The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America Audiobook (Free)

NAMED AMONG THE “100 Well known BOOKS OF THE YEAR” BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“An extraordinary reserve, I can’t recommend it extremely enough.” –Whoopi Goldberg, The Look at

From the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling writer 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 existing time, The Guarded Gate tells about The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Various other European Immigrants Out of America the storyplot of the researchers who argued that one nationalities were inherently poor, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration legislation in American background. Brandished by the higher course Bostonians and New Yorkers—most of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration motion, the eugenic quarrels helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups from the US for a lot more than 40 years.

Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its from 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge announced that “biological laws” had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive legislation was enacted three years later on. In his characteristic style, both exciting and authoritative, Okrent brings alive the rich ensemble of characters out of this period, including Lodge’s closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin’s initial cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who offered life to eugenics; the fabulously rich and profoundly bigoted Madison Give, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and his best friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Organic Background; Margaret Sanger, who noticed eugenics like a sensible adjunct to her birth control advertising campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A work of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate can be an important, insightful story that painstakingly attaches the American eugenicists to the rise of Nazism, and shows how their values found fertile garden soil in the thoughts of citizens and market leaders both here and abroad.