Okrent - Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, And The Law That Kept Two Generations Of Jews, Italians, And Other

By 1926, when this poster appeared at a Kansas fair, the merger of eugenics and the anti-immigration movement was complete, and the ethnic ancestry of our children was no longer up for grabs.

I ll begin with my own beginnings. My fathers family, shtetl Jews from central Poland, arrived in the United States in 1910, when the immigration gates were still wide open to all Europeans. My mothers father, also Jewish, was a physician who emigrated from Romania in 1922, under a temporary restrictive law that enabled him to slip in before those gates clanged shut two years later. By the time my mother and her mother arrived in 1930, my grandfather had obtained citizenship, which enabled their entry.

I consequently cant claim spotless objectivity as I tell the fateful story of how a perverse form of science gave respectability to the drastic limits imposed on the number of Jews, Italians, Greeks, Poles, and various other eastern and southern Europeans seeking to come to America between 1924 and 1965. Neither do I wish to assert that the sanctions imposed on these debarred millions were crueler than those endured by Asians or Africans or other peoples who suffered discrimination even crueler or of longer duration. The Guarded Gate is not the story of the interplay between xenophobia and immigration policy; its one of several. That it happens to cut so close to my own bone is inescapable but no more disqualifying than if earlier Okrents had stood on the deck of the Mayflower . Save for those of us whose antecedents were here before Columbus, every American has a stake in this story and presumably a predisposition of perspective.

About Language

As I was writing this book, the quotation marks I initially employed to surround the word science (as in the paragraph above) soon began to blemish the manuscript like some form of pox. I ended up deleting almost all of them. Their absence should not suggest my acceptance of forms of inquiry and assertion that were, in fact, not remotely scientific. Similarly, my uninflected use of evidenceand of superior, inferior, inadequate, and comparably judgmental termsconnotes the context in which they were used and not my appraisal of what they were meant to describe. I also use race in the way it was employed in that distant timenot as a distinction of skin color but of ethnic background of any sort.

About the Publisher

Beginning on , I acknowledge all the many individuals and institutions who helped me with my research and with various other aspects of this project. But I wish here to cite the special role of Scribner. Beginning in 1916 with the publication of Madison Grants seminal The Passing of the Great Race , Charles Scribners Sons (as the firm was then known) was effectively the official publisher of the scientific racism movement. Over the next decade and a half the company issued nearly a score of books that advanced the cause of immigration restriction by valorizing the racist principles on which it was based. The editors and their colleagues responsible for this publishing program are long dead; their successors of a century later could not have been more supportive of my effort to explore Scribners unfortunate place in this story.