NAMED ONE OF THE “100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR” BY THE BRAND NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“An extraordinary reserve, I may’t recommend it extremely plenty of.” –Whoopi Goldberg, The View

By the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Last Call—the powerful, definitive, and timely account of the way the rise of eugenics helped America close the immigration door to “inferiors” in the 1920s.

A forgotten, dark chapter of American background with implications for the current day time, The Guarded Gate tells approximately The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and regulations That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Various other European Immigrants Out of America the storyplot of the researchers who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration laws in American background. Brandished by the top course Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic quarrels helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and various other unwanted groups out of the US for a lot more than 40 years.

Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete tale from its from 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and additional Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “natural laws” had established 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 ensemble of characters from this time, including Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin’s first cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who gave lifestyle to eugenics; the fabulously rich and profoundly bigoted Madison Offer, founder from the Bronx Zoo, and his closest friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, movie director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, who noticed eugenics like a sensible adjunct to her contraceptive campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A function of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate is an important, insightful tale that painstakingly attaches the American eugenicists towards the rise of Nazism, and shows how their values found fertile earth in the thoughts of citizens and leaders both here and abroad.