The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants out of America

“The Guarded Gate” is interesting and informative. A general introduction to Eugenics and the leading politicians and eugenicists of the period. It explains how eugenics was used to help create the political and popular support necessary for the restrictive 1924 Immigration Law and how the law was designed to limit nationalities identified as undesirable by the 1917 military IQ test from entering the country and our gene pool.Eugenics was an extension of Mendals pea experiment that found that traits are transmitted faithfully from parents to offspring in specific patterns. Eugenics is very similar the field of genetics today. The aim of Eugenics was to improve the genetic quality of the human population by reducing the number of undesirable traits in our gene pool. Eugenics was supported by the highest institutes in our country. Harvard, Princeton, the Carnegie Institute ect. It was also supported by the National Breeders association. If you can make a better herd of cows, you can make a better society. Unfortunately at the time, such traits as: criminality, physical disablities, feeble mindedness and low IQ were considered inheritable and unchangeable Human traits. What I think the book fails to present is the degree Eugenic concepts worked themselves into the everyday culture. Up to 32 states passed Eugenic Laws, some as early as 1907. Estimates of 60,000 to over 80,000 forced eugenic based sterilizations occurred. The Supreme Court supported state forced sterilizations in the 1927 Buck vs Bell case. Eugenic boards (and sterilizations) continued well into the 1970’s. One local politician stated in a 1925 newspaper interview that he didn’t support a purposed eugenics bill. 2 weeks later his constituent’s forced him to vote for the bill. This is a good book on why and how the 1924 immigration law came about. But the book implies that eugenics was discredited in the 1930’s. But the eugenic paradigm continued to be a factor in our culture long after that. Perhaps a better general introduction to eugenics and its effect in our culture is “Orphans of Davenport” written by Marion Brookwood. It’s about the challenges faced by people who challenged some basic eugenic assumptions in the 1930’s.

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.

This is a detailed history of racism in America. It is also a biography of the country’s most prominent racists. The list of names run from Henry Cabot Lodge to Charles Davenport, Albert Johnson, Harry Laughlin, Francis Galton, Madison Grant, J H Kellogg (also of the corn flakes fame), and many others. Fascinating accounts of the fear of ‘race suicide’, a term attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, but the latter did not seem to have racism, but general eugenics in mind. Race suicide became one of the foundations of racist ideas in America. The theory forged the belief that if the stronger’ race does not reproduce, it would soon disappear and be replaced by the ‘weaker’ races. The eugenics movement was a part of American history best forgotten, for it led even the Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr to remark in one of his judgments, ‘Three generations of imbeciles is enough’ – and with that, the court sanctioned the involuntary sterilisation of a woman of low intellect. Supported by such men, and the Immigration Restriction League, America passed several laws that were intended to restrict the ‘weaker’ races, which included Eastern Europeans such as Poles, Southern Italians, and Jews. The Irish were initially included but were eventually accepted. Chinese were specifically catered for under the Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882. This book contains accounts of the gruesome atrocities committed against immigrants that the white racist Americans did not like. The history of official immigration policies started with the literacy test, and ended with the quota system. In both, the principles and rationale were highly questionable. Okrent writes that Hitler praised the Johnson-Reed Act in his autobiography, ‘Mein Kamph’. In 1935, the official Nazi Handbook for Law and Legislation ‘specifically cite American immigration as a role model for Germany’. This is not a part of history that Americans would be proud of, but learning and understanding history is the first step in education. As Okrent writes, many of the early racists named in the book recanted their misguided beliefs. This is a useful companion to the Isabel Wilkerson book about the white man’s racism against the blacks in America. Okrent’s account is wider and covers the roots and (misguided) rationale of the eugenics movement and their influence on race relations in the USA.

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.