True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 82: Shoot Me In St. Louis
Aired: 2020-07-11
Duration: 01:17:55


=== A Pizza Story (06:44) ===

[00:00:00]  So a little story about St. Louis.
[00:00:04]  Well, two stories about St. Louis.
[00:00:06]  Number one is the first time and only time I went there, a friend of mine, the drummer for our band who has, of my old band when I was a teenager, had a habit of making strange decisions sometimes.
[00:00:23]  And we've been on a three-month tour.
[00:00:26]  I knew you were going to tell this story.
[00:00:28]  Yeah.
[00:00:28]  Well, I've got two here.
[00:00:29]  I'm just going to, this one's very quick, though.
[00:00:32]  And we roll up to St. Louis, and there is a issue in the van where the guitarist of one band, this guy Josh, he does not want to view the arch.
[00:00:46]  Whereas the rest of us, you know, having arrived six hours before our show, we're like, well, we should go see the arch, right?
[00:00:51]  It's the arch.
[00:00:52]  It's like the Golden Gate Bridge of St. Louis.
[00:00:56]  We eventually settle on the arch.
[00:00:59]  We get there.
[00:01:00]  We are outside looking at the arch, realizing that maybe there wasn't really a good reason for us to come there.
[00:01:07]  And I turn over and Sean, the drummer, is just pissing all over it.
[00:01:12]  Which leads me into the second thing here is that we went right after that and got a pizza, which none of us, I think there was seven of us.
[00:01:23]  We couldn't finish altogether.
[00:01:24]  It was the biggest pizza I've ever seen.
[00:01:26]  What?
[00:01:27]  Yeah, there's a pizza place in St. Louis whose name I can't remember, but I'm sure people can look it up that has a pizza that if two people can eat it, you get 500 bucks.
[00:01:36]  Wait, how big is it?
[00:01:37]  Let me look at I'm Googling right now big pizza St. Louis.
[00:01:44]  I could eat it.
[00:01:45]  Pointers pizza.
[00:01:46]  Let me see how big this fucking pizza is.
[00:01:48]  $500 reward.
[00:01:50]  Clicking on there.
[00:01:50]  It is a 28.
[00:01:53]  It is a 28-inch two meat or four vegetable top pizza that weighs over 10 pounds.
[00:01:59]  10 pounds?
[00:02:00]  10 pounds.
[00:02:01]  Okay, I can't eat 10 pounds of pizza.
[00:02:03]  10 pounds of pizza.
[00:02:04]  We couldn't eat it either.
[00:02:06]  However, I knew these two guys from upstate New York who lived in a tent somewhere up there, who were down in Mexico riding the rails.
[00:02:15]  One is like a big, tall, skinny guy.
[00:02:17]  The other is a short, fat guy.
[00:02:18]  They are riding the rails in Mexico.
[00:02:21]  They're fucking, all right, Asa La Vista, Mexico.
[00:02:23]  They're rolling back through.
[00:02:25]  Bam!
[00:02:25]  Hit St. Louis on their way back to, you know, one of those towns, Rochester, whatever.
[00:02:31]  And they have no money in their pockets and they see this fucking sign for a pizza, $500 reward.
[00:02:38]  Did they eat the pizza?
[00:02:40]  Oh my God, baby.
[00:02:41]  They sit down.
[00:02:43]  They order.
[00:02:44]  No one's ever done it with four vegetable toppings before.
[00:02:48]  First of all, veggie pizza, not that great.
[00:02:50]  They're vegetarians, right?
[00:02:52]  Because they're trained hop first.
[00:02:53]  I think one of them's a vegetarian.
[00:02:57]  But no one's ever done it before with the two veggie toppings.
[00:02:59]  Because what do you got there?
[00:03:00]  You got fucking bell peppers?
[00:03:03]  They suck.
[00:03:04]  10 pounds of bell peppers.
[00:03:06]  That's a lot easier to take down than, you know, 10 pounds of pepperoni.
[00:03:10]  I'd rather swallow nine grams of lead than fucking 10 pounds of bell peppers.
[00:03:15]  My God, baby.
[00:03:16]  Bell peppers suck shit.
[00:03:18]  No, they're fine.
[00:03:19]  You've never done two peppers.
[00:03:21]  Nothing.
[00:03:22]  That's the problem.
[00:03:22]  They've done nothing for me.
[00:03:24]  Yeah, they're not offensive.
[00:03:25]  It's a non-offensive thing.
[00:03:26]  It's a bell pepper.
[00:03:27]  It's a who care?
[00:03:28]  It's a bell pepper.
[00:03:28]  You're fine.
[00:03:29]  I don't want to leave it alone.
[00:03:30]  For Christ's sake, baby, cotton isn't offensive to me.
[00:03:33]  And I'm not going to have cotton on my pizza, right?
[00:03:36]  Bell peppers are like gourds.
[00:03:37]  I don't want to eat a gourd.
[00:03:39]  You don't like gourds?
[00:03:40]  Do you eat gourds?
[00:03:42]  What?
[00:03:42]  That's like eating a lamp.
[00:03:45]  Like a squash.
[00:03:46]  Like a gourd.
[00:03:48]  Like a wardy fruit or whatever.
[00:03:52]  The little warded guy.
[00:03:54]  That's not.
[00:03:55]  Okay, did they eat the pizza?
[00:03:57]  They ate the fucking pizza.
[00:03:58]  You got to eat it in two hours.
[00:04:00]  You can't barf either.
[00:04:01]  If you barf, you forfeit the reward.
[00:04:03]  They ate the fucking pizza.
[00:04:05]  There's literally only like 10 couple contestants or whatever have ever defeated this pizza before.
[00:04:14]  They were the first to do it with veggie.
[00:04:16]  500 bucks, bam, fly home.
[00:04:18]  Oh, amazing.
[00:04:21]  Also, sorry, I'm doing the gun thing again.
[00:04:47]  Ops gave me all these fireworks the other night.
[00:04:49]  They said they were sick of handing them out to fucking teenagers.
[00:04:53]  Literally, these guys gave me about two grand worth of fireworks here.
[00:04:57]  You're joking, but you sent me an image.
[00:05:00]  You got a lot of fireworks.
[00:05:01]  did get a lot of fireworks i had i had me and young chomsky had a blast on fourth of july Literally.
[00:05:10]  Literally.
[00:05:11]  I mean, I'll tell you what.
[00:05:13]  4th of July, my favorite holiday.
[00:05:16]  And before all of you read settlers' types get all up in my mentions of my mind about this, because I will not interact with you on the internet.
[00:05:26]  First of all, in San Francisco, 4th of July is literally only done by Mexican people.
[00:05:33]  And so I was just attending their celebration.
[00:05:37]  They are so good at fireworks in the mission.
[00:05:40]  It's incredible.
[00:05:41]  And so there was no, you know, your America Kaca flags or whatever.
[00:05:47]  It was people just doing A, tricks in their fucking cars, B, setting off homemade bombs, and C, beautiful fireworks set off without the tube.
[00:05:57]  So they exploded street level, which was, I will say, I did slightly catch on fire at one point.
[00:06:03]  Wait, really?
[00:06:04]  Yeah, a little bit, but not like, it just burned into my leg.
[00:06:08]  Oh, God.
[00:06:09]  But you know, like, fireworks?
[00:06:12]  How, like, they shoot them in the sky?
[00:06:15]  Imagine if you just set it off when it was on the ground.
[00:06:19]  Yeah, dangerous.
[00:06:20]  Yeah, but still rocks.
[00:06:23]  Okay, well, welcome to Troadon.
[00:06:26]  Hello.
[00:06:27]  Hello.
[00:06:28]  i'm liz my name is they call me mr fireworks No, they do not.
[00:06:34]  Okay, it's Brays.
[00:06:36]  And we're joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:06:39]  They also call him Mr. Fireworks, but even though Liz won't let me say that.

