Sleepless in Amsterdam.

Amsterdamned? 

The things that we watch when we can’t sleep.

This will be a boring travelogue about how I became a new person in a new country. The truth is that I ferreted out the nearest place to smoke as soon as I got off the plane at Schipol. The closest thing I’ve had to a conversation with a human being in the past 48 hours is a man at Rembrantplein telling me his name was “Arthur, for the invisible king Arthur,” or something like that, and asking me for one of my last American Spirits, while complaining how awful the weather was that day because he was a depressive. (It was 75 and sunny.)

Social Agency and the St. Louis Black Veiled Prophet Celebration

In the 1920’s, the Veiled Prophet Organization codified its origins myth in a short illustrated text entitled “The Veiled Prophet’s Golden Jubilee.” They wrote how the “the “youthful and venerable” Veiled Prophet of Khorassan had flown from Persia on his magic carpet to keep watch over the City of Saint Louis, which he had seen “grow from a riverside town of a few square miles to a metropolis of first importance.”[1] They wrote how he was “civic leadership incognito,” a wealthy but selfless benefactor who, in secret, engaged in civic projects to promote the City and who returned every year with his royal court to hold a grand festival celebrating the City’s progress.[2]

The social motivations behind the origins of the Veiled Prophet are darker; by looking at the content of the parades as well as the political circumstances surrounding the creation of the organization, historian Thomas Spencer showed how it functioned as a means of social control. The position of the elites who began the Veiled Prophet Society was compromised in the wake of the 1877 railroad strike, and they formed the organization in 1878 in part to reassert their role as masters of the city. The parades, by focusing on patriotic American themes, worked to instill in the public white, middle-class values. Furthermore, the first Veiled Prophet, and the only one to not be kept secret in the 150-year history of the organization, was the then-Chief of Police, John G. Priest. By placing law enforcement at the symbolic center of the 1878 pageant, the organization sent a clear message to the “subjects” that police power was on the side of the elite, potentially quelling any further incidents of unrest.[3]

However, public spaces and public memory are never without contestation. Even Spencer notes that “parade spectators were not necessarily showing their deference to social betters simply by looking on.”[4] I am interested in the way the groups who the official Veiled Prophet organization sought to control responded to the parades and the balls. Many clearly enjoyed the celebrations and didn’t give them a second thought, and parades were important civic ceremonies throughout the twentieth century. But some responded to the pageants in counterhegemonic ways, rebelling against the overt, elitist symbolism of the Veiled Prophet.

For this paper, I look specifically at the Black Veiled Prophet balls that occurred several times throughout the twentieth century, as African Americans were officially barred from entrance into the official organization until 1979 and wouldn’t have been able to participate in the “official” organization until then. While the balls of 1919 looked very different from the celebrations that took place in 1968, the first appearing as more of a direct replication of the white celebration and the second being an overt form of mockery and protest, I argue that both iterations, as they corresponded with waves of Black Nationalism in the U.S., were sites of contestation, where black power could be celebrated and asserted. I also analyze these celebrations within the context of broader social movements in the St. Louis area, and, lastly, speculate on the changing role of the Veiled Prophet over time.

Origins of the Veiled Prophet.

In order to get a sense of what the Veiled Prophet was and why it is such a catalyst for protest, I will briefly discuss the history of the organization. I only came to learn about the Veiled Prophet in the wake of Ferguson; writers at The Atlantic and other media pointed to the seemingly strange and arcane festival as evidence of St. Louis’s deep-seeded racism, placing early depictions of the Prophet alongside pictures of Klansman in order to illustrate their similarity.[5] Indeed, this is how it seems to us now; the responses on Twitter after this article became popular reveal that very few twenty-somethings in St. Louis were aware of the phenomenon and, when confronted with it, saw it as a weird, dated ritual of the St. Louis elite (see Figure 1).

So it might be, but it began in response to social unrest and remained influential throughout the first half of the Twentieth Century. In 1877, railroad strikers had succeeded in paralyzing the city for a week; more than 1500 marchers from St. Louis and East St. Louis, backed by the Workingman’s Party, pushed for reforms such as an eight-hour work day and a ban on child labor.[6] Also, as Spencer notes, “many African Americans participated in the strike, thus providing the business class with a sense that black residents of St. Louis did not know their proper place.”[7] (This fear of insubordination would later arise in the aftermath of the East St. Louis Race Riot, when many whites worried about black rebellion after the white murder and terrorization of blacks across the river.)[8]

Although the business class was eventually victorious, quelling the unrest with the deployment of federal troops and specialized police forces, they were also jostled, and shortly after, in 1878, a small group of elite businessmen and politicians, headed by Alonzo Slayback (who himself was an ex-confederate officer), formed the Veiled Prophet Organization. This organization would try to restore order and promote faith in the City through the moralizing force of parades and civic ceremonies, as parades, in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, were greatly influential civic events.[9]

The early parades celebrated St. Louis’s history, valorizing men such as Pierre Laclede and August Chouteau. The early parades were also dedicated to providing “proper” culture to immigrants, blacks, and the lower classes; the theme of the floats of the 1881 parade was “10 popular authors;” the 1884 parade was about the plays of Shakespeare; the 1896 parade was about Western art; and the 1893 parade was about “storied holidays,” which helped teach immigrants about American culture and about appropriate modes of behavior.[10] Thus it was that the early Veiled Prophet parade wove “history, middle-class culture, and morality together into a single tapestry.”[11]

Many argue that the iconography of the Veiled Prophet draws on the iconography of the KKK. While it is easy to make this argument, especially when placing the images side-by-side as the article in The Atlantic did, it is not historically accurate. The Veiled Prophet lifted its imagery from the New Orlean’s Mystick Krewe of Comus, a Mardi Gras group that used the Prophet as its figurehead. Stretching farther back, Comus took the icon from Thomas Moore’s epic poem, “Lalla Rookh,” where the Prophet was depicted, interesting, as a villain, anything but the benevolent dictator that Slayback and the other St. Louis founders had intended. In this tale, the Prophet goes by the name “Mokanna,” an “evil white sorcerer who rapes innocent maidens” and who, after enslaving his population and committing mass murder, leaves “the dark Arabian hero of the tale to kill his beloved accidentally when he finds her disguised in the Prophet’s robes.”[12]

The Mystick Krewe of Comus and other Mardis Gras spectators enjoyed this figure the way one enjoys a notorious supervillain; however, the Prophet was stripped of its wickedness when the Slaybacks transported it to St. Louis, and here it has stood, a noble figure, ever since. The yearly debutante ball, fair and parade drew crowds, and the debutante ball is still cited as one of the most illustrious in the world.[13] The parades and balls were covered by the Post-Dispatch, who also speculated on the identity of the Prophet, and then on the television, as the balls were aired on local stations every December throughout the 1970’s.[14]

Clearly, the Veiled Prophet organization doesn’t have to have direct connections to the KKK to make it a racist and elitist organization.[15] As we shall see in the 1960’s, the organization came under attack by Percy Green and other ACTION (Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes) activists who wanted VP members—the heads of big businesses—to hire more African Americans. After these episodes and Green’s subsequent publicization of its less-than-illustrious origins-story as rapists and labor-squashers, the Organization changed the name of its yearly festival simply to the “VP Fair” and then, in 1992, just to “Fair St. Louis,” erasing all evidence of the past. Hence, the surprise by dozens of social media buffs when the ball was live-tweeted and images of a portly man in a purple veil escorting a young deb down a velvet isle, scepter in hand, began to be circulated. Watching from the sidelines, we in the Gateway City could only shake our heads. It was, strangely and after all, a tradition.

The First Black Veiled Prophet Ball, 1919.

“Equal in importance to the Colored people of St. Louis was the Colored Veiled Prophet Ball at Jazzland.”[16] So begins the St. Louis Argus’s description of the first annual Black Veiled Prophet celebration in October of 1919. Spencer, in his text, indicates that the Argus routinely published the white organization’s parade route on its front page and that the black middle class that read the paper was captivated, so much so that they created their own celebration that “appeared to be taken quite seriously by the participants” and included many rituals lifted from the white celebration, such as the coronation of a Veiled Prophet queen, the appointment of a court, and the procession of the court around popular black establishments (such as Jazzland or the Classique, which were located in the old Mill Creek Valley neighborhood).

The Argus article confirms this, writing how, “with a blaze of trumpets and a clash of symbols,” His Royal Highness entered the arena bedecked in “gorgeous raiment befitting his royal station” and that he “mingled with his happy subjects.”[17] Even the language mimics the language surrounding the white Veiled Prophet balls, with its obvious floridness and the way it appealed to conventions often used to describe royalty.[18] Indeed, it was the black “royalty” of St. Louis who were represented at the ball, the “colored aristocracy” of St. Louis that Cyprian Clamorgan so famously wrote about.[19]

However, this black version of the Veiled Prophet ball should not be seen merely as a copying of the exclusive white organization. In this section, I explore the ideology of black liberation inherent in this activity, by looking at the mythology surrounding the black Veiled Prophet, the history of the St. Louis Argus in which it was publicized, and the larger history of pan-Africanism in St. Louis.

The first indication of Black Nationalism in this celebration is in the title of the Veiled Prophet himself. “His Royal Highness” was not the prince of Khorassan as he was in the white version of events, but is dubbed “Ros Menelik,” or “King Menelik,” the name of the famous emperor of the newly-independent Ethiopia. Emperor Menelik II ruled over Ethiopia from 1889 to 1909 and successfully fought off Italian invaders in the battle of Adwa, thus making the country a diplomatic power. He was also interested in modernization and helped introduce Western technologies to the Abyssinian region.[20]

Menelik had even planned to come to St. Louis in 1903 before the World’s Fair, where he was to have an exhibition. Although he himself was not able to actually make the visit, the St. Louis Republic publicized the fact that the World’s Fair still intended to have a showcase about Abyssinia. The exhibit was to feature “mainly natural products, ivory, models of clothing, and robes and religious insignia from Abyssinian churches.”[21] However, there is no indication that the World’s Fair actually succeeded in having an Abyssinian showcase; no exhibit was listed for the region in the official catalogs, although the Fair did have a “Tribes of Africa” exhibit.[22]

Still, perhaps middle-class black St. Louisians in 1919 remembered the descriptions of Menelik (from the Republic, as well as other sources) and were inspired. The U.S. Commissioner to Abyssinia had reported that while visiting Menelik, he “was escorted to the palace by a brigade of 3,000 mounted troops, arrayed in flowing robes of silk and satin, and with mantles of lion and leopard skins, carrying shields of burnished gold and silver.”[23] Who knows if this is hyperbole or not, but it nevertheless points to the kind of imagery used to describe African kings, a mixture of the primitive (“lion and leopard skins”) and the palatial (“silks and satins”).

Also at this time, African Americans in St. Louis would have been no stranger to pan-Africanism. Marcus Garvey had emerged from Jamaica in the early teens to promote universal black brotherhood and a strengthening of the alliance between blacks in the United States, South America, and abroad, and especially pushed for increased support for African states like Swaziland and Ethiopia.[24] He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1916 to accomplish these ends. UNIA emerged at a key time: 1916 was the time of the Great Migration, when southern blacks moved north to escape police brutality, low wages, terrible living conditions, and to find jobs. However, the conditions in the North were not much better from those they had fled.[25]

The African American community in East St. Louis was also terrorized during the infamous race riots during the summer of 1917. American Pogrom. Garvey spoke out on this, saying that now it was a time to “lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy” and that “white people are taking advantage of black men today because black men all over the world are disunited.”[26]

The black Veiled Prophet of 1919 was tightly aligned with the mission of the St. Louis Argus in which it was publicized.[27] The Argus was founded in 1912, presided over by the president, J.E. Mitchell. Henry Lewis Suggs, who wrote on the black press in the south, states that the newspaper was created for the express purpose of “organizing the black community for political action.” Its masthead sported two slogans: “An exponent of truth and justice” and “a square deal for every man,” and it heavily endorsed the Republican Party. Mitchell himself founded Citizen’s Liberty League, whose goal was to elect more blacks to public office and increase the representation of blacks on political boards and committees.[28]

By the 1920’s, the Argus asserted that blacks had “awakened to a new consciousness of their own identity and purpose,” and Mitchell himself was a supporter of Du Bois’s pan Africanism, calling DuBois a “fearless leader” and reporting on the second Pan African conference in 1922, whose purpose had been to focus attention on African culture and black oppression within the United States.[29] The black Veiled Prophet ball would have been one of those St. Louis institutions that tried to reclaim African culture, specifically though the vehicle of the king, so aptly named Ros Menelik.

However, compared to the second black VP celebration that would arise in the 1960’s during another wave of black liberation ideology, this celebration was still a middle-class affair, avoiding the radicalism that the latter would become known for. To begin with, the leaders of the Argus were from an elite black fraternal organization, the Knights of Pythias, similar to the fraternal organizations that spawned the white Veiled Prophet (the Mystick Krewe of Comus). The league demanded black participation in the Republican party and supported the Urban League and the NAACP, but it distanced itself from Marcus Garvey once he attacked the NAACP.[30] Clarence Lang confirms this in his own text, calling the Argus “antiradical” in the context of 1920’s labor action and a “longtime Republican stalwart” even when the tide was changing toward the Democrats.[31]

Furthermore, the first black Veiled Prophet was a “Mr. John C. Lewis of the Twentieth Century Club.” Although information about the Twentieth Century Club in the 1920’s is scarce, Lang does indicate that it was an elite organization.[32] Also, in a volume entitled “St. Louis: The Fourth City” from 1909, Walter Barlow Stevens writes that the Twentieth Century Club was a highly influential liberal Republican organization that was born in the aftermath of the civil war.[33]

Either way, the black Veiled Prophet, while its rise was contingent with the Back to Africa movement and liberation sentiment, still remained largely an upper-class activity. I cannot say for certain why the celebration stopped later in the 1920’s, but perhaps the depression (which would have hit St. Louis blacks with more force), as well as waning interest in public ceremonies overall, contributed to it.

The Second Black Veiled Prophet Ball, 1968.

