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

                                  This is the history of America's virulent renunciation of a meaningful part of its heritage a century ago. A combustive mixture of racism, fear and pseudo-science led to the closing of our borders for over forty years. In 19th century England, the scientific community, fixated on Darwin's theories,  developed the field of eugenics. The term derived from the Greek  meaning 'good stock'.  Proponents of the eugenics movement believed that society could be improved by selectively breeding couples with positive genetic traits; later negative eugenicists tried to eliminate by sterilization those with unpleasant or unhealthy tendencies. Sir Francis Galton observed at a London symposium that society paid more attention to the selection of plants and animals than to people. In the US, Charles Davenport founded a lab in Cold Spring Harbor, NY to focus on the science of cross-breeding, experimental biology, evolution and eventually, eugenics. Simultaneously, one of Boston's Brahmins, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge a believer of his own admirable personal heritage, and the descendant of generations of Harvard educated men, took up the cause of limiting immigration to the US. American xenophobia was not new in America. In the previous century, Ben Franklin had deplored all the German speakers pouring into the colonies. The Irish and Germans were abhorred when they arrived prior to the Civil War. As the 19th century closed, it was the polyglot masses from Italy, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire that frightened the elitists. They looked vastly different from their northern European predecessors, did not speak English, were illiterate and worshipped differently. An 1891 law turned all immigration policy over to the federal government and precluded the admission of "idiots, insane persons and loathsome diseased peoples." Private lobbying organizations, such as Boston's Immigration Restriction League, sprang up.  The restrictionists supported Lodge's Literacy Test bill. The test would require a person to be able to read and write in their native language and per Lodge "would bear most heavily upon the Italians, Poles, Russians and Asiatics."  In Cold Springs Harbor, Davenport was able to take a major step adding the science of human evolution to his studies. Over time, all of the information compiled and the theories proposed by his Eugenics Records Office have been proven to be worthless. But, in the early 20th century, its anti-immigrant screed carried weight.                                                                                                                  The last decade of the 19th century saw 3.7 million Europeans arrive in America.  The following decade the number jumped to  6.7 million.  A restrictive immigration bill with the literacy test passed in 1912, but was vetoed by Taft in the last month of his presidency.  Two years later, Wilson vetoed a similar bill. The vitriol and hatred for dagos, kikes and bohunks could not outweigh generations of an open door policy and the need for inexpensive labor.  It finally passed in 1917 when America was in the thrall of anxiety about the war. Wilson spoke of immigrants "who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life" and called for them to be "crushed out." He actually vetoed the bill, but it finally passed over his veto.  The war virtually stopped immigration in its tracks. It started to pick up  again when 430,000 came in 1920. The Bolshevik Revolution shook the post-war world and the concept of completely eliminating immigration came to the fore in the US.  A State Dept. study referred to those looking to enter as undesirable; from Sicily - "small in stature and of a low order of intelligence", Jews from various locales - "filthy, un-American and dangerous in their habits, from Warsaw - "filthy, ignorant and verminous", and from Danzig - "decidedly inferior." The NYT berated the Senate for not acting on the "swarms of aliens." The final immigration restriction bill passed in 1924.  It lowered the number of immigrants allowed per year to 155,000 and  established a nation-by-nation quota of 2% based on the the US population as per the 1890 census. Victory did not end the anti-immigrant campaign. Millions and millions of inferior peoples were now in America and needed to be controlled. They were inclined to be ignorant, criminals, flat-footed and insane. The twenties saw the eugenics movement pursue the negative policy of forced sterilization. The Supreme Court approved a Virginia law, with Holmes stating "three generations of imbeciles is enough." Soon however, the sciences began to reject the movement.  It was taken up by the Nazis in Germany and faded from the American mainstream. The ERO finally closed in 1940. 

                                                                                  Hundreds of thousands of the undesirable Greeks, Jews, Italians, Serbs, Russians and Poles who otherwise could have come to America died in WW2. The end of the war saw a slight crack in the wall. Our Chinese alliance led to the repeal of the 1882 Exclusion Act. Refugees from the war were admitted, and later those fleeing communism were allowed to enter. In 1965, LBJ, at Liberty Island, signed the Immigration and Naturalization Act scrapping the old quotas. One of the co-authors was Emmanuel Celler of Brooklyn, grandson of German Jewish immigrants, who had vigorously fought the 1924 act as a new Congressman.                                                                                                                                                                  This is a difficult book to read. The racism and hatred of the many of the old-line elites drips from every page. It is of course a reminder that tribalism, extreme partisanship, racism and hatred have always been part of US history.