{"product_id":"2940170436811","title":"The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eBy the widely celebrated \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e best-selling author of \u003ci\u003eLast Call\u003c\/i\u003e amp;mdash; the powerful, definitive, and timely account of how the rise of eugenics helped America close the immigration door to ¿inferiors¿ in the 1920s.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, \u003ci\u003eThe Guarded Gate\u003c\/i\u003e 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 amp;mdash; many of them progressives amp;mdash; 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOver five years in the writing, \u003ci\u003eThe Guarded Gate\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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 Rooseve\u0026lt; 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA work of history relevant for today, \u003ci\u003eThe Guarded Gate\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Simon \u0026 Schuster","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47104972980464,"sku":"2940170436811","price":23.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940170436811_p0.jpg?v=1763802392","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940170436811","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}