The second coming the Black Veiled Prophet would not be a class-segregated affair. Activist Percy Green, who, throughout the 60’s and 70’s, worked for CORE and ACTION to fight for civil rights, wrote in 1970 that “at the Black Veiled Prophet, we allow people of all economic levels and all colors to enter. In another four or five years, we’ll see whether or not supporters of the White Veiled Prophet Ball have learned the concept of humaneness from the Black Veiled Prophet.”[34] His celebration would be one that was self-consciously the opposite of the white ball, one that celebrated blackness and condemned the white organization for both its racism and its elitism.

Indeed, Green was at the helm of the protest movement against the Veiled Prophet, staging protests against it every year, but he was not the only one to notice that it was a symbol of the city’s elitism. Spencer writes how one Jewish woman, during the 1960’s, remembers how she used to love to watch the Veiled Prophet Queen in the parade, but was always told that she could never be Queen because Jewish girls were not accepted within the organization. (It was during this time that organization attempted to make the parades more pleasing for families; no longer were they ways of indoctrinating immigrants and the lower class in the ways of “proper” American culture, but were rather seen as amusing displays, similar to how we currently view parades.) The Jewish woman then began to see the parades as the condescending spectacles they were, the parades being a kind of gift that the wealthy gave to the poor, who were only able to look on and swoon. The class element was obvious.[35]

For African Americans, the race element was also obvious, as there were clearly no blacks in the procession nor in the organization overall, and wouldn’t be until 1979. It was because of this that Green and his fellow protestors began to target the organization; for them, “the Veiled Prophet celebration symbolized racism and white control of St. Louis’s economy.”[36] Although ACTION’s main endeavor was to fight for more and better jobs for African Americans, it saw the protesting of the Veiled Prophet as especially pertinent, as many of the heads of the large corporations around St. Louis were members. Protesting the Veiled Prophet was protesting the exclusivity of the St. Louis elite, how the public and private spheres were closely intertwined, and how the main economic machine was and continued to be a white man’s social club, where strings could be pulled if you knew the right person.

During this time, the official Veiled Prophet Organization was holding its galas at the Keil Auditorium, which was funded by taxpayer dollars. The demands ACTION made of the Veiled Prophet organization were twofold: They wanted the CEOs to hire more minority workers, and ultimately, they wanted the organization to disband, as public money that could better be spend elsewhere was being funneled indirectly toward the organization to provide it with space at Keil. ACTION protested every year between 1965 and 1976, by lying in front of the parade route or picketing outside the Ball with signs reading “VP=KKK” or “Veiled Profit$.”[37]

The VP Organization eventually pulled the Queens from riding in the parade, out of fear that the debutantes would be attacked.[38] The most famous incident occurred during the 1972 ball, when ACTION infiltrated the Ball and one of its members, Gena Scott, slid down a rope onto the stage where the Prophet was holding his court and ripped off the Prophet’s mask, revealing it to be the CEO of Monsanto, Tom K. Smith. (This is only the second time in history that the identity has been revealed, although many continue to speculate.)

It is in this context that Percy Green began his counter-festival, the second Black Veiled Prophet Ball (and last, to date). His Prophet and Queen wore robes with African prints, rather than the illustrious gowns of the white’s celebration. His celebration also took place at the St. Louis Wall of Respect, a mural in Midtown that featured the likenesses of black heroes such as Malcom X, Martin Luther King, JR., Marcus Garvey, Amiri Baraka, and so on. As Ben Looker notes in his history of the Black Arts Movement in St. Louis, this wall was a key meeting place for black activists in the area, and brought together artists, performers, politicians, and community members together in an effort to “bring on black awareness and black consciousness of black history.”[39]

Although the valorization of black culture in his celebration was real, ultimately Green meant it to be a farce; in the margins of a scrapbook in SLU’s archive of ACTION documents, he had scrawled that this celebration was “a protest—a parody—to make a mockery of the white Veiled Prophet, the St. Louis symbol of white racism and oppression.”[40] In a newspaper clipping from the same archive, he is quoted as saying that ACTION “always used to say we’d like to challenge the white VP on the battlefield of justice.” They named their queen the “Queen of Peace and Justice” rather than the “Queen of Love and Beauty,” which was the name of the white Veiled Prophet Queen, and every year Green would invite the white Prophet to attend the black Veiled Prophet celebration. In no way did he want to join the white celebration, though; Spencer writes that “the Black Veiled Prophet celebration, like the 1968 Miss America Protest by radical feminist groups, was a public lampoon—an artful use of guerilla street theater.”[41]

In this way, it was distinctly different from the Black Veiled Prophet Ball that appeared in 1919. While both were driven by the need to promote black arts and culture and while both, through their iconography, created solidarity with a global black liberation movement, the earlier ball did show true signs of wanting to copy the illustriousness of the white Veiled Prophet, albeit within their own communities, while the latter celebration was a deliberate protest.

Still, what we can learn from these incidents is that public space and public celebrations are always negotiated. In his text, Spencer seems to indicate that cultural production goes one way—from the top down, from the dominant classes to the subservient masses. Especially when discussing the early period of the parades, he makes the public seem like dupes, easily swindled by the pageantry and mysteriousness of the Prophet and his entourage. However, upon closer examination, we see that the public who are supposedly being indoctrinated with middle-class norms were, in fact, actively contesting the figurehead, and entirely aware of the exclusivity he represented. It is important to remember that even with the most powerful civic ceremonies and the most excessive public displays, not everybody, even in supposedly “sleepy” St. Louis, is a willing subject.

 

Bibliography

Beauchamp, Scott. “The Mystery of St. Louis’s Veiled Prophet.” The Atlantic, September 2, 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/fair-st-louis-and-the-veiled-prophet/379460/

Berger, John. “The Veiled Prophet.” Berger’s Beat, Jan. 15, 2015. http://bergersbeat.com/the-veiled-prophet.

Bobley, Georgia. “Top Five Debutante Balls of the World,” Guest of a Guest, January 27, 2012, http://guestofaguest.com/socialities1/the-top-5-debutante-balls-of-the-world

Burbank, David. Reign of the Rabble: the St. Louis General Strike of 1877. New York: A.M. Kelley, 1966.

Clamorgan, Cyprian. The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Originally published in 1858.

Cronan, Edward David. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955.

“Fairy Land: The Story of the Pageant.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), Sept. 10, 1883.

Ferriss, Lucy. Unveiling the Prophet: The Misadventures of a Reluctant Debutante. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2005.

Gordon, Colin. Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Hess, Robert L. Ethiopia: The Modernization of Autocracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970.

Hill, Robert A. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers: 1826 – August 1919. Oakland: University of California Press. 1983.

“His Mysterious Majesty the Veiled Prophet’s Golden Jubilee: A Short History of St. Louis’ Annual Civic Carnival.” Pamphlet produced by the Veiled Prophet organization, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Veiled Prophet fair. St. Louis, Missouri, 1928.

“King Menelik Accepts Invitation.” The St. Louis Republic (St. Louis, MO), Feb. 25, 1904.

Lang, Clarence. Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.

Looker, Ben. The Point from which Creation Begins: The Black Artists’ Group of St. Louis. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2004.

Lumpkins, Charles L. American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008.

“Ros Menelik, Colored Veiled Prophet, At Jazzland.” The St. Louis Argus (St. Louis, MO) Oct. 10, 1919.

Sandweiss, Eric. St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

Spencer, Thomas. The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration: Power on Parade, 1877-1995. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002.

Stevens, Walter Barlow. St. Louis: The Fourth City, 1764-1911, Volume 1. St. Louis: S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1911.

Suggs, Henry Lewis. The Black Press in the South, 1865-1979. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 1983.

Veiled Prophet, The. “Hungry for Self-Puffery,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), Oct. 4, 1882.

[1] “His Mysterious Majesty the Veiled Prophet’s Golden Jubilee: A Short History of St. Louis’ Annual Civic Carnival.” Pamphlet produced by the Veiled Prophet organization, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Veiled Prophet fair, 1928. 3.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 43.

[4] Ibid., 20.

[5] Scott Beauchamp, “The Mystery of St. Louis’s Veiled Prophet,” The Atlantic, September 2, 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/fair-st-louis-and-the-veiled-prophet/379460/

[6] David Burbank, Reign of the Rabble: the St. Louis General Strike of 1877 (New York: A.M. Kelley, 1966).

[7] Thomas Spencer, The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration: Power on Parade, 1877-1995 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 16.

[8] Charles L. Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008).

[9] Spencer, The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration, 17. Interestingly, in the next passage, Spencer also writes that pro-business newspapermen considered a strike-related parade led by black workers to be a “riot,” and when a few of the marchers stole small amounts of bread and soap from nearby stores, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote that they were “tramps and loafers” who were “anxious to pillage and plunder.”

[10] Ibid., 41.

[11] Ibid., 43.

[12] Lucy Ferriss, Unveiling the Prophet: The Misadventures of a Reluctant Debutante (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 20.

[13] See, for example, Georgia Bobley, “Top Five Debutante Balls of the World,” Guest of a Guest, January 27, 2012, http://guestofaguest.com/socialities1/the-top-5-debutante-balls-of-the-world

[14] Spencer, The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration, 138.

[15] St. Louis, perhaps more than other cities, I think, is controlled by a small cadre of wealthy elite. In American Pogrom, Charles Lumpkins, writes how “most politicians in East St. Louis, including the political bosses, were businessmen involved in real estate activities.” (Charles L. Lumpkin, American Pogrom, 4.) Also, as Colin Gordon exquisitely details throughout “Mapping Decline,” this is equally the case on the other side of the river, where private real estate interests were in bed with ward alderman and they were all trying to squeeze the most from the federal and state governments in the name of “progress” and “development.” (Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.)) It’s not so different from the eighteenth century, when Chouteau and Laclede and Soulard parceled out lands to their heirs who subdivided it among their friends. (Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 46). The cliché that St. Louis is a “little ‘big city’” is true, and it is true that many people stay here, and that this leads to the kind of incestuous business/political relationships so remarked upon in these texts. It is also what leads the St. Louis Society gossip columnist John Berger to say that “everybody knows each other” at the “in-gathering of the clans,” that penguin-suited fathers waltz alongside the “ghosts of founding fathers and civic leaders” (John Berger, “The Veiled Prophet,” Berger’s Beat, Jan 15, 2015, http://bergersbeat.com/the-veiled-prophet).

[16] “Ros Menelik, Colored Veiled Prophet, At Jazzland,” The St. Louis Argus (St. Louis, MO) Oct. 10, 1919.

[17] Ibid.

[18] For example, an article from 1883 describes his robes as being “of silk and satin, heavily studded with diamonds and rubies and sapphires” and trailed by a “long flowing mantle.” (“Fairy Land: The Story of the Pageant,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), Sept. 10, 1883, 4.)

[19] Cyprian Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press), 1999. Originally published in 1858.

[20] Robert L. Hess, Ethiopia: The Modernization of Autocracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 51-52.

[21] “King Menelik Accepts Invitation,” The St. Louis Republic (St. Louis, MO), Feb.  25, 1904.

[22] Library catalogue of worlds fair exhibitions

[23] “King Menelik Accepts Invitation,” The St. Louis Republic.

[24] Edward David Cronan, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955), 17.

[25] Ibid., 22.

[26] Robert A. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers: 1826 – August 1919 (Oakland: University of California Press, 1983), 213.

[27] This is similar to the way the official Veiled Prophet Organization was affiliated with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, often sending them promotional material to publish or even penning letters to the editor signed by the Veiled Prophet himself. (See: The Veiled Prophet, “Hungry for Self-Puffery,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), Oct. 4, 1882.)

[28] Henry Lewis Suggs,The Black Press in the South, 1865-1979 (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 1983), 217-221.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid., 220, 227.

[31] Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 24, 32.

[32] Ibid., 20.

[33] Walter Barlow Stevens, St. Louis: The Fourth City, 1764-1911, Volume 1 (St. Louis: S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1911), 848.

[34] “Black Veiled Prophet Ball,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 23, 1970.

[35] Spencer, The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration, 122.

[36] Ibid., 123.

[37] Ibid., 124.

[38] Ibid., 126.

[39] Ben Looker, The Point from which Creation Begins: The Black Artists’ Group of St. Louis (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2004), 26.

[40] Archive.

[41] Spencer, The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration, 124.

The Allure of the Prophet: Visual and Textual Iconography and the St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration, 1878-1928

Since 1878, the St. Louis Veiled Prophet has been a central civic icon, and the organization behind it, comprised of elite businessmen and politicians, has thrown a yearly Parade and Ball to celebrate the City. Since the 1970’s, interest in the Prophet has waned, and the parade festivities that once stood on their own have merged with Fair St. Louis. However, in its infancy and for much of the twentieth century, the Veiled Prophet was a strong force uniting the public in revelry, and in many ways it continues to be a powerful symbol.

In this paper, I am interested in the way images worked in the early years of the Veiled Prophet parade to build up anticipation for the event and give the Organization and the City an aura of grandeur. I am particularly interested in the yearly parade posters that the men of the Organization used to announce the coming of the Prophet and the ensuing celebration. Why were these images so powerful? What symbols did they draw on to inspire excitement in people? How did this iconography change over time, and why might this be?

I am also interested in how written descriptions of the Veiled Prophet worked hand-in-hand with the parade posters to create this sense of intrigue and wonder. W.J.T. Mitchell writes in “Picture Theory” how certain texts are meant to be visualized, that they utilize visual language to captivate the reader. Thus, I also look at this “iconology of the text” as it occurs in newspaper articles that ran as supplements to the images of the Prophet.[1]

First, though, it is necessary to provide some context, and to situate myself in the existing scholarship about the Prophet. To begin with, I have to say that I am ambivalent about the Veiled Prophet Organization. On the one hand, I agree with historian Thomas Spencer’s argument that the Veiled Prophet was primarily about social control. In his work, he argued that the Veiled Prophet Organization was formed not only to foster business alliances and promote St. Louis, but also as a response to labor strikes that swept St. Louis in 1877 and shook the power and position of the business class.[2]

Spencer argues that these elites reclaimed the streets after these strikes with their own festivities—the Veiled Prophet celebration–and that the parade floats, which ranged from themes like “American History” to “Ten Greatest Books,” instructed the public in patriotism and middle-class morality. Their power threatened, the elites of the Veiled Prophet Organization, many of whom had been members of the citizen’s militia that had formed to quell the strike, sought to reassert their authority via public spectacle.[3] Such public spectacle was a common way in the late nineteenth century to build up civic consensus and identity, similar to the way Theodor Adorno argued that mass media worked to maintain hegemony in the early twentieth century.

