Review: The Guarded Gate – NBC2 News

The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law that Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of AmericaBy Daniel Okrent | Scribner528 pages $30Langans Book Mark: 4/4 stars

Until recently, the US has had a Republican administration anxious to keep certain peoples that it deems undesirable from immigrating into the country. If you thought this was a new impulse, Dan Okrents The Guarded Gate shows that it is a repulsive American policy with a recurring history.

Okrent is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and first public editor of The New York Times, former editor at Large at Time, and managing editor of Life Magazine.

Part of the story of The Guarded Gate is one of scientists, who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing an 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 eugenics arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.

Readers may find it hard to believe, but this policy is, relatively speaking, very old. Okrent, who took five years to write this important book documents the history of this plan that began in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. (Slightly earlier, 1891, Lodge wrote a piece for the North American entitled The Restriction of Immigration.) By 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that biological laws had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans and the restrictive law was enacted three years later.

This proof is something that fair-minded people find repugnant: a combination of the rise of eugenics, Nazism, and a repeat of Know Nothing political party beliefs that began in the 1850s, that were xenophobic and hostile to immigration.

Beliefs werent very different in the United Kingdom, where it was thought that the falling birthrate would soon lead to a national deterioration while the country fell to the Irish and the Jews and this was after Parliaments adoption of the Aliens Act of 1905, which had already cut the numbers of Jewish immigration into the UK by two thirds. About this alleged deterioration The Times of London asked in 1912: whether any of us are really wise enough to know how a human society ought to be constituted.

Okrent begins the story with Ellis Island, 1925. There youll remember, on the base of the nearby Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazaruss famous poem invited the world to Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The author tells us that at that time, many Americans still found a certain nobility, a confirmation of the nations promise, in Lazaruss word and image they evoked.

However, even then he warns, It was likely that even more citizens perceived evidence of menace, and threat, and an inevitable national decline.

Why so, we ask?

Henry Curran, commissioner of immigration for the Port of New York at the time, signaled the change. He was a former republican who lost a run for New York mayor in 1921. Curran told his visitors to Ellis Island in 1925, The immigrants of today are of a better kind than those of two decades earlier. They are better by reason of our new immigration law; the cause and effect are direct.

Currans reasoning was specious but widely held. Some examples of it: a major national figure had written four years earlier Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The editors of the nations most popular magazine had said continued immigration from southern and Eastern Europe would compel America to join the lowly ranks of mongrel races.

This was an idea, Okrent says, that had been gaining traction for years. Some of the nations leading scientific institutions, amplified by political activists, political exigencies and long-standing hatreds, had assured that a version of the Immigration Act of 1924 would pass. Sound familiar?

Who started this resurgence?

Credit Charles Benedict Davenport, a scientist beset with a nervous temperament, as our author describes it. Margaret Sanger recalled Davenport expostulating, And with his hands upraised as thought in supplication, quivered emotionally as he breathed, Protoplasm. We want more protoplasm.

In reality Davenport was a slim, van dyke bearded biologist at Harvard in the 1890s. He was a pure geneticist who published 439 scientific papers, sat on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals and maintained memberships in sixty-four scientific and social organizations. His work eventually changed the face of the nation to its detriment. Eventually, Okrent notes, Davenports ambitions distorted his work, leading him dangerously past the edge of reason. Perhaps over the edge at the time, he expostulated, I believe in such a selection of immigrants as shall not tend to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits.

Couple the efforts of Davenport with Sir Francis Galtons (1862 1911), an English Victorian statistician and eugenicist known for stressing psychological differences between people, the inheritability of talent, rather than their common traits, and you get an influential set of scientists who favored retrogressive social policies that eliminated Italians (gross little aliens and Eastern European Jews furtive, reeking, snarling Yacoob(s).

Other major figures in Americana pitched in to make the case for exclusion. They included Henry Cabot Lodges friend, Theodore Roosevelt, Darwins relative Francis Galton, Madison Grant, who founded the Bronx Zoo, and his pal, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History, as well as Max Perkins, the editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Perhaps a disappointment, but not a surprise, that all came to the same regrettable conclusion of exclusion being protective of a country built upon open access.

On an April Sunday in the spring of 1924 the New York Times announced the profound change in an eight column headline. It read, atop an article that stretched across a full page: AMERICA OF THE MELTING POT COMES TO AN END.

All a great shame, documented fairly and carefully by scholar-writer Okrent.

(An important aside: discredit both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, DC for not finding an equitable immigration policy for the past twenty years.)

President Biden offers more than nominal hope for a change to a better immigration program.

Michael D. Langan is the NBC-2.com Culture Critic. Dr. Langan has written for the BBC, The Dublin Review of Books, Boston Globe, Buffalo News and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, among other publications. This is a slightly revised review of a book that should be required reading in an America that continues to exclude so many from its shores.

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Review: The Guarded Gate - NBC2 News