A Book Review - "The Guarded Gate"

I’ve just read “The Guarded Gate” by Daniel Okrent (Scribners – 2019) which deals with “bigotry, eugenics, and the law that kept two generations of Jews, Italians and other European immigrants out of America.”  There’s enough in this book for all Americans to be ashamed of and for the scientific and academic communities, both of which (with rare exceptions) failed to live up to the standards expected of them for half a century, to share in that shame.  Okrent’s critical perspective is sometimes a bit overwhelming, but the vile nature of the subject matter makes that understandable, making the book more political and social commentary than pure history.

Some of the material in the book clearly resonates even today.  Here’s an example, taken from the period just after World War One, when some Americans feared that an increasing number of immigrants were on their way here:  “One congressman … claimed the Soviet Union was smuggling one hundred Bolshevik agents into the United States from Mexico every day (and) … had become chairman of the House Committee on Immigration.” (pg. 255)

 

Another example citing communication between two leaders of the immigration restriction movement had one asking the other, “Can we build a wall high enough around the country, so as to keep out these cheaper races or will it only be a feeble dam which will make the flood all the worse when it breaks?” (pg. 256).  

Even more:  In Calvin Coolidge’s first Annual Message to Congress in 1923, the President stated that “America must be kept American.  For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.” (pg. 336)

"Send These, the Homeless, Tempest-tossed to Me ....

The book concludes, after World War Two had shattered many of the mistaken ideas of the immigration restriction movement and the phony science of eugenics (which Adolf Hitler had adopted), with President Lyndon Johnson signing a new Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965 within sight of the statue of Liberty.  The author closes his work saying that “for believers in the promise of the nearby statue, the future of American immigration policy looked as bright as the brilliant sun overhead.”

Now, 54 years later, I am not so sure.  I suspect that if our 45^th President were to read “The Guarded Gate,” he would ally himself with some of its “bad guys.”  And they were truly bad, ranging from the courtly Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to the media gurus at the old Scribner publishing house and at the Saturday Evening Post.

These vicious, usually wealthy, gullible, often misguided, sometimes not very bright and sometimes very selfish, but always very respectable, Ivy-League educated people almost destroyed the American dream in their effort to keep America frozen in the elitist, White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant heritage which they believed was essential for the nation’s "biologic" survival.   Though they were reluctant to publicly admit it, their groundless fears for America's "bloodline" were grounded in antii-Semitism and a abhorrance of Italians, the groups most involved in immigration to the United States.

The restrictive, genetically-designed immigration quotas spawned by half a century of lies, reinforced by pseudo-scientific nonsense, were undeniably perniciously racist, and sadly, the American people bought into them in the 1920’s and 1930's, knowing no better.  In this light, incidents like the refusal of the United States to allow the refugee-carrying vessel, the St. Louis, to land in 1939 become more understandable, although still inexcusable, 

 

The goals may be a bit different today but you can still see some of these discredited ideas hard at work in slogans like “America First” and “Make America Great Again.” That really means "like it was before 'other' people started getting off the boat, or crossing the border," just as their own forebearers had done years before, but they’ve forgotten about that.

Jack Lippman