Spencer proves his thesis by showing the connections between the Organization and law enforcement and mining the themes of the floats for proof that they were indoctrinating the masses. However, he often portrays the public as dupes who were blindly sucked in to this gaudy display of power and majesty. In doing this, he makes them seem foolish, and downplays the sheer power of the Veiled Prophet as a civic icon and discounts the magic and mystery that it held for many people.

Thus, as I specified before, this project seeks to uncover some of the ways that the Veiled Prophet created its own spectacle. I do agree with Spencer that the organization was about social control—that interpretation underlies this project. But I also wish to dig deeper into how it accomplishes this, specifically by looking at the work done by images and their corresponding texts. In doing so, I hope to add something to the conversation, to shed light on the power of the visual to create consensus, and show how the Veiled Prophet Organization deftly morphed their iconography depending on what they wanted to accomplish within St. Louis society.

On October 6, 1878, the Missouri Republican gave us the first visual rendering of the Veiled Prophet. In this depiction, the Prophet is clad in white robes and wore a tall, pointed hat. As a first impression, it is foreboding; the overall figure is reminiscent of a Klansman, a similarity not likely to be missed by nineteenth century audiences. He also holds a rifle in one hand and a trident in the other, with another pistol within easy reach. The text accompanying the image, most likely provided by the Organization members themselves, stated that “it will be readily observed from the accoutrements of the Prophet that the procession is not likely to be stopped by street cars or anything else.”[4] This first parade, with the image of the vigilante Prophet behind it, was obviously meant to occupy the streets and reassert hierarchy and order. The article described the parade as unstoppable even to “street cars;” this was a clear provocation of the laborers who had participated in the strike, most of whom had been street car workers.

It was for these reasons that Spencer argues that the Veiled Prophet Parade, and this image in particular, “was an expression of class and racial control.”[5] However, the image is more than this. Mere threats would not have drawn throngs of people to the city, nor lured the current denizens from their stoops to the parade route. There is a joviality to the image as well that is inviting: The Prophet’s hat is bedecked with carnivalesque stars and his face is painted like a clown’s. He rides on a piece of cloth—perhaps his magic carpet—and he seems to be emerging from some secret grotto. Although the Republican’s description points out his formidableness, his ability to keep the public in line, and his intention to proceed through the streets no matter what, the Republican also described his expression as one of “benignant firmness.” His is dignified. In this image, the Prophet is also a paternal figure who has the potential to be cruel but who seems to have a nobler, perhaps even entertaining aspect to him.[6]

It is this mixture of fear and amusement that made the Prophet so titillating, such an object of fascination. The Prophet did help quell unrest as Spencer argued, but it was done by walking the line between intimidation and revelry, by showing brawn but also by creating excitement and inspiring the public to come together in celebration.

Other publications confirm this combination of the frightening and the jovial that the first image of the Prophet conveyed. On September 3, 1878, a few weeks prior to Missouri Republican article, the St. Louis Evening Post ran a lengthy piece that advertised and anticipated the coming parade, and it utilized these competing themes of evil and good to add to the Prophet’s mysteriousness. “Who were the Veiled Prophets?” the article begins. “’Are they of seraphic, demonic or human kind?’ ‘Of human kind,” it continues, “but whether prophets of good or evil, I know not….’”[7]

This mystery and potential for wickedness was compounded later in the article when it discussed the sounds that some people had heard coming out of the Veiled Prophet’s lair (at 12^th and Market): “Some say they have occasionally heard a kind of wild, unearthly laugh, while others maintain that they have heard a rasping sound as of a carpenter’s saw. But, strange to say, no living man or woman has ever seen a human being go into the building nor come out of it.”[8]

The article also played with the idea that nobody knew who the Veiled Prophet members were and that, therefore, they could be anywhere. The author writes that “you may jostle against them in the streets all day–and all night–but you will never know one as such.” The mixture of not knowing whether the Prophets were good or evil and not knowing which members of the public comprised the organization (they could be walking among us right now!) made the public even more curious.

Emphasizing Spencer’s point, this also, of course, did the work of social control. The article was essentially saying that the “Veiled Prophets” were constantly surveilling the public. With the Prophet, there was a vague threat not just of violence but of a mystical or demonic kind of cruelty that made people wary of crossing the wrong person and rebelling against the social hierarchy. Even if the article engaged in obvious hyperbole and was meant to be promotional–even if the public knew it was, at least in part, in jest—the text still advertised that there was a new group of powerful people who remained incognito and were potentially armed. This doesn’t have to register consciously to be effective; the message to be cautious around this strong, paternal, superego figure is still communicated.

But it was also all in good fun: The celebration seems like a Bacchanal, and the article ends with a call to celebration, stating that “old, young, male or female, will have one night of wild, unrestrained revelry, and the Veiled Prophets shall have the honor of it all.”[9] The image that later circulated from the Republican further did this work, providing a strong visual confirmation of the mystery, strength, jocundity, and, yes, potential for violence that the Prophet possessed. All of these qualities helped draw people to the event and created a rallying point—a powerful civic icon.

Lastly, the language of the article itself tread another fine line, that between aiding the reader in visualizing the Prophet and also maintaining an air of mystery. As Mitchell suggests, many poets’ answers to the question of how to verbally represent the pictoral is by using bright and evocative language; however, writing is also used—particularly by the Romantics, whose prose this work is reminiscent of—to express the invisible, that which is higher and inexpressible in the language of pure pictures. The article does everything but describe the regalia of the Prophet; it says that the Prophet’s residence is a “low, rakish building” and that, on the night of the parade, “the most ravishing music will burden the air with melody.”[10] By leaving a large blank space in the middle—the actual secret of what the Veiled Prophet will look like—the article creates a much stronger tension.

Thus, in looking at this first visual depiction of the Veiled Prophet and the texts that accompanied it, we begin to see more nuance to the figure and can appreciate how this combination of text and image built up tension and created a spectacle before the actual spectacle of the parade. The Veiled Prophet did do the work of social control and helped consolidate social power for the men of the organization, who, when their identities were made public on the night of the procession, would become even more highly esteemed; however, to reduce the entire figurehead and occasion to a form of indoctrination does not do justice to the richness of its imagery and the utter excitement and fascination it aroused.

In the coming years, the members of the Veiled Prophet organization changed their presentation, both of the Prophet and of themselves. Some of this can be attributed to the inevitable changes that happen when a large organization matures, but some of it has to do with changing social dynamics. The threat of labor unrest was not as pressing by the mid-1880’s, and perhaps because of this, the organization backed away from the vigilante figure of 1878 toward a more overtly regal one.[11] It makes sense to think that the changing goals of the Organization dictated how they presented their figurehead.

Veiled Prophet’s Sixth Annual Autumnal Festival, Oct 2nd, 1883. [Front cover]. Chromolithograph by Compton Litho Company, 1883 Missouri History Museum Archives. Veiled Prophet n25819

In looking at the images from this era, we can still see how the Organization created excitement and interest via its posters and imagery, but we see that they do this by using symbols that indicated royalty and grandeur and not through the overt threat of violence. This 1883 poster shows the Prophet transformed: No longer he is clad in white robes and a pointed hat, but rather wears a velvety red cloak and jewels (see Figure 2). He holds not a pistol but a wand and a written proclamation of his event, proving that it is his summons—his edict—through which he will exert his influence (much like the businessmen whose identities this figure cloaked.) His crown is not reminiscent of the Klan by any means, but is golden and be-winged. He appears as a knight, possibly having tamed the beast the he rides in on, which looks back at him in anger but which he manages to subdue nonetheless.

It is important to recognize that the members of the Veiled Prophet Organization were also heavily involved in boosterism and that the Prophet’s pageants were meant to help St. Louis compete economically and symbolically with other major cities. The parades were paired with the Agricultural and Mechanical Fair, an exposition where merchants were able to sell and promote their goods.[12] Businessmen came from all over to attend this fair and also to witness the Veiled Prophet Parade, as is indicated in an 1882 article that describes the large number of “country merchants” that were arriving in local inns for the event. Leading business houses prepared advertising cards with the visage of the Prophet to be dispersed to their customers, and these cards replicated the ornateness of the parade posters. [13]

This helps explain the transition to more regal costuming; in the same article, the writer also indicates the grandeur to which the Veiled Prophet Organization was aspiring to. He states that “the regular street pageant and illuminations of the secret order will be more magnificent than anything of the kind ever presented in the United States.”[14] The entire city was on display; the parade route would be filled with bright lights, so much so that “the assembled thousands will forget that it is night, if indeed the illuminations do not exceed the brightness and glare of the sun.” The Veiled Prophet Organization went overboard; they piled “attraction on attraction with a generous and lavish hand, so that not a city in the old world or the new can vie with [them] in [their] revels.”[15]

The Prophet’s costuming of this era is described in the articles as one of illustriousness. “His robes are of silk and satin,” the author writes, “heavily studded with diamonds and rubies and sapphires” and trailed by a “long flowing mantle.” The beast he rides on is portrayed in detail, for those who might miss the poster; the author writes that he is “seated upon his winged steed—half horse and half griffin, and a sacred flame borrowed from the altar fires of the Orient burns from a plume on the top of his golden helmet.” Although he is veiled, his identity still a source of mystery and speculation, “there is that in his proud bearing that speaks of the glory of his brow, the brightness of his eyes, the venerable splendor of his beard.”[16]

Interestingly, the text of these later articles appeal less to a sense of mystery than before. While the language is evocative and rich, the first article that described the Prophet was far more tantalizing and enigmatic. The 1878 text skirted around the image of the Prophet, avoided describing him in any kind of detail; this new lurid description is more majestic, but less awe-some. The iconography of these words directly corresponds to the image they are evoking, leaving little of the sense that they are attempting, through omissions, to describe that higher, invisible reality that the previous article endeavored to describe.

Nevertheless, grandeur was grandeur. Having gained a foothold in the lives and imaginations of the citizenry, the Veiled Prophet continued to put on a show, although in these years it embellished its image with majestic words and symbols, as the primary project of the Organization was boosterism and self-promotion.

Around this time, but more so in the early twentieth century, the iconography of the Veiled Prophet became more overtly Orientalist, using tropes of the “Mystic Middle East” to inspire the public to attend the celebration.[17] This 1923 poster shows the Prophet towering over the city, wearing a belt of jewels and a gold helmet and robes and a veil similar to a sheik. The practice of using Oriental imagery to convey the impression of mystery was popular among other men’s fraternal organizations, particularly among so-called “secret societies” like the Freemasons, where miniature Arabic or Turkish swords were used as decorations for shrine fezzes.[18] As Melanie McCalister notes in her summary of Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, Americans and Europeans see the Orient as “a world of harems and magic lamps, mystery and decadence, irrationality and backwardness.”[19]

This trope was further employed in the illustrations used in the 1928 “Golden Anniversary” promotional booklet published by the Organization itself, entitled “The Veiled Prophet’s Golden Jubilee” (see figure 4). The image on the inside flap of the book shows the same figure as in the 1923 poster—the wizened wizard holding a scepter, his other arm outstretched—although there are more specific Arabic symbols in this rendition. The medallion on the top of the scepter is the Islamic star and crescent, and the belt that seems just a link of jewels in the 1923 poster looks to be, in this drawing, to be more like a sheik’s sword. Also, the backdrop to the drawing in the Golden Book is of the domed roofs and minarets of mosques, and palm trees line a path that winds into the distance.[20]

By the time the Veiled Prophet Organization celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1928, it was firmly cemented in the culture of St. Louis. In following the trajectory of the images used by the group to promote the parades, as well as the newspaper articles that supplanted these, we can more clearly see the sheer majesty of the operation, and how fantasy is used to draw crowds and inspire citizens.

This fantasy looks different over time. At first it was more aggressive, in the form of a man clad in stark white robes, a pointed hat, bearing arms, but still with a clownishness to it, and the Veiled Prophet Organization used this combination of intimidation and joviality to titillate viewers. Later on, with the threat of labor unrest firmly in the past, the Veiled Prophet became more of a regal figure, clad in knightly robes, and aided in the Organization’s goals of boosterism. The final incarnation of the Prophet, one which remains with us to this day, is an Oriental figure, wearing the robes and veil of a sheik and drawing on tropes of the mystic Middle East to achieve its aura of opulence.

Perhaps we can conclude from the staying power of this later incarnation that it is easier to consolidate power not through brute intimidation, as the earlier figure tried in part to do, but through majestic pageantry and the presentation of illustriousness. This analysis helps us appreciate the richness of the symbol of the Prophet and the power of its images, rather than falling into the trap, as much current scholarship does, of seeing the Prophet as merely a symbol of oppression and social control.

Furthermore, without understanding the magic of the language and images and the mystery of the veil, we miss an important part of the story: The veil and the enchantment and the playful pageantry allowed the elite members of the Veiled Prophet Organization to articulate a vision of a hierarchical society where they were kings, but hide behind the idea that the celebration was “all in good fun.” For a city that was already nervous about the control of government and public life by a small cadre of West End businessmen, the “Big Cinch,” and of a fragmented City government that was overrun with corruption and ran on quid-pro-quo relationships, the Veiled Prophet members needed a figurehead—a veil—to hide behind.[21] They gave the appearance of jesting, when they were actually articulating a very real political opinion, one that argued that the City ran best when modelled after an Old World hierarchy where they, behind the guise of the Prophet, were at the helm. Thus, the images tell a similar story to Spencer’s one of social control, but they also present us with a richer idea of the intrigue around the Prophet, and help explain just why it was so captivating.

 

 Bibliography

“Fairy Land: The Story of the Pageant.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), Sept. 10, 1883.

