Admit One: An American Scrapbook

By Martha Collins

In Admit One: An American Scrapbook,Martha Collins relentlessly traces the history of scientific racism from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fairthrough the eugenics movement of the 1920s. Using a wide variety of documentary sources, including her Illinois grandfather's newspaper, Collins constructs a "scrapbook" of fragments, quotations, narrative passages, and lyrical riffs that reveal startling connections between the Fair, the Bronx Zoo, and ideas that culminated in anti-immigration, anti-miscegenation, and eugenic sterilization laws in 1924. Among the book's recurring elements are evolving portraits of the "exhibited" African Ota Benga, the sterilization victim Carrie Buck, and the eugenicist Madison Grant, whose reach extended to Nazi Germany. Following the practice begun in her book-length poem Blue Front and continued in her exploration of race in White Papers, Collins combines careful research with innovative poetic techniques to create an arresting account of a segment of American history that haunts us even today. Admit One is a brilliant, troubling, necessary read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9780822981299

Martha Collins

 Martha Collins is the co-translator of Dreaming the Mountain and Black Stars. She has also published eleven volumes of poetry, most recently Casualty Reports and Because What Else Could I Do, which won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous books of poetry include the paired volumes Day Unto Day and Night Unto Night, as well as a trilogy of works that focus on race, beginning with the book-length poem, Blue Front. Collins has published three additional volumes of co-translated Vietnamese poetry and coedited a number of volumes, including, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries. Founder of the creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts Boston and former Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, Collins lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Book preview

PITT POETRY SERIES

Ed Ochester, Editor

ADMIT ONE

AN AMERICAN SCRAPBOOK

MARTHA COLLINS

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2016, Martha Collins

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6405-6

ISBN 10: 0-8229-6405-8

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8129-9 (electronic)

in memory of Ota Benga, Carrie Buck,

and countless other victims

of the policies and attitudes

portrayed in this book

and for Pam, Kevin, and Lee

without whom not

CONTENTS

Fair

Zoo

Fitter

Fewer

Postscript

Acknowledgments

FAIR

1904 St. Louis World’s Fair

Louisiana Purchase Exposition

MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS

OPEN YE GATES

SWING WIDE YE PORTALS

ENTER HEREIN YE SONS OF MAN . . .

My mother went, inside

her mother, mother and father

went in, what did they see?

An Ivory City of Palaces

with columns colonnades towers

turrets fountains statues domes

engines working factories farms

dairies bakeries animals art

20 million trees and plants

75 miles of roads and walks

14 miles of railroad track

first electric wall socket

one million electric lights

the most progressed the most—

O Civilization!—the most evolved

Don’t tell me the lights are shining

Any place but there!

900 industries making and selling

hospital schools an underground mine

cablecars railcars automobiles

Schools for Defectives: blind made brooms

make

bring into      being by

work      trouble      money

progress      tracks      time

for      something out

of something

Made / Made of

Festival Hall, w/ gold-leafed dome larger than St. Peter’s

             An elephant made of almonds

World’s largest organ, w/ over 10,000 pipes¹

             A windmill made of tools and 5,000 axe blades

Vulcan, world’s largest cast-iron statue²

             A life-size Teddy Roosevelt on horseback, made of butter

Largest ever rifle, w/ a range of 22 miles

             A 1¼-ton eagle w/ 5,000 feathers, made of bronze³

World’s largest clock, w/ 13,000-flower face

             A 35-foot King Cotton w/ life-size pickers, made of cotton

World’s largest birdcage, w/ walk-through tunnel⁴

             A bear made of 14,000 prunes

The Palace of Art⁵

---

Current Locations:

¹ Wanamaker’s (now Macy’s), Philadelphia

² Red Mountain, Birmingham, Alabama (still largest)

³ Wanamaker’s

⁴ Now in St. Louis Zoo

⁵ Now St. Louis Museum of Art

The Pike

Below the Palaces, down

on the Pike, you could Ride

the Shoot the Chute! or watch

an elephant ride it, could Walk

a Street in Cairo! ride a tortoise,

camel or zebra! you could watch

the Boer War reenacted, complete

with Zulus and Bushmen! you

could ride a boat to the North Pole!

or laugh in the mirrory Temple of Mirth

you could go to Dante’s Inferno! be

present at the Six Days