The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration: Power on Parade, 1877-1995. (Book Reviews).

The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration: Power on Parade, 1877-1995. By Thomas M. Spencer. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, c. 2000. Pp. [xviii], 204. $29.95, ISBN 0-8262-1267-0.)

This book is a study of "the social and cultural functions" of St. Louis's annual Veiled Prophet (VP) celebration (p. 3). Six chronologically organized chapters examine fifteen- to twenty-year periods, with the exceptions of chapters 1 (treating 1877-78) and 3 (treating 1900-42). In his introduction Spencer clarifies why he devotes much more space to social rather than cultural aspects of this long-lived, still-existing parade and ball: Economic and political "elites," he argues, have always used the parade "to claim symbolically that they were in control" (p. 4).

Some reference is made in chapter 1 to the similarity of these social practices to those of the "krewes" that organize Mardi Gras activities in New Orleans. The Slayback brothers, the major founders of the Veiled Prophet parade, had emigrated from that city to St. Louis, and they proposed the orientalist symbolism of a mystical veiled potentate visiting St. Louis each autumn. But Spencer does not develop the comparison of the VP spectacle to Mardi Gras or any other civic celebration. The book is locally focused, and relevant recent studies of American celebratory events by John E. Bodnar, Susan G. Davis, David Glassberg, and Michael E. McGerr are cited chiefly to show how local developments fit in with what was happening elsewhere.

The most closely researched parts of the book deal with Veiled Prophet's origins from 1877-80 and the 1965-80 period, when VP experienced regular public confrontations during its balls and parades by a group called ACTION, which was committed to securing greater economic and civil-rights equity for African Americans in St. Louis. Spencer interviewed many ACTION members and some leading VP members from this period, although these interviews are not listed in the bibliography, making it difficult to track down note references in chapters 5 and 6. In the style of the times, ACTION's confrontations were outrageously delightful, and Spencer narrates them well.

Beneath the surface of the book, however, much is wanting. Rarely are newspaper assertions questioned or compared. Opinions, secondary or primary, are selected for their illustrative value (above all to demonstrate VP's elitism) rather than as points of departure for investigation. Description of the evolution of VP is frequently vague because the examples offered are not related to any stated methods that might allow consistent comparisons. The most obvious contexts are barely examined. VP parades were originally scheduled to coincide with the St. Louis Agricultural and Mechanical Fair, a fair whose organization and content are not explored except in scattered half-sentences (pp. 8, 33, 36, 64, 142). Similarly, the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis was planned and produced by many VP members, yet this famous parallel example of what Spencer calls "civic instruction" (p. 160) is mentioned only in passing in the conclusion.

St. Louis is a city with a long history, and its problematic position between North and South, slave and free states, industrial-commercial East and wide-open West, metropole and frontier, influenced its elites and its everyday folk, black and white, in ways not dealt with in this book. If the surprising longevity of the Veiled Prophet's antiquated romanticism is to be explained, this larger past, these grander sociocultural horizons, will have to be explored.

SAMUEL C. KINSER
Northern Illinois University