The Guarded Gate

Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America

Daniel Okrent

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781476798080
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

NAMED ONE OF THE "100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR" BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "An extraordinary book, I can't recommend it highly enough." –Whoopi Goldberg, The View By the widely celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Last Call —the powerful, definitive, and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America close the immigration door to "inferiors" in the 1920s. A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that "biological laws" had proven 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 cast of characters from this time, including Lodge's closest friend, Theodore Roosevelt; Charles Darwin's first cousin, Francis Galton, the idiosyncratic polymath who gave life to eugenics; the fabulously wealthy and profoundly bigoted Madison Grant, founder of the Bronx Zoo, and his best friend, H. Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History; Margaret Sanger, who saw eugenics as a sensible adjunct to her birth control campaign; and Maxwell Perkins, the celebrated editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. A work of history relevant for today, The Guarded Gate is an important, insightful tale that painstakingly connects the American eugenicists to the rise of Nazism, and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both here and abroad.

---

PART I

Enough! Enough! We Want No More!

---

Chapter One

The Future Betterment of the Human Race

Charles Benedict Davenport left a vivid impression on one of his occasional collaborators during his period of greatest influence. Davenport “used to lift his eyes reverently,” Margaret Sanger would recall, “and, with his hands upraised as though in supplication, quiver emotionally as he breathed, ‘Protoplasm. We want more protoplasm.’ ” When she wasn’t promoting the idea of birth control—and sometimes, tactically, when she thought it would help her cause—Sanger was one of dozens of prominent, if seemingly unlikely, Americans who waved the banner of eugenics in the first third of the twentieth century. The “protoplasm” that Davenport longed for was the genetic material that would create an improved human race—if the world followed the principles of planned breeding that embodied the eugenicist faith.

It’s not hard to picture Davenport—tall, slim, his Vandyke always impeccable, his brow invariably creased and taut—in the state Sanger described. By his own description he was beset by a “nervous” temperament. A colleague said he “liv[ed] a life of his own in the midst of others . . . out of place in almost any crowd.” When he wasn’t carried away by the nearly ecstatic bouts of optimism that arose from one or another of his studies and experiments (“life is a succession of thrills,” he exclaimed in midcareer), he was unconfident, defensive, even resentful. As a young biologist at Harvard in the 1890s, hunched over a microscope with an intensity of purpose that seemed to create its own force field, he provided a clear signal for those who didn’t grasp his zeal intuitively by spelling it out for them in words he had inscribed on his eyeshade: “I am deaf dumb and blind.”

That was a Davenportian way of saying, “Leave me alone; I have work to do.” And he had plenty: in a career that stretched for nearly five decades, Davenport published 439 scientific papers, sat on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals, maintained memberships in sixty-four scientific and social organizations, and trained generations of American geneticists (not to mention, along the way, a busload or two of charlatans). For four of those decades, operating out of a tidy scientific principality he established in the Long Island coastal village of Cold Spring Harbor, Davenport reigned as the nation’s foremost advocate, investigator, and—there’s really no other word for it—impresario of a science that altered the face of a nation.

---

The scientific colossus that eventually blossomed in Cold Spring Harbor, and that along the way would develop the intellectual arguments for limiting immigration to the United States by country of origin, began life in 1890 as the biological laboratory of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, a venerable civic institution that extended its reach thirty-five miles to the east on Long Island’s north shore.^I The thousands of men and women who worked in the Cold Spring Harbor laboratories over the decades to come would produce groundbreaking research in genetics, neuroscience, oncology, and other disciplines; eight of these people, including geneticist Barbara McClintock and James Watson, the codiscoverer of DNA, would win Nobel Prizes. Charles Davenport would never win a Nobel, but for a time his researches and his recommendations earned equivalent attention.

In 1898 the thirty-two-year-old Davenport was appointed director of the summer school of the biological laboratory. He was a Brooklyn boy of prominent family; another Davenport was treasurer of the Brooklyn Institute, and three more were among its donors. But anyone who might have suspected that he won his appointment through nepotism could not have been familiar with Davenport’s work, or his personality. At the time, he had not yet located the path that would eventually lead him to his intense engagement with the study of human heredity, but his school-year labors at Harvard were productive and his range was prodigious: a paper on the effects of water on the growth of frogs, a book on statistical methods, another encompassing such topics as “chemotropism in the tentacles of insectivorous plants.” He married Gertrude Crotty, a graduate student in zoology whose work he supervised, and so endeared himself to Harvard president Charles W. Eliot that Eliot invited the young couple to stay in his Cambridge house one summer while he was rusticating in Maine.

