The Failed Joke of the Veiled Prophet

A new book, The Failed Joke of the Veiled Prophet: How a Captured Illinois Klansman Became the Grim Symbol of St. Louis’s Happiest Civic Celebration, by George Garrigues, will be released on February 1.

The book from City Desk Publishing reveals that a widely seen photograph of a hooded man holding a pistol and a shotgun is not a Ku Klux Klan night rider at all but is an "improvised" stand-in from Southern Illinois.

The image has been erroneously presented as a symbol of the Veiled Prophet Parade of St. Louis, Missouri, most recently when it was paired online with that of sitcom star Ellie Kemper under the hashtag #KKKPrincess. She had served as the Veiled Prophet Queen of Love and Beauty in 1999 at the age of nineteen.

“I don’t know any other spoof in American journalism that has gone so sour,” writes Garrigues, a retired journalist and journalism professor. “It’s time to set the record straight.”

As a woodcut, the image was first published in a news story in the newspaper Missouri Republican on August 23, 1875, and then reprinted in a humor column on October 6, 1878, Garrigues has discovered.

The image has often been identified as connected somehow with the first Veiled Prophet Parade, a yearly celebration in St. Louis which began in 1878.

The photograph was taken by Republican reporter James A. Dacus the week of August 17, 1875, the book reveals. Dacus had been joined in a 20-mile buggy ride from DuQuoin, Illinois, to the county seat at Benton by Cyrus Oberly of the Chicago Times and the Cairo Bulletin, whose reportage included this key description of Dacus’s photography:

Dacus “improvised a Ku-Klux, according to agreement, dressed him in bloody garb, and extracted from his person four pictures.” (Oberly, Cairo Bulletin, August 29, 1875.)

The image was first used to accompany a startling Republican full-page news piece detailing vicious KKK crimes, including murder, followed by the arrest of a dozen Southern Illinois night riders, most of them later charged with violating the federal Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

A Republican writer repurposed it three years later, on October 6, 1878, as the top illustration of a humorous article about the first Veiled Prophet Parade, along with images of a bug, a lion, and a “lady with a cup of hot chocolate.”
The Atlantic magazine copied the image to its September 2, 2014, issue, claiming it was “meant to serve as a sort of empty shell that contained the accumulated privilege and power of the status quo.”

A book by a Harvard University professor stated in 2020 that the image was that of the first Veiled Prophet, who “patrolled the streets of St. Louis on the night of October 5, 1878, a revolver in one hand, a rifle in the other, a bowie knife looped through his belt.”

And in summer 2021, Garrigues wrote, “sitcom actress Ellie Kemper was crowd-shamed on the internet because somebody discovered that twenty-two years earlier she had reigned (at age 19) as the Queen of Love and Beauty during a fancy hoedown put on by rich toffs in St. Louis,” the Veiled Prophet Ball.

“Vidiots with computers quickly found the image online and cast it as a photobomb alongside Kemper in reproachful YouTube videos. A Confederate flag waved in more than one, which is pretty lame considering this image was made in Illinois, never a part of the Confederacy.

“Social media took note. The hashtag #KKKQueen popped up. Kemper found it wise to post an Instagram mea culpa in which she said that the Veiled Prophet affair ‘had an unquestionably racist, sexist, and elitist past. I was not aware of this history at the time, but ignorance is no excuse.’”
Garrigues wrote: “So here’s a whole book to cure any ignorance concerning the origin of this Veiled Prophet myth, . . . based on research and common sense, not on preconception.”

The Veiled Prophet Parade, which attracted tens of thousands of spectators each year for over a century, has been replaced by America’s Birthday Parade, held every July on the Mississippi Riverfront.

The Failed Joke of the Veiled Prophet: How a Captured Illinois Klansman Became the Grim Symbol of St. Louis’s Happiest Civic Celebration can be ordered from any bookseller or from your favorite online site.

GEORGE GARRIGUES ON AMAZON.COM