The last few decades have brought a resurgence of interest in the history of eugenics in America, including not only The Nazi Connection but also Alexandra Minna Stern’s Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (2005), Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003), and Jonathan Spiro’s resourceful biography of Madison Grant, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (2009). Now Daniel Okrent has added to the list with his carefully researched, spiritedly written, and protractedly subtitled The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America. Okrent’s interest is in the unholy alliance created when American nativism weaponized eugenics for the anti-immigrant cause.
