The Failed Joke of the Veiled Prophet

A new book, The Failed Joke of the Veiled Prophet: How a Fake Illinois Klansman Became the Grim Symbol of St. Louis's Happiest Civic Celebration, by George Garrigues, is now on sale.

In 126 pages from City Desk Publishing, Garrigues writes that a photograph of a hooded man holding a pistol and a shotgun has for the past score of years been presented as a symbol of the Veiled Prophet Parade of St. Louis, Missouri, and that this specter was claimed to be an "expression of class and racial control."

"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."

But the photograph was actually that of an innocent bystander who was posed in August 1875 with weapons seized after a mob of hooded KKK riders were arrested in Franklin County, Illinois.

The fellow was dressed in confiscated Klan regalia and stood with Klan weapons in front of an early camera furnished with glass negatives. Four images were made. One of them was used in the Missouri Republican newspaper on August 23, 1875. It was hustled up again three years later, on October 6, 1878, as the top illustration of a quasi-humorous Republican article that mocked the first Veiled Prophet Parade that week, along with sketches 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 that the man in the picture 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 flatly and wrongly in 2020 that the photograph 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, 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 found the image online and cast it as a photobomb alongside Kemper in reproachful YouTube videos or Twitter postings. A Confederate flag waved alongside her, which is pretty lame considering this mock Kluxer was photographed in Illinois, never a part of the Confederacy.