Terry Scambray // New Oxford Review
The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the
Law that Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants
Out of America, Daniel Okrent. Scribner, 2019. 402 pp.
Daniel
Okrent has marshalled a compendium of damning statements and information which
demonstrates the ignominy of the eugenics movement and how its advocates
desperately sought to limit immigration to the United States. Though this tale is not new, Okrent’s telling
of it is clear, well organized and full of the smaller stories and details that
enrich a narrative.
Francis
Galton began the eugenics movement, the stimulus for which came from his
cousin, Charles Darwin. As Okrent
writes, “without Darwin’s influence, Galton would likely never have begun his
explorations into the nature of heredity.” Darwin had
supposedly demonstrated how nature made itself by the process of natural
selection. Better known as “the survival
of the fittest,” natural selection was thought to be the engine of evolutionary
progress, relentlessly forcing nature to better itself by killing the unfit
while preserving the best and the brightest.
This
simple material process, however, had the profound consequence of making a
Creator superfluous. Thus, as Okrent writes, “Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was
revolutionary.” It showed “a universe
liberated from the intangible and unverifiable homilies of religion,
supposition, and superstition. If the development of the species was not guided
by a divine hand, Galton reasoned, then neither were the minds of men.” Supported by a bevy of assorted “facts”
which made his efforts appear scientific, Galton advocated what amounted to the
selective breeding of humans with woke people like himself doing the selecting.
Okrent tells
the consequential and disturbing story of how eugenicists with their impressive
scientific credentials insisted that immigrants from Southern and Eastern
Europe, especially, were inferior breeds who threatened to pollute the gene
pool of Americans. Eugenics had found
favor in Europe and from there it quickly spread to the United States where a
broad swath of influential individuals enthusiastically got on board. Boston Brahmins like the Lodges, Cabots and
the Adams’ united with labor leader, Samuel Gompers, and along with eminent
scientists like Charles Davenport and
popular figures like Theodore Roosevelt, Helen Keller and liberal theologians
like Henry Fosdick were all proponents of restricting American citizenship to
northern Europeans.
However,
prominent individuals from America’s aristocracy like Charles Eliot, president
of Harvard, favored immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe as did
businesses who wanted cheap labor and likewise steamship companies who profited
from having immigrants occupy what might otherwise be empty space in steerage
in their trans-Atlantic voyages.
Literacy tests
for immigrants were another plank in this guarded gate which attempted to limit
immigration as well as to show the inferiority of undesirable newcomers to
America. Enough opposition existed to
such tests, however, so that they became a political football with Congress
equivocating on the issue. President
Grover Cleveland, decidedly, opposed such tests.
When it became
known that Hitler and his cadres justified the Holocaust with rationales drawn
from eugenics, the ardor for it cooled in the 1930’s; then outright repugnance
for such ideas set in after 1945 when the horror of the Nazi death camps was
revealed, shattering any lingering belief that eugenics was a shortcut to
utopia.
Okrent shows
how the renowned anthropologist Franz Boaz opposed the eugenics movement
because he believed that environment shaped humans as opposed to their
inherited, ethnic characteristics. But
Boas, as a materialist, saw humans as merely one among the myriad organisms in
nature just as Darwin did. For example,
Boas arranged for six Alaskans to be brought to America where people could pay
twenty-five cents apiece to see them on display. When four of the Alaskans died, “Boas had the
flesh stripped from their bones, which became part of the collection” at the
American Museum of Natural History.
However, The
Guarded Gate has some glaring omissions which devalue it as worthy history. For one thing, it fails to mention the
evangelical Christians who were articulate opponents of Darwin and early on saw
the calamitous destination that the eugenics’ express was headed toward. Also barely mentioned is William Jennings
Bryan who was also a conspicuous critic of eugenics because he saw that
Darwin’s leveling of man began the reductionism that would lead to the Final Solution. Likewise the Catholic Church was the most
prominent institutional critic of eugenics as was its celebrated convert, G.K.
Chesterton, its most notable individual critic.
Nonetheless,
despite the opposition to immigration, between 1880 and 1924 more than 20 million immigrants arrived in America,
including four and a half million Italians and two million Jews. America’s population was 50 million in 1880
and rose to around 106 million by 1920 making immigrants a substantial part of
the population even subtracting those immigrants who returned to Europe which
may have been a substantial number, accurate statistics on this being hard to
come by. And even at that, a miniscule
number were denied entry for health reasons.
So the guarded gate was not as imposing it sounds.
Alas, in his
conclusion, Okrent tells of the thousands of pages written by leaders of the
eugenics movement that he read in preparing his book, writings which now serve
to incriminate the leaders of this inhumane program. Okrent goes on to speculate that when future
historians write about “the ant-immigrant activists of the 2010’s, there will
likely be no papers to turn to – or, at least, no private papers” because “People today , I believe, don’t want
their unfiltered selves made public, even posthumously.”
