FOOL KILLER PART SEVENTY-FIVE: JUNE 1915

Balladeer’s Blog continues its examination of the many facets of Fool Killer lore. FOR PART ONE, INCLUDING THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT IN THE 1850s, CLICK HERE.

PART 75 – Regular readers may notice that picking up in June of 1915 is quite a jump from last week’s Fool Killer installment, which left off in Fall 1914. That’s because I can honestly say that James Pearson’s version of The Fool-Killer hit a decided creative dry patch for several months.

I am genuinely surprised because Pearson’s Fool Killer had been so interesting. I’ve covered several 1920s installments and then slipped back to begin with his 1910 beginnings of this publication and nearly every installment kept me fascinated with every page. Not so with autumn of 1914 through May 1915.

Pearson seemed at odds with how to react to a world at war and was feeling his way toward how best to approach a satirical take. For months his output was so repetitious, unfocused and lacking in bite that I had to force myself to keep reading. I’m reviewing the June 1915 edition because it features his reaction to American deaths in the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine, a major development which nearly resulted in the United States entering the World War right then and there.

Through hindsight, we know that things soon settled down and America did not enter the war until April 1917. Years ago I covered how James L. Pearson acknowledged the general mood of patriotic support for the war effort by Americans once we became involved. From 1917 until 1919 he stopped the satirical takes on our politics and culture to the point that he renamed his publication Good News for those two years to reflect his less critical wartime approach.

Longtime readers may recall that my tongue-in-cheek approach to that two-year gap has always been to say that the folk figure the Fool Killer was hibernating in his cave just like he did during the U.S. Civil War. For newbies, Charles Napoleon Bonaparte Evans – who provided the first written accounts of the Fool Killer during the 1850s – had the Fool Killer show his disgust with both sides of the Civil War by washing his hands of them and going into hibernation.

Just as Evans eventually brought back his Fool Killer character by 1870, James Pearson brought back the Fool Killer in 1919 with the World War over and done with. That 1919-1920s period was, in my opinion, the creative peak of his publication, which is why I started my reviews of his Fool-Killer with 1919 years ago. 

ANYWAY, ON TO THE FOOL KILLER’S TARGETS FOR JUNE 1915:

*** Pearson fell into the trap that we have seen so many American satirists and political commentators fall into in more recent decades. He was so set on negatively interpreting every single thing done by the U.S. that he twisted himself into a virtual pretzel to justify bizarrely unnecessary pot shots against America, blaming everyone BUT Germany for the Lusitania tragedy.

           It couldn’t help but remind me of the way his odd take on the event resembled the way certain political zealots in this country immediately branded America “the bad guys” whose “chickens came home to roost” following the 9-11 attacks in September 2001. It’s an odd situation where people haven’t necessarily thought their position all the way through, so just to seem “edgy” they side with the obvious aggressor in an incident.   

*** Strained Take Number One: Pearson and his Fool Killer said the Americans who died on the Lusitania basically had it coming because Germany had published warnings about their submarine warfare.

*** Strained Take Number Two: Pearson criticized the U.S. for dealing weapons to both sides in the World War yet in the next breath said that for selling weapons to Germany’s enemies we had left them no choice but to start killing Americans.

*** Strained Take Number Three: Pearson stated that there was no reason to care about the American victims on the Lusitania because they were probably rich to be traveling by sea and therefore shouldn’t be missed. (I can easily picture AOC and other 2026 Democrats expressing such sentiments.)   

*** Strained Take Number Four: In the craziest and most convoluted example of Pearson forcing himself to be a contrarian toward the general national anger about the sinking of the Lusitania, he actually implied that because an American invented modern submarines it meant that we Americans had no grounds for being upset that a submarine had killed Americans. Wow!

           Even if one doesn’t want to be jingoistic there in 1915 that’s still VERY far off from blaming the dead victims for sharing a nationality with the credited inventors of the weapon which killed them. It’s interesting to see that it’s not just modern-day figures who have fallen into the trap of taking absurd positions just to be contrarian.

*** The strained takes continued as Pearson sneered at “sob-artists” who mourned the dead victims without taking Germany’s point of view into consideration.

*** Pearson added the jaw-droppingly tactless wording that the U.S. should not get involved “just because a hundred or so ventured where they had no business and were lost.” At best, Pearson could have read the room a little better and used milder language until some more time had passed. One could jokingly say that at least Pearson didn’t imply that the dead victims had sacrificed themselves just to get America into the World War.

*** In a mock letter from Uncle Sam to Germany, Pearson ridiculed Wilson’s claims that he would hold the country to “strict accountability” over the sinking of the Lusitania and compared it to what he saw as Wilson’s weak, mealy-mouthed threats to Huerta in Mexico.

           So let’s get this straight, James Pearson. You don’t want America to go to war over the Lusitania, yet you’re also ridiculing Wilson for having a wimpy, “Wilson always chickens out” approach.

*** He joked about a Lusitania victim named Herbert Stone, saying that of course a stone would sink. Uh, James, that’s not being “irreverent” – it’s being callous.

*** In the same vein, Pearson mocked dead victim Elbert G. Hubbard, asking how America would get its advertisements written with him gone. 

EVEN THE FOOL KILLER’S PITHY REMARKS THIS TIME WERE TIED TO THE ABOVE.

“I wasn’t on the Lusitania. Were you, Rube?”

“Have you seen any ‘strict accountability’ lying around loose?”   

“None of my ships have been torpedoed yet. Have yours?”

“Good morning! Have you used any ‘strict accountability‘?”

“Yes, honey, we will ‘hold Germany to strict accountability’ just about like we made Huerta ‘salute the flag.'”