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The Veiled Prophet Ball (commonly referred to as the VP Ball) is a dance held each December in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, by a secret society named the "Veiled Prophet Organization" (often referred to as "the VP"), first founded by prominent St. Louisans in 1878. The founders' intent was to create an annual local celebration similar to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, eventually to include pageantry and costuming as well as a parade with floats. Each year, one member of the Veiled Prophet Organization is chosen to serve as the "Veiled Prophet of Khorassan," to preside over the VP Ball. Five of the debutantes who attend the ball (all attend by invitation only) are chosen by secret process to make up the "Veiled Prophet's Court of Honor." One is chosen to be crowned the "Queen of Love and Beauty" by the Veiled Prophet.
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Events also included the Veiled Prophet Fair (or "VP Fair"). In the face of increasing criticism of using civic resources to support a socially exclusive organization, this was renamed as Fair St. Louis in 1992 and broadened in appeal. The Fair was moved from the riverfront to Forest Park in 2014 and 2015 due to construction in the area around the Gateway Memorial Arch and reworking of roadways and the park.
Origins
The event had its roots in the St. Louis Agricultural and Mechanical Fair, an annual harvest festival which had been held in St. Louis since 1856. It attracted agricultural crops, crafts, demonstrations and attendees from throughout the region. In the economic difficulties after the American Civil War in the 1870s, such events declined. City boosters devised the Veiled Prophet Fair in an attempt to reclaim from the rapidly growing city of Chicago, pre-eminence for St. Louis as a manufacturing center and agricultural shipping point.
On March 20, 1878, Charles Slayback, a grain broker and former Confederate cavalryman (who had spent several years in New Orleans after the Civil War and become acquainted with its Mardi Gras traditions) called a meeting of local business leaders at the Lindell Hotel. Together with his brother Alonzo, Slayback created a mythology for a secret elite society, whose public demonstrations would coincide with the annual fair. From Irish poet Thomas Moore, the Slaybacks borrowed the name of the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan; they also incorporated features from the Mystick Krewe of Comus of New Orleans. In their version, the Prophet was a world traveler who had made St. Louis his home base. The first parade, attracting over 50,000 spectators, and grand ball were staged that year on October 8, 1878.
The fair was also intended to re-assert the social hierarchy which had been challenged by the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Historian Thomas M. Spencer said this was the first and most successful strike of its type, and unusual for involving large numbers of African American workmen as well as ethnic whites. Though the fair has regularly been characterized as "a way of healing the wounds of a bitter labor-management fight," Spencer suggests "the first Veiled Prophet parade was more a show of force than a gesture of healing."
He commented on the early imagery of the Veiled Prophet (see image above), dressed in a hood and robe similar to members of the Ku Klux Klan and being armed with pistol and rifle, thus referring to issues of the white supremacist South. At the time, the Missouri Republican commented, "It will be readily observed from the accoutrements of the Prophet that the procession is not likely to be stopped by street cars or anything else."(October 6, 1878) Historian Spencer interpreted the reference of the Republican to "streetcars" as related to the 1877 labor strike. Lucy Ferriss wrote about the VP events in her memoir, characterizing St. Louis as "the northwest outpost of the Confederacy."
The Prophet was selected secretly from among male members, who were made up of St. Louis' business and civic elite. The first prophet was Police Commissioner John G. Priest (who had been energetic in suppressing the 1877 strikers' attempt to prevent strikebreakers from taking their jobs). Although the identity of a given year's Grand Oracle, or Veiled Prophet, was officially a secret, early holders of the office were reported to include Col. Alonzo W. Slayback, Capt. Frank Gaiennie, John A. Scudder, Henry C. Haarstick, George Bain, Robert P. Tansey, George H. Morgan, Col. J. C. Normile, Wallace Delafield, John B. Maude, Dr. D. P. Rowland, Charles E. Slayback, Leigh I. Knapp, David B. Gould, Henry Paschell, H. I. Kent, Dr. E. Pretorious, Win. H. Thompson, and Win. A. Hargadine. In the 21st century, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch still speculates each year on the identity of the Veiled Prophet.
The Queen of Love and Beauty, and later maids of honor, were to be selected by the Veiled Prophet from among the debutantes who had received invitations to the ball. (The list of invitees was determined by a process never made public. The supply of tickets was limited to members of the VP organization, which had a secret constitution, and the assignment of these non-transferrable tickets required the organization's approval.) The Veiled Prophet would dance the "Royal Quadrille" with the Queen, and then award her some keepsake of the occasion. Over the years, the Queens and their courts received pearl necklaces or silver tiaras, which became family heirlooms (as did the elaborate invitations themselves).
The 1928 Veiled Prophet Ball illustrates how seriously the event was regarded as an instrument of social control. The 50th anniversary celebration records show "no queen." Mary Ambrose Smith, who was selected as Queen, was found to have secretly married Dr. Thomas Birdsall days earlier, violating the rule that the Queen of Love and Beauty must be a "maiden." In a 1979 interview with the St. Louis Times, Smith recalled how the Veiled Prophet
"gave her travelling money and told her to 'begone, don't register at any large hotels, and don't use your real name.' ... Smith was 'made to feel she disgraced her family. None of her friends stuck by her (she was told she could not visit their houses), she was never invited to another VP ball, her picture was removed from the collection of queens' portraits at the Missouri Historical Society, and her name was deleted from the Social Register.'"
