Select ILLUSTRATIONS AND photoGRAPHs from THE GUARDED GATE

Arriving “direct from the slums of Europe daily,” immigrants were held responsible for the assassination of William McKinley (upper left).

A 1909 cartoon from a popular magazine.

Seeking to publicize the dangers of unplanned reproduction, a medical journal hired four vagrants to parade on Wall Street with signs declaring their deficiencies.

The first wall: complete exclusion of Chinese immigrants was enacted in 1882.

Foolhardiness, forgery, gastritis — some of the thousands of traits categorized and catalogued by the researchers of the Eugenic Records Office.

Madison Grant, known as America’s foremost environmental conservationist, gathered wider fame by providing the faux scientific glue that completed the merger of eugenics and the anti-immigration movement.

Maxwell Perkins is remembered for editing Fitzgerald and Hemingway. At the same time, however, he was working with and publishing Grant and several other “scientific racists.”

Eugen Fischer (center) was a close colleague of the American eugenicists up to the point that Hitler made him rector of the University of Berlin.