Every serious student of cities - American, especially - eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable recognition: that what we see around us is intentionally designed and the designers won the argument. Redlining, restrictive covenants, highway placement, school district boundaries — these are the visible sediment of decisions made in rooms most of us never entered. What makes St. Louis singular even over such vaunted cities of memory like London, Venice, and Rome, and what makes Devin Thomas O’Shea’s The Veiled Prophet such a valuable study, is that in St. Louis the room had a name, a costume, and a parade. The decisions were not merely made in secret; they were ritualized in public, annually, by men in robes crowning their daughters before a masked monarch called the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan.

O’Shea’s central claim is deceptively simple. The Veiled Prophet Society, founded by ex-Confederate officers in the immediate aftermath of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 — the multiracial general strike that briefly produced what historians call the St. Louis Commune — was never the quaint civic pageant of local nostalgia. It was a counter-revolutionary project: an Orientalist Klansman conjured to reassure the city’s mercantile elite that labor would not rise again, and to warn labor of what awaited if it tried. The Society’s iconography did double duty, facing inward and outward at once — inwardly binding the bourgeois class in solidarity, outwardly announcing that the plantation’s authority had not died with emancipation but merely changed costume. O’Shea’s phrase for what secret societies actually do — prestige brokerages — is one of those formulations that reorganizes everything around it. The debutante ball is not adjacent to the boardroom; it is the boardroom, in its sacramental mode.

The Emancipation Proclamation forced the capitalists of Reconstruction into the wage-labor system, but the fantasy of owning slaves carried on, especially among industrialists who wished to command their armies of factory labor with an iron fist. The Veiled Prophet Society was an organization of Mississippi River capitalists who ritually resurrected the Slave Power through theater and costume, role-playing the plantation authority twice a year, “for fun,” during a parade and a debutante ball.

O’Shea sets us up for what this theater was for — showmanship, he argues, is fundamental to the fascist strategy, and “the chief fascist argument is the parade.”

The horror of the St. Louis Commune affected the city’s rich on a deep and visceral level. They rallied around the Veiled Prophet to celebrate, and ritualize, their victory over labor. To celebrate, they created an Orientalist Klansman. The story of the Veiled Prophet is an Arabian Nights fairy tale invented to assure the rich, and the children of the rich, that the workers would never rise up again. Inwardly, the Prophet reminds the bourgeois class of what can happen if solidarity among the elite is not thoroughly observed. Outwardly, he is a warning to workers that they should never challenge hierarchies, unless they’re ready for a shoot-out.

From this foundation the book radiates outward with genuine ambition. The 1904 World’s Fair, with its human zoos instructing the working citizenry in the proper harmonization of capital and labor. Charles Lindbergh, garlanded by the city and by the Reich in turn. The remarkable chapters on Tom Dooley, Dr. America — the St. Louis doctor-saint who became one of the CIA’s most effective assets, his humanitarian celebrity helping manufacture American consent for Vietnam. I found his relationship to Michael Harrington, founder of The Democratic Socialists of America (The DSA) interesting. The threads running through the House Select Committee’s “St. Louis plot” theory of the King assassination. The Brookings Institution, founded by a Veiled Prophet, later certifying St. Louis as the nation’s most distressed city was like asking the arsonist to write the fire report.

Running beneath all of it is O’Shea’s coldest observation — that the Prophet’s elite regarded poor St. Louisans as “low-status, disposable people in the same way that they deemed an adversarial foreign population less human, with less of a right to life, especially if there’s a war to win”, no more entitled to life than the adversarial populations of the South Pacific. The domestic and imperial threads are one thread. And finally Ferguson, whose sundown-town history and chained roads to Black Kinloch reveal 2014 not as an eruption but as a continuation. O’Shea is persuasive that St. Louis is a bellwether — that its fault lines, running unbroken from the Civil War to the present, are America’s fault lines, merely more legible here because the elite was careless enough, or confident enough, to wear its mask in the street.

Reading from Virginia, I kept testing that bellwether claim against Richmond, and it holds with unnerving precision. Richmond had no Veiled Prophet, but it scarcely needed one: the former capital of the Confederacy performed its secret rites openly in bronze rather than silk, lining Monument Avenue with mounted Confederates in what amounted to a permanent parade — the same iron fist in a velvet glove, cast rather than costumed. And when the ritual grammar of the twentieth century shifted from pageantry to pavement, both cities spoke it fluently. In Richmond, the Richmond–Petersburg Turnpike — now Interstate 95 — was driven through Jackson Ward, the “Harlem of the South,” and through Shockoe Bottom, which before the war had been the largest slave market on the continent outside New Orleans; the city’s African Burial Ground, where the enslaved and free Black dead were interred beside the gallows, spent decades entombed beneath highway ramps and a commuter parking lot. St. Louis performed the identical operation on Mill Creek Valley, the Black neighborhood of some twenty thousand souls flattened in 1959 for the corridor that became Highway 40 and its attendant “renewal,” and on the riverfront blocks cleared for the Arch, as Devin O’Shea describes — monumentalism and demolition, as in Richmond, working as a single gesture.

The pattern repeats wherever one looks: Interstate 375 through Detroit’s Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, I-94 through St. Paul’s Rondo, I-10 down the oak-lined spine of Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans, the city that lent St. Louis its Prophet in the first place. The interstate era, viewed this way, was the Veiled Prophet’s parade route nationalized — a procession of concrete through precisely the neighborhoods where Black wealth, memory, and the dead themselves had accumulated, communicating the same message the floats once did about who owns the city and who merely labors in it. The graves of Shockoe Bottom lie under the asphalt - making literal what O’Shea argues throughout: the American city is built directly atop what it refuses to remember, the roads and city structures are just the veil to the secret history behind.

