Alonzo Slayback with Devin Thomas O'Shea

Summary

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“This Guy Sucked” Podcast

Episode: Alonzo Slayback with Devin Thomas O’Shea

Date: May 28, 2026
Host: Dr. Claire Aubin
Guest: Devin Thomas O’Shea, journalist, historian, and author of Veiled Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis

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Episode Overview

This episode takes a deep dive into the life and legacy of Alonzo Slayback, a relatively obscure but deeply influential 19th-century figure in Missouri’s history. Through an expansive and irreverent conversation, host Claire Aubin and guest Devin Thomas O’Shea peel back the layers of myth, privilege, and violence surrounding Slayback—Confederate cavalry officer, poet, co-founder of the notorious Veiled Prophet Society, and all-around “guy who sucked.” The episode weaves together history, regional politics, secret societies, and the afterlife of white supremacist traditions in St. Louis.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: Secret Societies and Silly Costumes

• The conversation opens with lighthearted speculation on designing a secret society—emphasizing the vital importance of eccentric fashion (03:00–04:09).
  • Quote:
    “You can't have a secret society without peacocking about it, you know?”
    — Devin Thomas O’Shea (03:59)
• Discussion of the performative aspect of real secret societies, drawing parallels between historical rituals and pop culture (e.g., Dune, The Skulls, Masonic bibs).

2. Who Was Alonzo Slayback?

• Introduction to Slayback as a textbook example of a person whose historical reputation deserves skepticism (09:49–11:11).
• Slayback’s origins: Born in Plum Grove, MO, raised in the borderland chaos of pre–Civil War America.
• Family background: Masonic legacy, father died young, free Masonic college education, early exposure to occult mythos.

3. The Kansas-Missouri Border Wars and Civil War (11:12–25:04)

• Slayback’s pro-slavery zealotry, enthusiastic involvement in violent “Bleeding Kansas” clashes.
  • Quote:
    “He wanted to fight for the south to let slavery spread into the west.”
    — Devin Thomas O’Shea (13:36)
• Detailed contextualization of the region’s volatility—Missouri as a crucible for the broader national struggle over slavery.
• Anecdotes about Missouri’s inherent contradictions (progressive city of St. Louis vs. reactionary rural areas) and ongoing political implications.

4. Southern Chivalry and Toxic Masculinity

• Psychoanalytic speculation: Did the loss of his father push Slayback into hyper-masculinist, chivalry-obsessed culture?
• Exploration of competing “manospheres”: Knights of the Golden Circle (pro-slavery secret society) vs. Turner Halls (abolitionist German gymnasiums), and how these spaces cultivated racial and political identities (27:13–29:39).
  • Quote:
    “There’s also a war for the youthful masculine sort of power that’s happening.”
    — Devin Thomas O’Shea (28:37)

5. Civil War Career: Obnoxious Cavalry and Performance

• Slayback as “the loudest, most obnoxious cavalry officer”, torn between reckless bravado and sickly withdrawal (19:15–20:08).
  • Quote:
    “He is both hyper enthusiastic and wants to die gloriously… But then, if he’s not charging into battle, he is a wilting violet.”
    — Devin Thomas O’Shea (19:15)
• Slayback’s cavalry regiment, “Slayback’s Lancers” – notable for their name and for militaristic, orientalist stylings (30:21–31:47).

6. Exile and Mythmaking in Mexico

• After the Confederacy’s defeat, Slayback (with associates) flees to Mexico in an attempt to build a new slave-based colony (34:38–41:45).
• Lore vs. reality: Stories about his supposed nobility and titles (such as “Duke of Oaxaca”) are debunked as self-aggrandizing fantasy (38:08–39:19).
• Slayback spends his Mexican exile mostly ill, eventually bribed home by his family (41:08–42:17).

7. Postwar Influence and the Veiled Prophet Society

• Upon return, Slayback quickly ascends in St. Louis legal and political society, leveraging old networks and a flair for spectacle (43:10–44:53).
• Secret societies as unions for the powerful:
  • Quote:
    “Secret societies are...unions for rich people.”
    — Devin Thomas O’Shea (45:00)
• Slayback and his brother model the Veiled Prophet Society on New Orleans’ mystic krewes, combining racist spectacle, costumed processions, and political intimidation.
  • Creating an “archaic affectation” of tradition by importing parades & rituals, including reusing floats from New Orleans (52:30–61:17).
  • The Veiled Prophet, a costumed figure, served as a symbol of elite dominance and intimidation of labor, especially after the 1877 General Railroad Strike in St. Louis (54:19–56:15).