=== St. Louis Protests and Memes (12:08) ===

[00:06:45]  And, you know, we have a bit of a different episode, which maybe was hinted at by your opening anecdotes.
[00:06:54]  Storytelling Hour.
[00:06:56]  We are talking about St. Louis, as I like to call it, St. Louis, Missouri, and a bizarre debutante, racist, sorcery ball at the heart of this history of the city.
[00:07:16]  Yeah, basically, imagine if the deep state was like fucked up looking.
[00:07:23]  Well, not just that.
[00:07:24]  And wore like crazy masks.
[00:07:26]  Well, wait a second.
[00:07:27]  Yeah, hold on.
[00:07:29]  Yeah, we have a hell of an interview with a local gumshoe about it.
[00:07:34]  And let's just put on our masks and repel rope into Carcosa, baby.
[00:08:01]  You know, it's funny.
[00:08:03]  Before we started talking to you, I thought it was pronounced Street Lewis.
[00:08:09]  I thought it was the ST was short for street, but boy, boy, do I have pie in my face?
[00:08:15]  Speaking of pie on my face, this is not a very good intro, but I'm rolling with it.
[00:08:20]  We have with us today, writer from St. Louis, Devin O'Shea, here to talk to us about some freaky deeky shit.
[00:08:31]  It's pretty weird.
[00:08:32]  Yeah.
[00:08:33]  Some pretty weird River City shit.
[00:08:36]  Thank you for having me on.
[00:08:37]  A pleasure.
[00:08:38]  So let's talk about real quick a picture that was recently making the rounds, although I feel like it's kind of died out.
[00:08:47]  A pair of elderly people standing outside their mansion clutching a old style, you might call it a vintage AR-15 or M16.
[00:09:02]  The woman's sweaty porcine paw clutched so tightly.
[00:09:08]  around what looks to be a lower caliber pistol, screaming in terror and ecstasy at the parade of people walking outside.
[00:09:22]  Yeah, we're of course referring to the pretty famous images that emerged out of the, I think it was just last week, yeah, the protests in St. Louis.
[00:09:33]  Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who became internet famous, they memed themselves into infamy protecting their property, it seems like, from some protests in St. Louis, where you live.
[00:09:51]  Yeah, just down the street from Mark and Patricia.
[00:09:54]  Hi, Mark.
[00:09:56]  Yeah, they got memed into existence.
[00:09:59]  As, you know, this happens a lot in St. Louis where we just get into the news for the worst shit.
[00:10:04]  Like a lot of kids get shot or we top the records of the most violent city in the country or, you know, who knows?
[00:10:16]  Maybe the Veiled Prophet will make the news one day.
[00:10:20]  Yeah, I was about to say, right after that, a bunch of people started posting pictures of a man who appeared to be someplace in Carcosa, perhaps, wearing a, well, a veil, gaudy and bejeweled.
[00:10:38]  And I had actually seen pictures, not of this recently.
[00:10:41]  I knew that this had been a celebration.
[00:10:45]  I don't know if I knew it was in St. Louis, but I had seen pictures famously of Percy Green in the 70s sort of leaning a protest at one of these things.
[00:10:53]  But the Veiled Prophet Society.
[00:10:55]  And we have brought you here to our sanctum to talk to us about it.
[00:11:00]  Because I think it's from what I gather and from what you've told us before this, the Veiled Prophet, the story of the Veiled Prophet Society and their ball and their parades is pretty inextricably linked with labor and race issues out there in sunny St. Louis.
[00:11:19]  Yeah, that's exactly right.
[00:11:22]  The society basically traces the last hundred years.
[00:11:26]  And if you know anything about St. Louis, you know that the last hundred years have been all decline.
[00:11:31]  So that like St. Louis is a city, a very old city for the United States, but really had its high point kind of at like the World's Fair around like the 1920s or 10s.
[00:11:44]  There's so many Midwestern cities that that's true for.
[00:11:47]  Yeah, well, very true.
[00:11:49]  If only they knew the World's Fair was like the last nail in the coffin.
[00:11:53]  And that was it.
[00:11:56]  But yeah, the Veiled Prophet Society, you might say, is like the invisible hand behind most of the way that the city looks now, which is extremely divided, extremely tense racially, and consistently voted sort of the most mismanaged place in the Midwest.
[00:12:19]  I was going to say, you got some tough competition there.
[00:12:21]  It's true, yeah.
[00:12:22]  But we excel.
[00:12:23]  We excel here.
[00:12:24]  You guys got to get, I know this family, the Dalys.
[00:12:27]  They really got Chicago in good shape.
[00:12:29]  I know a couple of cousins.
[00:12:30]  I can get them.
[00:12:31]  I can set you up with them.
[00:12:33]  Well, let's talk about these Veiled Prophet motherfuckers and from whence they came.
[00:12:39]  So this is the Veiled Prophet Society, I believe, started in 1878, unless I am totally misremembering that.
[00:12:47]  And can you kind of set the scene for us of how that came to be?
[00:12:52]  Right.
[00:12:52]  I mean, I think that was the first debutante ball and the first parade.
[00:12:56]  So there's these two parts of the Veiled Prophet Society in public.
[00:13:01]  And they're a secret parade society.
[00:13:04]  And so this is like an oxymoron because like if you're having a parade, how secret can it be?
[00:13:09]  But this guy's got a veil on.
[00:13:12]  So in 1878, this is a year after one of the biggest strikes in U.S. history, which was, you know, it was called the great railroad strike of 1877.
[00:13:25]  But that's, again, like historians taking something that was fucking cool and naming it something that was really lame and sounds inconsequential.
[00:13:35]  I mean, it was a massive general strike.
[00:13:37]  Oh, yeah.
[00:13:39]  There's a Thomas Pynchon line about this period of American history where he says that like the country literally grew to be the size and dimensions of the iron rails running up and down it.
[00:13:51]  And so like the country really is like the railroads.
[00:13:55]  Yeah.
[00:13:55]  And from what I get about this, like this, this, this strike didn't start in St. Louis, but it started, I think, somewhere on the East Coast aftermath of the panic of what, 1873, still sort of echoing through it.
[00:14:09]  And it looks like, or from what I remember rather, rail workers' wages were being cut like fucking crazy.
[00:14:16]  And they were being asked to work like two or three, I mean, kind of similar today, asking to ask to work like two or three days a week.
[00:14:22]  A lot of people were fired and strikes started and just really spread.
[00:14:28]  Right.
[00:14:28]  And this also predates a ton of labor history, including one of the things that the strikers talked a lot about as a massacre of coal miners, I think, in North Carolina that they used as a rallying cry.
[00:14:40]  But I think it was in Pittsburgh that they set fire to their rail depot and destroyed like miles and miles of just capital sitting on the rails.
[00:14:51]  And then if you think about it sweeping from the East Coast West, when it gets to St. Louis at this time in 1877, you really still are on the periphery of the country.
[00:15:03]  Like it really is after St. Louis, it does get more wild.
[00:15:08]  It's still more untamed.
[00:15:10]  But sort of like in that liminal space for St. Louis, like sort of weirder stuff could happen.
[00:15:17]  And I think that's why you had actually, I refer to like Philip Foner.
[00:15:22]  This is Eric Foner, the Civil War historian's uncle, who was a great labor historian, who also got red scared out of his job in a New York university.
[00:15:32]  But he writes about St. Louis as sort of the most successful aspect of this giant labor strike in which they the it was not only the railroad workers, but a general strike in the city in which white and black workers both struck at the same time and literally shut the city down for a little under a week.
[00:15:57]  But they like it really freaked all the rich people in town out.
[00:16:02]  They were singing the Marcia.
[00:16:05]  They were, you know, they were carrying the like tools of their profession through the streets and waving American flags and basically shutting everything down.
[00:16:20]  And this is what's so fascinating because this is the like immediate backdrop for this like mystical elite society.
[00:16:27]  Right.
[00:16:30]  Where it's born.
[00:16:32]  And it's an important context because this the veiled profit society or even I guess what we could say like before the society kind of comes to be in its like concrete form, the specter of the veiled prophet is sort of conjured as a way to as an attempt to break this strike.
[00:16:54]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:16:56]  I mean and it yeah he really this is also contextualized in the fact that this is at the end of the first wave of the Klan terror.
[00:17:08]  So this is like post-Civil War night writing, which was largely a media event of like the papers in the North sort of like watched it with curious awe and then the papers in the South covered night writing as like, look at these noble people upholding the Knights of the South.
[00:17:26]  Right, exactly.
[00:17:27]  So they're heroes.
[00:17:28]  But the context for that also is that this is a time when the federal government is trying to crack down on night writing.
[00:17:38]  But so St. Louis essentially shuts down for seven days.
[00:17:45]  All the rich people are freaked out.
[00:17:47]  They have to.
[00:17:48]  The strikers are threatening to shut all the water off to their neighborhoods.
[00:17:53]  And so every time these people have to, the city fathers, leave to go talk about negotiations or meet at the Four Courts building, they have to fill their bathtubs and sinks because they're not sure if they're going to get like literally starved out of their houses.
[00:18:10]  And this is also where Phil Foner makes the argument that because of a sugar refinery, having to ask the executive committee, the strike committee, to let it continue operations.
[00:18:21]  Foner makes the argument that this is actually the first de facto commune government set up during the strike for about one day because the owner of the refinery had to go ask permission from the strikers and not the city fathers.
[00:18:38]  Yeah, so the strike, so the power there sort of flipped where the strike committee had the power that the government would normally have.
[00:18:44]  Right.
[00:18:45]  And they sent about 100 men to protect the refinery because that became, you know, the people sugar.
[00:18:50]  It was not, didn't belong to the refinery owner anymore.

