The Veiled Prophet - Devin Thomas O'Shea

Every December in downtown St. Louis, the city’s upper crust gathers for a garish costume party that doubles as a debutante’s ball, a ceremony in which the daughters of high society are paraded toward a cloaked figure in the center of the room who will select one young woman as the “Queen.” Known as the Veiled Prophet’s Ball, at first glance the event is easy to dismiss as outdated and clownish. But the truth is that the Veiled Prophet Society has functioned as a space of solidarity for the city’s “fathers,” the wealthy men at the head of businesses, banks, and whole industries who come together to break strikes, quash protests, and enforce 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 this Midwestern city through the lens of labor politics, racial inequality, and capital accumulation. O’Shea follows the Veiled Prophet Society from its origins in the wake of the 1877 railroad workers’ strike, the height of its, and St. Louis’s, influence during the 1904 World’s Fair, and the unexpected places its members exerted influence across the globe, from Rhodesia and Vietnam to the halls of power in Washington, DC.Yet the power wielded by the Veiled Prophet has not gone uncontested. Orphans armed with simple pea-shooters rose up against the secret society in the late 19th century. Communists organized against them
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