The Guarded Gate

December 1, 2018

In the early 1920s, with some scientists arguing that biological laws proved certain nationalities to be inherently inferior, America shamefully restricted immigration from eastern and southern Europe, keeping out Jews, Italians, and other suspect groups for decades. Could Nazism be far behind? Pulitzer Prize finalist Okrent (Great Fortune) takes a steely-eyed look at America's eugenics movement. With a 125,000-copy first printing and a five-city tour.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2019
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.In his latest book, Okrent (Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, 2010, etc.), the former managing editor of Life magazine and editor at large at Time Inc., chronicles a time when white-supremacist policymakers joined forces with pseudo-scientists promoting eugenics, creating widespread anti-immigration sentiment throughout the country. The author's prodigious archival research covers the final decades of the 19th century and culminates in 1924, when Congress and President Calvin Coolidge passed the Johnson-Reed Act, the most restrictive immigration law in U.S. history; that act set quotas for various foreign nations. The formula used to determine the nation-by-nation numbers intentionally excluded not only would-be immigrants deemed inferior to white Christians, but also stranded people desperate to leave their home countries because of persecution and possible death. In the New York Times, one headline read, "America of the Melting Pot Comes to an End." Much of the book focuses on policymaking, but Okrent does not stop there. 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." Okrent keeps his personal commentary about these individuals to a minimum while presenting their biographies and the findings of their eugenics studies. Through the skilled, subtle use of language, however, Okrent makes clear that most of these immigration restrictionists were privileged bigots deserving of little respect. Sadly, there are few heroes in the book, though it's certainly no fault of the author. Perhaps the most surprising villain is iconic book editor Maxwell Perkins. Legendary for his editing of novelists Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, among many others, Perkins also edited two books by famed eugenicist Madison Grant, including The Passing of the Great Race, which argued for the superiority of the Nordic race.A relentlessly depressing but revelatory and necessary historical account.

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March 25, 2019
As journalist and popular historian Okrent (Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center) shows in this engrossing book, the American eugenics movement demonized not only people of non-European descent but also the inhabitants of southern and eastern Europe. Influenced by the Victorian English social scientist Francis Galton and his concept of the “inheritability of talent” within both families and cultures, many of the leading intellectuals of the late 19th- and early 20th-century U.S. considered Italian immigrants to be “gross little aliens” and Eastern European Jews “furtive, reeking, snarling Yacoob and Ysaac” who, unlike previous generations of immigrants from northern and western Europe, were, not just “beaten men” but members of “beaten races.” Thus, eugenics supporters concluded, their descendants would not be worthy to live in the U.S., and their presence could only undermine the nation’s culture and even its security. At the height of eugenics’ appeal in the isolationist 1920s, its supporters convinced Congress to place strict limits on immigration that “kept 18 million Europeans from American shores,” including many who would die in the course of WWII. Although Okrent ends on a positive note, with Lyndon Johnson signing into law a nationality-blind immigration measure, this fascinating study vividly illuminates the many injustices that the pseudoscience of eugenics inflicted on so many would-be Americans. Agent: Liz Darhansoff, Darhansoff & Verrill.

May 1, 2019
Most political shifts reflect established social currents, and such was certainly the case for the Immigration Act of 1924. This book explores two movements, immigration restriction and eugenics, that gained momentum around the turn of the twentieth century and eventually inspired the law's passage. Okrent (Last Call, 2010), an editor and historian, describes how each practice developed conceptually and how they were brought together in the early 1910s to promote scientific racism as a political creed. He focuses on their mostly WASP leaders and the philanthropists and publishers who enabled their shaping of American public discourse, including just enough broader commentary to explain how the country shifted from its pre-WWI open-door policy to the exclusionary doctrine of the 1920s. In a brief discussion of the act's aftermath, Okrent makes clear that its restrictions of European Jews and other refugees from fascism during the 1930s was not the only evil wrought by these thinkers. The Nazi ideology that caused them to flee was heavily influenced by American scientific racism. A sobering, valuable contribution to discussions about immigration.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)