| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Thomas M. Spencer. The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration: Power on Parade, 1877–1995. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2000. Pp. xv, 204. $29.95.

In the winter of 1972, civil rights advocates in St. Louis, Missouri, took aim at a rather unlikely target. The Veiled Prophet ball—the Midwest's oldest and most public debutante ball—had long given St. Louis's prominent families an opportunity to show off in each other's company. Given the city's grave socioeconomic problems—only six months before, St. Louis spectacularly demolished the infamous Pruitt-Igoe project, laying waste to a group of thirty-three public housing apartment blocks that had come to symbolize the city's failure to house its poor—what could be more trivial? But to the Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION), social injustice and the ball were dialectically related. When ACTION disrupted the December ball by shouting "Down with the VP," scattering leaflets, and, most dramatically, clambering on stage and removing the crown and veil that adorned the pageant's king, it sought to make that connection explicit. 1

That seemingly innocuous display events like the Veiled Prophet ball often serve the interests of those in power was not lost on civil rights protestors of the early 1970s, and it should not be surprising that historians have begun to investigate them as sites of cultural hegemony and resistance. Most studies examine the years surrounding a tradition's invention or, perhaps, make general comparisons about, say, pageants in Victorian England or parades in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Few, however, trace the historical evolution of a display event over an extended period. Thomas M. Spencer attempts such a project and largely succeeds. . . .

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