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- In 1924, a new American law ended the wave of immigration to this country that had begun in the 19th century.

Where hundreds of thousands of Southern and Eastern European immigrants had entered the United States each year before the law.

After 1924 those numbers we reduced to a trickle.

Today's guest is the author of a remarkable history of the bigotry and sham science that lay at the heart of the Immigration Act of 1924.

He's Daniel Okrent this week on Story in the Public Square.

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to Story in the Public Square where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

Alongside me is my friend and cohost, G. Wayne Miller of The Providence Journal.

Each week we talk about big issues with great guests, Authors, journalists, filmmakers and more, to make sense of the stories that shape public life in the United States today.

To help us this week, we're joined by Daniel Okrent, whose distinguished career includes service as the first public editor of The New York Times, as well as stints as editor-at-large at Time Inc. and managing editor at Life Magazine.

He's the author of six books, including the recently published "The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That "Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians "and Other European Immigrants Out of America".

Dan thank you so much for being with us.

- [Dan] Well thank you for having me Jim.

Happy to be here.

- So let me just say, out of the gate, this is as an impressive body of work as I've read in some time.

So congratulations on all fronts.

- [Dan] Thank you very much.

- What led you to this story in particular?

- My last book was a history of Prohibition.

And one of the things that I learned about Prohibition was that a big aspect of it was anti-immigrant character.

It was aimed by Methodists and baptists ministers in the middle of the country against the Irish and Italian political machines that were taking over in the big city, for whom alcoholism an intimate part of their lives.

And just studying the anti-immigration feeling led me into this territory, where I learned that the most restrictive immigration law in American history was passed because of a dependence on a non-science science called eugenics.

- So for the folks who maybe only have a hazy recollection from school about eugenics is, give us a working definition.

- The simplest one, and I do use the word science advisedly, it's the science of planned breeding so as to produce better human beings.

It's the belief that if you match two people, if there's a decision made for the purpose of having a better human being result in the offspring.

That's the eugenics in practice.

- It's breeding.

- Yeah, it is the same thing that happens with thoroughbred horses.

It is precisely the same.

In this particular case though, it was applied to religious, racial, and ethnic groups.

A rather different story.

- What sort of amazed me in reading this book, was the number of the great and the good in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, families that people would recognize.

Rockerfellers and Carnegies, major important Massachusets families, Henry Cabot Lodge, others, presidents of Harvard and MIT and Princeton, who all get wrapped up in both the anti-immigrant aspect of it, but also in the eugenics piece of it.

- Yeah, what they use, the anti-immigrant feeling comes first.

Anti-immigrant feelings go back in the republic, back to before the republic in 1750s.

A newspaper editor in Philadelphia wrote about how the Germans coming into Pennsylvania colony were destroying it.

And that newspaper editor was Benjamin Franklin.

And there were series of laws, it goes in a cycle like a sine wave, of when we are feeling, anti-immigrant feeling is intense, or when we're welcoming immigrants.

In this particular case, the New England aristocracy was very strongly anti-immigrant at the end of the 19th century.

Not getting anywhere with it until they hooked up with the eugenicists.

And then it was no longer a matter of prejudice, it's not that we dislike these people, they are provably by science not as good as we are.

And that's what led to the passage of the law.

- So why was the establishment anti-immigrant?

I mean they were the people in power, they had the wealth, they had the political influence and office.

What was threatening to them about immigrants?

- I think it's nothing more complicated really than the fact of the other.

There's a description of Henry James coming back to Boston after having been in Europe for 20 years and seeing the Italian immigrants on Boston Common, and he's horrified, because who are these?

This is something utterly different from the world I come from.

They dress differently, they speak differently, they behave differently.

There's also I think, when the innate, I'm afraid this is inbred to all of us, the need to have somebody who's lesser than you are.

The need to establish your own value in the universe by having somebody to look down on.

So it's a combination of these things.

And then there was the political aspect as well, because they obviously were a political threat to the aristocracy.

- So we'll probably get into this later, but there's clearly an echo of that, what you just described in what is happening in this country today.

But I had a question.

