Veiled Prophet Ball
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The Veiled Prophet Ball (commonly referred to as the VP Ball) is a debutante cotillion 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, and originally part of the Veiled Prophet Fair (or "VP Fair"), which today is Fair St. Louis. The founders' intent was to create a local celebration in the likeness of Mardi Gras, eventually including 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," donning an elaborate costume with a hidden face to preside over the VP Ball. Five of the debutantes are chosen by secret process to form the "Veiled Prophet's Court of Honor," of which one is chosen to be crowned the "Queen of Love and Beauty" by the Veiled Prophet.
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[edit] Origins
The event had its roots in the agricultural and mechanical fairs held in St. Louis beginning in 1856. These languished in the years after the American Civil War, however, and the Veiled Prophet Fair was in part an attempt to reclaim pre-eminence for the city as a manufacturing center and agricultural shipping point from rapidly growing Chicago. On March 20, 1878, Charles Slayback, a grain broker, former Confederate cavalryman, and New Orleans native, called a meeting of local business leaders at the Lindell Hotel. Together with his brother Alonzo, Slayback invented a mythology for an annual fair meant to revive interest in the commercial fairs, and especially to increase participation in harvest-season events. From Irish poet Thomas Moore, the Slaybacks borrowed the name of the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, adapting features of their home-city's Mystick Krewe of Comus. In their version, the Prophet was a world traveler who had made St. Louis his home base. The first parade and grand ball were staged on October 8, 1878, attracting over 50,000 spectators.
The fair was also intended to re-assert the social hierarchy which had been challenged by the general strike of 1877, claimed by Spencer (p. 18) to have been the first and most successful of its type, involving large numbers of African American workmen as well. Though the fair has regularly been characterized as "a way of healing the wounds of a bitter labor-management fight," Spencer (8) suggests "the first Veiled Prophet parade was more a show of force than a gesture of healing."
The Prophet was selected from among St. Louis's business and civic elite. The first prophet was Police Commissioner John G. Priest (who had been energetic in suppressing the 1877 strike). 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. A.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. Today, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch speculates each year on the identity of the Veiled Prophet.
The Queen of Love and Beauty, and later maids of honor, would be selected by the Veiled Prophet from among the debutantes who had received invitations (the list of invitees determined by a process never made public, though the supply of tickets was limited to members of the VP organization, also of murky 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 iullustrates the seriousness with which the event was regarded as an instrument of social control. For the fiftieth anniversary celebration records list "no queen," as Mary Ambrose Smith had 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.'"
The ball was suspended between 1943 and 1945, due to World War II. Upon its resumption, there was increasing objection to the use of a civic facility for such a socially exclusive event. In the 1950s, the exclusive Chase Park Plaza Hotel constructed the opulent Khorassan Ballroom specifically for the purpose of hosting the annual debutante ball, and it was moved from the former venue, Kiel Auditorium. In recent years, the Ball has been held at the Downtown Adam's Mark Hotel).
[edit] 1960s and later
The ball, parade and fair became an established St. Louis tradition, though it was 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."[1] The event had the effect of foregrounding, rather than soothing, class conflicts. Indeed, as early as 1882, public objections were made to the ethnic stereotypes represented by some of the parade's floats (Spencer 45). Assaults on the floats with pea-shooters and less innocuous projectiles came to be a predictable part of the parade, with confectioners' shops actually stocking them in anticipation of the parade, in a kind of institutionalized defiance (Spencer, 74). By 1969, the ball was the object of civil rights protests, resulting in numerous arrests.
The event deliberately had displaced the parades originally held by the trade unions, and occasionally the unions would stage events to mock the pretensions of the VP Ball [2]; The radical newspaper St. Louis Labor vilified the event and its organizers for decades, although the parade still attracted heavy crowds, and even the ball exercised fascination. In 1949, for the first time, the ball was broadcast on KSD-TV (now KSDK), and it was estimated that over 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." [3] 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."[3] 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.[3] According to Spencer, this elite-oriented event replaced more pluralistic celebrations, and placed 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.[3]
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, there was increasing dissatisfaction with the use of civic resources for a celebration emphatically excluding all but the white elite. As the culmination of protests organized by Percy Green and the civil rights group Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes ("ACTION"), on December 22, 1972, in Kiel Auditorium, Gena Scott slid down a power cable and unmasked the Prophet, who was Monsanto executive vice president Tom K. Smith, according to the St. Louis Journalism Review[4] (though the papers at the time claimed that the unmasking was too brief to allow for identification). Subsequently, Scott's car was bombed, and her apartment vandalized numerous times. The incident is the subject of Lucy Ferriss's memoir, "Unveiling the Prophet" (Ferriss's aunt, Ann Chittenden Ferriss, had been 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 larger numbers of minority workers, and even to disband the organization so that public and private funds could be spent on worthier projects. Spencer sees the event as a crucial moment in a long process of disintegration of the civic unity and class harmony which the VP Fair claimed to celebrate. Indeed, according to Spencer (138-9), by the late 1970s, the wives and daughters of the elite, for whom the event constituted a sort of marriage-market, had become resistant to its inherent sexism. Even members of the VP Organization itself began to express distaste: William Maritz, a one-time Veiled Prophet himself, reported, "'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 foregrounded what, according to Thomas Spencer, had been the classist underpinnings of the event from its inception. Only in 1979 did the Veiled Prophet Organization admit its first black members, and in 1981, fair officials were confronted with accusations of racism when they closed the Eads Bridge to pedestrian access from mostly black East St. Louis. According to Ronald Henges (Spencer 140), "People just didn't want other people flaunting their wealth and their position." The event lies behind the present day Fair St. Louis, held on the riverfront, which began as the "Veiled Prophet Fair" in 1979, and was renamed to delete all reference to the "Veiled Prophet" in 1995.
[edit] See also
- Fleur de Lis Ball - St. Louis's other debutante cotillion
- Jewel Ball - another debutante cotillion in Missouri
[edit] References
[edit] Sources
- Jefferson National Expansion: Administrative History. Chapter 3.
- Spencer, Thomas M. The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration Power on Parade, 1877-1995 U-MO P 2000
- "The Prophet's Pearls", by Katherine Darst; The St. Louis Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 4, Sept. 1963.
- "St. Louis The Fourth City, 1764-1909", by Walter B. Stevens, S.J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1909.
- Ferriss, Lucy. Unveiling the Prophet: The Misadventures of a Reluctant Debutante. U-MO P, 2005.