In later years Davenport would allow his ambitions to distort his work, eventually leading him dangerously past the edge of reason. But as a young man working at Harvard and beginning a family, he was a pure scientist. He was especially tantalized by an emerging field known as experimental evolution, an area of study for researchers seeking to unlock the Darwinian code in the controlled environment of the laboratory, thus abbreviating the millennia required to apprehend evolution in nature.

As attached to Harvard as he might have been—undergraduate degree, PhD, faculty appointment—Davenport did not find the university sufficiently accommodating for the work he wished to pursue. Each week, when the journal Science arrived in the Davenport household, Gertrude would scour the death notices, hoping to find news of an appropriate opening. In 1899 Charles accepted a full-time position at the University of Chicago but felt the strong pull of his seasonal appointment in Cold Spring Harbor. (Gertrude also held a faculty position at the summer school, teaching microscope technique.) For a natural scientist with interests as varied as Davenport’s, the village and its surroundings were a version of paradise: seashore and estuary, ponds and streams, meadows and forests, every imaginable environment for gathering specimens. The train to New York from nearby Oyster Bay ran frequently enough to serve the wealthy families building their country palaces in the area (among them a young New York politician named Theodore Roosevelt), and its depot was close enough to town for an inveterate walker like Davenport. For the next four decades he could be seen striding purposefully down country roads, sometimes before dawn, to get to the station and then to the wide world beyond the principality he created in Cold Spring Harbor. He had a story to tell—a story rooted in the work of a singular British gentleman scientist, then translated by Davenport into a credo for America, and characterized by both men as nothing less than the basis for a new religion.

* * *

FRANCIS GALTON’S MOTTO, a colleague said, was “Whenever you can, count.” He counted the number of dead worms that emerged from the ground near his London town house after a heavy rain (forty-five in a span of sixteen paces), and he counted the number of flea bites he suffered in 1845 while spending a night in the home of the Sheikh of Aden (ninety-seven, but even so he thought the sheikh was “a right good fellow”). Galton consumed numbers ravenously, then added them, divided them, shuffled and rearranged them so he could amaze himself with his own discoveries.

The extraordinary man who developed the theory that talent, intelligence, and even morality were bequeathed biologically believed that everything knowable could be expressed in numbers. Galton’s major discoveries—among them the individuality of fingerprints, the movement of anticyclones, the statistical law of regression to the mean—elevated his obsessive collection of data from triviality to significance. But for every one of his substantial contributions to human understanding, he probably hit upon a dozen that were trivial. His meticulously constructed “Beauty Map” of Great Britain, he believed, established that Aberdeen was home to the nation’s least attractive women. His essay “The Measure of Fidget,” published in England’s leading scientific journal, was an effort to “giv[e] numerical expression to the amount of boredom” in any audience by counting body movements per minute. Observation and enumeration convinced him that “well washed and combed domestic pets grow dull” because “they miss the stimulus of fleas.” For good or ill, and often for purposes utterly irrelevant, this lavish reverence for numbers, his belief in their power, enabled Galton to live a life both intellectually distinctive and richly productive.

Having grown up surrounded by wealth and inheriting a good deal of it while still a young man didn’t hurt. In a century (the nineteenth), a place (Victorian England), and his particular milieu (the cosseted world of wealthy amateurs), Galton was better armed than most for a life of inquiry and experimentation. His paternal grandfather, a gun manufacturer who grew rich supplying the British army with muskets, married one of the banking Barclays, whose family business was already more than a century old by the time Francis was born in 1822. A third grandparent was the daughter of a landowning Scottish nobleman descended from Richard Plantagenet, father of Richard III. These three compounded the fortune that Galton would inherit at age twenty-two, enabling him to live the life of a gentleman. His fourth grandparent may have provided the bloodlines (and Galton would come to care a great deal about bloodlines) that led him to the field of scientific inquiry. This progenitor was the obese, libidinous, polymathic physician and poet Erasmus Darwin, one of whose other grandsons would do fairly well in science himself.