I wanna get back to eugenics, cause it hasn't been well understood or studied by a lot of Americans.

You said eugenics was applied.

What do you mean by applied?

- Applied science, rather than laboratory science.

It was taking the laboratory science of what became known as genetics.

Eugenics predates the term genetics.

Taking what was believed to have been learned in the laboratory, now let's apply it to actual, the way that people live.

And there are different aspects of it.

There's the positive eugenics of I wanna marry somebody who is as smart and as beautiful as possible to have great kids.

There are the negative eugenics, which is let's not let people who are deficient breed, because they're only going to create more deficient people.

And then there's these so called scientific racism that was the national eugenics, in which it becomes policy to apply the principles of planned breeding to large populations.

- So this is enacted through law?

- Eugenics does get aspects enacted in law in 32 states starting in 1907, allowing states to sterilize the deficient.

The definition of the deficient was very, very broad.

But the deficient who were under state control, in other words, living in state institutions, almshouses, prisons, homes for the insane.

- [G.Wayne] Carrie Buck, for example.

- Carrie Buck being the leading example, the lawsuit in 1928 that legalized it.

So that aspect of eugenics, where the state could determine whether you could reproduce.

That was put in place in law across the country.

- Was there opposition to this amongst sane people or rational people?

- Yes, to the eugenics movement there was, for all sorts of obvious reasons, I think.

But when the Supreme Court was asked to pass on it in Buck v. Bell in 1927, 1928, the vote was eight to one.

An eight to one majority said that the states could do this and included in the majority were the great liberals Louis Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote the decision in which he said, "three generations of imbeciles is enough."

- That's shocking.

- The book recounts the history of anti-immigration efforts led by Henry Cabot Lodge in the period up to 1907.

1907 there's an effort to get a literacy law passed that's basically a requirement to pass a literacy test if you're gonna become an immigrant to the United States.

- Little bit earlier than that.

- Okay, but when it fails in 1907... - It fails four times, Jim.

It passes Congress in 1896, vetoed by Grover Cleveland.

It passes Congress again in 1912, vetoed by William Howard Taft.

Passes again in 1914, vetoed by Woodrow Wilson.

Passes again 1917, vetoed by Woodrow Wilson again, but then a veto override by Congress, because by then they had the eugenics to add to what they had already argued.

- And so there was that moment in, I thought it was the 1907 effort that failed that led the anti-immigration activists to then seek unholy alliance with the progenitors of eugenics.

- It's a little bit later than that that happens.

I mean, 1907 is an important year because a big piece of legislation was stopped on the floor or Congress and a commission was established.

What do you do when you can't solve a problem?

You create a commission.

But it came back to the floor of Congress in 1912.

- The question I guess I'm trying to get at though, is was the marriage between the anti-immigration activists and the eugenicists, if that's the right word, was that born of political failure?

- Yes I believe it was.

- Or was it born of more than that?

- Well I think that there were aspects, other aspects, that feeling of superiority, but the anti-immigration movement, which had been strong and successful in Congress for 20 years, wasn't getting anywhere.

They kept getting vetoed.

And they needed something to make it not seem that they were prejudice, because that wasn't electorally a safe thing to do by then.

There were a lot of people from these countries who were voting at that point.

So by 1917 they picked up on the idea of eugenics based on a book written by a New York aristocrat named Madison Grant.

In which he created a hierarchy of racial divisions among white people, among European bred people.

So that the top are the Nordics, who are tall and beautiful and blond and brave, and who made are country what is is.

In between are the Alpines, and we need the Alpines because we need artisans and craftsmen.

And at the bottom were the Mediterraneans, short, swarthy and really not worth much of our attention, except for their contributions to music.

He actually wrote this.

And in the book he makes the eugenic argument that, "we know from science" he says, "that the mating of any two "racial groups" he considered them races, the children would revert to the lower one of the two groups.

So the mating between a Nordic and an Alpine, he said is an Alpine, between an Alpine and a Mediterranean is a Mediterranean, and the mating between any of the three European groups and a Jew yields a Jew.

