This weekend, a newspaper clipping emerged with a photograph showing The Office and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt actress Ellie Kemper as a 19-year-old pageant queen for a distinctly unsettling event known as the Veiled Prophet Ball. The ball is a centuries-old ritual in her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, with historical ties to the city’s business elite and white supremacist overtones. Let’s unpack.
What is the Veiled Prophet Ball?
The copy in the story announces that Elizabeth Kemper, then a freshman at Princeton University, was crowned Queen of Love and Beauty at the 1999 Veiled Prophet Ball, a historic St. Louis event originally created by a 19th-century secret society called The Order of the Veiled Prophet. Framed today as a debutante gala, the ceremony involves a procession of that year’s deb class (about 70 women), who parade down the “Veiled Prophet runway” in “couture gowns,” in front of about 2,000 “family and friends.” The Order is composed of the upper echelons of St. Louis business and society, and every year it anonymously nominates a Veiled Prophet, whose identity is kept a secret and who crowns a Queen of Love and Beauty—the honor that Kemper received—before presenting her with an elaborate family heirloom.
Does the ball have a history of racism?
Although the group has no known ties to the KKK, a sample of the ball’s original imagery from an 1878 edition of the Missouri Republican shows a white hooded figure (the so-called Veiled Prophet) carrying a shotgun and pistol. The Order allowed neither Jewish nor Black people in until 1979, and was a big target of the civil rights movements in the 1960s and onward. In 1972, the Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes managed to sabotage the ball, symbolically unmasking the Prophet in an attempt to expose which members of the St. Louis elite were involved. As the most flagrant expressions of white supremacy became less socially acceptable in the ensuing decades, the group shrouded itself further in secrecy, renaming its annual parade—an accompaniment to the ball that sent floats throughout the city—the Fair Saint Louis. Black Lives Matter activists still show up to protest the ball.
Anything else about this ball I should know?
A cultish air of elitism also pervades the group’s entire vibe. That annual parade was largely conceived in 1878 as a sort of antidote to increasingly effective labor strikes that had been borne from Black and white workers cooperating. And the ball itself, at least in its original form, has a sort of Handmaids’ Tale-esque eeriness in the way it mimics nuptials. The paper clipping mentions a “court of special maids,” five young women who seem to essentially function like maids of honor. Naturally, at least for several decades, all female participants were presumed virgins, and one was even cast out of St. Louis society in 1928 for having married three days prior to the ritual. While the Veiled Prophet’s website makes no mention of whether there is still a Veiled Prophet nominated, photos from the 2019 event confirm the role still very much exists.
Was Ellie Kemper in the Order?
It’s not totally clear. But it wouldn’t be all that surprising that, in 1999, the Princeton-bound daughter of a banking CEO participated in an annual ball thrown by a cohort of wealthy white businessmen. Kemper is part of a long line of Missouri elites: her great-great-grandfather was a banking and railroad magnate, which likely made him a great candidate for a group banding together against railroad worker strikes. Kemper has yet to release any comment.