Does
Okrent presume his readers to be of a lesser intellectual stock, speaking in
the argot of the present discussion?
Patronizing your readers is also bad manners as Okrent certainly knows,
having been an editor at The New York Times as well as at respected
publishing houses and magazines.
All of which is to ask Okrent, if he knows the
difference between “the anti-illegal immigrant movement” and “the
anti-immigrant movement?” No
significant “anti-immigrant movement” exists in the United States just as no
significant “white supremacist movement” exists here. These are Democratic Party talking points
used to stimulate the party’s base.
Even at that, why would Okrent
assume that those in “the anti- immigrant movement” would be ashamed of having
their words revealed? Likewise, does he
consider that those in the “pro-illegal immigrant movement,” which includes all
of the Democratic Party candidates as of October 2019 as well as Chamber of
Commerce Republicans, would be proud to have their private talk on this topic
revealed?
Indeed, is Okrent proud of his book
which can be seen as a polemic, suggesting that the eugenicists are comparable
to Americans who want their border laws enforced? Will he have given, in whatever small way,
more impetus to those who support “the open borders, illegal alien movement”
which will fundamentally change America if not irrevocably ruin her for our
children and grandchildren?
Speaking
of revealing private conversations, Slate, the online magazine, has now
revealed the transcript of a meeting in which the editors of The New York
Times, thwarted by the failure of Russia-gate to undo President Trump, are
about to deploy their “1619 Plan” to white out the beginning of America
in 1787, changing it to 1619 when the first black slaves were brought here in
chains. Of course, slavery existed in
America, as it did elsewhere in the world, prior to 1619. Nonetheless, the plan is to impute racism to
the white males who founded America; therefore, white male, Donald Trump, is a racist.
But America only became a country in 1787 not
1619. Besides, slavery, however
horrendous it is anywhere, was a regional institution in America, confined almost
exclusively to the one party Democratic
South though supported by the national Democratic Party. So too The Guarded Gate seeks
to indict America for embracing eugenics, whereas the
movement actually was driven by a tiny minority, intellectuals, as usual, duped
by progressivism’s bastardization of science in its attempt to perfect the
world by ridding it of “Gregor Mendel’s recessive genes.”
However,
Okrent’s biggest omission is his failure to recognize that eugenics was a
foreshadowing of the top down, junk science, profiteering initiatives which granted
experts power, the dream of progressives from their beginning in the 19th
century. And this dream has not died
despite the nightmare of eugenics and the Final Solution.
Consider
the top down programs which continue to poison our landscape: “sex education programs,” given the original
impetus by sex-o-crat, Alfred Kinsey, the charlatan pervert; infanticide and
euthanasia endorsed by governors and by intellectuals like Peter Singer,
professor of Bioethics at Princeton; the continuing presence of Planned
Parenthood clinics in mostly black neighborhoods, a chilling reminder of the
racism inherent in the selective breeding of the eugenics program, the
callousness of which is revealed by the Project Veritas videos showing Planned Parenthood
officials cutting deals over the sale of baby parts.
So also with the many social programs
concocted to alleviate poverty but which destroyed,
for example, black families and increased poverty by making fathers redundant; the global cooling hoax along with the mass starvation hoax of the
1970’s led by Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich; trade agreements which promised to make
China fair and transparent in her trading policies and her treatment of her own
people! And, of course, the latest and most egregious is the global warming/
climate change cult that threatens to destroy civilization if one is to take
seriously the proposals of progressives.
Okrent, apparently, fails to see this as the
lesson of his vibrant narrative so intent is he on presenting another polemic
on America the bad. That he would be so
biased or so ill-informed is disappointing.
Certainly
it is understandable that the many material improvements in the 19th
century gave people hope that such progress could be applied to solving
humanity’s various conundrums. And,
certainly, material improvements are often necessary to resolve such problems. But they are not sufficient to do so. Expertise has its place, but experience
demonstrates that when the sublime Judaic-Christian doctrine that each
individual is made in the image of God is ignored, then scientism and cults
like eugenics flourish. Though
progressives may see this doctrine as anachronistic, if not laughable, they
would not chose to live where it is ignored.
Perhaps
the best summary of the tumultuous history of immigration to America was simply
and eloquently put by the late Joseph Sobran who, not incidentally, was a
Catholic:
At
times American Protestants were suspicious of immigrants, and though their
suspicions have become notorious, they were not without reason. At any rate,
the suspicions were quickly abandoned, and the immigrants were welcomed as
fellow Americans. Today the immigrants are glorified and the natives
disparaged, as if the immigrants were the originators, rather than the
beneficiaries, of tolerance.
Read the full review here
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