And this was the book, published by Scribner's.

The editor was the great Maxwell Perkins, editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who continued to publish a number of these scientific racism books.

And it provided the so-called intellectual basis for the final push toward the restrictive immigration laws.

- But it was total BS, I mean it was made up.

This ranking of races, and what you just described, it was made up, there was no basis and real science, correct?

- In 1921 an article appears in Good Housekeeping Magazine that says that now that science has proven that these people, meaning the Eastern and Southern European immigrants, are inferior, we have to have legislation to keep them out.

That was written by Calvin Coolidge.

- What made him think it had been proven?

Who proved it?

It certainly wasn't in a peer review publication (laughs).

- No not peer reviewed.

But as Jim points out, it was embraced by many important scientific institutions.

The American Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, most of the research was done at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, at Yale, at Princeton, some at Harvard.

The President of Stanford, David Starr Jordan, the man who founded Stanford was one of the leading scientific advocates of it.

These people had authority.

They had the authority of position and the authority of background and of degrees, and of influence, that enabled them to turn national minds.

- And of course, these are big names, big people, big institutions, and when you have that kind of stature and authority the masses... - It also was a wide political range from extreme right-wingers like Madison Grant might be described, through really the core of the Progressive movement.

Including such people as Margaret Sanger a little bit later than this.

But the financiers who backed the anti-immigration movement, they were the same people who were, same families, same people who led the abolition movement, who fought for voting rights for blacks in the south, the founder of the Massachusets Civic League, which is the good government group of all good government groups.

These were all, we would think, forward-looking people, but they bought into this, and they grabbed it and they ran with it.

- And part of the appeal, I think, is the trappings of science.

And so I'm wondering if in sort of writing this you had opportunity to reflect on what is science.

- Well yes, and this is, Jim, one of the troubling aspects of it for me.

I mean, many things about that, I had these guys living in my head for five years, that was not fun.

(Jim laughing) - And you're still sane.

(Jim and G. Wane laughing) - And now here I am again, and I got them back in my head.

So thanks for that.

- We are pretty sorry, but we have to talk about it.

- But science only knows what it knows today.

It does not know what it's going to know tomorrow.

So if we go back to the early part of the 20th century, Gregor Mendel's famous paper on genetics was not discovered until 1900.

The early geneticists, they're kind of groping in the dark.

The science that is being created suggests that these things that are happening with pea plants, or with livestock, or with thoroughbred horses, well maybe that applies to humans as well.

They only knew what they knew.

And there were very few scientific voices arguing against them at the time.

The reason why this troubles me is I think about science today.

I want to believe today's science.

I want to believe the climate science is the science that is right.

How do we know?

We don't really know.

But let's not talk about climate science.

Back then, they didn't really know, The leading scientific voice against the eugenicists was the great anthropologist Franz Boas, really the father of American anthropology.

And he was dismissed because he was Jewish, well of course he feels this way.

- So what about the Catholic church?

You mentioned specifically Italians and Irish, and certainly those are two groups that were highly Catholic, really throughout the United States, wherever they settled.

Where was the Catholic Church on this?

- Well in fact, there was a division.

The Irish were okay.

- [G. Wayne] What do you mean the Irish were okay?

- To the eugenicists they were, if you'll excuse the expression, white.

They had been here, they came from the British Isles, they spoke the same language, the point is, they already had votes.

Henry Cabot Lodge was from Massachusets, the Irish were electing governors and mayors, and the vote meant a great deal to them.

- [Jim] And Kennedy was on the horizon.

- The Kennedys were on their way.

Italians were different.

They were Mediterraneans.

They were not even buddies to the Nordics.

The Catholic Church was great on the issue.

The Catholic Church was very much against eugenics and very much for immigration.

The pope in 1917, there's a papal encyclical that he publishes saying that the bible tells us to take in the stranger.

In the vote, the eight to one vote on the Buck v. Bell at the Supreme Court, the one vote against it, was Pierce Butler, very right wing, mossback conservative Justice, but a Catholic.

The idea to the Catholic Church of planning breeding, no we don't do that.

