those who only want to read one book about this period topic so they can speak with some degree of authority about the past and understand today's immigration debates in context, then this will make for a good summer read.
24 people found this helpful
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Karl
5.0 out of 5 stars Science in the Service of Bigotry and Racism
Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2019
Verified Purchase
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.
34 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

John Brennan
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 7, 2019
Verified Purchase
I was well aware of the immigration quotas set down by the Congress in the 1920's but had always assumed, because of lack of historical background, that the quotas were set to control immigration generally, not, as this book clearly identifies, for eugenic reasons. What is all the more revealing is the famous names who believed in such control, e.g. Benjamin Franklin and Oliver Wendell Holmes among others, and the effect that the research had on the Nazi regime, with the attendant atrocities carried out.
2 people found this helpful
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