The Veiled Prophet
Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A provocative look at the secret society that has controlled St. Louis for over a century, revealing how shadowy elites organize themselves against working-class power.
Every December in downtown St. Louis, the city’s upper crust attend a garish costume party that doubles as a debutante’s ball. The daughters of high society are paraded to the throne of a cloaked monarchical figure, and bow to the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan. At first glance, the event seems outdated and clownish, but in truth the Veiled Prophet Society has functioned as an exclusive club for the “city fathers,” where solidarity is built between wealthy men who head major U.S. corporations, banks, and control whole industries. At the Veiled Prophet’s Ball, these titans of capital come together to crown one of their daughters the Queen of Love and Beauty, and celebrate the breaking of strikes, the sabotage of protests, and the enforcement of racial hierarchies.
Devin Thomas O’Shea’s The Veiled Prophet is the definitive history of the Veiled Prophet Society in all its violence and pageantry, offering a colorful alternate history of the United States through the lens of the Midwestern elite. O’Shea follows the Veiled Prophet Society from its origins in the wake of the 1877 general strike, through the 1904 World’s Fair, to the height of the Prophet’s—and St. Louis’s—influence during the Cold War. The Veiled Prophet examines the unexpected ways this secret society has shaped the course of history, from the CIA to the Vietnam War to the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Yet the power wielded by the Veiled Prophet has not gone uncontested. Since the Gilded Age, the Prophet has faced resistance from orphans armed with pea-shooters, Communist Party organizers during the Depression, Civil Rights icons, and renegade debutantes. The Ferguson uprising of 2014 was only the most recent challenge to the Prophet’s influence.
As the fight for the soul and streets of St. Louis intensifies, it’s more critical than ever that we expose the sordid history of these powerful, masked figures and their control over our democracy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist O'Shea debuts with a beguiling history of the Veiled Prophet Society, a secretive organization for St. Louis businessmen and politicians. Started in 1878 by an ex–Confederate soldier, the Society has hosted presidents, like Grover Cleveland; featured influential members, such as CIA and FBI director William Webster; and is best known for its elaborate spectacles, including a public parade and private debutante ball featuring an anonymous figure costumed as the Veiled Prophet. The author contextualizes the society's founding as an upper-class reaction to "one of the largest multiracial general strikes to ever take place," the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, with the strike-squashing police commissioner serving as its first prophet. O'Shea also exposes the society's foundational racist motivations, with its aesthetic derived from the KKK and its blatant romanticization of slavery. The book is most exhilarating when focused on the society's antiquated traditions, like the annual crowning of a businessman's daughter as the Queen of Love and Beauty, and on efforts at disruption from without, whether working-class crowds pelting the prophet with dried peas or the dramatic 1972 unmasking of the prophet by civil rights activists (he turned out to be a Monsanto executive). While intriguing, more painstaking attempts to flesh out conspiratorial tangents—like the society's tenuous link to the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination—can drag. Still, it's a wild exploration of a shadowy elite.
