Veiled Prophet
About This Book
Every December in downtown St. Louis, the city's elite gather for a lavish costume party that doubles as a debutante ball. The daughters of high society are paraded toward a cloaked figure at the center of the room, who chooses one of them as "Queen." This is the Veiled Prophet's Ball, and it is easy to dismiss as dated and silly. Yet the Veiled Prophet Society has long served as a place of solidarity for the city's "fathers," the wealthy men who run businesses, banks, and whole industries, and who have used it to break strikes, crush protests, and enforce racial hierarchies. Devin Thomas O'Shea's history of the society traces its violence and its pageantry, and in doing so tells an alternate history of this Midwestern city through labor politics, racial inequality, and the accumulation of capital. It begins with the society's origins after the 1877 railroad workers' strike and moves to the height of its influence, and that of St. Louis itself, at the 1904 World's Fair. It also follows members into unexpected corners of the world, from Rhodesia and Vietnam to the corridors of power in Washington, DC. The society's power has never gone unchallenged. Orphans armed with pea-shooters rose against it in the late nineteenth century, Communists organized against it in the 1930s, and civil rights figures and rebellious debutantes defied it in the 1960s. The most recent challenge came with the Ferguson uprising of 2014. With the struggle over the city's future as heated as ever, the book argues that it matters to understand and expose the long history of this masked society and its continuing effect on the ordinary people of St. Louis.
ISBN: 9798888905784
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