8. The Veiled Prophet’s Enduring Legacy (60:13–66:54)

• The Veiled Prophet Ball persists today, with rituals that have become central to local elite identity; critiques focus on how the event telegraphs exclusion and racial violence (62:54–63:47).
• Notorious modern fallout: Ellie Kemper (actress) crowned as “Queen of Love and Beauty”—used as a pop-culture flashpoint for the society’s racist origins (63:30–64:57).
• Quote:
  “The hate needs to be trained on their parents and the people that keep perpetuating this thing.”
  — Devin Thomas O’Shea (64:18)

9. Slayback’s Dramatic and Violent Death

• Slayback killed in 1882 after storming into a newspaper office over a perceived slight; intended a duel, but was shot when his own gun jammed (68:21–73:13).
  • Quote:
    “Alonzo and his other lawyer friend showed up. Both of them had a Glock on him...he was about to get for his gun...but it jammed because he never cleaned it. And then the managing editor got him.”
    — Devin Thomas O’Shea (73:07)
• The spectacle of his funeral underscores how Southern “martyrs” were publicly mourned even after violent, reactionary careers.

10. The Cursed City: St. Louis as Symbol and Battleground

• Throughout the conversation, O’Shea and Aubin grapple with St. Louis’s dual legacy as both reactionary stronghold and hotbed of radicalism.
• O’Shea’s “hopeful countercurrent”: The region’s history of socialist, labor, and civil rights activism exists alongside (and against) its deep stains of violence and exclusion (78:00–80:56).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You can’t libel the dead.” — Claire Aubin (00:27)
• “He was just a full throated supporter of slavery.” — Devin Thomas O’Shea (13:23)
• “The ideology of the lost cause is literally being created by guys like Alonzo who are very upset about the loss and are getting their way…” — Devin Thomas O’Shea (43:52)
• “The Veiled Prophet...is meant to draw people into the city to spend some money...it’s a explicitly racist telegraphing.” — Devin Thomas O’Shea (65:48)
• “St. Louis is covered in blood...and has encoded into it...this strong counter current to all of this horribly evil stuff.” — Devin Thomas O’Shea (78:00)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Time | Topic | |------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:00 | Secret societies & obsession with costumes | | 09:49 | Who is Alonzo Slayback? His origins | | 11:12 | Missouri’s political climate; Civil War context | | 13:36 | Slayback’s chivalry & pro-slavery activism | | 20:21 | Cavalry life: drama, disease, and violence | | 27:13 | Masculinity and cults: Knights of the Golden Circle vs. abolitionists | | 34:38 | Confederate exile in Mexico & mythmaking | | 43:10 | Return to St. Louis: postwar power politics | | 45:00 | Secret societies as “unions for the rich” | | 52:30 | Birth of the Veiled Prophet Society | | 54:19 | 1877 Railway Strike & elite backlash | | 62:54 | Evolution of the Veiled Prophet Ball, debutante rituals | | 68:21 | Slayback’s violent death; dueling culture | | 78:00 | St. Louis: dual legacy and modern echoes | | 81:00 | O’Shea’s closing thoughts on regional history |

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Final Thoughts: Lasting Relevance

The episode skillfully blends historical rigor with bantering critique, showing how obscure figures like Alonzo Slayback shaped American racial politics and elite power structures—legacies that remain visible today. Devin Thomas O’Shea’s book is lauded as an essential resource for understanding St. Louis’ haunted legacy and the performative power of secret societies.

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Where to Learn More

• Devin Thomas O’Shea: @devontoshea on social media; book available from Haymarket and Leviathan Bookstore in St. Louis.
• Bookstore Support: Listeners encouraged to support both independent bookstores and the podcast through bookshop.org links.

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[Summary by Podcast GPT | Original language and irreverent tone maintained throughout.]

Transcript

[Claire Aubin]

A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode description.

[Host/Interviewer]

Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show,

[Claire Aubin]

where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. Claire, I'm your host, Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, as we all know, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar

[Host/Interviewer]

every week to tell us why.

[Claire Aubin]

With me today is Devin Thomas o', Shea, a journalist and historian who teaches at Saint Louis University and whose writing you can find in places like the Nation, Slate, and Jacobin, among others.

[Host/Interviewer]

Like a lot of others, this is a very, very truncated list.

