It’s summer, and for me that means it’s time for a trip back home to visit the family in St. Louis. When I think of summer in St. Louis a few things spring to mind, the first of which is the humidity. People in New York complain about humidity and I just have to smile and nod. Walking outside in St. Louis is like being gently covered by a warm, invisible, wet blanket. It’s almost a jungle heat. The only place I can think of that’s potentially more humid is New Orleans.
The second thing I think of is Fair Saint Louis, an outdoor music festival and air show that is this year being headlined by edgy and challenging acts Maroon 5 and Montgomery Gentry. If you’re doing the cultural math in your head, the correct result would be: White People Festival. And not only would you be correct this year, but that conclusion would have held even more truth when the fair first began in 1878.
In my early childhood I knew the festival by the name V.P. Fair. The name was changed to Fair Saint Louis in 1992, but my family and I still call it the V.P. Fair. I never really wondered what the V.P. stood for until recently and decided to do a little digging around. I didn’t have to dig deep. There’s a Wikipedia page, but here’s a very short synopsis: using imagery that was a mixture of Klu Klux Klan iconography, Mardi Gras themes and Irish poetry, a small and secret organization of St. Louisians hostile to African Americans and Unions held elaborate parades in order to intimidate those agitating for social and economic justice. The “V.P” stands for Veiled Prophet, and comes from a Thomas Moore poem about Al-Muqanna, a veiled prophet who is usually called a heretic by most mainstream Muslims. A small group of business leaders in St. Louis (consisting mostly of former Confederate Calvary men who believed that St. Louis was the Northwestern border of the Confederacy) adopted the imagery and changed the mythology so that St. Louis was the home base of the prophet. There’s also a lot of weird stuff about agricultural cities named after Middle Eastern places (such as Cairo, Illinois and Memphis) and how it relates to a Masonic order known as The Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets of the Enchanted Realm (or M.O.V.P.E.R. or “The Grotto”) and something else called The Mistick Krewe of Comus…but I wouldn’t dare ask you to follow me that far down the rabbit hole.
The parade also had a ball, in which there was an actual veiled prophet (or at least he was veiled, can’t be sure whether he was a prophet) and a queen of the ball, etc. This of course was an event closed to all but the cream of St. Louis society. I imagine William Burrough’s grandparents were somehow involved. And then in 1972 a civil rights agitator ripped the veil off of the prophet, and from then on the ball has been turned into a fair with everyone invited and expensive beer and shitty music ever since. That was the end of secret racist societies in St. Louis. Or was it?….
Pictured at top: The original image of the veiled prophet, with all his guns to kill union members and black people and stuff.
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