Believing Catholics do not step in the way of God's plan, and eugenics was smack in the way of God's plan.

- So early in the book you discuss a poem, "The Unguarded Gate" and the title of your book is "The Guarded Gate" is that a coincidence?

- No, gotta steal your titles from somewhere.

"The Unguarded Gate" was a poem that was recited on the floor of Congress over and over during every debate, written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a Boston aristocrat and writer and editor, in which he said, the hoards are outside our unguarded gates.

- And was it a response to Emma Lazarus?

- Yes, it was.

It was not stated at the time, but it was a defective response.

It was 12 years later so there's a little bit of a gap.

But he invokes the Statue of Liberty in the poem.

"The great white goddess" he calls her standing there.

So that poem gets used by the anti-immigrationists because the gates were, they felt, unguarded, and my book is about how they came to be guarded.

The law that passes in 1924 is in place for 41 years.

41 years where, just to indicate its effect, under the complicated formulae that were developed for the 1924 law, there had been an average of 220,000 people coming from Italy every year in the years immediately before the passage of the law.

After the law the limit was 6,000.

Decimation would be 22,000, this was beyond decimation.

And the same applied to Jews, to Romanians, to Poles, to Russians, the worse of all were the Greeks.

It's complicated, these numbers were based on how many people from those countries were already here.

But they didn't use the 1920 census for that, because all these Jews and Italians were already here.

They used the 1890 census, before they started coming.

- [G. Wayne] Geez, that was convenient, huh?

- Yeah, how did they get to that?

So in the case of the Jews and Italians, there had been some immigration from those countries, not a lot, but there had been some.

So their numbers, as bad as they were, were nothing like the Greeks.

The Greek immigrations doesn't begin until the early 20th century when the Turks and the Greeks are at each other's throats, and their economic problems in Greece.

So the Greek quota was 100, 100 Greeks a year.

Ask a Greek friend of yours when his or her family came here.

It was before 1924.

- So just very quickly.

Where were the eugenicists on Native Americans, the original inhabitants of this land, and African Americans, where were they on each of those populations?

- (laughing) I'm laughing because the term that the anti-immigrationists aristocrat, Boston Brahmin aristocrats used to describe themselves was native Americans.

- Come on, seriously?

- Absolutely.

All of their text, their brochures, their speeches.

- Geez, do they know anything about Roger Williams?

- We are the native Americans, they said.

The Indians didn't exist.

Somebody said of Henry Cabot Lodge, Lodge's idea of the west was Pittsfield.

- Which for our viewers is Western Massachusets.

Not even into New York.

- I should elaborate that.

The Indians did not figure, they don't come up, they are not mentioned in any of the debate, any of the literature of the period at all.

- I want to say unbelievable, but it's not unbelievable.

- But not unbelievable.

African American, very different, Lodge was the leading Congressional voice for guaranteeing the vote for freed blacks in the South.

It was a real issue for him.

He pursued it passionately, as many of these people did.

But I believe that they saw African Americans as so much the other, that it wasn't even a question, and certainly they're not coming over from Africa.

When they put in the quotas, one African nation had a quota of 1/2 a person a year.

- How do you get 1/2, top, bottom, left right?

- Try to connect with somebody from another African nation to get one.

- The 1924 law is the result of decades of effort.

It biases immigration towards Northern and Western Europe.

Those are very white populations.

Is this just white supremacy with a different name?

- Yeah, it's white supremacy, where there's a distinction made between whites.

I'm not saying that that's any worse than the distinction we make between whites and people of other colors.

But what it demonstrates to me is that the intensity of this feeling of need to feel superior, and to need to have somebody else be inferior is so important to the human race, I think.

It was not white enough, if you were from Italy, or if you were from Spain, or if you were Romania or Hungary, that wasn't white enough.

That's not really white.

And you see in the writings of Edward A Ross, a sociologist who coined the term race suicide, you see him referring to certain groups, like the Slavs, as being almost white.

He was later the president of the American Civil Liberties Union.

- Did Hitler incorporate any of the ideas of American eugenics?