=== Veiled Prophet Trolley Strike (10:16) ===

[00:18:53]  So that's a bright spot.
[00:18:56]  Then the strike is crushed brutally.
[00:18:58]  I think, you know, it was the police, an ad hoc militia, the National Guard.
[00:19:06]  The great thing about a general strike, though, is that the National Guard is deployed literally everywhere.
[00:19:11]  So it can't be everywhere at once.
[00:19:12]  It's very spread thin.
[00:19:15]  But in sort of the aftershocks of this week, the most recalcitrant aspect of the strike were the trolley workers.
[00:19:24]  And the trolley workers in St. Louis were just hard-ass motherfuckers who kept being, you know, the thorn in the city father's side.
[00:19:33]  And that's when Alonzo Slaback, our main character here, comes in, who's one of the city fathers, an ex-Confederate cavalry officer, who runs a steel-cut engraving in the Missouri Republican that is the first depiction of the veiled prophet in St. Louis.
[00:19:51]  And I mean, you've seen that picture.
[00:19:53]  Yeah, I was going to say, pause here.
[00:19:55]  Listeners, on your little, your little cell phone there, bring up a picture.
[00:20:00]  I think just Google probably Veiled Prophet 1878, and you will get a picture.
[00:20:07]  You'll know if it's the right one because it will be a man that looks exactly like a Klansman clutching a gun with a, I believe, another either gun or knife in his belt.
[00:20:18]  Let me bring it up here.
[00:20:20]  Allegedly, it's two guns and then like one in the background, just in case.
[00:20:25]  Yeah.
[00:20:25]  Oh, just in case, you know, run out of bullets or something.
[00:20:27]  Classic.
[00:20:29]  But it's astounding because he looks kind of like a Klansman with like a painted face.
[00:20:35]  Yeah.
[00:20:37]  Oof.
[00:20:37]  Like a Lovecraftian horror, it seemed.
[00:20:40]  I think one thing just to mention too is that like the you you mentioned the first wave of the clan, which is very different than kind of the what is actually the second wave of the clan, which is maybe the more popular understanding of the clan.
[00:20:55]  Whereas at this time, they were like heavily involved in kind.
[00:21:00]  I mean, it's almost in that kind of Masonic tradition where it's like very mystical.
[00:21:05]  You know, everyone's a wizard or, you know, has all these crazy names that, you know, it's swords and symbolism.
[00:21:13]  And it's very much not the, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but the burning crosses and all that, that comes much later.
[00:21:22]  Pretty much the hoods and that, that kind of popular image, that comes much later.
[00:21:28]  And so there's this, there is this like mystical tradition at the heart of these knight writers and in this first iteration of the clan that this image of the veiled prophet is like directly referencing.
[00:21:41]  And if I may just interrupt real quick here, that actually, so much about sort of the early history of this group reminds me a lot of the Free Corps in Germany in the 20s and their relationship with these sort of mystical, you know, neo-Masonic groups that were basically practicing the same stuff, except slightly more Germanized.
[00:22:05]  In some cases, extremely similar, where you have these sort of like armed ex-soldiers who are fighting against workers standing up for themselves.
[00:22:20]  And they are backed behind the scenes and financially, basically by mystical freaks.
[00:22:29]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:22:32]  Actually, this is the historian Elaine Parsons writes about this first wave of the Ku Klux Klan as just Ku Klux, but also that they are participating in a tradition that comes from Central Europe called Sherevery, which is this tradition where if you don't like somebody in town, you put on crazy garb, you call yourself a moon man, and you go and clang pots and pans outside their house and let them know you're pissed off at them.
[00:22:59]  Or if you're trying to be, make more of a point, you like drag them out of their house and kick them out of town.
[00:23:04]  Yeah.
[00:23:06]  So yeah, there's like a lot of sort of pan-European naturalist imagery.
[00:23:12]  Very strange.
[00:23:13]  These guys, after the Civil War, were also calling themselves the ghosts of Shiloh.
[00:23:19]  But that still does like beg the question of why the veiled prophet of Coruscant, like Coruscant is in Iran.
[00:23:28]  It's a province in Iran.
[00:23:31]  And that sort of like that question also bugged me in doing like initial research because the big problem here is that this veiled prophet is coming to town to shoot striking trolley workers.
[00:23:48]  He said so explicitly.
[00:23:50]  I'm gonna, no trolley strike is gonna stand in my way.
[00:23:54]  So they're using this veiled prophet as a direct threat to labor.
[00:23:58]  Yeah, it says, it says something like, because you said that he took out the ad with the with the with the image of the prophet in it, but it says something about trolley workers in the ad too, right?
[00:24:09]  Yeah, it's like a direct threat at them.
[00:24:13]  And that is strange because of like the source material that they're drawing from, which if you go even further back in American history before the Civil War, one of the most popular plays of the time that was a poem and a book of poems is called Lala Rook.
[00:24:32]  It's a little bit of Orientalist literature written by Thomas Moore, the Irish poet.
[00:24:38]  And one of the poems in this book is called The Veiled Prophet of Coruscant.
[00:24:43]  But the problem is that that Veiled Prophet is way, way different than the Veiled Prophet that then develops with the Veiled Prophet Society.
[00:24:53]  Because we kind of, well, we kind of like go through the iron-fisted veiled prophet at the strike.
[00:25:00]  And then later the Veiled Prophet Society in St. Louis wants to turn him into more of a Santa Claus character that shows up once a year to crown his queen of love and peace and have a parade in his honor and then he flies away on this magic carpet.
[00:25:18]  Yeah, so this is what's so strange to me about this story because it's like, okay, you've got this Klan character who's deployed in the newspaper as a direct threat to labor to striking workers who then becomes basically like the most well-known character of St. Louis of the town and like a town symbol that is supposed to be like you say this like Santa Claus happy character.
[00:25:48]  We'll get to when this parades start and when the actual society forms where they're kind of doing all these things.
[00:25:56]  But like retains a lot of the bizarre mysticism while also getting into like elite debutante balls and crazy moneyed circles.
[00:26:09]  It's just like this is such a mind-blowing story to me.
[00:26:13]  I can't even wrap my head around a lot of it.
[00:26:16]  It's yeah, it is very bizarre.
[00:26:18]  And I some of the source material doesn't exactly make it seem any clearer, but like in the original Thomas More poem, this is a very allegorical,
[00:26:32]  like didactic poem about a mystical ruler in Khorasan who has developed a cult following where he is going to summon all the riches of Khorasan in order to do endless conquest wars in the Middle East.
[00:26:52]  And he eventually pisses off all of the sultans who are his allies during this like big advanced empire that he forms.
[00:27:03]  And the problem is that he keeps taking all the gains that they get in conquest and spending them on himself and his harem.
[00:27:13]  And so then the sultans turn on him and they come for the veiled prophet.
[00:27:19]  The veiled prophet turns around to his cult and orders them to all kill themselves rather than be captured.
[00:27:26]  And then the veiled prophet jumps into a dish of fire like the devil.
[00:27:33]  Yeah.
[00:27:33]  Just like Santa Claus, a Santa Claus taste.
[00:27:36]  Classic Santa Claus story.
[00:27:37]  You know, I may be Jewish, but I am familiar with, you know, general lore here.
[00:27:41]  This does seem to be consistent with the biblical version of Santa Claus.
[00:27:44]  Exactly.
[00:27:46]  That is, yeah, exactly.
[00:27:49]  And so Thomas Moore is writing at a time, and Lord Byron is literally telling him, hey man, if you want to get rid of your writer's block, you got to try this new cool poetry.
[00:27:59]  It's called Orientalism.
[00:28:01]  And it's like where you take all the things you want to say about the King of England and you just say that it's about like this ruler in Coruscant.
[00:28:10]  You know what I mean?
[00:28:11]  And so that was a big invitation for a lot of artists of the time to do a lot of projection upon the Middle East.
[00:28:19]  And one of the stranger parts of this also is that Moore got his idea for the Veiled Prophet from a bit of Islamic folklore about a ruler named Al-Makana who was a chemist and had burned his face during a chemistry experiment.
[00:28:40]  And so that's why he had to wear a veil.
[00:28:43]  But this is also a little confusing in some of the scholarship because it also could be that Al-Makana was sort of a Zoroastrian slash Islamic blend of a certain number of beliefs and that he was actually maybe the Prophet Muhammad in sort of like a secondhand disguise because the Prophet Muhammad is often has to be depicted as wearing a veil because you can't depict his face.
[00:29:08]  Traditional Islam.

