I had to put the book down to take a breather. The author had just described a blazingly racist parade float. The float, supposedly representing Irish culture, was part of an annual parade and celebration for the Veiled Prophet, a secret society of the white, capitalist elite of St. Louis. Yes, potatoes. Yes, alcoholism. Yes, whatever you’re imagining, it was worse. When members of the Irish community spoke out against the float, the organizers responded with, essentially, “What? You can’t take a joke?” It might as well have been a Twitter exchange in 2026.
The Veiled Prophet was founded in the mid-to-late 1800s during the a U.S. craze for secret societies, nearly all of them drawing on the “orientalism” that Edward Said would describe almost a century later. The Veiled Prophet was a direct response to the general strike of 1877, in which workers took control of the city for more than a week. The bosses weren’t just angry, they were terrified. So, drawing directly from a depiction of the KKK, Alonzo Slayback – a former confederate soldier and failed adventurer in Mexico – got help from his wealthy brother Charles and organized them into a whites-only club that threw parades and pageants, coordinating the consolidation and extension of their power against any and all threats of economic and racial justice.
As we move into and through the 20th century, members of the Veiled Prophet show up in the roots of the Cold War, racist urban renewal, subtle and not-so-subtle opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, support for the Vietnam War, nuclear-military testing in impoverished neighborhoods in St. Louis and even, potentially, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The idea that connected, informed and directed their actions was that “the elites saw U.S. citizens as low-status, disposable people in the same way that they deemed an adversarial foreign population less human, with less of a right to life, especially if there’s a war to win. Poor St. Louisans were, in the eyes of Veiled Prophet elites, an expendable class akin to the revolutionary armies of the South Pacific.” In some ways, choosing a fictitious tyrant as their avatar tells us all we need to know about what the founders and subsequent members of the Veiled Prophet stood for; they believe they are rightful rulers of the world and that the rest of us should be grateful for their claimed benevolence.
And then I came to the Ferguson chapter. A sense of dread washed over me. I already knew a significant number of Black Lives Matter activists from Ferguson died under suspicious circumstances. Having read the preceding violent history of the Veiled Prophet, the alliance between private capital and the police, the racism always simmering in society, imagining the possibilities shook me. Of course, O’Shea isn’t able to reveal anything new about the deaths, and it was foolish of me to imagine he could; at the same time, those deaths have an extra layer of significance when put into the historical context of the Veiled Prophet. Regardless of the actual cause of death, Deandre Joshua, Darren Seals, MarShawn McCarrel, Edward Crawford Jr., Danye Jones and Basem Masri had spent their entire lives in a system that viewed them as less than human. That system killed them just as it killed Michael Brown.
It is clear one of O’Shea’s goals is to show the threads that run through the history of the Veiled Prophet, the techniques, ideas and principles born in the crystallized fear of the 1877 strike and focused on maintaining the power of the white capitalist elite. Frequently, O’Shea will jump back and forth in time in the same paragraph to connect its subject with the past and future of the organization. I found this technique occasionally disorienting, causing me to lose track of his current topic. This was especially frustrating for me because I found his descriptions and images vivid enough to stay with me as I moved through the book, even reading at the very slow pace my toddler allows. For me, the thread O’Shea wove was robust and compelling, and the book as a whole would have been that much stronger without the asides.
Even with that, O’Shea makes a powerful point, one that could inform our response to present crises. White supremacy and wealth concentration do not develop organically. They take work by powerful people to maintain, work built on the very rational fear of a conscious population finding solidarity and leveraging the power that comes from it. And though the rich and powerful may not sit around comically large tables in hypersecret, hypersecure bunkers plotting every twitch and spasm of the global economy, that image isn’t so far from the truth. How far, really, are the Stonecutters from “The Simpsons” from the Veiled Prophet, Peter Thiel’s Dialog, fraternities at Ivy league universities or even the World Economic Forum at Davos?
But for all their wealth and power, they have no imagination. The techniques have been the same for decades, maybe centuries: Use bigotry to divide the working class, capture governmental power, leverage the press to spread propaganda (press coverage perhaps being the most impactful aspect of the Veiled Prophet balls and parades) and, if all else fails, use violence. I still cannot decide whether I’m encouraged by the real limitations of the vanguard of power in this world or discouraged because those limited tactics are still effective.
Ultimately, O’Shea shows us how pathetic the Veiled Prophet actually is, a mixture of absurdity and pathos so potent it’s clear why he initially wanted to write a Pynchonesque novel. We are talking about grown adult men who have achieved the apex of success in their own understanding of what human society is for, yet dress up in silly costumes, throw parades to impress the poor and flaunt their daughters at annual parties. It’s hard not to see a straight line between playacting as the magical court of a divine ruler and Elon Musk’s meltdowns every time some rando on social media tells him he’s not cool. It would be kinda sad actually, if they weren’t so damn destructive.
A version of this story appeared originally on the Porter Square Review of Books. Buy “The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis” from Porter Square Books.