---

We have it on the testimony of Lewis M. Terman, one of the pioneers of intelligence testing in America, that when Galton was a child, it was already clear that his IQ “was not far from 200.” Among the thousands of children Terman had personally tested by the time he announced this impressive assessment, it was true that he had yet to encounter an IQ greater than 170. It is also true that Terman arrived at his conclusion six years after Galton’s death at eighty-eight, and had never met him, much less tested him. And it’s conclusively true that Terman had a horse in this particular race: much of his career was predicated on principles first elucidated and techniques first developed by Galton himself.

Still, Terman had a point. Francis Galton was precocious to roughly the same degree that an ocean is large. He could read at two, mastered Latin at four (around the time he wrote to his sister to inform her that “I read French a little” as well), quoted freely and at length from Sir Walter Scott at five, was intimate with the Iliad by six. The spirited self-confidence that would for the next eight decades mark his prose, his speech, and virtually every delighted leap of his lush and expressive eyebrows had received an early familial boost when his father had sent seven-year-old Francis, alone, on a journey by pony from their estate in England’s West Midlands, with instructions to stay at a particular inn along the way. The boy managed without difficulty—and without ever becoming aware of the servant following a careful two miles behind.

Tall and thin, his face framed by spectacular muttonchops that seemed to provide architectural support for what an admirer called “a forehead like the dome of St. Paul’s,” Galton possessed an emotional buoyancy as well. He floated blithely from one endeavor to the next, ever productive, ever sanguine. When he wrote about his “rather unusual power of enduring physical fatigue without harmful results,” he wasn’t boasting. More than twenty books and two hundred journal articles spilled from his pen, the last of them published in his eighty-ninth year.

---

By all accounts Galton was an amiable person and a charming host, but he was also a thoroughgoing snob. He never saw reason to challenge the class system that produced him, nor did he ever miss a chance to take advantage of its benefits. And though the Galtons (like the Darwins) were ardent abolitionists, Francis didn’t doubt the inferiority of black people. This was hardly a rare attitude in Victorian England, but one would think that a man of science would seek firm evidence to support his beliefs, especially a man as data crazed as Galton. But no: “It is seldom that we hear of a white traveler [in Africa] meeting with a black chief whom he feels to be the better man,” he wrote in 1869.

The case can be made that Galton came to his belief in the heritability of talent partly because it was self-affirming—an implicit endorsement of the familial process that reached its apotheosis in his own genius. It certainly didn’t arise from his earlier work. “Until the phenomena of any branch of Knowledge have been submitted to measurement and number,” Galton declared late in life, “it cannot assume the status and dignity of a science.” But before he reached his forties, Galton’s science was neither meaningfully scientific nor particularly dignified. As a medical student—a program of study he never completed—he decided to sample every drug in the basic pharmacopoeia; working alphabetically, he never made it past croton oil, a powerful purgative that produced violent bouts of diarrhea. He did attain membership in the Royal Geographical Society after conducting a self-financed two-year expedition to southwest Africa, accompanied by nine “white or whitish people,”^II ten “natives,” eighty-six oxen, thirty small cattle, and two wagons. The titles of some of the journal articles he published between 1855 and 1865 probably indicate the best way to define Galton’s nature at this point in his life: “Signals Available to Men Who Are Adrift on Wrecks at Sea,” “On a New Principle for the Protection of Riflemen,” “First Steps Towards the Domestication of Animals.” He never got around to publishing his findings from a three-month investigation into the proper temperature for brewing tea.

---

Charles Darwin and Francis Galton barely knew each other when young, which was partly because of their age difference (Darwin the elder by thirteen years), but more likely because grandfather Erasmus was as profligate as he was prolific: his children—twelve legitimate and (at least) two not—produced grandchildren almost too numerous to list, much less to know one another. The first substantive communication between the two cousins didn’t take place until 1853, when Darwin was forty-four and Galton thirty-one; the older man wanted to compliment the younger on his first book, The Narrative of an Explorer in South Africa.

But without Darwin’s influence, Galton would likely never have begun his explorations into the nature of heredity. In this regard, he was no different from virtually everyone else who had been exploring the boundaries of biology in the British scientific world of the 1850s. Natural scientists were clamoring for data on “tides, the analysis of life insurance tables, bills of mortality, population censuses,” wrote Janet Browne in her magnificent biography of Darwin. “Raw information flooded in from every corner of the world, piling up in London’s learned societies and in government corridors.” At the same time, philosophers were contemplating the perfectibility of society and trying to discern the meaning of the individual. The protean thinker Herbert Spencer drew on biology, anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines to build a unified theory of the structure of human societ...