Veiled Prophet Ball - 1960s and Later

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." 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; The leading socialist and working-class newspaper St. Louis Labor vilified the event and its organizers for decades, although the parade still attracted heavy crowds and elicited 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." 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. 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.

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 late as the early 1960s, Jews were excluded not only as members but as guests. 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 Company executive vice president Tom K. Smith, according to the St. Louis Journalism Review (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 1974, and was renamed to delete all reference to the "Veiled Prophet" in 1992.