=== New Virginia Colony (06:35) ===

[00:29:10]  So why, so is it clear why Slavak would have Used this image or what he found about, or like, is there, was this like really in the popular, like, imaginary, or was this just he just happened upon it and was like, that's my dude?
[00:29:29]  I mean, well, I think the first thing to know about Slayback is that after the Civil War happens, he's a real son of a bitch during the Civil War, has a terrible campaign, and then after it's over, he flees to Mexico with a bunch of Confederate uppercrosss to found the New Virginia colony, which is a new slave colony in Mexico.
[00:29:52]  Part of, yeah, and a lot of people don't know this, but again, much like the Nazis, the fucking, I'm telling you, the Confederates had their eyes on a lot of spots in South America where they could have this little colony.
[00:30:04]  They, in fact, do.
[00:30:05]  To this day, there is a Confederate colony.
[00:30:08]  I can't remember what country it's in, if it's in Colombia or Brazil, but there is a colony of Confederate descendants living in South America.
[00:30:19]  Oh, that's so bizarre.
[00:30:21]  I mean, Slayback spent a while there, but he was there to write poetry because that's essentially what he was.
[00:30:30]  They published all of his poems after his death.
[00:30:33]  They're all really bad.
[00:30:34]  They suck.
[00:30:35]  Yeah, I read a few of them leading up to this.
[00:30:36]  They are not good.
[00:30:37]  Oh, yeah, really bad.
[00:30:39]  All about the lost cause and how great it was.
[00:30:42]  Or like, oh, I miss my sweetie.
[00:30:44]  Like, whatever, dude.
[00:30:45]  Shouldn't have gone to Mexico to have slaves.
[00:30:48]  You could easily be with your sweetie if you weren't like, I'm going to go fucking south of the border to the slave colony.
[00:30:55]  He had to be bribed back into the country by his mother, also with like a $100 bill.
[00:31:01]  That's so pathetic.
[00:31:02]  Very pathetic.
[00:31:04]  And he like reserved the right to flee again if they were going to like put him up against the wall.
[00:31:09]  So like, I don't know.
[00:31:10]  This guy's Greek.
[00:31:11]  How is he such a mama's boy?
[00:31:14]  It's true.
[00:31:16]  But so in 1868, this is three years after the Civil War, in New Orleans, the Mystic Crew of Comas, which is another secret parade society, holds a parade that is called The Departure of La LaRuk from Delhi.
[00:31:31]  And this is a parade that each one of the floats is a different one of the poems in the Thomas More book of poetry.
[00:31:39]  And so that's likely where Slayback saw the Veiled Prophet for the first time.
[00:31:46]  But the other bit of context there is that if you're standing in the French quarter and you're looking at that parade and you're looking at the Veiled Prophet, you're definitely not seeing a allegory for like English colonialism or anything that Thomas More is thinking about.
[00:32:04]  You're definitely seeing like a Ku Kluxer is from the newspapers that you've, you know, are hyper-aware of.
[00:32:13]  So Thomas or Slayback comes back, gets pardoned, becomes a lawyer in Missouri, uses his connections in the Mystic Crew to form the sort of like network, old boys network between St. Louis and New Orleans, lots of river barges of the day.
[00:32:33]  That's a great way to make money.
[00:32:36]  And he is extremely freaked out by the general strike in 1877, as are all these other guys.
[00:32:45]  And so running that ad in the newspaper is the first step towards saying, okay, we're all going to get on the same page as the City Fathers and the economic interests in this region.
[00:32:56]  And we're going to form our own club.
[00:32:58]  And it's going to be called the Veiled Profit Society.
[00:33:01]  And we are going to have our own rituals and exclusive membership.
[00:33:06]  and we're going to do these parades, and we're going to have this as our symbol, which is a Klansman, but it's a Klansman with enough...
[00:33:15]  One of the problems here, if you're Alonzo Slayback, is that the Third Enforcement Act has just gone into effect.
[00:33:23]  And that forbade, essentially forbade night writing by forbidding you from covering your head.
[00:33:30]  So like you couldn't cover your head at all in public.
[00:33:33]  Oh, like they have those still, like those mask laws and stuff that they'll enforce around protests.
[00:33:39]  And a lot of that does just come from a direct result of trying to fight the Klan at various points.
[00:33:45]  I should note too that the Weimar government also outlawed non-actual military, military uniforms in a sort of attempt to stamp out the SA.
[00:33:57]  Yeah, that's very strange.
[00:33:59]  All the Boogaloo boys have their own.
[00:34:01]  Well, that's where they got shirts.
[00:34:07]  Yeah, so, you know, it's like the that's what's so funny, you know, what's so fascinating about the story is that, you know, Veiled Profit emerges as this sort of reconstituted elite,
[00:34:23]  you know, as a kind of disciplinary tool against striking workers who were, you know, by the way, striking together black and white, which is really what scares the shit out of capitalists, by the way.
[00:34:38]  Absolutely.
[00:34:39]  That was a huge, to have all of the wharf workers who were black join with the slightly better paying railroad workers who were mostly white.
[00:34:48]  That was a big act of solidarity that did not come easily and was one of the reasons that the strike broke up probably prematurely, is that there were some white striking union men who turned away hundreds and hundreds of black strikers just because, you know, they wanted to splinter the movement, basically.
[00:35:08]  Yeah, I should note, too, that there were two, I mean, because unions looked very different back then, but there was two main groups that seemed to be involved in the strikes.
[00:35:17]  The Knights of Labor, who I think a lot of people know about, sort of like the precursor to a lot of what we have today.
[00:35:24]  And then the Working Men's Party, which I wasn't too familiar with, but I guess Albert Parsons was at some point a part of it, who eventually became, I think, part of the Socialist Labor Party, which still exists today out of Mountain View, which is, I think, probably where their sole member lives.

=== Parades as Propaganda Tools (03:19) ===

[00:35:45]  His name is Sergei Brin.
[00:35:47]  Oh boy.
[00:36:06]  Well, so we've danced around it a little bit, but let's get into like exactly what this secret society starts doing because the rituals that they perform and the kind of annual pageant.
[00:36:21]  aside from the parade that they do, is, I don't know how else to put this, like really fucking weird.
[00:36:27]  Yeah, so like, how did all this start?
[00:36:29]  Like when was the first event of the Veiled Prophet Society?
[00:36:33]  Like what did they, what did they launch into?
[00:36:36]  Right.
[00:36:37]  Well, the first thing is the parade.
[00:36:39]  And Thomas Spencer is the academic who wrote about the Veiled Prophet Society as a parade society because he was sort of studying how parades are like propaganda tools of this time, 1880s, 1890s.
[00:36:54]  And so in 1878 is the first parade in which the Veiled Prophet is the centerpiece of the parade and he's standing up on a float with an executioner and a bloody butcher's block.
[00:37:07]  So like sending a very clear message and also they're not going down like Main Street.
[00:37:12]  They're in the worker districts.
[00:37:14]  And so these parades are very much like, you know, if your local police department decided to drive the tank down your road, you know.
[00:37:22]  Right, right, right.
[00:37:24]  And so from there, they lighten up and soften up and these parades become more about didactic ways of teaching these upstart immigrant classes, many of which have picked up communist ideas overseas and brought them here.
[00:37:39]  We're sure of it.
[00:37:42]  And so the parades become this way of like teaching American history or literature or like the, you know, the founding values of the country as they progress.
[00:37:55]  But Alonzo Slayback isn't around for much of that because he gets into some kind of dispute with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor John Cockriel.
[00:38:05]  And there's some shady stuff that happens, but Alonzo goes to the newspaper office late one night in like 1883 and ends up shot dead.
[00:38:17]  And that's the end of Alonzo.
[00:38:19]  I will be honest, I wish other journalists had such gumption.
[00:38:28]  It was hard to figure out from that period what was really going on because it really involved a lot of newspaper people.
[00:38:35]  And Alonzo was very involved in the Missouri Republican.
[00:38:38]  But anyway, newspapers will come up again.
[00:38:41]  So the Veiled Prophet Society as a boys club is sort of just this parallel political structure to any kind of democracy that might work its way into the city where all the business leaders, all the guys who are selling farm equipment, working the barges, getting rich on the railroad, getting rich on the highways that are starting to come in as we move through the decades.