[Co-host/Contributor]

He's got a new book that caught

[Host/Interviewer]

my eye even before we were in talks to have him on the show. So I was very excited when this came to fruition. It's called the Veiled Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the struggle for St. Louis. Welcome to the show, Claire.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Thank you for having me on.

[Co-host/Contributor]

To be a hater.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

It's one of my favorite activities.

[Host/Interviewer]

Well, great.

[Co-host/Contributor]

This is a safe space for you and not for the person we're talking about.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I mean, they're dead. They can't be. You know, I guess Alonzo is probably, like, following me around in the afterlife

[Co-host/Contributor]

as, like, a ghostly visage and just

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

being like, man, I hope you, like,

[Co-host/Contributor]

stub your toe or whatever.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I don't know how much ghosts can, like, do to people from beyond the veil. But, yeah, if he is, he's hating on me.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I'm just hating back. You know, it's a mutual relationship.

I think that's totally fair.

[Host/Interviewer]

And also, him being a spooky ghost guy, being horrible in the afterlife fits everything that I know about this man, which, admittedly, is little compared to you.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I mean, a lot of it is in that book. We cover a lot of Alonzo in

[Co-host/Contributor]

that first part, especially including the magnificent ending that I can't wait to talk about.

[Host/Interviewer]

I am very excited about that in particular. So I like to start with a question usually, and this is probably one that you've been asked before, so please feel free to, like, roll your eyes at me when I ask it.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Never.

[Host/Interviewer]

If you were going to invent a secret society, what would you be doing? What things would you incorporate?

[Co-host/Contributor]

Oh, this is a great, great, great question.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I think the most important Thing that I've learned from secret societies is that you have to have a silly costume. You have to have like the veiled prophet, of course, a beautiful example of

[Co-host/Contributor]

just like a strange looking guy in a costume.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

But also you have like the Masonic bibs. You know, if you've ever seen like

[Co-host/Contributor]

George Washington sort of having a bib

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

is like a crazy accoutrement, you know, because it does kind of look cool. You know, if you have like a suit on and a bib that's kind of like a flex, I don't know, I like it. So I'd need something like that, some sort of like hat maybe that would also signal to other people in the society.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Society that like, yeah, I've got a tricorn hat on in like 2026 or something. I recognize.

[Host/Interviewer]

I like that. The main thing you've decided to incorporate is not a ritual, just like an

[Co-host/Contributor]

outfit, it's like an accessory.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

It's a fashion statement.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah, absolutely.

You just have to look fly as

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

long as you can go out in public and be like, ah, damn, there

[Co-host/Contributor]

goes one of like the neo masons in the tricorn hat. You know, that's the most important that

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

is a big part of secret societies is like, oh, they're secret, they're so cult and they have so much like hidden knowledge. But it's like you can't have a

[Co-host/Contributor]

secret society without peacocking about it, you know?

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah. You have to let other people know

[Co-host/Contributor]

that like, don't worry, I'm a master mason, you know, I'm up in this structure.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah, I will say so. Some may know I teach at a university which is famous for having social clubs within it of a, of a, of a town.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

One of my favorite of a brand

[Host/Interviewer]

that's part of our campus lore.

[Claire Aubin]

And I will say it's quite funny

[Host/Interviewer]

to be walking around at night and seeing 19 year olds in cloaks.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Sure.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

And you know, these people will have power over all of us one day.

[Co-host/Contributor]

But it is funny to be like that could be a student whose paper I'm on my way to grade as

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

we speak and he's dressed in a cloak and he has to go kiss

[Co-host/Contributor]

a skull and then later they're going to go to their island and like,

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

you know, allegedly, the normal stuff that.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Allegedly. Allegedly. No one would ever.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Have you ever seen the Skulls? The movie?

[Host/Interviewer]

No.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Adding to list, highly recommended.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

It's got Pacey from Dawson's Creek in

[Co-host/Contributor]

it and it's just like this hyper dramatic skull and bones thing and they take lots of liberties to make it, you know, who knows what they're actually doing in there?

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I don't.

[Co-host/Contributor]

And I don't claim to.

[Host/Interviewer]

I don't. I don't know. I don't know what secret society rituals I would have in my secret society. I do think the accessorizing is important to it.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It is, for sure.

[Host/Interviewer]

I didn't even really consider the costuming aspect, which also goes to. Says a lot about your guys, your society, and how important the costume thing is to them.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yes, it got real important.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Speaking of the ritual, you always have to have something where every initiation is always.

