num_pages: 496
description: NAMED ONE OF THE 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWAn extraordinary book I cant recommend it highly enough. Whoopi Goldberg The ViewBy 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 Yorkersmany of them progressiveswho 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 Lodges closest friend Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwins 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.
language: English
title: The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America
publisher: Scribner