“Glimpses at the Glorious Pageant of the Fair.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), Sept. 13, 1882.

Gruber, Christiane and Avinoam Shalem. The Image of the Prophet: Between Ideal and Ideology. Berlin: De Gruyter Press, 2014.

His Mysterious Majesty the Veiled Prophet’s Golden Jubilee: A Short History of St. Louis’ Annual Civic Carnival. Pamphlet produced by the Veiled Prophet organization, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Veiled Prophet fair. St. Louis, Missouri, 1928.

McCalister, Melanie. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994, 112.

Spencer, Thomas. The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration: Power on Parade, 1877-1995. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002.

Stein, Lana. St. Louis Politics: The Triumph of Tradition. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2002.

“The Autumn Festival.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), Sept. 1, 1883.

“The Veiled Prophet.” The Missouri Republican (St. Louis, MO), October 6, 1878.

“The Veiled Prophets: True Inwardness of the Mystic Order,” St. Louis Evening Post (St. Louis, MO) 3, 1878.

“Veiled Prophet Long on His Throne Before First Queen Ascended.” Daily Globe Democrat (St. Louis, MO), Sept. 30, 1925.

[1] W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 112.

[2] Spencer, 3.

[3] Ibid., 10-19.

[4] “The Veiled Prophet,” The Missouri Republica, (St. Louis, MO), Oct. 6, 1878.

[5] Spencer, 7.

[6] “The Veiled Prophet,” The Missouri Republican.

[7] “The Veiled Prophets: True Inwardness of the Mystic Order,” St. Louis Evening Post (St. Louis, MO), Sept. 3, 1878.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] The organization also began holding debutante balls in 1894, of which they are most famous for; the fact that they instigated these balls later on proves they were becoming more entwined with high society over the years. (See: “Veiled Prophet Long on His Throne Before First Queen Ascended,” Daily Globe Democrat, (St. Louis, MO), Sept. 30, 1925.)

[12] Spencer, 8.

[13] “Glimpses at the Glorious Pageant of the Fair,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), Sept. 13, 1882, 4.

[14] Ibid.

[15] “The Autumn Festival,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), Sept. 1, 1883.

[16] “Fairy Land: The Story of the Pageant,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO), Sept. 10, 1883, 4.

[17] The figure of the Veiled Prophet had always Middle Eastern, and previous articles cited his origins in the land of Khorasan in Persia, but it wasn’t until later on that his dress and surrounding symbols became specifically Middle Eastern.

[18] Christiane Gruber and Avinoam Shalem, The Image of the Prophet: Between Ideal and Ideology, (Berlin: De Gruyter Press, 2014), 377.

[19] Melanie McCalister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 8.

[20] His Mysterious Majesty the Veiled Prophet’s Golden Jubilee: A Short History of St. Louis’ Annual Civic Carnival. Pamphlet produced by the Veiled Prophet organization, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Veiled Prophet fair. St. Louis, Missouri, 1928.

[21] Lana Stein, St. Louis Politics: The Triumph of Tradition (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2002), 10.

White Desire and New Orleans Voodoo Tourism

In 1946, Robert Tallant mused on the predicament of the white man who was curious about New Orleans voodoo. In his account, he makes his way from Canal Street down toward Rampart, crossing into the black district; he smells the “stale beer and whiskey” and pauses before the novelty shops but is always self-conscious of the fact that he is a foreigner.[1] With wonder he watches older black women purchase balms and trinkets and will speculate on whether or not they are Voodoos, but cannot break through the barrier to ask them. “Everyone will be polite,” Tallant writes, “but they will tell him nothing.” They might offer to sell him some wares, but that is all; “that is all the average white man in New Orleans will ever learn about Voodoo. That is all the Voodoos want him to know, unless he is one of them himself.”[2]

White curiosity about voodoo rituals has long brought people to New Orleans, before and after Tallant; in the late nineteenth century, journalists would come from the north hoping for a chance to witness the famous rituals on St. John’s Eve, when all the Voodoos would gather on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain for what white reporters would consider an orgiastic bacchanal.[3] Now, no trip to the Bayou City is complete without visiting a voodoo shop or placing flowers on the grave of the famous voodoo priestess, Marie Laveau. However, voodoo remains hidden, occult, wrapped in a mixture of fantasy and embellished stereotypes, and unless one is a practitioner, still a source of desire and unfulfilled curiosity.

However, modern tourism has attempted to offer outsiders a way in, a safe way to experience voodoo culture by going to occult shops, visiting Laveau’s grave, getting a tarot reading, or going to the historic Voodoo museum. The voyeuristic component of white journalists peering in on black rituals in 1870 or uncomfortably observing voodoo practitioners vending their wares through shop windows is still there, but it has been transformed by the tourist experience; voodoo has been commodified and used as bait to lure the curious to the city.

I am interested in the manufacturing of this experience, in how the tourism industry has attempted to bridge the gap that Tallant illustrated in 1946, capitalizing on white desire for the exotic other by offering visitors, through common touristic practices, a way in. Even though most visitors are savvy enough to understand when something is a tourist trap, they nevertheless still come and purchase voodoo trinkets and other occult-related experiences. I am interested too in the idea of authenticity, both the authenticity that some visitors expect and the way the tourism industry has offered them a variety of levels of experience, from the blatantly phony to what is assumed to be closer to the real. How has authenticity has been manufactured by the city, especially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? And how do real voodoo practitioners negotiate the touristic landscape?

First, it is necessary to understand both tourism in general and the way tourism has operated specifically in New Orleans; then it is possible to consider several voodoo experiences that are available for the tourist, such as the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum,[4] Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo,[5] and the gravesite of Marie Laveau,[6] in order to dissect these cultural artifacts through the lens of white desire for the other and a craving for authenticity.

Tourism is a key facet of modern life. In The Tourist, Dean MacCannell argues that tourism emerged as a facet of the new leisure class and as a response to alienated labor; mass tourism provided a coherent and meaningful experience that contrasted with an increasingly fragmented work-life, something that provided the tourist with markers of culture and history that helped make them feel connected to a venerated national past.[7] Tourists also tend to seek outside locations for examples of a culture that has been unblemished by industrialization, something that is no less true today than it was when MacCannell was writing in the 1970’s; he writes that “modern man has been condemned to look elsewhere, everywhere, for his authenticity, to see if he can catch a glimpse of it reflected in the simplicity, poverty, chastity or purity of others.”[8]

And, I would add, the exoticism of others. In his book, “Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy,” Kevin Gotham writes that, in regard to New Orleans, “the emergence of jazz music, the increased popularity of voodoo ceremonies and gaming, and the indelible Mardi Gras celebration contributed to projecting an image of New Orleans as a unique place with a distinctive culture and irresistible charm.”[9] This was not, however, an innocent process, and claims to authenticity were largely dominated by white interest groups. Although historically home to a large mixed-race population, with black, white, Spanish, French, and Haitian ancestry, Gotham notes how in the beginning of the twentieth century, the white residents of New Orleans transformed the term “creole” to erase blackness and mean just white French and Spanish ancestry. This white-washed version of “creole” was then used to sell New Orleans to white visitors, promising them racial homogeneity even as it offered its version of authentic, local color.[10]

Later, the development of the New Orleans Association of Commerce would provide oversight for the maintenance and restoration of the French Quarter, the main tourist district; however, not only were blacks barred from participating in the Association, but they were also strategically left out of tourist brochures. Gotham writes that “the image of New Orleans as a unique place of rich history, ethnic diversity, and unforgettable charm was built on the erasure of blacks from tourist images and local promotional campaigns.”[11] However, I would argue that the image of New Orleans as a place of exoticism and authentic blackness as well as the locale of the mysterious Voodoos was already built up in the popular imagination due to a century of journalistic hyperbole.[12] The whitewashing by the Association of Commerce did not erase those impressions, but made it so that white people felt more comfortable coming to New Orleans knowing they had a “home base” in the French Quarter and could venture out into more exotic locales at their leisure.

Voodoo in particular has always been of interest to visitors; Anna Hartnell, in her article on New Orleans tourism before and after Katrina, notes how “Voodoo tours” have been added alongside cemetery, plantation, and haunted house tours; these experiences capitalize on the stereotype that voodoo is a mystical and primitive practice and obscure the fact that it is an actual religion held by many, as well as obscuring Louisiana’s wide network of spiritualist churches that offer a combination of Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, and voodoo worship; these churches are “collapsed into one-dimensional images [of voodoo], and degradingly represented as exotic instances of ‘local color’ as opposed to significant social institutions,” ones that often have tight ties to anti-racist organizations such as the NAACP.[13]

Thus, a stereotyped black culture became one of the main draws of the city; as Hartnell writes, “Ethnic tourism appropriates black cultural forms and transports them for consumption into white tourist spaces.”[14] However, blackness was always also clearly kept at a distance from the actual tourist experience; like in many urban districts, poor blacks who worked in some capacity in the tourist industry went home at night to districts far removed from these sites. Hartnell notes that the fact that New Orleans was so strongly identified by the French Quarter, with its mere token multiculturalism, was part of the reason the world was so shocked by the aftermath of Katrina, which exposed vast swaths of the city that had been hitherto ignored, and put the plight of New Orleans’ many urban poor front and center. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, it was the main tourist center that, in the years following Katrina, was the first to be rebuilt.[15] And tourists still come in droves, desiring some kind of experience of the other, but always at a distance; perhaps, like Tallant, they think what they desire is exposure to and inclusion in authentic black practices, but based on touring habits, most are ambivalent about this closeness.

With this context, it is possible to look at several cultural artifacts that draw visitors into the black voodoo experience while simultaneously keeping them safely at bay, deftly negotiating their nervous desires.

The first place I look at is the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum. In his work, MacCannell relates the idea of front and back regions, and I read the Voodoo Museum in light of these.[16] Front regions are places like hotels and shops, where customers and service workers interact in a formal tourist setting; there is an understanding in these places that one is a consumer of an experience, whether it is viewing a display or watching a “traditional” cultural reproduction. Back regions, on the other hand, are the places every tourist hopes to penetrate, the behind-the-scenes areas where locals can be observed in their “natural environments.” No visitor likes to perceive themselves as a typical tourist, but rather as a traveler on a quest to discover something, even though travelers tend to collect “authentic experiences” as they would other commodities, and pay for them, too.

The Voodoo Museum is interesting in that, in its layout, it escorts one from a front region to a supposed back region, from a stereotypical tourist shop toward a more intimate immersion in voodoo. The Museum itself sits in a small house in the middle of the French Quarter, and its front room is a small space that doubles as a ticket office and a gift shop, vending in books, T-shirts, dolls, candles, and other voodoo paraphernalia. There is no doubt as you pay a $5 entrance fee that you are engaging in a typical tourist excursion; however, once past the threshold, the museum leads you from this entrance of obvious commercial inauthenticity to a small labyrinth of rooms that have the aura of someone’s eclectic home. The tightness of the space, the dim lighting and the incense smoke creates an almost oppressive intimacy, confusing the simultaneous awareness that one is still in a museum. This, in fact, is the illusion it promises: intimacy and inclusion for a small fee.

Laid out inside are paintings of voodoo priestesses and pictures of ceremonies as well as elaborate altars that describe common voodoo deities and offer brief incantations. Unlike a traditional museum, though, where the signifiers—glass cases, bronze plaques, drastic lighting—all act as markers for the tourist, indicating to him that what he is seeing is indeed a “site,” as MacCannell illustrates in his chapter on the “Semiotics of Attraction,” this museum for the most part shuns such markers and confronts the visitor with an immediate interaction with the altars.[17] They are invited to leave offerings, such as cigarettes, make-up, condoms, beads, or small bottles of rum. It is a participatory experience, one that allows visitors to feel as if they at least caught a glimpse of a voodoo back region, even though on some level they know it is inauthentic. It is also a safe space; it involves no real confrontation with a cultural other, but participation at a distance, bounded by the transactional nature of the experience. In this way, voodoo becomes temporarily accessible to those who desire to learn about it, something slightly more real than stopping in a gift shop or lustily peeping in through windows, but pins it still to the commercial tourism industry of downtown New Orleans.

Looming over the New Orleans voodoo scene is the specter of Marie Laveau, and her grave is another key site. Laveau, who lived in New Orleans from 1801-1881, was a free woman of color who came to be considered the “Queen of the Voodoos.”[18] Although much legend has sprung up around her, particularly during the “Laveau Revival” of the 1920’s-40’s that coincided with increased investigations and interest in Voodoo by employees of the Federal Writers Project such as Zora Neale Hurston, Lyle Saxton, and Robert Tallant, her actual domestic life did not necessarily match those tales. She married a free man of color, Jacques Paris, and later had a relationship and children with Christophe Glapion, a white native of Louisiana.[19] Although there are no verifiable records of her role within the voodoo community, as biographer Carolyn Morrow Long reports, one can safely assume that she did indeed practice voodoo and held some type of leadership position; furthermore, her profession as a hairdresser would have put her in contact with many white patrons, who she reportedly also worked spells for.[20]

From there, though, the legend takes over; newspapers consistently put her at the center of New Orleans’ voodoo activity, citing her as a leader of “that curious sect of superstitious darkies who combined the hard traditions of African legends with the fetish worship of our creole Negros.”[21] Civil rights activists considered her a champion of the black New Orleans community during Reconstruction, when voodoos were persecuted and their ceremonies raided; Laveau is claimed to have hexed the police who broke up dances in Congo Square.[22] She was also a symbol of exotic female sexuality and purportedly a “quadroon,” the one-quarter-black-blood racial designation that scholar Emily Clark describes as the epitome of stereotypical creole promiscuity in antebellum New Orleans. (The quadroon ball itself, Clark notes, “became part of a well-oiled tourism machine that supplied a ready-made itinerary of dissipation to other male visitors in the 1840’s and 1850’s.”)[23]

Thus, Laveau’s gravesite draws visitors who want to commune with the spirit of a nostalgic voodoo past, what they perceive as the heyday of voodoo rites before the Civil War; perhaps, by extension, there is also a longing for a Southern past before the devastation of the Civil War, a past of rollicking and mysterious ceremonies, red light districts and quadroon balls. A visit to the Saint Louis Cemetery where Laveau is buried is also in line with what MacCannell and others consider the religious nature of travel and tourism: Tourism can be seen as a modern take on the religious pilgrimage, where the group journey to find religious truth is replaced by the individual journey to find authenticity away from one’s own culture.[24]

Not only are traditional religious institutions opening themselves up for touristic movement like we see with the cemeteries of New Orleans in general and the gravesite of Marie Laveau in particular, but any tourist attraction can become the structural equivalent to Mecca, a site that one “just has to see” for a trip to be complete; it would not be acceptable, for example, to go to Paris and not see the Eiffel Tower.[25] These sites have been raised to the level of the sacred, accompanied often by crass commercialization in the form of souvenir reproductions—although nobody, to my knowledge, has yet created a Laveau-themed tombstone keychain. The religious, or ritualistic nature of the tour is, I would argue, doubled when tours confront actual religious places.

