Halloween a Hundred Years Ago

I've been deep in newspaper archives from Indiana in the 1920s doing research for my book I HATE THOSE MASKED BASTARDS! Right now, a lot of my writing process involves clipping newspaper articles and filing them away in a piece of bespoke software I've written to help me create an annotated timeline which I'll use to start crafting chapters, so I've been copy/pasting a lot of old news articles. A lot.

While I've been digging around in these old newspapers, I've been drawn to all the advertisements. In addition to being beautiful, each one is an amazing little capture of life a hundred years ago (you could buy a new car for about $600 and there were a surprising number of uses for laxatives). In fact, I've been drawn enough to these old ads that I created a second piece of bespoke software just to collect them (OK, yes: writing bespoke software is apparently my procrastination method).

With Halloween tomorrow, I thought I'd share some of the ads I've collected from newspapers across Indiana to give you a glimpse of what Halloween was like in 1925. A hundred years ago, everything was cheap, there was a lot of "nose putty" involved, pumpkin pie was a Halloween thing, and the cuts (think clip art from 100 years ago) illustrating many of the ads were incredible. Plus, Chicago's best typeface, Cooper Black, makes a few appearances. Of course, this is America and so racism is also always close at hand: "Mexican" and "Chinaman" costumes are cheerily advertised and burnt cork, for blackface, is on sale for 50 cents. Scratch under any surface in this country—even the ones with seemingly immaculate spooky vibes—and there it is. A hundred years ago and right now are not that far apart in that way.

Anyway, everything is very hard right now, so travel back in time with me for a few minutes and take in the Halloween vibes—the good and the bad—of 1925.