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 69 – Some of the Fool Killer’s targets on both sides of the aisle in the March 1914 edition of James Larkin Pearson’s version of the folk figure:
*** Mining companies that paid their employees in the infamous Company Scrip which wasn’t real money but could only be spent at the Company Store just to let the mine owners get back much of what they paid their miners as those employees had to buy groceries, clothing, etc. at Company Stores since no one else would accept the scrip as payment.
*** Democrat President Woodrow Wilson’s administration for supposedly making the economy so bad that more and more working-class people would be killing themselves with the new coffin-shaped mercury bichloride pills.
NOTE: As I’ve mentioned in earlier Fool Killer installments, I find it fascinating how in the 19-teens and twenties socialists (and Pearson openly called himself one) hated Woodrow Wilson and denounced him as an ally of capitalist tycoons. Today, of course, socialists tend to like Wilson and it’s Republicans who hate him, blaming his policies for supposedly setting the U.S. on what they see as the disastrous route that we are still on today in their eyes.
As another reminder of how one cannot do one-to-one comparisons with political affiliations then and now, bear in mind that Wilson opposed voting rights for women, but Pearson and his Fool Killer supported them.
*** Get-rich-quick authors who were selling books and courses about how to write photoplays (called screenplays today) so that the buyer could make money writing for the ever-growing movie industry. So basically, the Syd Fields of 1914.
*** The Charlotte Observer newspaper, where Pearson used to work, for supposedly having many employees who smoked tobacco and used drugs despite their editorial pages always condemning the “evils” of smoking and drug use. NOTE: Pearson counted alcohol and Coca-Cola as “drugs.” Continue reading
PART 67 – Some of the Fool Killer’s targets on both sides of the aisle in the January 1914 edition of James Larkin Pearson’s version of the folk figure: 
The previous installments of Fool Killer lore have seen the neglected 1800s folk figure in a variety of roles: 
In honor of the Halloween season this post will look at the Fool Killer as a 1980s slasher. 
THE FOOL KILLER – As we all know, Anthony Perkins starred in the eerie 1965 movie The Fool Killer as an amnesiac Civil War veteran who came to believe he was really the legendary title figure. A 1980s slasher version of the Fool Killer could feature a deranged killer who has similarly come to regard himself as the “real” one.
AUGUST 1919 RETURN – From January of 1910 to July of 1917, James Larkin Pearson’s monthly Fool-Killer had been published, with his revival of the violent folk figure doing his ages-old job of bashing political and societal fools. In April 1917 America entered World War One and by July Pearson felt that a unified front for wartime was appropriate. 
In August of 1919, nine months after the end of the war, Pearson changed the name back to The Fool-Killer and resumed the hard-hitting political satire. That month’s targeted fools included: 
JANUARY 1910 – James Larkin Pearson, poet and newspaper man, carried on the Fool Killer tradition from 1910 to 1917, then again from 1919 into the 1920s. Pearson’s fellow North Carolinian Charles Napoleon Bonaparte Evans had written the Fool Killer Letters of the 19th Century so it’s appropriate that another Tar Heel continue the lore for so many years of the 20th Century.
Pearson’s Fool-Killer was the mascot of the entire publication, which was merely 4-6 pages anyway, not simply the supposed author of letters regarding his body count of “fools.” Think of this Fool Killer (I prefer no hyphen) as the written word equivalent of Puck (1876-1918), the political cartoon mascot of the humor magazine of the same name.
*** Frederick Cook, who, the previous December, had seen his claim to have reached the North Pole ruled invalid and possibly fraudulent by the University of Copenhagen. (The Fool Killer was unable to locate Cook, however.)
PART TWENTY: In a surprising development Balladeer’s Blog was contacted by THE actual Fool Killer. Using Jimmy Neutron-level science I determined that this correspondent was indeed the actual supernatural figure who had been at large in America since the 1830s. 
Coming to you as I wander in search of fools to kill, as usual a murder of crows following in my wake to feast upon the ample corpses I leave behind me in my travels.
Previously I examined Joel Chandler Harris’ 1902 story Flingin’ Jim And His Fool-Killer, set in Georgia in October of 1872, plus Ridgway Hill’s Facts for the Fool-Killer, set in and around Buffalo, NY in 1909. 
If he had, one possible source would be the Fool Killer figure from Melungeon folklore in East Tennessee and other Appalachian areas. Or, since we have no way of checking exact dates, Evans’ darkly satirical tales may have influenced the existing Melungeon lore since Melungeons at the time were scattered from Tennessee to North Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia. 