The gravesite of Marie Laveau provides visitors with another chance to access an authentic past; regardless of the commercial nature of the walking tours that bring people to the site, there is an air inside the Saint Louis Cemetery of suspended animation. The raised cemetery sits just north of the French Quarter, a few large blocks away from Canal Street, the main thoroughfare; it is sectioned off from the surrounding cinderblock buildings by a tall brick wall, and a similar sense of intimacy as in the Voodoo Museum is fostered by the tight cluster of graves. This experience is likewise participatory, even as it bears more of a resemblance to a religious observance; visitors are invited to leave offerings, and tour guides perpetuate the myth that if one marks three “x’s” on the grave and turns around and knocks three times, Laveau will grant them their wishes.[26] (All of this is much to the chagrin of local “Save Our Cemeteries” activists, who are appalled by the vandalism that occurs; in an article about the recent restoration efforts, one guide said that “It doesn’t make any sense. You wouldn’t travel to Egypt and do some hokie-pokie with King Tut’s pyramid, so why would you do that with a queen or a Voodoo priestess?”)[27]

Still, while observing certain rituals at the site of the famous priestess is another way white culture can access a particular aspect of this bastardized representation of black culture, and even take part in history, leaving their own mark on the site and building upon what came before, actual black people are kept strictly at bay. An interesting entry in Fodor’s guidebook states that along with Laveau’s grave, which remains a destination for “the spiritual, the superstitious, and the curious,” the Saint Louis Cemetery also houses the grave of Homer Plessy, the main defendant in 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case that upheld the state’s “separate but equal” clause.[28] Explicitly connecting the voodoo queen to an aspect of Louisiana and the nation’s fraught racial history acknowledges the injustices committed against the black population; however, in the very next line, the guidebook says that the cemetery is also located near a “downtown housing project, so visitors are advised to exercise great caution.”[29] This move immediately reifies fears of black criminality and sabotages whatever progressive claim Fodor’s was trying to make by highlighting the Plessy case. Hartnell noticed this was also the case in the guidebook’s advice regarding another cemetery; the tours continue to invoke past racist tropes, tropes that “continue to stalk the white imagination in the form of the phantom figures of usually black male predators.”[30]

Lastly, there is the occult shop. These shops are common throughout the French Quarter, stocking supplies for the actual voodoo practitioner as well as fronting as a voodoo gift shop and selling things such as alligator feet necklaces, vials of different perfumes that supposedly bring love or luck, candles, jewelry, etc. Reverend Zombie’s Voodoo Shop on the south end of the French Quarter is the kickoff point for one of the more popular voodoo walking tours, and Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo in the center of the district is well-known for both its well-stocked occult pantry and its tarot readings.[31]

Of particular note is the tarot reading; although many visitors see through the gimmicky exterior of these shops, the online reviews time and again cite the authenticity of the tarot card experience.[32] One reviewer wrote that she “received a reading yesterday from the most amazing and gifted empath…He is THE REAL DEAL.”[33] Even the Reverend Zombie website purports to be more authentic than the host of tourist shops out there, acknowledging the skepticism that the majority of both voodoo and touristic enterprises are met with.

Individual tarot readings as part of the tourist’s encounter with voodoo are also a byproduct of the maturation of mass tourism. As sociologist John Urry notes, no longer are consumers content with pre-packaged tours; tourism has responded to the shift from Fordism to Post-Fordism, where individuals now desire customized experiences and are not content to be led blithely from one thing to the next.[34] Tarot, of course, isn’t really a voodoo phenomenon but belongs to a wide range of New Age practices; however, for the majority of people, all things relating to the occult in New Orleans become unquestioned signifiers for voodoo practices. By getting one’s fortune read, the visitor is, out of the three examples cited in this paper, engaging most directly with what they consider to be (black) spiritual culture, but once again through the medium of commercial exchange.

Looking at all of this, it is easy to see Tallant’s “desire of the white man” perpetuated through the decades; although obviously not all tourists are white, by and large it is white culture that harbors a hesitant interest for the “magic” of black people. It is not at all clear, however, that they have made any real progress in looking behind the veil, and in her article, “Why We Can’t Talk To You About Voodoo,” Brenda Marie Osbey provides a response to the consistent and oppressive gaze of the visitor. She notes the young white traveler’s desire to be included in something magical and forbidden, to temporarily immerse themselves in exoticism; however, she refutes all parts of the voodoo mystique–its dolls, its incantations, its festivals, its snake charming, and even its famed Voodoo queen.[35]

She doesn’t offer much insight into what voodoo is—that’s part of the point of the essay. For years voodoo has been the object of white desire, yet the real heart of voodoo, and perhaps the real heart of New Orleans’ black culture, remains forever off-limits. “This City is our home,” she writes, “and you–no matter how long your stay–are and will always be supernumeraries on the City stage.”[36] The incessant questioning of white visitors like Tallant and later tourists is intrusive, and will never be fulfilled.

Furthermore, Osbey pinpoints the origins of such desire in colonial America; large gatherings of black people, as Long had noted, were cause for alarm, as they indicated potential revolution against slave owners.[37] Later this alarm transformed into hesitant fascination, and, as blacks were often seen as occupying an entirely different “historical and social and technological reality” than whites, they were presumed to be supernatural. “Colonial whites, by and large, believed in the inherent magical nature of black people,” Osbey writes.[38] This “inbred white superstition” has allowed the narratives of voodoo to proliferate, narratives that have then been used to sell New Orleans to tourists, resulting in the myriad of voodoo phenomena we see today. These phenomena still bear the weight of history: “Isn’t it possible,” Osbey asks, “that there remains some element of the old colonial desire to contain–and so have mastery over–at least one proven source of black resistance?”[39]

There is also a way one could read popular tourist structures of French Quarter voodoo, which, as Gotham reminds us, is heavily funded by predominately white interest groups, as a form of racial mimicry, which would validate the colonial account of Osbey’s critique (although it is often (but not always) black shopkeepers who are engaging in the performance.) Hosts repeat again and again a stereotyped form of Voodoo that was first articulated by white colonial officials and journalists in the eighteenth century, a representation laden with superstition, mockery, and the eroticism of Voodoo queens, as well as real terror over rebellion. This constant charade of black religious practices is, as postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha writes, a tactic of colonial control; it is “the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power.”[40] Tourism, and the appropriative “gaze” of tourists, is already itself a kind of representation and performance, and thus the perfect vehicle for such mimicry, disavowing blackness as it continually repeats it through “partial representations.”[41]

In this way, the unfortunately lesson for Tallant and numerous other “voodoo tourists” who travel down to New Orleans to attempt to have a real experience with black culture through the occult is that authenticity doesn’t matter, nor does one benefit from travelling with the cynical distance of the “post-tourist” who acknowledges the inauthenticity of tourist representations and merely enjoys the type of play involved in movement. The institutions that structure their experiences are the same. These institutions are led by the money-makers of the South, the same Association of Commerce that barred blacks from engaging in the City in the 1930’s and would advertise the splendor of the French Quarter while large expanses of hurricane-ravaged areas went unfunded.

If there are secrets of voodoo, perhaps Osbey is right to not want to share them. And would the “white man” really want to know? Judging by his touristic practices, which dangle authenticity while keeping him from any real encounter with the “other,” it would seem not.

[1] Robert Tallant, Voodoo in New Orleans (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1946), 4.

[2] Ibid., 6.

[3] Carolyn Morrow Long, A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 119-136.

[4] New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum, 724 Dumaine St., New Orleans, LA 70116. Visited 21 December, 2013.

[5] Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo, 739 Bourbon St, New Orleans, LA 70116. Visited 21 December 2013.

[6] “Gravesite of Marie Laveau,” Saint Louis Cemetery #1, 425 Basin Street, New Orleans, LA, 70112. Visited 22 December 2013.

[7] Dean MacCannell, The Tourist (Oakland: University of California Press, 1976), 84-89.

[8] Ibid., 41.

[9] Kevin Fox Gotham, Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 72.

[10] Ibid., 84.

[11] Ibid., 80.

[12] See, for example, “Fetish Rites,” New Orleans Daily Picayune (New Orleans, LA), June 26, 1870; Lafacadio Hearn, “The Last of the Voudous,” Harper’s weekly, Nov. 7, 1885; or Newbell Pucket, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926).

[13] Anna Hartnell, “Katrina Tourism and a Tale of Two Cities: Visualizing Race and Class in New Orleans,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2009): 728.

[14] Ibid., 741.

[15] Trouble the Water, directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (2008; New York City: Zeitgeist Films, 2009), DVD.

[16] In his chapter on “Staged Authenticity,” MacCannell bases his analysis of front and back regions off of tourism scholar Irving Goffman’s formulation. MacCannell, The Tourist, 92-96.

[17] MacCannell, The Tourist, 109-133.

[18] Long, A New Orleans Voudou Priestess, xxiiv-xxxvii.

[19] Ibid., 51-56.

[20] Ibid., 209.

[21] Ibid., xxv.

[22] Ibid., xxvii.

[23] Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 177.

[24] MacCannell, The Tourist, 42-48.

[25] Ibid., 43.

[26] Richard Webster, “Tomb of Marie Laveau, Voodoo queen of New Orleans, refurbished in time for Halloween,” NOLA.com, October 29, 2014,  http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2014/10/tomb_of_marie_laveau_voodoo_qu.html.

[27] Ibid.

[28] “New Orleans Sights: Saint Louis Cemetery #1,” Fodors Online, accessed December 9, 2014, http://www.fodors.com/world/north-america/usa/louisiana/new-orleans/review-580181.html.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Hartnell, “Katrina Tourism,” 128.

[31] “Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo: Official Website,” accessed December 9, 2014, http://voodooneworleans.com.

[32] “Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo,” Yelp.com, accessed December 9, 2014, http://www.yelp.com/biz/marie-laveau-house-of-voodoo-new-orleans.

[33] Ibid.

[34] John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage Publications, 1990).

[35] Brenda Marie Osbey, “Why We Can’t Talk to You about Voodoo,” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 58, no. 2 (2011): 4.

[36] Ibid., 2.

[37] Long, A New Orleans Voudou Priestess, 97.

[38] Osbey, “Why We Can’t Talk to You about Voodoo,” 6.

[39] Ibid., 10.

[40] Homi Babha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (Spring, 1984), 3.

[41] Ibid., 6.

Zizek, Lacan, and The Story of the Eye

It was like Simone was transcribing some vortex, the nascent chaos eddying inside her, through sensuality and sex. Flirted in a way with the empty space of being, cracking eggs into the toilet (because what, after all, is an egg?) and rolling hard-boiled ones around her body. She had no check against her desire, throwing herself into obscenity and death, neurotically obsessed with transgression in any form; Bataille writes that she “so bluntly craved any upheaval that the faintest call from the senses gave her a look directly suggestive of all things linked to deep sexuality, such as blood, suffocation, sudden terror, crime; things indefinitely destroying human bliss and honesty.”

The legitimate thrust, urgency, obsession behind her actions shouldn’t be downplayed or academically stifled; it is a world of frenetic physicality that verges on transcendental. But it is interesting to think of in in the context of psychoanalysis, too, and ideology; the transgressions of the two lovers compromise a fantasy world that, seeming to be a universe unto themselves, cannot actually be separated from the world around them or the other ideologies and actors in their lives. Throughout the narrative, the two rely on structures that are in place, and always on third parties; they are never truly, solipsistically alone with their passion. How that fantasy is constructed, too, not merely its manifest content, has curious implications for our entire modern ontological worldview .

Slavoj Zizek, the (somewhat rockstar) Slovenian politico-philosopher, provides a unique way to understand fantasy and its relation to politics by drawing on both Lacanian postmodern psychoanalysis and Marxism. In his book Looking Awry, which explores Lacan’s theories through pop culture, Zizek describes the Lacanian position that our realities are actually constituted of our fantasies about ourselves. Lacan posited three (overlapping) spheres: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic; the “Real” is conceived of as that preternatural void that exists beyond the realm of conscious thought; it is the synesthetic experience of the infant before they learn to separate and categorize experience, before they become “self-conscious” beings; the “Real” is the most inaccessible realm, submerged as we are in language, which requires that we collapse all of the possibilities of that void into actual words, iterations of self. Once we do begin to interact with the world through language, a system which is, by its very nature, always relying on reference to other things, our subjective realities are constructed from whatever is in the lexicon of the Imaginary (the phonemes, or bits, or images, or language, or whatever, on the level of proximate social relations) and the Symbolic, which is the larger ideological practices and assumptions that, although we are not always aware of it (and even if we are), we are constantly acting out in our social lives–the unknown knowns, as he puts it, the unconscious externalized.

The point for Zizek is that, as opposed to the (post?)modernist concept of an existent self that is self-consciously choosing the images from their culture to ally themselves with and thus structure their identity, he does not posit a  definite, deciding self, a Cartesian “I,” and agent behind the mask of culture.

