Andrew Hartman reviews Devin Thomas O’Shea’s The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St Louis — a history of one of the strangest and most revealing elite institutions in American history.
The Veiled Prophet Society was founded in 1877 by Alonzo Slayback, a Confederate veteran who fled to Mexico after the Civil War seeking help from Emperor Maximilian I before receiving a pardon and returning to St Louis. Its purpose: to reassert elite control after the St Louis Commune — a brief but real workers’ uprising led by the first Marxist party in the United States — had seen the city’s proletariat seize power for about a week.
Key threads from the book and review:
- The interracial solidarity of the St Louis working class in 1877 was the specific threat the Veiled Prophet Society was designed to destroy — white supremacy was central to the project from day one
- The Society’s mascot, the “Veiled Prophet,” wore a KKK-inspired mask and robe, paraded annually before the masses to evoke awe and intimidation
- Members included Clark Clifford (architect of the CIA under Truman), who brought Veiled Prophet operatives into Cold War statecraft
- Urban renewal in postwar St Louis — highways demolishing black neighborhoods, the starvation of Pruitt-Igoe — was directed by the same elite networks
- The civil rights movement forced the Society to end its parade and rebrand; the first black member was admitted in the early 1980s
- By the Ferguson uprising of 2014, the club was a shell — but elite control of St Louis was unchanged
Hartman’s central critique of O’Shea’s book is sharp: secret societies aren’t the mechanism of capitalist rule — they’re a window onto it. The real conspiracy is capitalism itself.