Due to the demands of world wars, the Ball was suspended for the years 1917-1918 and from 1942 through 1945. When the ball was resumed after World War II, critics began to object to using Kiel Auditorium, a civic facility, for such a socially exclusive event. In the 1950s, the Chase Park Plaza Hotel constructed the opulent Khorassan Ballroom specifically to host the annual debutante ball, and the event was moved there. Since the turn of the 21st century, the Ball has been held at the Downtown St. Louis Hyatt at the Arch.
1960s and later
The ball, parade and fair became an established St. Louis tradition, though not without controversy. According to the official St. Louis city government website, "The traditional VP celebration has represented for St. Louisans a perceived link between different components of the community in a holiday celebration, while also reinforcing the notion of a benevolent cultural elite." Spencer believes that the event generally revealed rather than soothed class conflicts. As early as 1882, public objections were made to the ethnic stereotypes represented by some of the parade's floats. Assaults by onlookers against the floats with pea-shooters and less innocuous projectiles came to be a predictable part of the parade. Confectioners' shops stocked the pea-shooters in anticipation of the parade, in a kind of institutionalized defiance.
The VP parade had been deliberately created in part to displace the parades regularly held by the trade unions. Spencer believes it cast workingmen in a passive rather than active role, not merely in the celebration, but in the mythology asserted for the history and economic life of the city. Occasionally the unions would stage events intended to mock the pretensions of the VP Ball. The leading socialist and working-class newspaper, St. Louis Labor, vilified the VP event and its organizers for decades.
But the parade continued to attract large crowds and exerted a certain fascination. In 1949, for the first time, the ball was broadcast on KSD-TV (now KSDK), and the station estimated that more than 80% of area viewers tuned in. According to historian Thomas M. Spencer, "Most St. Louisans probably enjoyed the 'fairy tale' nature of it. By watching the ball, they were vicariously living the experiences of the elites dancing across their television screens." According to Harry Levins, "The parade was aimed at boosting the spirit of the city's common folk. The ball was aimed at reassuring the city's elite of their exclusive status." The early pageants had been partially meant to move working-class viewers to awe at the accomplishments of great men, all of whom were said to be ancestors of the Prophet.
Local news media continued to cover the ball at length, printing long lists of attendees from locally prominent families. However, from the mid-1960s onward, observers and social critics expressed increasing dissatisfaction with the use of civic resources for a celebration that excluded all but the white Christian elite. As late as the early 1960s, the VP excluded Jews as members and guests. It also excluded African Americans.
By 1969, the ball was the object of civil rights protests, resulting in numerous arrests. Percy Green and the civil rights group Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes ("ACTION") conducted numerous protests against VP activities. Editorial staffs suppressed much of the reporting of the protests by ACTION against VP activities. Patrick J. Buchanan, then an editorial writer for the Globe-Democrat newspaper, particularly portrayed the group as radical dissidents.
On December 22, 1972, in Kiel Auditorium, the most dramatic event occurred when Gena Scott slid down a power cable and unmasked the Prophet, who that year was Monsanto Company executive vice president Tom K. Smith, according to the St. Louis Journalism Review. But newspapers at the time refused to print his identity, although likely at least 100 people saw him. The papers claimed that the unmasking was too brief but it has been documented that their editorial policy led to suppression of customary journalistic reporting.
In continuing reaction, Scott's car was bombed near her apartment. Her place was vandalized numerous times. (Lucy Ferriss explores these events in her memoir, Unveiling the Prophet. Her aunt Ann Chittenden Ferriss, was selected as the 1931 Queen of Love and Beauty). The unveiling of the Prophet was the most dramatic disruption in ACTION's long campaign (1965-1976) to encourage the many CEOs in the VP Organization to hire more minority workers at their businesses. While VP spokesmen said they took no notice of ACTION, its leader Percy Green had been laid off in 1964 and never was able to get another job for a St. Louis corporation.
The activists encouraged disbanding the VP organization so that public and private funds could be spent on worthier projects. Spencer sees the unveiling at the Ball as a crucial moment in a long process of disintegration of the civic unity and class harmony that the VP Fair claimed to celebrate. According to Spencer, by the late 1970s, the wives and daughters of the elite, for whom the Ball constituted a sort of marriage-market, had become resistant to its inherent sexism. Even members of the VP Organization began to express distaste: William Maritz, a one-time Veiled Prophet, said, "'A lot of members' in the late 1970s 'felt uneasy with the social connotations' and that 'people were saying 'get that godamned ball off of television, don't force that on the community."
The subversive act of unveiling the Prophet revealed what Spencer said had been the classist underpinnings of the event from its inception. Only in 1979 did the Veiled Prophet Organization admit its first black members. In 1981, fair officials were confronted with accusations of racism when they closed the Eads Bridge to pedestrian access, which reduced the ability of attendees from mostly black East St. Louis from reaching the fair. According to Ronald Henges, "People just didn't want other people flaunting their wealth and their position."
Beginning in 1974 the "Veiled Prophet Fair" was held on the riverfront. It was finally renamed in 1992 as Fair St. Louis, removing all reference to the Veiled Prophet. Because of construction related to redesign of roadways and the National Gateway Arch Memorial, Fair St. Louis was moved to Forest Park in 2014 and is to be held there in 2015. Fair organizers were pleased with turnout and arrangements for managing access to the fair.
Veiled Prophet Queens
The Veiled Prophet Queens have included: