Review: The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis

Months ago author Devin Thomas O'Shea was kind enough to send me a galley copy of his upcoming book. I wrote this review and submitted it to a handful of outlets, all of whom declined to print it. So here is my brief review of this fantastic new book. Read this then go buy it !

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The skeleton key in The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis comes in the introduction when author Devin Thomas O’Shea writes his working definition of a secret society as “a form of social technology that is held together by desire”. From this central understanding O’Shea unfolds a tale starting in the aftermath of the Civil War and reverberating up to recent headlines in St. Louis and the rest of the country. In this tale we follow an elite strata of St. Louis as they forge an identity which allows them to project their growing nationwide influence into shoring up their local position, while a diverse array of St. Louisians outside of power contend with this structure using social technologies of their own.

After the local rabble organized the most ambitious labor revolt in the history of the United States up to this moment, the elites of St. Louis crafted a mechanism which allowed them to use the intimidation prowess of the Ku Klux Klan while telling themselves a story of still being somehow more civilized than similar minded efforts throughout the country. While those efforts have been as abhorrent as any cross-burning, those elites did understand that they were focused on something beyond enforcement of red-lined neighborhoods and a racialized reserve army of labor. O’Shea lays out how the Veiled Prophet Society managed to enforce racial and class lines at home while forging ties to many facets of the military, industrial, and eventually military-industrial complexes of the wider United States. And we get to learn as well how these structures and identities contend as the once locally fixed elite diffuse into an ever more globe spanning network.

Any lifelong student of U.S. history will not be surprised to find familiar themes in The Veiled Prophet; what may surprise them is to find seemingly all the familiar themes of U.S. history woven into a single narrative; racialized patriarchy, industrial labor conflict, intentionally constructed social identities, and more. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the city at the geographic crossroads of the whole United States would be chosen by the geist of historical materialism to be a stage for all American struggles to be enveloped in one century and a half long arc.

The Veiled Prophet pulls you through the development of the Saint Louis metro area by telling you about one of the biggest conspiracies to ever happen partially out in the open. Everyone concerned about the long-standing forms of systemic oppression in the United States should read O’Shea’s debut work and ask how many comparable efforts exist in our own backyards, just wearing a different type of veil.