(In fact, he rescues Cartesian philosophy at the exact moment when it poses the “self” that has lead to all of the reductive reasoning of the twentieth century. This is worth exploring, if only because I’m interested in it–Thomas Brockelman, in his book on Zizek, Heidegger, and Techno-Capitalism, writes that there was “a mistake in Descartes’ own understanding. [Descartes’] basic argument in the Second Meditation demands only that we admit there is representing going on.” (Here he is referring to the inability to trust sense data, the physicality of which is always filtered through the imperfections of human eyes, ears, experience, whatnot.) For Descartes, the subject, the “I,” remains transcendental, outside of the sphere of that representation.

But as Brockelman and many others have asserted, “This does not, in any full way, however, necessitate that this subject really ‘exists.’ Descartes’ full assertion, ‘Cogito, ergo sum,’ is certainly unwarranted.  In the place of the supposed certainty of the subject’s being, there is just a void. It is not the same subject that thinks and that is; the one that is is not the one that thinks, even more, the one that is is ultimately not a subject at all.'”

For Zizek, it’s not even about identity so much as it is about “reality,” or maybe realities, which are subjective and consist of our fantasies and our relationship to the ever-sought-after “other,” the unattainable object of those fantasies. In Looking Awry, Zizek writes that “in Lacanian theory, fantasy designates the subject’s “impossible” relation to a, to the object-cause of its desire,” and that, furthermore, and most importantly, “fantasy is usually conceived as a scenario that realizes the subject’s desire…what the fantasy stages is not a scene in which our desire is fulfilled, fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes, stages, the desire as such. The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed–and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject’s desire…to locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn how to desire.”

Simone in this light is not channelling some inner turmoil; rather, her entire self is that very fantasy she has about herself, as a writhing and sexual creature constantly challenging the boundaries of acceptable behavior. So what is the object of her desire? If we buy in Lacan’s definition that the object-a of desire must be kept constantly out of reach (so that we continually engage in (re)iteration of self and avoid the void of stasis), what is this thing that she has to keep just out of reach, to avoid the anxiety of getting too close?

At first that would appear to be Marcelle, who is posed opposite to Simone and depicted as the epitome of innocence. Simone has one of her most violent orgasms together with Marcelle while Marcelle is locked in a wardrobe. Marcelle, after also violently climaxing and pissing on herself, has a nervous breakdown and is sent to a sanitorium, kept physically separate from Simone and the narrator.

Shortly after the incident, the narrator recounts how “Simone and I were sometimes taken with a violent desire to fuck. But we no longer thought it could be done without Marcelle, whose piercing cries kept grating on our ears, for they were linked to our most violent desires. Thus it was that our sexual dream kept changing into a nightmare…Simone could not forget that the unforeseen orgasm provoked by her own brazenness, by Marcelle’s howls and the nakedness of her writhing limbs, had been more powerful than anything she had ever managed to picture before. And her cunt would not open to be unless Marcelle’s ghost, raging, reddening, frenzied, came to make her brazenness overwhelming and far-reaching, as if the sacrilege were to render everything generally dreadful and infamous.”

Perhaps there is something here, though, something real, something beyond just a fantasy-of-self, something dangerous and revolutionary. Perhaps there was a true cataclysmic connection with the other, something unexpected and from the void, an exasperating and shocking experience that warped the consciousnesses of both girls, causing one to lose her grasp on reality and the other to be plagued even further by her psychosexual death-drive. It is definitely the case that, if they were fascinated with Marcelle before, she was absolutely necessary for the continued sustenance of the fantasy, and that much of their relationship during these months was preoccupied with thinking of her and plotting ways to rescue her from the sanitorium. Once they finally do rescue her, though, the illusion proves impossible to sustain; if there was a moment of true connection with the other-a, it was momentary. The fantasy the two had created for Marcelle was not her own–Marcelle envisioned marrying the narrator, and not the endless ways to subversively fuck–and where else could this disconnect lead than to Marcelle’s increasing psychological unravelling and eventual suicide.

There is something else going on here as well, though. Not only is Marcelle the desired object that is always in some way unobtainable, but as a third party she is necessary to legitimate the perversion/subversion of the lovers. Perversion cannot function on its own; it requires another to recognize that the transgression is taking place–their obscenities would not be such if they existed in a vacuum. What makes them obscene is the assumed gaze of a third party monitor that themselves observes the mores of traditional society, a gaze that they delight in–delight in imagining the shock and disgust that their acts might illicit.

Brockelman delineates the phenomena of modern perversion, sees it as symptomatic of the modern condition itself. Having seemingly exorcised an Absolute Authority (God) from our worldview, modern philosophy is left no recourse but to pose one’s self as solely responsible for constructing and maintaining one’s universe. There is, then, the inevitable anxiety that accompanies that realization–but the decline of the Absolute Authority is, however, not really true, either. Despite having “killed God” in the Nietzschean sense, in order for our reality to have any coherence, we do have a rulebook and try to posit a Big Other, this time in the form of ideology. Our modern act is more insidious only because we have convinced ourselves we are not doing it (that our worldview is now scientific, democratic, thought through, unprescribed.) In this system, enjoyment is capitalized upon; the only moral imperative is to (without doing harm) essentially have fun, or, in less blithe words, experience existence to the utmost, revel in the human condition, live life to the fullest, surrender yourself to beauty, or whatever number of feel-good platitudes exist.

With the primacy of enjoyment and the need to also maintain a sense of objective (big Other) reality, we see modern perversion function. Brockelman writes that “it is in this sense of a disavowed belief in the Other that we are justified in following Zizek’s lead in finding the predominant master signifier of our world in perversion. The pervert is a false transgressor of the law, apparently radical in his/her willingness to engage in ‘forbidden’ practices but secretly invested in maintaining Law so as to leave room for the pleasure of breaking the rules!”

It is, as he writes, ultimately diversionary, the way all fantasy is, providing a distraction to what is the true chaotic nature of the Universe. Brockelman says that perversion is a “‘substitute’ for the traditional master signifier, an assertion that [is justified] by the analogous way that perversion diverts or fascinates us, preventing us from  ‘paying attention to what’s behind the curtain’ of fantasy… Reality gains its consistency by diverting attention from a fragmentary and senseless condition.” Or, as Zizek puts it, “perversion allows the subject to treat life as a ‘childish game,’ one ‘unencumbered by the Real of human finitude.’”

I would argue, though, Simone’s perverse construction is taken with the utmost seriousness. Her lover states that it was not a game for her; “we never calmed down,” he writes, “or played, except in the brief, relaxed minutes after an orgasm.” Even though she is fascinated with death, she plays with it safely through the construct of her obscenity, through the sheen of it.

The role of the third party–Marcelle, then Sir Edmund–always serves as a kind of “check” or authority. The modern condition requires that we construct a symbolic authority in order to maintain our reality, but we secretly know this is a false construction (insofar as it carries none of the weight of God), thus requiring our rebellion against it…Simone never really wants to escape that cycle; with Marcelle gone, who was her true other/antithesis from the beginning, she must not only have Sir Edmund to legitimate the fantasy but must hold onto Marcelle by literally carrying around Marcelle’s watchful eye inside of her vagina for the rest of the narrative.

It doesn’t end, of course, with the narrator’s discovery of the eye inside of the cunt; like the serpent eating its own tail, the world, for them, will continue to be constantly rearticulated in various transgressive fantasies, their reality constantly questioned and reframed, under someone’s watchful eye. As Bataille concludes that “In this way, we kept disappearing all through Andalusia, a country of yellow earth and yellow sky, to my eyes an immense chamber pot flooded with sunlight, where each day, as a new character, I raped a likewise transformed Simone, especially toward noon, on the ground and in the blazing sun, under the reddish eyes of Sir Edmund.”

So it goes.

The Radical Psychology of Melancholia

The space is grey and uniform. I am in it, but I am not–that is, there is no I, no dastardly wizards of conscious thought; it is just formless, inchoate, the pause before the word, the unspoken unknowing nothing–or something–from which…I don’t know. It is what I am left with sometimes, when even the barest of fantasies escape me–when I can neither envision a future I want nor a single enviable material thing. It is what I consider melancholia, the lack of desire, and not just the lack of desire but the corresponding and anxious desire for desire itself.

In 1917, Freud called melancholia the longing for the “lost love object”–perhaps not any object at all, but the longing for a drive. It is what Lars von Trier explores in his film by the very name, placing Kirsten Dunst among the grass and the horses and the burgeoning sky, alone, immobile, caught in the paralysis of that ether.

Slavoj Zizek likens this to the Lacanian “real,” the “presymbolic substance in its abhorrent vitality.” For Lacan, and for Zizek, “reality” is the stuff of illusion. We are dreamers; our identities are the stories we tell ourselves, the fantasies we play out in our minds that fabricate and tinker with the road forward to so many different goals and desires. Modern neuroscience will even corroborate; consciousness is likened to a film, dendrites and neurons the projectors for the ever-shifting narrative that plays in our heads and every moment gives us the context of who we are and what our purpose is. “Tis true,” said Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, “I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, which is as thin of substance as the air and more inconstant than the wind.”

It is nothing if not inconstant and thin, and the barrier between the Lacanian “real” of the grey and melancholic ether and the “reality” of our fantasies of consciousness is likewise indistinct; the real threatens to seep in and engulf us, remind us of the wells of deep oblivion that linger just beneath the surface. Mark Rothko, the twentieth-century expressionist painter, killed himself to keep away from such a void; Zizek recounts how his series of paintings of squares depict the existential tension between the real and reality, strict demarcating colors of grey and black, red and yellow, so that, if placed together chronologically, one can almost watch Rothko’s desperate struggle to maintain the border of his own reality until the final paintings that furiously contrast red and yellow, the paintings among which he is found dead, having slit his wrists. “He preferred death,” Zizek writes, “to being swallowed by the Thing.”

But in a way, I wonder if it has to be depressing. I wonder if there isn’t a radical type of psychology to be formed out of our melancholia, and if the extent of our obsessive desiring is not inherently structured by certain ideologies. I wonder how natural it even is to be so existentially anxious when confronted with stillness–and if so, if movement and fantasy be the sine qua non, if the extent to which we feel anxiety and the method which with deal with it isn’t profoundly shaped by ideology.

Capitalism has, at its heart, a constant striving-for; it would seem to epitomize the relentless scheming of the conscious mind, so that those immersed in it cannot help but feel this drive possess them in toto. When I am at my most deeply melancholic it is not even the chasing-after of material things I wish I wanted; that type of materialism has been transposed into other areas, into an endless gathering of ideas, accumulation of texts, minutes passed while exercising, always some kind of achievement. I define myself in large part by my patterns of consumption; the great American novelist David Foster Wallace portrays this cynical cycle of want in Infinite Jest, exploring the addictive behavior and yearning that underlay everything from drug use to competition to even the quasi-religious behavior of “recovering” addicts. The message seems to be that we can’t help but fill ourselves with some other, or escape our psychological creations of self in any way; they are we and you are they and we are they and we are all together, (to butcher John Lennon.)

Perhaps I am fallaciously glorifying Eastern traditions, but I wonder what my relationship to melancholia would be like if there were a cultural method for understanding it. If religion and ritual are the fantasies and stories that an entire group of people tell about themselves, what would melancholia look like if there was a way to insert a conscious understanding of the inchoate, Lacanian “real” into the symbolic order of our “reality”? If, instead of pathologizing the lack of want inherent in melancholia, which is so anathema to capitalism, there was a precedent for sitting back and allowing yourself to exist in that void?

Zizek, in one of his interviews with Paul Holdengraber, says that “I think sometimes the truly subversive thing is to do nothing. You know, because by doing nothing you make people feel–feel what through all their hyperactivity they are covering up.” Perhaps a truly subversive cultural psychology would be a melancholic one–not the paralysis of severe depression, of course, but the rejection of the treatment of our sometimes not-wanting as a pathology. Melancholia, when confronting capitalism, would seem to be the most radical thing of all.

The Immense Journey

What are we searching for when we travel? What is this lust we feel for movement and for the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe or the exoticism of the East? Why are we propelled from the banalities of our own towns into the vortex of some romantic unknown?

I think that the complexities involved in our flight are many. We are, after all, not the first ones; we are heirs to a cultural legacy of travelling. We come at the end of a long line of Western journeyers, as American Studies scholar Caren Kaplan points out in her book, “Questions of Travel”–the artists who fled the perceived provincialism of the United States for the aesthetically progressive metropolises of Europe, or the erudite nomads who brought back tales of their adventures in Vienna, Madrid, Marrakech–always middle-class, educated, somewhat diffident, male, alone.

We are heirs also to the industry of tourism, which self-consciously reconstructs the identity of a place and chooses celebratory parts of its history to package to consumers, and now lines and lines of tacky stores span the historic districts and indigenous people find good money in trinket-selling. This is the postmodern Disneyland-ification of countries and cultural experiences, of which most who venture abroad will claim to want to escape in order to find the “true,” “authentic” experience of a place.

I am interested in this idea of authenticity. We do seem to be, among other things, searching for truth; the self-proclaimed authentic “traveler” fumes vitriolic dispassion against the group of tourists. She seeks true cultural experiences with fervor and impatience and extensively tries to document her journey whatever way possible, to share later, yes, but to also make it real to herself. She insists, Kaplan writes, “upon proof of the authentic. The photographic component of documenting a trip, the collection of souvenirs…these activities become part of a technology of documenting the ‘real.'”

For Kaplan, there is a “crisis of reality” at the heart of our endeavor. We live every day enmeshed in a miasma of images with questionable ties to the tangible world and our own histories; it’s almost as if we travel to become real again. If we do happen to find ourselves in a manufactured tourist experience, then we become haunted by the strange idea that there is no end to the peculiar matrix of simulacra and performance. The traveler’s fear of the tourist isn’t about crowds or kitsch so much as a destruction of any hope of finding something genuine in a world increasingly dominated by disjointed messages and decaying cultural traditions.

This fear and this crisis is intricately bound up with Western colonialism; in a phenomena Kaplan calls “imperialist nostalgia,” she recalls our longing for connection with all that we’ve managed to eradicate through policy and practice, including both the cultural “other” whose traditions we seek abroad, and also the unique aspects of cities themselves, whose individuality is floundering under capitalism.

