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 At first glance, the event seems outdated and clownish, but in truth the Veiled Prophet Society has functioned as an exclusive club for the “city fathers,” where solidarity is built between wealthy men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.
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“Devin Thomas O’Shea’s The Veiled Prophet inducts readers into white supremacy’s back room, revealing the pomp and circumstance of racism, the gaudy esoterica that is presumed to elevate brute domination into something sublime and mysterious. O’Shea tells the story of the racial phantasmagoria of Midwestern elites with great clarity and insight.”
—Greg Grandin, author of America, América: A New History of the New World
“O’Shea lifts the veil on Midwestern modernity to see the sequence of class struggle underneath. Gripping and thorough, you'll never look at the Gateway Arch the same way again.”
—Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
“The Veiled Prophet is a dark romp through the backrooms of American history. This thoroughly-researched true story reads like fiction: thrilling, colorful, and very, very funny.”
—Colette Shade, author of Y2K: How the 2000’s Became Everything
“This big, important St. Louis story, arrestingly told, goes to the heart of what the ruling class does when it rules and when it parties. O’Shea captures how an elite reeling from Civil War, emancipation, and a general strike turned to white terrorist symbolism and Orientalist fascinations to create an enduring pageantry that could cement alliances among the rich and create awe and interest, though also inspired resistance, more broadly.”
—David Roediger, author of Wages of Whiteness and An Ordinary White
“The elaborate, occult pageantry of St. Louis’s Veiled Prophet Ball is stranger than fiction. Devin Thomas O’Shea tells the whole wild story of this conspiratorial society of cloaked elites crowning each other’s daughters, crushing labor strikes, and bankrolling reaction—and in the process delivers one of the most vivid and entertaining accounts of American class power I've read.”
—Meagan Day, Jacobin, co-author of Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism
“The Veiled Prophet is a deeply researched, beautifully written, and shocking exposé of how a secret society of wealthy white supremacists has over centuries dominated the economy and politics of one midwestern city and how that dominance has harmed the wider world beyond the metropolis. Among the book’s many achievements are its deft blending of seeming opposites—domination and resistance, continuity and rupture, social structures and human agency.”
—George Lipsitz, author of A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition and The Sidewalks of St. Louis.
“A true page-turner, O’Shea’s study makes plain the centrality of St. Louis to US history and the trajectory of working-class struggle from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to the Ferguson Uprising of 2014. The Veiled Prophet is searing and uncompromising history.”
—Keona Ervin, author of Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis"A genuinely startling deep-dive into something that sounds like it should be a conspiracy theory but is, in fact, real.... It sounds like something out of Pynchon, but it turns out truth is stranger than fiction."
—LitHub Most Anticipated Books of 2026
Other books of interest
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Blood in the Face (revised new edition)
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An Enemy Such as This
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Set the Earth on Fire
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Dead Cities
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No Neutrals There