FOOL KILLER PART SEVENTY-EIGHT: OCTOBER 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 78 – As always, it’s fascinating to read the over 100-year-old opinions of James Larkin Pearson (and by extension his Fool Killer), including the opinions that one doesn’t agree with. Here are some of the Fool Killer’s targets in October 1915:

*** Dr. Stephen Herbert Langdon, for his claim that his translations of ancient Sumerian clay tablets convinced him that instead of the Biblical First Man it was really the Bible’s version of the Survivor of the Great Flood who ate of the Forbidden Fruit. And the Forbidden Fruit was really a legume from a cassia tree, not an apple.

        NOTE: I found news articles about Langdon’s claims as far back as August of 1914, but they were apparently just getting big in the U.S. in 1915. Oddly, in 1920 the New York Times, Antique Religion and others started covering Langdon’s claims as if he had just made them. At any rate, Langdon’s claims eventually influenced comparative mythology theories about the Adam and Noah stories being based on Utnapishtim and other figures from Sumerian myths.

*** Eastman Kodak Company. The Fool Killer was being very cynical about the recent decision by the Federal District Court at Buffalo, New York which ordered the company to be dissolved on anti-trust grounds. They even joked that Kodak stock would probably go up and that the company would survive intact given how so many big money corporations had circumvented anti-trust rulings from courts. 

*** King George V & Czar Nicholas of the Allied Powers, and Kaiser Wilhelm of the Central Powers, all of whom said that God was on THEIR side in the raging World War. 

*** The Georgia lynch mob who dragged Jewish Leo Frank out of his cell and hanged him for the murder of Mary Phagan. The Fool Killer’s reason for targeting them was what he saw as their false chivalry. That Mary Phagan had lived and died without any of them caring about her plight, working in a pencil factory for starvation wages. That she only had value to them after she was dead. 

*** America’s prisons, which were coming to be filled with so many High Society criminals of late that they might have to start keeping out killers for fear that they might prove to be a bad influence on the white-collar inmates.

*** President Woodrow Wilson’s administration, for letting railroads raise their rates because they claimed their current profit margins were so slim that it threatened their ability to keep train service up and running. The Fool Killer pointed out that the government would never help railroad workers by raising their wages if they had trouble making ends meet. 

*** Democrat Senator Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman of South Carolina, a REAL white supremacist going back to the Reconstruction Era. The repulsive Tillman was at the time the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs. He had also been targeted by Charles Napoleon Bonaparte Evans’s original Fool Killer in the 1800s.  

*** At first the Fool Killer targeted the thousands of men who were volunteering to serve as mock drowning victims to provide life-saving practice for the National Women’s Life-Saving League. The league taught life-saving methods to women in case they needed to save drowning people at America’s beaches. At length it dawned on the Fool Killer that men wanting to be “saved” by bathing beauties wasn’t so foolish after all and he let it pass.

*** The weekly publication The Saint Louis Humorist, which he dismissed as more sad than funny. NOTE: This is interesting because online sources speculate that the Humorist stopped publishing in 1909. Obviously, if it was relevant enough to be made fun of in 1915, it must have still been going.   

*** The shallow, fashion-conscious, freshly coiffed “dudes” whose numbers were multiplying.

*** The British author and illustrator Oliver Onions, for having such a silly name. (He would change his name to George Oliver in 1918.)

*** Politicians, for being willing to accept Imperial Germany’s “disavowal” of the sinking of the S.S. Arabic via one of their U-Boats as the World War raged on. Kaiser Wilhelm promised to not target non-military shipping from now on, but went back to unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, which ultimately led to U.S. entry in the war that April.

*** Politicans again, for being willing to continue lending money to England and France for the war, but turning down America’s struggling farmers for a loan.

*** American voters, for foolishly remaining loyal mostly to the Big Two Democrat and Republican Parties no matter how badly they failed the nation.

*** Writer Henry James, for becoming a naturalized English Citizen.

AMONG THE FOOL KILLER’S PITHIER REMARKS THIS TIME AROUND:

“If we were put in the world just to help other people, then what in the dickens were the other people put here for?”

“Just about the supremest pleasure in this life is turning over and going to sleep again after the alarm clock has played its little tune.”