Daniel Okrent, "The Guarded Gate"

Daniel Okrent discusses his book, "The Guarded Gate", at Politics and Prose on 5/18/19.

In this timely history, Okrent chronicles the period from 1895, when a group of Bostonians, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, initiated an anti-immigration campaign, through the following four decades when the U.S. restricted the entry of Jews and people from eastern and southern Europe on the grounds that they were inferior. Tailoring immigration policy to “biological laws,” President Coolidge promoted eugenics as national policy, and U.S. law kept hundreds of thousands of people out of the country. Okrent, author of books on Prohibition, Rockefeller Center, and baseball, brings the period to life with vivid profiles of the key figures involved, from the researchers and politicians to the many progressives—such as Margaret Sanger and Maxwell Perkins—who saw in eugenics a rational model for the future. Okrent is in conversation with Strobe Talbott, a journalist, diplomat, and former president of Brookings.

Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times, editor-at-large of Time, Inc., and managing editor of Life magazine. He worked in book publishing as an editor at Knopf and Viking, and was editor-in-chief of general books at Harcourt Brace. He was also a featured commentator on two Ken Burns series, and his books include Last Call, The Guarded Gate, and Great Fortune, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history. He lives in Manhattan and on Cape Cod with his wife, poet Rebecca Okrent.

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Produced by Tom Warren