In a lot of ways, I think this is a self-imposed illusion. We are trapped in our own minds, existentially obsessed with meaning and authenticity, but if we really want truth we need only turn a corner to see the consequences of the imperialist exorcism of this “other” and how privileged our dilemma actually is. The groups of people that are forced to move–such as refugees and exiles–or those who, bound by poverty, cannot move at all, are often situated next to our hotels, but like the myth of the South American natives who were not able to see Columbus’s ships, we are not yet trained to recognize these communities as connected at all to our own ability to move so freely from place to place.

However, I’m sympathetic with the traveler. I am her. I am the daughter of Western culture, and travel, along with both the imperial tropes and the true exhilaration of movement, has been formative. For me, while I do find myself attempting to apprehend “real” experiences, my own impetus to travel is also bound with my own restlessness. It isn’t as much about the place but about the process of moving, the freedom of being unhinged from time and space.

It was, before, also a time to come to terms with the displacement and anxiety of adult life; I went on my first trip abroad after high school with the express purpose of self-consciously sloughing off my childhood skin and being reborn on the continent. In one of my travel journals, I wrote down a quote from Herman Hesse’s coming-of-age novel, Demian:

“Many experience this death and rebirth, which are our destiny, only once in their life, when childhood decays and slowly disintegrates, when all that has become dear to us is about to leave us and we suddenly feel the solitude and deathly chill of outer space around us. And very many are hung up for good on this reef and for the rest of their life cling painfully to the irretrievable past, to the dream of the lost paradise, which is the worst and most murderous of all dreams.”

I did not want to be hung up on the reef. The authenticity I sought, and that I think many others also seek, is not necessarily of engaging with a type of pure foreign cultural production or even of gleaning an understanding of my own nation and self in light of that foreignness, but darkly, negatively, of flirting a little with that “deathly chill of outer space” that displacement invokes.

Bon voyage.

My Middlewest

I’ve lived my life in the Midwest; I spent my childhood watching the undulating Missouri hills from out of car windows, heading into the supposed no-man’s-land south of St. Louis; I’ve driven the long road to Denver and the long road to Chicago and the long road to New Orleans, the apparently eternal long road to get to a place where you, ye coast-dwellers, would consider “anywhere at all”. I’ve been to Paris and Istanbul and San Francisco and New York, lived briefly in Madrid and D.C., but have only ever called St. Louis home.

In a world where everybody is expected to be cosmopolitan, where the young trot from one frantic urban center to the next in their exploration of the perfect career or the perfect relationship, to be a chronic denizen of the heartland is often looked at askance, always with a  wariness of our perceived provincialism. Their eyes are full of the notion that somehow they have lived more, seen more things, that their sidling up cat-like against the warm legs of multiple towns gives them a perspective we couldn’t hope to acquire–that in being from somewhere else, multiple places, they have suckled the culture from civilization’s teat and exist now in a realm apart.

The warped thing is that I kind of believe them. Or I did. I’ve always felt inexplicably inadequate compared to friends who trot off to New York or L.A. and set down roots. I fear there is an inability in myself, my poor Midwestern self, to completely part from St. Louis and its clusters of neighborhoods. I cannot for the life of me comfortably lose myself to the dazzle of another metropolis. Something in me can’t give up that sense of home, of place, that, despite restless college nights dreaming of moving away, still weds me to this City.

I’m starting to think, though, that this isn’t a bad thing. In a world increasingly dominated by dislocation, I feel that my deep affair with St. Louis, like those long unending marriages, is exceedingly rare, and possibly even something to cherish.

In his seminal paper on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson writes about our postmodern dislocation. The real, autonomous “self,” once considered de facto, has becoming increasingly indistinct from the flows of global capital, images and people of which it/we are immersed in. Our identities and therefore our “selves” have essentially become the images and ideas that volley around us. (We create Facebook profiles and populate them with random snapshots, which are then churned back out at us according to some algorithm in the form of our own “personalized” Facebook movies set to kitschy Hallmark nostalgia music that attempts to tell us what’s been important to us…) Having little to no resemblance to reality, these phenomena leave us in a strange and amorphous space, unsure of morality or truth. Coupled with our increasing transience, our connection to time and space, history and culture, becomes likewise amorphous.

Is it wrong, then, to want to hold on to some sense of home?  The Midwest has often been written about as a repository of old-timey values–Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Franzen, the lilting unpretentiousness of Francis McDermott’s character in Fargo–and as naive, but for me, already afloat in a postmodern ethic, grounding is important. Not that the middle of the country is more moral–of course not–but that having a real solid connection to a place, physical as well as social, and being entwined in physical webs of people seems equally as valid as having a multiplicity of experiences in different, more “cultured” places, and I’m not sure I’d give it up so easily for a feeling cosmopolitanism. The familiar rise of the red brick apartment buildings, the barges and the river pushing on in the distance…

“That’s my Middle West,” says Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, “…I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up… in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

And perhaps I am, too, the stodgy forever-wife of this City on the river–travelling, yes, but compelled always to return. And I’m starting to see the uniqueness, and the value in that.

The Entertainment!

Nothing exemplifies the difficulty of real human communication and agency in contemporary America better than Infinite Jest. The circuitous and hefty novel by the late (great) David Foster Wallace begins with Hal Incandenza, boy-protagonist, sitting before an interviewing panel of academics and University administration. His inner voice as they question him is completely sane–a highly intelligent monologue on his qualifications and his humanity. “I read. I consume libraries,” he thinks he says to them, “But it transcends the mechanics. I feel and believe. I’m not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.” And as things become more desperate, “…Please don’t think I don’t care.”

All that ends up verbalized, though, if you could call it that, all the panel hears, are these screams–strangled, obnoxious, animal sounds–nothing of the real thing inside him, trying to get out. And the more he thinks he’s speaking coherently, the more horrified those around him become.

The problem of communication, of externalizing the internal, of making some other person understand the strange copse of a world inside your head, is one that would come up again and again for the author, who struggled himself with depression and with the dilemma of really reaching an audience in an America of declining literariness. His first novel, The Broom of the System, centered around crossed telephone wires and the chaos that ensued from the mixing of signals. His books and essays themselves are famously riddled with footnotes and parenthetical asides, showing the burden of information and ideas that he obsessively carried with him and couldn’t relinquish, causing his thoughts to splay out mycelia-like under the obvious structure of the prose.

But why is it so hard to say what you mean? Or to be understood–to find someone to understand? The conundrum of having our own separate consciousnesses, cited as far back as Babel, is clearly nothing new–so why does it seem more difficult now? Why do our writers struggle so neurotically with questions of expression, despite the excessive amount of ways there are to communicate?

I think that some part of it necessarily has to do with mass culture and our desire–and possibly need–for constant entertainment. I revisit something Theodor Adorno said about this “culture industry,” that it feeds us diversions and ecstasy in the form of media and that not only do we assimilate to this empty enjoyment but we begin to recreate it for ourselves and in our relationships. Spoon-fed ecstasy and mimesis spells the death of identity: “It is this rather than self-expression and individuality which forcibly produces such [imitative behavior], which recalls St. Vitus’s dance or the motor reflex spasms of the maimed animal.” (If you didn’t already think this postwar German theorist had a funny bone, think again.)

In Infinite Jest, Wallace builds a particularly malicious form of entertainment, cleverly called the Entertainment, a video so enthralling that watching it causes the viewer to become catatonic and eventually die due to self-neglect. The two other narratives in the novel involve a similar type of surrender to pleasure-addiction in the form of drug use (and the ensuing indoctrination of recovery-speak) as well as competitive tennis. The point is this: That all we want is to be by ourselves, amused, and we seek the swiftest road to such amusement, regardless of the cost.

If Wallace’s dystopia in any way mirrors reality, it has profound implications for the type of communication we all seek. It is nearly impossible to thoroughly engage someone in a genuine and interested way when you have become so accustomed to focusing only on your consistent, almost demanding need for the continuous intake of things–gratification, media, information, alcohol, whatever. The problem with Wallace’s Entertainment and with Adorno’s mass culture is not that it is entertaining per se, but that it robs us of the ability to be outward-looking, creative people that can engage and empathize with another’s complex personhood, with all of the faults and contradictions inherent to that. Mass entertainment and addiction are simple and totalitarian, and thus they are dehumanizing. They require only that we please ourselves.

Adorno, and maybe Wallace as well, positioned themselves and other intellectuals outside of culture, able to have some critical vantage; many who write about mass culture similarly have this notion of a throng of people greedily slopping up whatever establishment gruel they can get their chomps around, from the grease of television to the anesthetizing desert of industry-produced pop music. The few, the critics–they are the tortured souls with the real thoughts in their brains, crying out Hal-like for true interfacing and meeting nothing but incomprehension. (Father oh father, what do we here, in this land of unbelief and fear? William Blake poetically asks.)

But it affects all of us. Underneath our masks of culture, underneath all of these limiting conventions and inclinations toward entertainment in place of uncomfortable humanness, are voices trying to escape their skins and be heard–even if the protest is protean and undeveloped, manifests itself only in the nagging idea that something just isn’t quite right, that there is more imagination and life in people than we’ve been lead to believe, something beyond the banalities of office banter and stilted, transaction exchanges.

I suppose it’s up to us if we want to turn our attention away from ourselves and ask, like Hal’s nurse-aide at the end of chapter one, “So yo then man, what’s your story?”

The Rise of Pop Sci, 1915-1917

Final Paper for American Modernism.

Popular Science Monthly has not always been the periodical it is today, plagued as it is with surface-level analyses and trivia, boasting to have over 300 pictures, and neither has American popular science culture always been so devoid of complexity and insight. In 1900, physicist William J. Humphreys described the importance of having a popular science that offered “that knowledge and understanding that broadens our sympathies, that increases our interest in the world around us, and that makes us more contented and more useful human beings.”[1] In a 1915 edition of Popular Science Monthly, professor of psychology M.E. Haggerty wrote that the scientific spirit was central to American democracy, that “twentieth-century society has no more vital faith than [their faith in the process of science],” and that “men have become accustomed to changing their minds, to having their beliefs unsettled, and to feeling the good that comes with a new order of things.”[2]

However, both the rise of mass culture and the professional isolation of the scientists in the early 20^th Century helped to change the face of the magazine and create a corresponding popular science culture that, compared to the “genteel, literary” popular science culture of the 19^th Century, was diluted and inextricably linked to industry and consumerism.[3] While science and technology were becoming significant factors in ideas about progress and nationhood, the actual population was becoming less and less knowledgeable about key scientific concepts, a dilemma that echoes with us today.

In 1872, though, scientist and publisher James McKeen Cattell founded Popular Science Monthly with the aim to convey scientific knowledge to the educated lay person and encourage those interested to participate in science for science’s sake through reading and exploration.[4] Although it bore Cattell’s obvious and inexcusable social biases, including a strong belief in the benefits of eugenics, the magazine still worked hard to enrich the lives of the public.[5]

Common to the style of magazines of the late 1800’s, the early version was mostly text.[6] The articles themselves ran the gamut of scientific subjects, but all were comprehensive and aimed to enlighten. There were articles about the geography, history, and people of Fiji and Tahiti that read like a combination of an ethnography and a geographic survey; there were studies on topics such as plant fertilization, of interest to the amateur botanist; and the magazine covered advances in modern physics, especially those recent discoveries regarding the nature of electromagnetism.[7] Editorials were equally intellectual: One issue ran a long, liberally-slanted piece concerned with the application of Taylorist scientific management to higher education; the article offered an intelligent counterpoint to such a widely-accepted way of controlling labor mechanistically.[8]

By the mid-teens, however, both the sentiment among the scientists to popularize their work, and the interest among the public to read high-brow literary science, were waning. Science had undergone a process of professionalization, where the work of science became an esteemed occupation that set its practitioners apart.[9] People were no longer “men of science,” meaning members of the community at large who practiced science, but were “scientists” who held their own privileged place in the culture.[10] Historian Ronald Tobey, in The American Ideology of National Science, 1919-1930, writes that, by 1915, “the [scientific] profession had excluded popularization as a valid scientific activity.”[11]

Where once the great physicist Michael Faraday had performed lectures and demonstrations for the benefit of the public, now there was a contempt for such popularization. Science in America was becoming split between two camps: On the one side, you had the academic, professional scientists who were attempting to distance themselves from any entanglement with industry and applied science. In “Science in American Society,” George Daniels writes of a fear that “if social problems influenced the scientist in framing his research, then the purity of the developing body of knowledge would be seriously undermined.”[12] The professional scientists became a conservative, isolated group, more and more detached from the general public, as opposed to earlier decades when there was less of a distinction, when these “natural philosophers,” as Daniel’s phrases it, “had been attracted by…reformist public activities.”[13]

On the other end of the spectrum, the public was starting to relate to science not through in-depth editorials but through technology; Daniels writes that “the telephones, telegraphs, and electric lights…were more powerful arguments for science from the layman’s perspective than was the most elegant theorem of mathematical physics.”[14] This “technological sublime” helped instill in the Progressive imagination the notion that technology, rather than the pure science of the academies, would lead to national greatness.[15]

The public was also increasingly being conditioned to see science as spectacle and a wonder show, which was at odds with the real, humble nature of science and the often slow progression of its discoveries.[16] Mass culture, which demanded little from people in terms of intellectual effort, did not prove conducive to the success of a theoretical and literary popular science culture.

Cattell tried to hold out, committed to the project of educating the public. He wrote an appeal to the astronomer Simon Newcomb for aid, declaring that “perhaps I overestimate the importance of maintaining direct relations between the scientific worker and those who are not directly engaged in scientific research, but…this is not unimportant.”[17]

However, Cattell’s attempts ultimately failed; his journal, which tried to bridge the gap between the engineer and the academic and truly engage the general public, continued to hemorrhage money, and in 1915 the magazine as well as the name Popular Science Monthly was purchased from Cattell by a publishing group that wanted to print the type of periodical that resembled the profit-making products that were already on the market. This new version would mainly cover manufacturing, electronics, engineering, and other applied sciences, and leave only a small amount of space devoted to theoretical or academic sciences like astronomy, chemistry, physics and naturalism. Cattell’s work continued on under the name The Scientific Monthly and was distributed to a limited number of paying subscribers.[18]

The version of Popular Science Monthly that was published from 1915 onward resembles the magazine that exists today. There are no longer any long and thoughtful articles; advertising and images dominate the spreads, and the lengthiest pieces are no more than a few pages in length. The majority of the content in the early 20th Century regarded World War I and offered behind-the-scenes descriptions of wartime technology, running pieces titled “All Around a Battleship,” “Thrusting Spears for Cavalry,” and “Assembling Torpedoes.”[19]

Marketed also to the hobby electricians and mechanics, roughly a quarter of the magazine’s content between 1917 and 1919 fell under sections titled “The Practical Worker’s Department,” “Radio Communications,” “Motor Vehicles and their Accessories,” and “Housekeeping Made Easy,” the latter of which applied technological and scientific ideas to the service of women in the home. The non-technological science that was injected between these commentaries was sensationalized, such as one article entitled “The Lizard that Squirts Jets of Blood from its Eyes.”[20]

This new periodical treated science and knowledge far more superficially than its previous incarnation, a superficiality that was to define much of mass culture in general. In the 1940’s, Theodor Adorno and other theorists of the Frankfurt school set about trying to understand the effects mass culture had on society in general, and those theories are useful for understanding this new phenomenon. For Adorno, mass art, as disseminated by the culture industry, was produced for the explicit purpose of consumption and reproduction and served to duplicate the culture of advanced capitalism and the ideology of the market. Mass art was not about its own intrinsic properties but had adopted the objectives of capitalism and thus lost its essential, possibly emancipatory function. High art, on the other hand, was free; by maintaining distance from the economic sphere, it was able to express something about the human condition and help illuminate one’s social position. Most insidiously, mass art and popular forms of entertainment kept consumers within a matrix of capitalist domination by reflecting upon them a vision of life free from the real conflict inherent in an industrial society.[21]

The content of the latter versions of Popular Science Monthly had a similar social function. To begin with, the term “science” itself was co-opted to sell things; products appealed to the fact that their use above others was “scientifically proven,” and dozens of articles were written about how to diet, bathe, or cook, “scientifically.”[22] Technology and gadgets filled the role that pharmaceuticals do now; they had enough of the mystery–and legitimacy–of science behind them to pose as legitimate solutions to common problems, further entangling science with the market.

For example, a December 1917 issue ran an advertisement for the “Kolon Motor,” a device that was meant to solve the problem of constipation by massaging the muscles of the colon. One places it against their abdomen, leans against a door, and turns the handle; then, “the face rotates with a scientific waving motion” which restores the colon to its proper functioning. Another advertisement boasted rapid weight loss without exercise: A fixed bicycle and an electrical heater sit inside a large box, and by heating the chamber and going through the motions of cycling, the advertisement avers that “you enjoy all the benefits of bicycling and all the benefits of a Turkish, Roman and Electro-therapeutic bath” and can “rid yourself of clogging poisons and superfluous tissue.”[23]

Within this low-science schema, even knowledge begins to be treated as a commodity similar to what Adorno saw happening with art; information was presented in short, easily-digested articles, what Adorno calls “baby food.”[24]  Even if the piece is interesting and speculative, such as an article that considers future space travel, it is still no more than 500 words.[25] Like mass art, knowledge begins to adopt capitalism’s telos, and whatever intrinsic value or autonomy it might have had was displaced in favor of its market value. Frivolous articles were consumed not for the sake of understanding itself but for the actual possession of knowledge; within this matrix, our curiosity becomes instead concerned not with what is known but “with the fact of knowing it, with having.”[26]

The prose itself also illustrates this, both in content and in style. In July 1915, under the editorship of Cattell, Stanford University professor John Maxson Stillman wrote an article called “The Dawn of Modern Chemistry.” He begins by outlining his thesis, describing the emergence of modern chemistry between the 16th and 18th Centuries; he then gives this period its context within the rest of human history, explaining how “the earliest records of Egyptian or Babylonian origin show that the arts of metallurgy and the making of bronzes and other alloys have been practiced, and uninterruptedly so, since at least some 3,500 years before the Christian era.”[27] He then traces chemistry forward in time through Aristotelian conceptions of the four elements, the pre-Enlightenment association of metals with each of the (then) seven planets, and onward through the beginning of the modern era, citing chemists such as Georg Bauer and Bernard Palissey. Stillman ends his piece with an exploration of more recent work by Lavoisier, who helped pioneer the chemical revolution of the 1700’s, and notes his hope for the future of the science. “The sun,” he concludes, is “shining brightly above the horizon.”[28]

In contrast, an article in the post-Cattell version of the magazine describes the history and future of chemistry in relation to the coal industry, and it considers only the recent past and chemistry’s specific application. “Industrial chemistry,” the magazine notes, “is in a state of transition. The impossible of the present becomes the inevitable of the future. It was only a short while ago that the molecule was regarded as indivisible; yet, in the chemistry of petroleum alone, this belief has been repeatedly shattered. By the ‘cracking’ of molecules of kerosene, the supply of gasoline, in this country, has been appreciably increased.”[29] The difference between the two articles and their treatment of a similar topic is striking. Both attempt to illustrate the progress of science, but the former delineates a long, deep history in well-formulated prose; the latter gives the reader only what they need to know in the moment in order to understand some of science’s application to the products they use and the type of manufacturing that the nation deems important.

The intermingling of science and capitalist industry also took the form of a control over our free time, which Adorno writes about extensively. The latter version of Popular Science Monthly sought to provide, through the outlet of science-related hobbies, an acceptable leisure-time activity; for Adorno, leisure must be tightly-structured under capitalism and distinct from labor, a time when one can recuperate in order to be energized for the next day. In this way, “free time is nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labor.”[30] An editorial in the front of the December 1918 Issue illustrates Adorno’s critique. Dr. Fisk, a “medical expert” who “speaks with high authority,” testifies as to the benefits of keeping a hobby; he writes that “No man can overwork, who does two kinds of work: the work by which he earns his living, and the work by which he balances life’s strain…The release furnished by the tool-using hobby is often like balm to the tired and discouraged soul.”[31]

More than just allowing for recovery from labor, the impulse to do science among the public is reduced to a hobby, a hollow pursuit because in order to maintain its social function it must be light and undemanding. Yet even when advertisements encourage the hobbyist to move beyond mere flirtation with his craft, it is with the impetus to make more money and gain social status, not to further the cause of science through research or to engage in anything deeper than circuitry. Advertisements for “Hawkins Electrical Guides,” which are interspersed throughout the sections on electricity and mechanics, promise to teach one the nuances of the field so that they might “command the high salary of an electrical expert.”[32]

An expose on camping that appeared in an October 1919 edition demonstrates how commercialization has affected our conceptions of nature and natural science. “When You Live in a Duffel-Bag: An autumn vacation in the woods” describes how we go camping to “rid ourselves of many of the so-called ‘luxuries’ of our conventionalized modern life.”[33] The article then gives a detailed account of what one must bring with them in order for the trek to be tolerable. The list—towels, tents, combs, matches, mosquito netting, rope, wire, socks, special moccasins, a variety of cooking utensils, and so on—is minimal compared to the lists espoused by modern sporting goods catalogs, but the purpose is still to convince people they need a certain amount of products in order to properly engage with nature. The “endless array of articles offered in catalogs” are available for purchase, almost on a whim, for many of them, the article notes, will be “discarded forever” in the endeavor to amass a suitable collection of personal camping gear, a note that furthermore highlights the waste and the superfluity of the products.[34] Rather than dealing with nature as it is, as a subject for true exploration and as something both phenomenal and potentially dangerous, interaction with nature and the possible science of naturalism is treated as just another experience to be collected. People go to “enjoy the scenery” and relax; this is another way, along with hobbies, for workers to once again gather themselves in order to prepare to return to work.

An article about naturalism from the version of Popular Science Monthly under Cattell’s editorship again looked very different. In “The Biological Laboratories of the Pacific Coast,”  Professor WM. E. Ritter writes about “seaside laboratories” that were established in Puget Sound and Central and Southern California. After describing the natural laboratories themselves, he writes more philosophically about naturalism in general, which he sees as “highly poetic as well as profoundly scientific.”[35] Science, for Ritter, is spiritual; naturalists “have sought to penetrate to the single essence or substance…to [seek the] Spirit, the grasping of which should constitute the discovery of the great mystery of existence.”[36] He then quotes the British poet Lord Alfred Tennyson: “Little flower–but if I could understand/What you are, root and all, and all in all/I should know what God and man is.”[37]

Although they weren’t actively engaged with popularization as much in the latter part of the teens, the scientists themselves did offer stern warnings about the intermingling of research and economics from the sidelines. In an article published in the journal Science in 1921, one scientist, Sir Richard Gregory, writes that, once coupled with industry, the purpose of science becomes “to secure something of direct profit or use, and not that of discovery alone, by which the greatest advances of science have hitherto been achieved.”[38] The motives of the true scientist, he says, “are intellectual advancement, and not the production of something from which financial gain may be secured.”[39]

With the rise of mass culture and the professional isolation of the academic scientist, though, the concurrent culture of popular science that arose, as can be read on the pages of the magazine that bears its name, had at its center the social values of capitalism, where information was both seen as a commodity and displaced in favor of entertainment. The irony, of course, is that, as Tobey points out, there was a simultaneous “disinterest of the public in [academic] science…in a society which self-consciously made science one of its primary values.”[40]

In A Demon-Haunted World, the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan ominously warns us of this: “When awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when…our critical faculties [are] in decline, then we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”[41]

If scientists don’t pay attention to what the public knows, they leave the captains of industry to do the telling for them, and if the public, including powerful government officials, doesn’t understand what is truly going on in the world of science, then society as a whole cannot hope to make responsible decisions regarding the dissemination and application of scientific knowledge and the technology it helps create.

 

[1] Tobey, Ronald C.. “The Paradox of Progressive Science.” In The American ideology of national science, 1919-1930. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 9.

[2] M.E. Haggerty,  “Science and Democracy,” Popular Science Monthly, September 1915, 263.

[3] Tobey, “The Paradox of Progressive Science,” 9.

[4] James McKeen Cattell,“The Scientific Monthly and the Popular Science Monthly,” Popular Science Monthly, September 1915, 307–310.

[5] For example, see Thomas H. Haines, “The Ohio Plan for the Study of Delinquency,” Popular Science Monthly, June 1915, 576-580; Arthur J. Thomson, “Eugenics and War,” Popular Science Monthly, May 1915, 417-427

[6] Ohmann, Richard M. “The Origins of Mass Culture,” American Studies: An Anthology, (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009,) 271-79.

[7] Alfred Goldsborough Mayer, “The History of Fiji,” Popular Science Monthly, June 1915, 521-38; Alfred Goldsborough Mayer, “The History of Tahiti,” Popular Science Monthly, February 1915, 105-38.

[8] Grant Showerman, “The Liberal Arts and Scientific Management,” Popular Science Monthly, June 1, 1915, 539-49.

[9] Tobey, “The Paradox of Progressive Science,” 11.

[10] Paul, Lucier. “The Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth-Century America.” Isis 100 (2009): 699-732. Accessed March 24, 2014. doi: 10.1086/652016.

[11] Tobey, “The Paradox of Progressive Science,” 9.

[12] Daniels, George H.. “Science, Scientism, and Planned Progress.” In Science in American society; a social history. (1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1971), 289

[13] Daniels, “Science, Scientism, and Planned Progress.” 289

[14] Daniels, “Science, Scientism, and Planned Progress.” 290.

[15] Nye, David E.. American technological sublime. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.)

[16] Nadis, Fred. Wonder shows performing science, magic, and religion in America. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005.)

[17] Tobey, “The Paradox of Progressive Science,” 11.

[18] Tobey, “The Paradox of Progressive Science,” 12.

[19] “All Around a Battleship,” Popular Science Monthly, September 1917, 402-403; “Thrusting Spears for Cavalry,” Popular Science Monthly, September 1917, 430; “Assembling Torpedoes,” Popular Science Monthly, November 1917, 717.

[20] R.W. Shufeldt, “The Lizard that Squirts Jets of Blood from its Eyes.” Popular Science Monthly Dec. 1, 1917, 805.

[21] Adorno, Theodor W., “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Edited by J.M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 2001, 61-97.

 

[22] “How To Take a Bath Scientifically,” Popular Science Monthly, August 1923, 45

[23] “The Lazy Muscles that Cause Constipation” Popular Science Monthly, December 1917, 10.

[24] Adorno, Theodor W., The Schema of Mass Culture,” 58.

[25] Duncan Johnson, “The Evolution of the Stars and the Creation of the Earth,” Popular Science Monthly, September 1915, 209-35.

[26] Adorno, Theodor W., The Schema of Mass Culture,” 74.

[27] John Maxson Stillman, “The Dawn of Modern Chemistry,” Popular Science Monthly, July 1915, 5.

[28] “The Dawn of Modern Chemistry,” 22.

[29] John Walker Harrington, “Butter from the Coal Oil Cow,” Popular Science Monthly, December 1918, 55.

[30] Adorno, Theodor W., “Free Time,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Edited by J.M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 2001, 187-97.

[31] “What is Your Hobby?” Popular Science Monthly, December 1918, 6.

[32] Hawkins Electrical Guides. Print advertisement. Popular Science Monthly, September 1917, 10.

[33] “When You Live in a Duffel Bag: An Autumn Vacation in the Woods,” Popular Science Monthly, October 1919, 87

[34] “When You Live in a Duffel Bag: An Autumn Vacation in the Woods,” 88.

[35] Wm. E. Ritter, “The Biological Laboratories of the Pacific Coast,” Popular Science Monthly, March 1915, 230.

[36] “The Biological Laboratories of the Pacific Coast,” 231.

[37] “The Biological Laboratories of the Pacific Coast,” 231.

[38] Gregory, Richard. “The Message of Science.” Science 54.1402, 1921: 447-56

[39] “The Message of Science,” 448.

[40] Tobey, “The Paradox of Progressive Science,” 3.

[41] Sagan, Carl. The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark. (New York: Random House, 1996,) 25.