=== List of Veiled Prophets (03:02) ===

[00:39:04]  Sort of the structure of the city grows and the Veiled Prophets every year put on this debutante ball in which they elect one of the daughters of the society, the queen of love and peace.
[00:39:21]  And there's like a hundred debutantes in every debutante ball and they parade in front of all the blue bloods in one of the Ritzy hotel rooms or in one of the public arenas of the early times.
[00:39:34]  And they kiss the feet of the veiled prophet who is literally sitting on a gold throne at the front of the stage.
[00:39:41]  These women actually bend down and kiss the feet of a veiled man in a gold throne.
[00:39:46]  Yeah, pretty much.
[00:39:48]  I mean, they literally bend and like worship him.
[00:39:52]  Yeah, he's also like wearing gloves and like a hat and like a whole thing.
[00:39:57]  Like it is a fucking freaky costume.
[00:40:01]  It's like unnerving to look at.
[00:40:04]  He has like a Hermes helmet that he wears also and like the veil is very lacy and a little transparent and sometimes he wears another mask underneath that.
[00:40:15]  And he also has like a scepter.
[00:40:17]  Right, just in case you like noticed a freckle or something.
[00:40:21]  So like through, just to like pause for a second on the history, like through the decades, like we never really find out who the Veiled Prophet every year is, right?
[00:40:34]  It's always kept a secret.
[00:40:36]  It's still kept a secret.
[00:40:38]  Presumably, somewhere in the city, there's a list of all the veiled prophets.
[00:40:41]  We just don't know where they are.
[00:40:44]  But you were saying that, you know, you can kind of guess maybe who some of these people might be based on some of the queens that are named, right?
[00:40:58]  Right, because we do have a complete list of all the queens.
[00:41:01]  Oh, I have a complete list of queens, too.
[00:41:04]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:41:04]  Let me tell you.
[00:41:06]  The girl, okay.
[00:41:08]  The girl listening to this.
[00:41:09]  The girl listening to this, you are awesome.
[00:41:12]  No, but there's some big names on this list, right?
[00:41:16]  Right.
[00:41:17]  The first one is Susie Slayback, so we can guess whose daughter that was.
[00:41:21]  Okay, all right.
[00:41:22]  That makes, I get that.
[00:41:25]  But wait, wasn't the first prophet himself, though.
[00:41:28]  Oh, we can talk about that in a second, but the first commissioner, right?
[00:41:34]  Who broke the strike?
[00:41:36]  Who is sort of the only first, like, I guess they didn't have the whole plan hammered out on the first year, and they like, like, and there's John Priest, the police commissioner, as the anonymous veiled prophet.
[00:41:49]  Or they wanted you to know that, like, yeah, the police commissioner is going to parade through your working-class neighborhood and, you know, boss you around.
[00:41:57]  Sorry, let's get back to this list of names, which, by the way, I have many lists of names open on my desktop right now.
[00:42:04]  And it's taken me a while to click through.
[00:42:06]  New Republic.

=== Names That Repeat Themselves (05:09) ===

[00:42:07]  No, that's not it.
[00:42:08]  Yeah, it's quite, I mean, if you live in St. Louis, it's even more eerie because, for example, the Schnooks are very familiar because they own all the grocery stores.
[00:42:21]  The Schnooks?
[00:42:23]  The Schnooks.
[00:42:24]  I mean, I'm honored that there's another Jewish person being mentioned here, I assume, but the Schnooks?
[00:42:31]  The Schnooks.
[00:42:32]  That's normal for us.
[00:42:33]  I don't know.
[00:42:34]  Okay, so wait, I'm sorry.
[00:42:36]  I'm trying not to laugh, but the Schnucks.
[00:42:37]  So that's a big, you're saying that's a big grocery magnet.
[00:42:41]  It's easy.
[00:42:41]  Yeah, it would be the same as Jewel Osco or, I don't know, I've never lived outside of the Midwest.
[00:42:48]  But yeah, the Schnooks are very identifiable.
[00:42:52]  Shoto is a family that was supposedly the founders of St. Louis.
[00:42:59]  As you go through here, I think we've looked at it before, and all these names sort of repeat over and over again.
[00:43:06]  There's the Bushes of August Bush, August, you know, the Bush family, the Anheuser-Busch family, who basically ran the town after 1933, all the way up until the MBEV merger.
[00:43:19]  The Walshes are very well known to be a rich family around here.
[00:43:24]  So it's really like the elite elite of the city.
[00:43:29]  Right.
[00:43:30]  And the people that pretty much like run all, like pretty much all the business as well.
[00:43:38]  Right.
[00:43:38]  Like Washington University is the biggest, most richly university in town, and their campus is called the Danforth Campus.
[00:43:46]  And in 1947, Dorothy Danforth was the queen of love and peace.
[00:43:50]  Yeah.
[00:43:51]  And, you know, there's also the Kempers, which are very well known in Washview also for having donated a giant art museum there, which I very much appreciate.
[00:44:01]  But this is also the same family as Ellie Kemper, who is Erin from the office, because she was queen of love and peace in 1999.
[00:44:11]  So to repeat that, the show that you watch with your girlfriend, The Office, has starring in it a member of the Veiled Prophet Society.
[00:44:22]  Well, at least a, I don't know.
[00:44:25]  Through this, it's been hard to tell how much of this is driven by women, because it seems much of it is driven by a small group of men.
[00:44:34]  So at least an auxiliary to the Veiled Prophet Society.
[00:44:38]  Yeah, I think there's also a contingent of the women and the queens who have wanted to continue the debutante ball, especially not because they like the Veiled Prophet, but because they like the Debutante Ball, because it's fun to dress up.
[00:44:51]  Yeah.
[00:44:51]  And like more power to them.
[00:44:54]  But I get into this problem with the Veiled Prophet Society constantly, which is like you could just have the Debutante Ball and get rid of the guy.
[00:45:02]  Like get rid of the queen.
[00:45:03]  The kissing the feet of the guy on the gold throne.
[00:45:06]  I think that's a little weird.
[00:45:07]  What do you guys do that for?
[00:45:09]  But that seems to be like a real central part of it.
[00:45:11]  You know?
[00:45:12]  Yeah.
[00:45:13]  I mean, I think that the guys get off on the costume and with, we haven't mentioned them yet, but another part of the debutante ball is the like Bengal Lancers, who are sort of like the paramilitary guys around the Veiled Prophet who protect him and dress up in turbans.
[00:45:34]  And it's very strange.
[00:45:37]  Yeah, I mean, I assume that they're based on the actual Bengal Lancers, except these seem to be like 30-year-old white guys with beards pasted on sometimes rather poorly.
[00:45:48]  And I think also, isn't that like the Lancerati, who are like the fascist cavalry troop?
[00:45:55]  Aren't they like sort of related to that also?
[00:45:58]  I don't know.
[00:45:59]  I've got to look that up after this.
[00:46:01]  I'm always interested in a fascist cavalry troop.
[00:46:04]  Who's not?
[00:46:05]  Yeah.
[00:46:06]  It's the boots.
[00:46:07]  But so we've got this thing starting in the late 1800s, and it really takes off at first, right?
[00:46:16]  Yes, it's very, it's a really good political tool because especially in this era in like the 1870s to around the 1920s, I mean, debutante balls are ways of securing your wealth within a very narrow set of options for who your daughter is going to marry.
[00:46:38]  Like it's really about keeping the blue blood circulating in just like four or five families.
[00:46:44]  And they're very effective at that, as you can see from just like the returning names on the roster and sort of the entrenched wealth.
[00:46:51]  Yeah, that is the amazing thing about this roster of names, which you can find just like on their Wikipedia page, is the same groups of names repeat themselves like every 15 years as one generation takes the place of the next.
[00:47:04]  It's very strange.
[00:47:07]  Another big one is the Schlaflys, which include Phyllis Schlafly and also the Schlafly Beer Company here.

=== Gated Wealth Circulation (15:43) ===

[00:47:16]  Right.
[00:47:17]  Yep.
[00:47:18]  Famous bitch.
[00:47:21]  Yeah, famous enemy of all women and possibly people.
[00:47:26]  Yeah.
[00:47:29]  Well.
[00:47:30]  I think that's that's so, I mean, that's like an important thing to puss on too, because as you kind of mentioned at the top of the show and what will continue to be part of this story is that St. Louis remains one of the most segregated cities in America.
[00:47:46]  And like this society is at the heart of that, of stopping any kind of development.
[00:47:54]  You know, like you say, it's this like re-entrenching of elite and bluebud.
[00:47:58]  I mean, that, so that neighborhood that, you know, the McCloskeys are in is like a gated, I mean, it's like in the center of the town, right?
[00:48:07]  And it's like a, and it's like a, you know, a gated, very wealthy community.
[00:48:12]  And right across the street from their house is the hall where they would hold these.
[00:48:20]  Yeah.
[00:48:20]  These balls?
[00:48:22]  Right across the street is the Chase Park Plaza, which is a beautiful Art Deco 1950s hotel in which they named the ballroom the Coruscant Ballroom.
[00:48:34]  And that's where they would have.
[00:48:36]  So all of those, the neighborhoods that the McCloskeys live in is in the shadow of that hotel.
[00:48:43]  And there's another set of neighborhoods even further down.
[00:48:45]  Like they keep going.
[00:48:47]  And a lot of the Veiled Prophet people all lived in these giant mansions.
[00:48:52]  And because all the houses around there are about 100 years old, built to impress people during the World's Fair, basically.
[00:49:03]  And then they put up the gates so that no one could see them.
[00:49:05]  Oh, it's actually gated.
[00:49:07]  Yeah, actually gated.
[00:49:08]  Okay.
[00:49:09]  Sometimes people are.
[00:49:09]  There's a whole controversy around opening the gate and what happened during the protests, but for the most part, it doesn't matter.
[00:49:17]  Yeah, I mean, like Liz was kind of hinting at this there.
[00:49:20]  Like St. Louis is incredibly segregated, right?
[00:49:24]  Right.
[00:49:24]  So if you turn the other way, not facing the hotel, two blocks north of the McCloskeys' house is something that like economists and like journalists at the BBC have termed the Del Mar Divide.
[00:49:40]  Yeah.
[00:49:40]  Which the BBC came out and did like a whole expo about it a couple years ago.
[00:49:45]  It is one of the largest economic shelves in the country.
[00:49:50]  Meaning, on one side of the street, there's these are million-dollar houses and all this very stable property at high prices.
[00:50:00]  And on the other side of the street are a lot of buildings that are so worthless that tearing them down and palletizing the bricks and selling the bricks is more valuable than repairing the building itself.
[00:50:15]  So like it's very much a Detroit situation.
[00:50:18]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:50:20]  Yeah, and that like the life expectancy of someone born on the north side of the Del Mar Divide is actually 15 years younger than their counterpart on the south side.
[00:50:32]  And these are literally streets apart.
[00:50:35]  Like you can drive from the McCloskeys to the heart of one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the Midwest within 10 minutes.
[00:50:46]  Yeah, and it's really astounding.
[00:50:48]  The Vail Prophet, I mean, the Vail Profit kind of like re-emerges in this, you know, in this story of fighting segregation through the 20th century, you know, with the emergence of the civil rights movement and action around that in the late 60s and early 70s, where, you know, I mean, it's quite a big, big moment where,
[00:51:18]  I mean, maybe we could just go into it, I guess.
[00:51:21]  Action, the civil rights organization, disrupts one of the Vail Profit Society meetings.
[00:51:29]  Right.
[00:51:30]  This is in 1973.
[00:51:32]  It's like sort of the big apex of, you know, about a half a decade of action protests.
[00:51:40]  And action actually, the main character in action, or one of the main characters is Percy Green.
[00:51:46]  It was a very egalitarian organization.
[00:51:50]  They were a guerrilla theater group.
[00:51:53]  So they were very focused on like media imagery and how to create an image that would get on TV that would go to the suburbs.
[00:52:00]  Yeah, I was reading that he climbed the St. Louis Arch when it was under construction, I think with another guy to basically draw attention to the fact that they had not been hiring black workers.
[00:52:10]  There was no black workers working on it.
[00:52:12]  Exactly.
[00:52:13]  He wrote hire black workers on his back in order to climb the arch.
[00:52:17]  And the post-dispatch conveniently never ran a picture that showed the message on his back.
[00:52:23]  That's just another one of my, you know, a little bit of ire I still hold about that one.
[00:52:30]  Like yeah, the and Percy got his start actually fighting against McDonnell Douglas, where he was working on the line at McDonnell Douglas when the you know, when they basically came in and just cut all of the black workers all off the payroll, McDonnell Douglas is what is now what we would call Boeing.
[00:52:51]  It turned into Boeing right yeah yeah, manufacturing bombs and jets, all the same stuff, And so he got his start there.
[00:53:00]  And actually, the result of that strike led to a Supreme Court case, which ruled in favor of Percy Green and the black workers of McDonnell Douglas.
[00:53:09]  A very important piece of legislation.
[00:53:12]  Yeah.
[00:53:12]  I mean, that sealed him in the annals of history.
[00:53:15]  But also while all this protesting was going on, that was still working its way up in the courts.
[00:53:20]  And Percy Green developed a very long cointel pro record during this time.
[00:53:25]  One can imagine, yes.
[00:53:27]  Right.
[00:53:29]  And so they would, action being like a guerrilla theater group would hold these protests against the Veiled Prophets because what they essentially wanted was, you know, just like the arch strike.
[00:53:39]  They wanted the white CEOs in the city to hire more black workers because factories were leaving the north side where the city had already ghettoized most of the black population.
[00:53:50]  And they were the only new stuff was going in in West County where all the white people fled out of the city.
[00:53:57]  And so what better way to protest all these guys than at the secret quote-unquote, you know, meetings they have once a year.
[00:54:06]  And so Percy Green in action would put on rival Veiled Prophet pageants like having the black Veiled Prophet and the Queen of Human Justice.
[00:54:17]  Yeah, there's some pretty cool pictures of that.
[00:54:19]  Yeah, they're really great.
[00:54:21]  And their demands were to be sat right next to the white veiled prophet and the white queen.
[00:54:26]  Yeah, and to be clear, the Veiled Prophet Society had zero black and I think zero Jewish members until the 80s.
[00:54:33]  Not that, you know, my biggest priority is getting, you know, the Jews into the deep state.
[00:54:41]  You know, we have enough problems on our hands.
[00:54:44]  But super like not, I mean, especially considering how many black people there are in St. Louis, clearly very intentional.
[00:54:52]  Right, exactly.
[00:54:53]  Very much a waspy insular thing, which, you know, we can talk about with William Webster also in a minute.
[00:55:01]  But the apex of all the action protests, they would do other things like hold up the 4th of July parade and handcuff themselves to the car and be dressed up as a doctor and a patient.
[00:55:14]  And the patient would be society and the doctor would be justice and he'd revive him.
[00:55:19]  And it was very, you know, on the nose, but it was very, it was genius because of, you know, the media landscape of the time.
[00:55:28]  Of like, you can protest.
[00:55:30]  I mean, there's a lot to say about protesting in the street and just clogging intersections, but Action really understood that like you need to create a dynamic image in order for people to see.
[00:55:41]  A spectacle.
[00:55:42]  Yeah, a spectacle, exactly.
[00:55:44]  Yeah, I was also listening to that podcast, Blinders Off, which is like a St. Louis podcast earlier about Veiled Prophet.
[00:55:50]  And they said that around this time, independent of action, people had just like begun just throwing things at the parade sometimes too.
[00:55:58]  Like people who didn't like the parade or whatever would like get on the roofs and shoot slingshots at them.
[00:56:04]  That's praxis.
[00:56:06]  Yeah, well, it got to the point where the parade, like people walking the parade would wear body armor and not like full-on Kevlar or whatever, but like, you know, something underneath their costumes.
[00:56:16]  And that is what led to them bringing women and children on the float because no one's going to throw a brick at human shields.
[00:56:27]  Bomb it anyways.
[00:56:28]  Hey.
[00:56:29]  Sorry.
[00:56:33]  So this kind of reaches Napex in 1973.
[00:56:41]  Can you tell us about this big event that, you know, as you mentioned, your problem with the media landscape and journalists is curiously like pretty much not covered at all in the media.
[00:56:55]  Right.
[00:56:56]  So in 1973, the Veiled Prophet Society was using the Keel Center, which is a publicly funded organization, you know, amphitheater with a big balcony up top and a big sort of organizing stage at one end and a lot of chairs and tables and stuff in the middle.
[00:57:14]  And so Action got three tickets to the Veiled Prophet parade and they smuggled these three white debutantes in and they went up to the balcony and in the middle of the ceremony as all the debutants are marching down the center aisle to kiss the feet of the Veiled Prophet, two of the debutants start throwing leaflets from the balcony and screaming, down with the VP.
[00:57:40]  And then this third debutante, Jenna Scott, grabs a power cord that is hanging from the ceiling and like rapples Tarzan style across the amphitheater, landing on the stage steps and fracturing her rib and creating this just the scene of like absolute chaos.
[00:58:01]  And she is unfazed by the rib fracture and charges up to the Veiled Prophet and rips off his veil and crown.
[00:58:11]  And so, and we know that there's cameras all over the place because they're taking pictures of all the debutantes.
[00:58:17]  We know that there's pictures that survived because there's a picture of the Veiled Prophet having put his veil back on after a little bit of struggling.
[00:58:27]  But somehow the picture of the guy never makes it out of that event.
[00:58:34]  And the guy is Tom K. Smith, who was the vice president of Monsanto Corporation, which is headquartered in St. Louis.
[00:58:43]  And at the time, was dumping a lot of Agent Orange on Vietnam.
[00:58:47]  Yeah.
[00:58:47]  1973?
[00:58:48]  Yeah.
[00:58:49]  Oh, yeah, right in the heart of it.
[00:58:50]  But to be clear, Agent Orange has killed over like, I think half a million people.
[00:58:57]  Right.
[00:58:58]  And has ruined the lives of like, you know, probably several times that number.
[00:59:03]  I mean, this guy is, you know, I'll stop making these soons, but, you know, a little allegory to the Nazis here.
[00:59:11]  I mean, this motherfucker, this is like working at Auschwitz or something.
[00:59:14]  Like these, they make death.
[00:59:17]  Yeah, directly capable or culpable for just, yeah, deserves no sympathy.
[00:59:25]  Especially in the way that like the Veiled Prophet Society and the rest of St. Louis media closed ranks around him immediately and kept his name out of the newspapers, but for one heroic publication called the St. Louis Journalism Review, which published his name.
[00:59:42]  And that's kind of the only reason that we know for sure that's what happened that year besides like hearsay, basically.
[00:59:51]  And Gina Scott's car was bombed too after that, right?
[00:59:56]  Right.
[00:59:57]  She was, this wasn't the first time the Veiled Prophet Society had tried to drive a woman out of town, but yeah, there was clear retribution.
[01:00:09]  You can only imagine at this time also with Cointel Pro and the paranoia of the 60s and the fact that one of the most powerful Veiled Prophets is a guy named William Webster, who at the time was either in charge of the FBI or in charge of the CIA.
[01:00:29]  And he then went on to be in charge of Homeland Security.
[01:00:34]  Under W. Bush?
[01:00:36]  Under W. Bush.
[01:00:37]  Jesus Christ.
[01:00:39]  These people are too old.
[01:00:40]  It's like, you know, they got a retirement age for federal employees at 55.
[01:00:46]  That's what I say.
[01:00:47]  Can't be around for that long.
[01:00:51]  Yeah.
[01:00:55]  So after the Jenna Scott incident, the Veiled Prophet Society is forced out of public view.
[01:01:02]  They concede eventually that they can't hold their stuff in the publicly funded Kiel Center.
[01:01:08]  They have to move into these private ballrooms.
[01:01:12]  And then in the 80s, we know this because William Webster is working his way up sort of the national security ladder, that in his Senate transcript, he and some other guy senators are having a conversation about his involvement in something called the Noonday Society, the Vailed Profit Society, and the West County Country Club, which are all white, no Jewish members, no female members.
[01:01:42]  And some of the senators are gently ribbing Mr. Webster about it.
[01:01:48]  And he says, no, it's like... I think Strom Thurmond, too, right?
[01:01:52]  Oh, I'm sure.
[01:01:53]  Yeah.
[01:01:55]  So the senators are like ribbing him about it, but then they sort of like stop talking about it because another senator turns out to be in one of the secret clubs also, who's like supposedly vetting William Webster.
[01:02:10]  And they kind of just like laugh it all off and move on.
[01:02:14]  But after that Senate hearing, the Failed Profit Society did let three black doctors into the organization and solved racism.
[01:02:24]  Yeah.
[01:02:25]  Absolutely.
[01:02:28]  Yeah.
[01:02:29]  Since then, they've also just had a number of, you know, self-inflicted wounds where in like 1981, they had the VP fair, which was downtown, and they closed the bridges to East St. Louis because all of the black people live in East St. Louis, and they didn't want them walking across the bridge into the fair.
[01:02:49]  Wait, what was the ostensible reason?
[01:02:54]  They kind of just shrugged and were like, you know, bridge is closed.

=== Bridgegate And Beyond (04:37) ===

[01:02:59]  Like, incredible.
[01:03:01]  It's over.
[01:03:02]  And then the newspapers picked up on it and sort of kept Adam about it and it became a big scandal.
[01:03:08]  So.
[01:03:09]  Classic Bridgegate incident.
[01:03:12]  Really?
[01:03:12]  It was.
[01:03:14]  Really?
[01:03:14]  I'll tell you what, guys.
[01:03:15]  If you are in charge of a city, you don't want a bridgegate.
[01:03:17]  People don't like a bridgegate.
[01:03:19]  All history hitherto is the history of different bridge gates.
[01:03:23]  Absolutely.
[01:03:24]  That's what I'm always saying.
[01:03:25]  Yes, it is.
[01:03:27]  This organization seems like it's been on sort of a decline in some ways, right?
[01:03:33]  Yeah.
[01:03:34]  I mean, like a lot of Rust Belt cities, in the 80s, when you have corporatization, like a lot of companies where the CEOs would have been Vailed Profit members, those companies got bought up and their headquarters got relocated to New York or to like Anheuser-Busch gets bought up by InBEV.
[01:03:56]  There's no reason to have a corporate office in St. Louis anymore.
[01:03:59]  You wipe out a giant executive class basically locally.
[01:04:03]  A bunch of money leaves town.
[01:04:05]  Yeah, that's an interesting twist in this story.
[01:04:07]  I mean, just through history here with the Midwest is that, you know, capital flight beginning in, like you said, the early 80s and really like, I mean, up until this day, but I mean, it's pretty much all, I mean, certainly in rural areas and then in larger Midwestern cities, you know, has totally gutted these towns in ways that even show up in these like secret societies where now,
[01:04:35]  you know, we were talking that, you know, you start to see kind of less VPs.
[01:04:41]  You're not seeing Monsanto in there.
[01:04:42]  You're not seeing these like ruling class, you know, maniacs, but you're seeing these kind of local petty bourgeois members or you're seeing, you know, you have the police chiefs or you have the local business owners or things like that, which presents its own kind of concerns in a lot of ways as well.
[01:05:02]  Right, exactly.
[01:05:04]  And like, you know, some of those people are worse in some ways than the predecessors, but also they just don't fully comprehend that like your veiled profit counterpart in 1955 would have looked down on the sort of people who are let into the society now as just, you know, absolute trash.
[01:05:23]  I can't, you know, identify with those people.
[01:05:26]  So like you have to, the elitism sort of is also, I don't know, it just doesn't get to these people.
[01:05:34]  And also, you know, another thing about St. Louis right now is that we have a billionaire psychopaths, libertarian named Rex Singfeld, who made all his money in like financial bullshit, trying to privatize literally everything in the city, including the airport, the water.
[01:05:56]  He would privatize the roads, I'm sure, if he had the chance.
[01:05:59]  I love that.
[01:05:59]  I love the libertarians privatizing the roads.
[01:06:02]  They love it.
[01:06:03]  They want Sam Brown back literally the entire center of the country.
[01:06:07]  Yeah.
[01:06:09]  And so the Veiled Prophets are acting sort of as like the landed gentry still, and they get in Rex's way and they have like a definite reason to not go through with these privatization efforts.
[01:06:19]  But basically all of the local politics then boils down to like, you know, the petty bourgeois versus this psychopath individual.
[01:06:31]  And like who wins is just like who sort of like, I don't know, gets to say what goes between them and not really anybody else.
[01:06:39]  Very dialectical.
[01:06:42]  Yeah, it's a little depressing, but to live here and pay attention to local politics.
[01:06:47]  So are they still doing this ball?
[01:06:49]  Are they still doing the parade?
[01:06:51]  What's going on now?
[01:06:52]  I mean, this is the other thing is that like this thing will not die.
[01:06:56]  This thing from the past just staggers on.
[01:07:01]  They have a veiled profit.
[01:07:04]  I wanted to write an article about them and like get into the ball and like see what you know, witness it firsthand.
[01:07:10]  And they wanted me to like cover their charity work.
[01:07:13]  They're like a charity organization yeah yeah yeah, you know right.
[01:07:18]  And so, like I don't know, I don't think anybody's really buying that one.
[01:07:23]  They've had to remove VP from the VP Fair and now it's just called St. Fair, St. Louis, so like they are getting slowly sort of pushed out of further and further out of public view, but it still happens.

=== Stark Urban Realities (10:18) ===

[01:07:37]  I mean, in the year that Michael Brown happened, you know, with the Northside literally having militarized police waltzing through the neighborhoods in tear gas in the air, the Veiled Profit Society had the ball and literally crowned one of their daughters, the queen of love and Peace.
[01:07:55]  I mean, it just, there's something about St. Louis that is like, there is no subtlety here.
[01:08:00]  It's just like a very stark place.
[01:08:03]  It's a very beautiful place, but it's very stark.
[01:08:06]  I think that's what struck me about this entire story is like, as we kind of move through this history, beginning with these, you know, with the labor strikes and through, I mean, we didn't really talk about kind of the development of East St. Louis and the Great Migration, which is like a part of that story we probably don't have time for, but was home to a brutal fucking massacre.
[01:08:31]  I think it's 1917, where still it's like unknown how many black residents were killed.
[01:08:40]  I mean, it's just, it's a complete and total, I mean, you could call it a pogrom probably if you wanted, but, you know, and then through the civil rights era and into the 70s, and then now, you know, or even most recently, you know, with the Ferguson protests, that there's this very, I mean, you know, I really am not trying to be on the nose, but like the black, white, the black and white of all of these issues is so stark, like you say.
[01:09:08]  It's like very, everything is just so mask off.
[01:09:11]  Yeah.
[01:09:12]  You know, and again, not to be too on the nose, even when there's the veil up.
[01:09:16]  I mean, it's like, it's just a fascinating, like, you know, this story of the Veil Prophet is such a fascinating conduit into this history of, you know, the, you know, post-civil rights, you know, the failure of reconstruction into this, the backlash of the Klan and the new developments of the Klan leading into, you know,
[01:09:45]  still living in the and the, you know, still living in mass segregation, dealing with that through the 20th century.
[01:09:55]  I mean, it's just, it's such a, um, it's such an incredible window into all this history.
[01:10:03]  Yeah, I mean, I wish we at some point, there's so many things to talk about also about the black community in St. Louis and how, you know, the pogrom that you just mentioned really did shape the rest of the city and Ferguson because the pogrom sent a lot of black migrants fleeing the massacre on the east side over the bridges and into the city where they settled in, you know, the slum areas near the wharf or the black neighborhoods around downtown.
[01:10:33]  And throughout the years, those neighborhoods have been demolished to build the arch and they've been demolished like Mill Creek just by executive veto to do urban waiting.
[01:10:42]  They demolished a whole neighborhood to build the fucking arch.
[01:10:46]  Oh, yeah.
[01:10:46]  I mean, the most historic part of St. Louis is on the wharf in the riverfront.
[01:10:51]  And they cleared the whole place and built our parabola.
[01:10:55]  Jesus.
[01:10:56]  I mean, they had urban, I mean, they called it, they did it here too.
[01:10:59]  They called it urban renewal and just built these horrible fucking buildings down in Fillmore.
[01:11:05]  Along with the interstate highways.
[01:11:07]  That was the way to get it, get the interstate highways built.
[01:11:10]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:11:11]  And so as that's happening, all of these black neighborhoods are evicted and pushed north into Ferguson into these, you know, at the height of it, the North St. Louis was a really beautiful place to live if you're a black migrant in, let's say, the middle of the century because you could work and go to school there and become a doctor there, all within black institutions.
[01:11:34]  It's just when that, you know, when the capital flight happened and when factories moved overseas or new ones only got built on the white side of town, that parallel economy for black people fell completely apart.
[01:11:49]  And we have what we have now.
[01:11:51]  And that's not even to mention Pruadigo or the failed housing projects.
[01:11:55]  The Pruadigo myth is a great documentary about that and it's free right now online.
[01:12:00]  Okay, go check that out.
[01:12:02]  It's a very good one.
[01:12:03]  I mean, to bring it all back, I guess what to say is that I'm sure you were not surprised at all by the McCloskey photos that came out.
[01:12:13]  No, not really.
[01:12:14]  I mean, it was amazing how it's weird when your local thing becomes the center, becomes like a natural character of the internet.
[01:12:24]  That's how I felt when I saw The Rock.
[01:12:26]  Welcome to The Rock.
[01:12:31]  Oh, God.
[01:12:33]  Exactly.
[01:12:36]  Yeah, I could imagine.
[01:12:37]  I mean, especially such poetic-looking photos.
[01:12:41]  Yeah, the mustard saying, the Brooks Brothers shirt on the tubby belly.
[01:12:46]  God, her finger on a trigger for like 20 minutes.
[01:12:49]  Streaming private property.
[01:12:51]  You could just see it coming off her mouth.
[01:12:53]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:12:54]  And then the house itself and the fact that they paid for it as what kind of attorneys are they?
[01:13:00]  Personal injury lawyers.
[01:13:02]  Classic.
[01:13:02]  By the way.
[01:13:03]  That also seems like perfectly poetic for this development we talked about with the Veil Profit, where it's like they're not even CEOs of a fucking huge corporation.
[01:13:13]  They're local personal injury attorneys, which if you want to talk about petty bourgeois scum, oh, I mean, that's like the top, that's the top of the heap there.
[01:13:22]  It's pretty bad.
[01:13:24]  I think you've also seen like the interior design that they went with and sort of refurbished, I don't know what you would call that, Midwestern royalty, like tacky shit.
[01:13:37]  It's to have all that money and to be completely scared of the most peaceful, like calls for, you know, local change about how we spend the money as a city and to just get out on your lawn with a gun and just be terrified with a mustard stain on your shirt.
[01:13:57]  That is that St. Louis baby.
[01:14:00]  We love it.
[01:14:01]  Well, to close us out here, you were, you're actually, you're writing a book about the Veil Profit, right?
[01:14:07]  Yeah, I have, I wrote a novel about it, and it's locked and loaded, but it's not published.
[01:14:14]  I'm still looking for a publisher and agents.
[01:14:19]  But yeah, that's sort of all of this research was in service to that.
[01:14:25]  And the book isn't really nonfiction.
[01:14:27]  It's much more of a artsy fartsy novel, you know?
[01:14:31]  I love an artsy fartsy novel.
[01:14:34]  Well, thank you so much for doing it.
[01:14:36]  Joining us, Jevin.
[01:14:39]  Oh, for Christ's sake.
[01:14:42]  For Christ's sake.
[01:14:43]  God, thank you.
[01:14:46]  Doinin.
[01:14:47]  Fuck, I can never recover from that.
[01:14:48]  Thank you so much for joining us, Devin.
[01:14:50]  Look at that.
[01:14:51]  I mean, I fucking nailed it.
[01:14:53]  Thank you so much for having me on.
[01:14:54]  This was incredible.
[01:14:56]  And if I could plug just one last thing.
[01:14:58]  Absolutely.
[01:14:59]  Whatever you want.
[01:15:01]  The local forces in St. Louis are also fighting against all these guys, like Corey Bush, a Justice Democrat who's running for Congress, or Megan Green, who's the STL DSA endorsed candidate for Missouri Senate.
[01:15:15]  And then there's also the Expect Us protest group who's been organizing all of the protests lately.
[01:15:22]  And you should find those links and donate to them because they're all amazing and we could use the help in St. Louis.
[01:15:31]  Yeah.
[01:15:31]  Cool.
[01:15:32]  Well, thank you so much.
[01:15:34]  And together we will smash the Veiled Prophet.
[01:15:38]  All right.
[01:15:39]  Remember that article that came out the other day that was like, why is architecture sexist?
[01:16:02]  Because it was like buildings look like dicks?
[01:16:06]  Yeah.
[01:16:06]  It was in The Guardian, of course.
[01:16:09]  Counterpoint, St. Louis Arch.
[01:16:12]  Yeah, looks like a boob.
[01:16:13]  Yeah.
[01:16:14]  Well, okay, that too.
[01:16:16]  Or a curvy wife.
[01:16:18]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:16:18]  It looks like a hot wife.
[01:16:21]  I have a theory that The Guardian is a psyop to make women look bad.
[01:16:25]  I will say, I literally love women.
[01:16:31]  Appreciate that.
[01:16:31]  Thank you, Brace.
[01:16:32]  No problem.
[01:16:34]  Guardian, ladies, I say this as your friend, your strongest advocate.
[01:16:40]  You guys got to shut that shit down.
[01:16:42]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:16:43]  It's not, I don't think it's doing anyone any favors.
[01:16:46]  It's no, it's kind of making us all look bad.
[01:16:51]  On that note, thanks for sticking with us.
[01:16:56]  Yeah, appreciate it.
[01:17:00]  Big thanks.
[01:17:02]  No.
[01:17:03]  I don't know where we're going with this one.
[01:17:05]  It's the end of the episode, sweetheart.
[01:17:08]  Well, I don't know.
[01:17:08]  Maybe we'll just keep going.
[01:17:11]  You want to keep going?
[01:17:12]  I don't know.
[01:17:13]  Do you have anything else you want to say?
[01:17:14]  Oh, yeah.
[01:17:18]  Wait, can I do a spell?
[01:17:20]  No, you can't do any magic.
[01:17:21]  Okay, well, then never mind.
[01:17:22]  Let's close this shit out.
[01:17:24]  All right.
[01:17:25]  I'm Liz.
[01:17:26]  My name is Brace, and we are joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:17:30]  You see, I was modulating there.
[01:17:32]  And we will see you next time.
[01:17:34]  Bye-bye.
[01:17:52]  Just Jeffrey Dexter.
[01:17:54]  Come out.
[01:17:55]  Come out.