- He read Grant's book, "The Passing of the Great Race" while he was in prison in Lundsberg in 1923, 1924.

He quotes him in speeches.

In "Mein Kampf" he doesn't address Grant, but he writes about immigration, very specifically that the one country who has figured this out is the United States, and we need to look at what they're doing.

- But he wasn't talking about the melting pot, he was talking about the 1924 law that was excluding immigration.

- Right, yes.

The only country that is understanding what to do about immigrants, keep them out, was the U.S. - We've got about five minutes left, and I wanna talk a little bit about today, because I listened, reading the rhetoric, particularly the anti-immigration rhetoric pre-1907, in my mind echoed with a lot of the rhetoric that we hear today.

Is this shared DNA, so to speak?

- [Dan] (laughing) speak of eugenics.

- Do you think that they're cognizant of?

- Well some are.

Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, when he was still merely a senator from Alabama he gave an interview in 2015 and said that we need a law like the 1924 law.

Very specifically, he knew what that law was designed to do, and what it did do, effectively, until it was repealed in the 1960s.

Whether our president is familiar with it, I guess he's not, but he's certainly using the same tropes, which is to say, it's one thing to say, let's cut immigration, let's cut immigration down to X a year, but when you are specifically naming, identifying ethnic groups, Central Americans, Muslims from the Arab Countries, that's exactly what we were doing in 1924, from 1924 to 1965.

And we saw the consequences of that.

The people who didn't make it from Europe between 1924 and 1965, and not just the slaughtered Jews, but the 300,000 Greeks who starved, the 200,000 Serbs who were killed by Nazi death squads, the desperate poverty in Italy.

These people would have come.

Many of them would have wanted to come, certainly.

But they couldn't because of this law.

- Do you think people who support immigration reform as outlined by the Trump administration, see any link between those policies and the eugenics movement?

Or is this not even on the radar?

I'm talking now the average person who would support them.

- No I don't think so, but if you go online to the places like Stormfront, the extreme, the replacement theory people, "they will not replace us."

They invoke eugenics, they reprint Grant's book.

They hold these people up as heroes, and they look at the 1924 law and the eugenic aspect of it, as central to their belief.

So certainly on the activist fringe, definitely.

- The activist fringe is one thing.

I think about the day that Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015.

He said very specifically, "when Mexico sends their people to us they don't send their best."

Which sounds remarkably like the argument from a century before.

- Well the century before they say don't send any of them.

You know, we don't want their best either.

Although there were exceptions put into the law that let in M.Ds, my grandfather came from Romania in 1922 and where there'd already been the first version of the restriction law, but he was a physician so he was allowed in, there were exceptions.

Now it's the totality, when he refers to Central Americans as a group, or Muslims as a group, not individual bad Central Americans, or individual Central Americans we can't afford to have here, but Central Americans period, while saying, let's have people come from Sweden, it's exactly the same.

- We got about a minute left here.

How does, you talked about the sine wave of American history around this issue.

Does this fever eventually peter out?

Is this a panic or?

- It has always petered out in the past.

That's the good news.

The bad news is it always comes back.

- Well that's not very encouraging.

(all laugh) We're always looking for a glimmer of hope.

- Well there's a hope for you know... - But you're absolutely right.

I mean, history shows that there's absolutely no question that that's a true statement.

- Yeah.

You know usually, it's a reaction.

Something gets so extreme, and I think many of us, I'm certainly hoping that this president will be replaced by a president who does not have any racial issues involving immigration, and by a population that's supporting that view.

- So very quickly, its a great book, wonderfully researched and written.

How long did it take to write it?

- It was a little bit over five years.

The research, I get lost in the research, I spent three and a half years researching before I put... - Down the rabbit hole, but it's fun going down that.

- I love the rabbit hole.

It's sitting at the keyboard that I hate, that's terrible.

- Well, it's a phenomenal read and a remarkable accomplishment.

Dan Okrent, the book is "The Guarded Gate" you wanna check it out.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit Pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

He's G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

(inspirational music) - [Announcer] This program is made possible in part by a grant from Charlotte Metcalf.

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