The book is not without formal frictions. It is repetitive — the same formulations of the Prophet’s function, the same return to 1877, recur across chapters with metronomic regularity. Whether this is a flaw or a method is genuinely uncertain to me. There is something liturgical in the repetition, a cadence of beats that mirrors its subject: the Society itself worked by annual recurrence, the same parade, the same ball, the same crowning, ritual repetition as the engine of hegemony.

What the book put me most in mind of, unexpectedly, was Italo Calvino. In one of my favorite books, a repeat annual read, Invisible Cities, Marco Polo entertains Kublai Khan with tales of fantastic cities — cities of memory, cities of desire, cities and the dead — until the Khan perceives what the traveler has known all along: every city Polo describes is Venice. All cities are one city. The recognition is what releases him.

The resonance with O’Shea runs deeper than mood, because the Veiled Prophet’s own literary genealogy passes through precisely such a frame-tale. Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh — the 1817 Orientalist bestseller from which the Slayback brothers lifted their mascot, by way of a New Orleans Mardi Gras float — is the story of a poet telling tales to a Mughal princess on her journey from Delhi, and “The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan” is the first tale told.

Two Eastern courts, two storytellers spinning cities and prophets for a royal listener: Calvino’s Khan and Moore’s prophet are siblings in the same Western dream of the Orient that the St. Louis elite raided for its costume chest. The Calvino insight is O’Shea’s insight - arrived at from the archive rather than the fable: read closely enough, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Richmond, Detroit, Philadelphia — all of them are St. Louis. The Veiled Prophet is a study of one city that is secretly a study of every city; the veil, lifted anywhere, is lifted everywhere.

There is a final irony the Society’s founders could not have intended. In Moore’s poem, Mokanna’s veil conceals not divine radiance but hideousness — he is a fraud whose mystique survives only so long as no one looks directly at him. The captains of industry chose, as their eternal mascot, literature’s great warning about what veils are for. Few self-indictments in American history have been so ornate. O’Shea notes that “in mid-nineteenth-century literature, a veiled prophet is someone so brutal and deceptive that it’s difficult to look directly at them.”

What emerges, reading O’Shea alongside Calvino, is a theory of the city as a narrated thing. Benedict Anderson taught us that nations are imagined communities — populations too vast for acquaintance, bound instead by shared fictions. St. Louis presents the concentrated case: a city whose ruling class did not merely inherit a national fiction but commissioned a bespoke one, imported from Moore’s Persia and staged annually as civic liturgy. The Slaybacks performed a second-order theft: an English Romantic’s fantasy of a Persian fraud, repurposed to costume an American Klansman. Khorasan-in-St.-Louis is a fiction of a fiction, twice removed from any place that could contradict it. A mask borrowed from a land that exists only in poetry can never slip.

Here Calvino reads as the benevolent inversion of the whole operation. Marco Polo, too, spins imaginary lands for a real sovereign, but his fictions are diagnostic: each impossible city an instrument for seeing the one real city truly, and the Khan frees him the moment he recognizes the fiction as fiction. The Veiled Prophet works in the opposite direction — the parade depends on no one asking who stands beneath the veil, and the single occasion the Society lifted it, revealing the police chief who had broken the strike, the revelation was itself a threat or a warning of the fascist union between the city-state and corporations, as when a protestor revealed the Monsanto Vice President as the Veiled Prophet a hundred years later.

One veil lifts to liberate; the other lifts only to menace. Every city, one begins to suspect, is organized around some Khorasan of its own — an invented tradition, a bronze Camelot, a frontier — an imaginary elsewhere conscripted to govern a real place. The open question is whether a city can do what Kublai Khan does: hear its founding fictions told back as fictions, recognize itself, and be released. That, in the end, may be the best description of what O’Shea has written — a Marco Polo performance for St. Louis, a book of fantastic tales that all turn out to be about the listener.

I must end, however, with a dissonance, because the book itself trained me to notice it. In his acknowledgments O’Shea thanks, among others, the hosts of TrueAnon — including Brace Belden, who years ago embedded himself with the Kurdish YPG in Syria, a militia then operating within the American security umbrella. Having just read four hundred pages on characters like Tom Dooley — the charismatic narrator whose frontline authenticity was precisely the mechanism by which intelligence services laundered a war into a humanitarian cause — one cannot help but feel the parallel arrive dissonantly. I make no accusation; the cases differ in motive, scale, and consequence, and Belden went as a volunteer, not an asset. But the structural rhyme is exactly the kind the book highlights: the embedded voice, adjacent to American power projection, returning home with narrative authority. A history of engineered social relations that closes by embracing its own scene’s prestige brokerage produces, at minimum, a cognitive hum. Perhaps that is the book’s final, accidental lesson — that no one, not even the unmasker, stands entirely outside the parade.

None of this diminishes the achievement. The Veiled Prophet is deeply researched, vividly told, and structurally important: it supplies the missing middle term between conspiracy theory and materialist history, showing that elite coordination is neither paranoid fantasy nor impersonal market force but something more mundane and more damning — a club, with dues, a ballroom, and a costume budget. The Khorassan Ballroom, O’Shea notes, still bears the name.

Nothing changes, the cities change their veils and the powers perform their ritualized dances of power and oppression.