[Co-host/Contributor]

We were talking about certain associations that's well known for having you get into

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

a coffin and sort of like ceremonially

[Co-host/Contributor]

die and then you become reborn.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

So we would have to factor in something like that with also the fashion statements like maybe after you get resurrected,

[Co-host/Contributor]

you get to wear the tricorn hat.

[Host/Interviewer]

This is sort of. Is this the third or fourth time I've brought up Dune on the show? But you know the part where he drinks the, like, blue worm stuff and then dies and come yet or she does not. He. He doesn't. Who does it?

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

He does it, she does it, he

[Host/Interviewer]

does it, she does it.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I can't remember now.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Isn't it, Timothy, that listeners get in the comments. Get in the comments. Tell us about Dune.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Someone drinks the worm stuff.

[Host/Interviewer]

I think she does it, and that's how she gets all the knowledge.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Oh, that's right. Yes.

[Host/Interviewer]

And that's why her eyes turn blue.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yes, that is correct.

[Host/Interviewer]

I don't know. Someone drinks the worm stuff, they die, they come back, and then they get to wear a funky outfit.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Classic hero narrative, right? That you have to sort of venture into the realm of the dead and

[Co-host/Contributor]

come back with new knowledge. You've seen all of time.

I just know listeners are being like, what is wrong with.

Yeah.

Why can't they remember a basic fact about Dune? Who drinks the blue stuff?

It's been a minute.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Okay, I. I gotta go back to them. They haven't put out a new one

[Co-host/Contributor]

recently, so it's coming out in before too long.

I think the Frank Herbert heads are screaming.

Well, that's fair.

[Host/Interviewer]

And I've actually read.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Oh, have you?

[Host/Interviewer]

Yes. So it's extra embarrassing on this front. But you know what? My brain is chock full of knowledge.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Okay. Yeah, I got a lot of Nazis in here.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

A lot of Nazis up here. Thinking about a lot of swastikas.

[Co-host/Contributor]

We should probably talk about the guy

[Host/Interviewer]

who sucks at some point.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Absolutely.

[Host/Interviewer]

Who's your guy?

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

My guy, and I think he has

[Co-host/Contributor]

just such a beautiful name for a guy who sucked. Alonzo Slayback, also a good drag name.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Oh, yeah, Slayback.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Ah, that's right, yes.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I'm just saying he had a nickname

[Co-host/Contributor]

also, which was Lon, given to him by his mother. So Lon Slayback, that would kind of

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

be a cool drag name.

[Co-host/Contributor]

But you're retaking sort of the Confederate uniform and putting a twist on it. Maybe that could be problematic. Who knows? As with all of the veiled stuff. Yeah. The costuming is problematic.

[Host/Interviewer]

Lon Slayback is kind of giving Star Wars a little bit, though.

[Co-host/Contributor]

He's also in the cantina and represents the old south in alien form. He's got like a cappy hat on Tatooine. It's just like. Okay. I don't know, George.

[Host/Interviewer]

I was gonna say George Lucas has him killed because he's like my heavy handed metaphor about Vietnam needs to also

[Co-host/Contributor]

include the death of the south will not rise again.

Exactly. Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

We're doing sort of an Iraq War

[Co-host/Contributor]

parable about like Senate space politics and also Alonzo.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And we got to get a dig

[Co-host/Contributor]

in at the Confederacy too.

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

And they have to kill him in the way that he is actually killed in real life in order to circle back around.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Honestly. There is a shootout. Yeah. He did shoot first. Or who did.

[Host/Interviewer]

I know.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I'm talking.

Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Crazy.

[Co-host/Contributor]

We're cooking on this.

[Host/Interviewer]

So Alonzo slash Lon Slayback, what is he? Well, I don't know if fate, I mean, I guess he's famous. He's famous enough that there's like a wiki site about.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

Do you know about this?

[Host/Interviewer]

There's like a fandom wiki, military wiki site about him. So, yeah, he is a known figure to some extent. What's his deal before we get really to why he sucks the general deal?

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I mean, I think that he fits in so well with the podcast ethos because like you're saying, basically a few years ago, if you were interested in Alonzo, you would either be a Civil War buff or you would know about the Veiled prophet society in St. Louis and you would have read some sort of glossed over history about like Alonzo Slayback and his brother Charles decided that they wanted to found a civic organization that wanted to give back to St. Louis and they founded the Veiled Prophet. And that's basically the whole story.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Please don't look into what he was up to before that or like any of his other stuff.

And don't Google the veiled prophet.

