MFA Alumnus Devin O’Shea Discusses the Origins of His New Nonfiction Book, The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis
When I was up in Chicago for graduate study at Northwestern, I wanted to write a historical, Thomas Pynchon-esque novel about St. Louis because it’s an authentically weird place.
St. Louis, where I live now, is an in-between liminal city with a lot of history and high symbolism — it’s older than the United States by a bit, being Native American, French, and briefly Spanish before it became American. For most of its official existence, it’s been on the Western frontier, but most importantly, it’s a Mississippi River city, and a big part of that Americana zone Mark Twain wrote about.
When I discussed the novel idea with my mother, Kathleen O’Shea, she mentioned this creepy guy who used to preside over St. Louis’s Fourth of July parade. Like most millennial St. Louisans, I had never heard of “the VP” [the Veiled Prophet]. Older people didn’t exactly know what his story was either. This was a character right on the cusp of everyone’s awareness, but also, there was a great deal of archival material to sift through. Thomas Spencer published an academic book on the club [associated with the Veiled Prophet] as a parade society in 2000. Newspaper digitization meant there was an enormous amount of new archival material to examine, along with everything that had happened in St. Louis with the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, in St. Louis County, in 2014.
I did a lot of research on the ex-Confederate founder, Alonzo Slayback, and a half dozen VP characters who impacted national and global politics. The Veiled Prophet Society is novel because it’s been encased in amber since the 1870s. What sealed it up and preserved it, letting it persist for so long, is the last century of St. Louis’ decline.
The city is now in a different phase of its life, but it’s old and haunted. The Veiled Prophet is still hanging around in one form or another, with Erin from The Office being his latest victim.
In the day-to-day, St. Louis is very cosmopolitan. It’s full of punks, chefs, people from all different faiths and backgrounds. It’s hated and sabotaged by our Republican state and federal government, and many want to fix St. Louis by making it white-er and richer, which won’t work. St. Louis is an African American city, with a proud and historic black community that gave the world Josephine Baker, Scott Joplin, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, et cetera. It’s a city with a lot of working-class history, and it’s a refuge for the LGBTQ+ community. This place is a million things at once: Bosnian, Afghan, Mexican, Indian, Korean, Chinese, on and on.
St. Louis architecturally, historically, and culturally rich, with many moments in the city’s history where the spirit of democracy tried to break through — in the 1877 Railroad Strike, in the Communist Party organizing in the 1930s, in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, in the Black Lives Matter movement after 2014. These were all efforts to design a city where working class St. Louisans enjoy safety and stability. The Veiled Prophet is the symbolic counterforce to that spirit.