The Guarded Gate: BigotryEugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians and Other European Immigrants Out of America by Daniel Okrent
We like to say that we are a nation of immigrants and liberals treat Trump’s cruelty, his cages and his wall, as an anomaly, an attack on America’s tradition of welcoming outsiders. In The Guarded Gate, Daniel Okrent, a journalist and historian, puts the lie to that line of thinking. It tells the story of how anti-immigration activists partnered with eugenicists in the first third of the 20th century to pass the most comprehensive and effective ban on immigration in American history, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.
There has, of course, rarely been truly free immigration to the United States. Even before Asian immigration is barred by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Asians are widely discriminated against in employment and housing, as well as being denied the chance to become citizens and prevented from serving on juries. But in 1894, the Immigration Restriction League is formed in Boston to lobby for an end to all immigration. Of course, this movement is acting in response to changes to the demographic makeup of the immigrants. Northern Europeans are coming less often, while Jews and Italians, and Southern and Eastern Europeans more generally become the majority of the passengers on ships that pour into New York, Boston and every port on the East Coast. This history is well known, but Okrent does a formidable job of highlighting the basic racism of the anti-immigration movement. They are attempting, in the words of the head of the Census Bureau, to keep out “beaten men from beaten races.”
At the same time that Henry Cabot Lodge and others are working to cut off immigration, Charles Davenport gets funding from the Carnegie Institute to set up a lab at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island to study the relationship between genetics and human development. Davenport is an openly racist crackpot who sets out to prove that virtually all human character traits are genetically – and therefore ethnically – based. The shallow nature of Davenport’s “research” is itself shocking. He develops a list of 3,500 character traits that go beyond physical details like hair color, eye color, height and bone density, to include things like the ability to arrange flowers, forgetfulness, emotional frigidity, geniality, honesty, criminality, short-temperedness Through brief interviews conducted by college girls who volunteer, he claims to trace these character traits across generations, relying on details like someone’s memory of their long-dead grandparents. His work conveniently finds negative traits are prevalent in the very groups of immigrants that the IRL and others are trying to keep out.
The story of their partnership, its victory on immigration and the at least partial defeat and discrediting of eugenics is long and involved. What seems most pressing is the number of familiar and respected names that are in one way or another, at one time or another, supportive of both eugenics and racist immigration restrictions. A short list would include The New York Times and their owners the Sulzburgers, Teddy, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, George Eastman, Edgar Lee Masters and Maxwell Perkins. Perkins, for example, not only edits the novels of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe, but edits several of the many prominent books that promote eugenics and racialized science, including Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color, which Fitzgerald mocks in The Great Gatsby. His publishing company, Scribners, is associated with eugenics for more than a generation.
In fairness, for many of these boldfaced names, the association with eugenics is brief and somewhat youthful. The Roosevelts, for example, are brought up in a world where racial hierarchy is assumed and all three of them come to reject it and embrace a broader view of humanity.
However, Cold Spring Harbor has for a century been one of America’s leading research laboratories and has supported the work of 8 Nobel Prize winners. Yet for its first quarter century it was the main engine behind the scientific justification of racism. Its primary funder, Margaret Harriman, was a key figure of New York society and the father of Governor Averill Harriman (and the donor of the land that became Harriman State Park). Margaret Sanger may not have been a true believer in racism, but as eugenicists support family planning, she supports policies that call for sterilization of undesirables. Perhaps more shocking, the Museum of Natural History was run by one of eugenics chief voices, Fairfield Osborne, and for some 40 years was essentially the headquarters for the eugenics movement. On more than one occasion, Osborne closes the museum and removes regular displays to host international conferences devoted to ideas that would later be admired, and copied, by Nazi Germany, including the forced sterilization of undesirable genetic types. Carl Brigham, who developed early intelligence testing and the forerunner to the SAT, was also a committed eugenicist (for a time – in the 1930s he disavowed much of his early work).
Some of the power of the movement is lost when immigration is cut off in 1924 by the Johnson-Reed Act. That law sets strict quotas for each nation, limiting their immigration to a small fraction of what it had been in the past. The law further reduces the influx of certain nationalities by basing these qutoas on the census of 1890, before the tide of immigration drastically shifted to Italy and Eastern Europe. However, it is the rise of Nazi Germany and the advent of World War II that more fully discredits eugenics. Even then, change comes largely because the heads of the two important institutions, the Cold Spring Harbor Lab and the Museum of Natural History are forced to retire and are replaced by more qualified scientists. Much of the damage is already done and Okrent concludes by discussing how the Johnson-Reed Act prevented Jews from escaping the Holocaust.
Some of the “science” described here is comical. Madison Grant, who is the key mover behind the development of the New York Zoological society and the Bronx Zoo, spends some time twisting logic and evidence out of shape to establish that there are several races within Europe – chiefly the Nordic, the Alpine and the Mediterranean, that the Nordic is superior to the others. That is merely shocking. It becomes more comical when the existence of outstanding figures from non-Nordic countries must be explained. Nordics pop up in unusual places – according to eugenisists, Jesus, Christopher Columbus, Dante and Leonardo DaVinci are all clearly Nordic.
Of course, much of this rings relevant today. “beaten men from beaten races” is more elegant than “shithole countries,” but the effect is the same. The denial of science is the same. In the not too distant future, the periods of relatively open immigration, the stories of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, the burst of new immigration of the last 30 years, may seem like incongruous interludes in our history of restriction and racism.
Okrent is a lively and smooth writer. He has done an admirable job of taking scholarly-level research and packaging it in a popular history that virtually anyone can read. His style is marred at times by a love of drama – he likes to hint at famous names for a paragraph or two before shocking the reader with a practiced reveal. He is also overly concerned with convincing the reader that he condemns the ideas and practices he is describing. While scholarly neutrality would be abhorrent given the topics he discusses, we do not need to be reminded quite so often that these men are dangerous and ignorant. The first half of the book is less dramatic, as the early ideology of immigration restriction and of eugenics are spelled out. It is with the start of WWI and the immense increase in nationalism it causes that the story takes off and Okrent’s writing quirks become less frequent and less annoying.
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