No, don't do that.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Just trust us that it's cool and on the level and that everybody's pretty. You know, it's a ubiquitously loved thing in St. Louis.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Everybody. Nobody likes it.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

That's the sort of. That is the general gloss.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Like, when I was growing up in St. Louis, this was just like.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

That was enough to deter a lot

[Co-host/Contributor]

of people from, like, thinking critically about any of that.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

But as we're saying, Alonzo, born in Plum Grove, Missouri, which is north of St. Louis, he was just born into this period of American history where, like, the Midwest was on fire with politics

[Co-host/Contributor]

because of westward expansion. And so whenever we're talking about this,

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I think it's useful to think about the United States continentally as not basically

[Co-host/Contributor]

having California yet and sort of everything ending at the Mississippi river and then just the west on the other side of it.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And so Alonzo basically is born on the western frontier. His father is a Mason.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I think it's very interesting that he's

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

born into a Masonic legacy. His dad dies of cholera at 30

[Co-host/Contributor]

and he's already got like four kids, which is also very Victorian.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And then he goes to a Masonic

[Co-host/Contributor]

college because his father was a Mason for free.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And he's just surrounded by occult mythology. And then he ends up sort of

[Co-host/Contributor]

in the Kansas, Missouri border wars. Right when they're popping off. He's like a young man ready to go, which, you know.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Claire, have you ever been out to Missouri? Have you been to the Midwest?

[Host/Interviewer]

You know. Okay, so let me just preface this by saying I have not been to Missouri. I have done a cross country road trip to move from California to New

[Claire Aubin]

England, where I currently live.

[Host/Interviewer]

So I have seen much of the Midwest. I am from the West West.

[Co-host/Contributor]

There you go.

[Host/Interviewer]

Like the West West.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Absolutely.

[Host/Interviewer]

Which we talked about with Megan Kate Nelson on her episode of the show. I spent time in places like Amarillo, Texas.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Beautiful.

[Host/Interviewer]

Which is where my partner is from.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Nice.

But I have managed to avoid Missouri.

[Host/Interviewer]

And that makes it sound like I'm attempting to do it, but I have not been to Missouri. So I will need a little bit of a primer on this. But I will say you have managed to skirt around a very important detail now twice in this that I'm really excited for you to get to, which is you've said Civil War buff and fought.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah, right. He. That Alonzo was a Confederate cavalry officer, basically.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Right.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

But even before that, like, he was destined to be a man on horseback charging into a firefight for literally the most heinous.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Sort of causes.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

He was just a full throated supporter of slavery.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Co-host/Contributor]

So Alonzo was a pro slavery. Just like. We'll also talk more about how just chivalry was like a huge thing for

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

him and that he wanted to fight for the south to let slavery spread into the west and get all the way. There's the sort of pressure cooker theory

[Co-host/Contributor]

of the Civil War is like the slavery model economically, as Du Bois talks about in black Reconstruction breaking down, not profitable.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

As soon as you're not getting new

[Co-host/Contributor]

shipments of slaves from the Triangle trade, then the plantation morphs into like the most disgusting and heinous version of itself and, like it needs to expand. And so I forgive you for not

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

visiting Missouri because it's also a very

[Co-host/Contributor]

evil place with a lot of evil stuff that has happened here.

Oh, okay.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

It's beautiful. I love St. Louis.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I'm a full throated, you know, St. Louis advocate.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And I will also say everything is

[Co-host/Contributor]

covered in blood out here and it's just part of it.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah. I was trying really hard not to like slander Missouri because I was like, you know, you could be like the

[Co-host/Contributor]

biggest Missouri booster and you're like, look, base level of understanding. A haunted, cursed, haunted, cursed land.

Yes.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

So much pain and suffering basically around every corner. So understandable but great. A lot of beautiful forests. There's a lot of beautiful rivers and wildlife.

[Co-host/Contributor]

And also St. Louis is cool.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Steam boats, steamboats. We love a good steamboat.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Very important.

That's my knowledge of.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

That's about it. When I was growing up, I was always. I hated the steamboat stuff.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I just seemed like the most boring. No.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

But I have come to a more, you know, I've become a more mature

[Co-host/Contributor]

historian and now I understand. Like, actually steamboats were kind of goated with it. Like they were very important.

Right.

