The Guarded Gate

Eugenicist arguments ranking the presumed genetic virtue of various ethnic groups helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the United States for more than forty years. By 1921 Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that 'biological laws' had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law that remained U.S. policy until 1965 was enacted three years later. Okrent connects the work of the American eugenicists to Nazi racial policies and shows how their beliefs found fertile soil in the minds of citizens and leaders both…