On Oct. 31, 1933, John Gould Fletcher attended "a rather dull meeting of a culture club at Fourth and Main." When he arrived at 8 p.m., the streets of Little Rock were quiet. When he emerged an hour later, he discovered a crowd:
"Dressed in a fantastic array of old garments, disguised in papier-mache masks of every description, the crowd yelled and jostled, blowing horns and whistles, unrolling long curling 'ticklers' of paper, hurling thick handfuls of confetti down the backs of all passers by. At several street corners stood tall, solemn figures in the white robes and peaked hoods of the Ku Klux Klan. Not a policeman ... was in sight."
The streetcars were all stopped, and automobiles drove slowly through the crowd. "Slapping hands were frequently applied to the rumps of passers-by, women and men alike," Fletcher writes in his history of Arkansas. He observed the horseplay for a little over an hour before tiring of it and heading home.
Home for Fletcher was once again the Pike mansion at Seventh and Rock streets. He had returned to Arkansas early in 1933 following a mental breakdown and suicide attempt. (He leapt from a window 30 feet high on July 10, 1932, breaking his shoulder. For a few months he was confined at London's Bethlehem Hospital, better known as Bedlam. Ben Johnson's biography of Fletcher quotes the letter he wrote from Bedlam to Conrad Aiken: "I am in a madhouse, a patient in room Number 4, with maniacs in padded cells nearby, and nothing in prospect but a living grave.")
By the end of February 1933, Fletcher was out of Bedlam, preparing to separate from his first wife, Daisy Arbuthnot, and return to Arkansas. His sister Adolphine Fletcher Terry and her husband, David D. Terry, had become the owners and stewards of the Pike mansion. They did not know that Fletcher was coming home until crates of his books began to arrive at the house.
I wonder what daily life was like for the Terrys after John Gould Fletcher's return. (I haven't read Adolphine Fletcher Terry's autobiography yet.) The highly ordered rhythms of the household must have persisted. Did Fletcher behave as a guest, or a proprietor, or something in between? He was still married, not yet involved with Charlie May Simon. One imagines he did a great deal of brooding.
Clearly he was well enough to attend meetings of a culture club. He writes in "Arkansas" that before 1933, he had never seen a Halloween celebration in Little Rock that involved masks and costumes. During his boyhood (in the 1890s), he writes, Mardis Gras was the holiday of masks and Halloween was the holiday of pranks.
Tom Dillard found plenty of evidence of Halloween pranks and published his findings in this space in 2021; the theft of gates was popular by 1900, and by 1904 so common that the mayor of Eureka Springs called for the arrest of anyone caught doing it. (The pranks got worse: in 1914, an electrician died when Little Rock boys dislodged an electrical line from the pole where he was working.) Fletcher recalls pranksters stealing gates during his boyhood, as well as soaping windows, lighting bonfires, and overturning iron carriage stoops.
There was a polite aspect to the celebration of Halloween: in November 1888, the Gazette's "Society Doings" column reported on an All Hallow's Eve party given by Judge Uriah M. Rose, where "one of the chief amusements was biting apples floating in a basin of water." (E.O. Clark says the columnist won all the prizes.) The party-goers also cut a cake containing a ring and a nickel; maybe hiding prizes in cakes originated with Halloween, not Mardis Gras.
Fletcher repeats what he was told about the demise of Mardis Gras: During his decades away from home, it "led to so many manifestations of hooliganism that sermons were finally preached and editorials written about the celebration of that day. And since Little Rock is in the Bible Belt, and since the minority Catholics made no attempt to save what was, after all, their holiday, Mardis Gras was abandoned about 1910."
So Halloween absorbed the public revelry of Mardis Gras. Fletcher speculates that it might have happened in 1917 when resident soldiers' carousal spilled over to the general public. But he is certain that what he witnessed on Halloween 1933 was new to him. Whatever its origin, he seems to approve of its spontaneous emergence: "The festival ... celebrated is not a legal one. How it sprang up and developed none can say. The local Chamber of Commerce does not support it. It may at any moment be prohibited by law."
Fletcher does not comment on the presence of Klansmen among the Halloween crowd, but Kenneth Barnes addresses it in "The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas: How Protestant White Nationalism Came to Rule a State" (2021). The hooded men present were remnants of the second incarnation of the Klan. Though it had as many as 7,800 male members at its peak, by 1933 its membership was nearly gone. So was its power, though one wonders what impression those hoods made on others in the crowd.