[Host/Interviewer]

It's Freud who says that the sign of the transition to adulthood is deep and abiding interest in. He doesn't say this.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I said this. Deep and abiding interest in transportation. All of a sudden you hit like 30 and you're like, you know, I

[Host/Interviewer]

think I might be a public transit head. I think I might love trains.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I think that that is.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I believe this. I think you should advance this theory

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

because it does seem like at some point when you're growing up, it's like, God, it's like, why can't we get

[Co-host/Contributor]

people around all over faster? And then you're like, steamboats. Steamboats were important.

[Host/Interviewer]

You first start with that and then you're like, now I have to get really into Japan, because they've figured it out.

[Co-host/Contributor]

They figured it out. Yeah.

The slippery slope from St. Louis.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

You're going down the rabbit hole on YouTube watching like the train advocates who

[Co-host/Contributor]

really get into it when the train comes. I love that. I love seeing the pure enthusiasm of that, for sure.

Anyway, anyway.

[Claire Aubin]

Hello everybody, it's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're currently listening to the free version of our show. Because we're trying to make accessible, engaging history independently and sustainably. We switch off between free weeks and Patreon weeks. So if you're a fan of public history made by actual experts and it's in the budget for you, consider supporting our Patreon. It's only one tier, which means everyone who subscribes gets access to the same perks across the board. For the price of a pint of beer, you'll get access to a new episode every week instead of just the bi weekly free ones. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get access to the full episode archive, bonus content, early access to merch, and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives to sweeten the deal. Just head over to patreon.com thisguysucked or follow the link in our episode description to sign up.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

This kind of does dovetail with what we're talking about because the steamboat is making St. Louis into a rival to

[Co-host/Contributor]

New York City in this period at the turn of the century after the Civil War.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

But everybody's pretty sure that it's going

[Co-host/Contributor]

to become this very important transit network

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

because you got to get over that

[Co-host/Contributor]

Mississippi river, you got to build a

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

bridge as soon as the railroad sort

[Co-host/Contributor]

of stuff, it terminates in St. Louis.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And then politicians, especially from the 1800s,

[Co-host/Contributor]

spend their entire lives trying to get the transcontinental railroad to work.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And so this all becomes the stakes

[Co-host/Contributor]

for what Alonzo is kind of fighting for on the Kansas, Missouri border.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

He's over in St. Joseph, Missouri for a long time pretending to study law

[Co-host/Contributor]

and actually sort of like stockpiling guns and ammunition for what we don't know

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

is the Confederacy yet, but is like

[Co-host/Contributor]

forming into the Jefferson Davis splinter cult.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

So there's a lot of bloody stuff

[Co-host/Contributor]

happening on that, the pre Civil War era that he gets involved with a lot of raiding. They sack Lawrence, Kansas, which is also very beautiful town in the Midwest.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And Alonzo ends up just joining right away. And what was your impression of his

[Co-host/Contributor]

military career, if you had to boil

[Host/Interviewer]

it down, I mean, while reading this? So I read the Book. And then I also was doing some Googling. Like I said, I was in his. I want to find this Wikipedia page again, the Slaybacks Missouri Cavalry Regiment fandom

[Co-host/Contributor]

page for this, which is crazy.

Slaybacks, lancers. Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

Military history.fandom.com for this. Some things seemed like he was good at them. Other things seem like people fucking hated him.

[Co-host/Contributor]

So I can't really figure out what the deal is with this guy.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

He's a man of extremes. Because my like in general impression is that he is the loudest, most obnoxious cavalry officer and that there's a reputation

[Co-host/Contributor]

that cavalry officers have in this era

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

is that they're crazy because you literally

[Co-host/Contributor]

have to get on a horse and charge into musket fire.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

So Alonzo is both hyper enthusiastic and wants to die gloriously.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Just like all the poetry he's reading, he's also writing a lot of poetry.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

So he's sort of a chivalry worshiping

[Co-host/Contributor]

Confederate pro slavery psycho.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

But then there's. There's the flip side of it where he is like always sick. He is just like. If he's not charging into battle, he is a wilting violet who is like

[Co-host/Contributor]

stricken with scarlet fever and is like on a cot, like laying down, which is cool.

[Host/Interviewer]

He's kind of doing the two things people imagine during the Civil War, which is either like doing something actually insane or deeply in pain somewhere rotting.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Basically.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

You're looking at your foot, it's turning colors that you didn't know was possible

[Co-host/Contributor]

because you got like shrapnel in it like three weeks ago.

Yeah.

The doctor hasn't gotten around to cutting it off.

[Claire Aubin]

Yeah, I just.

[Host/Interviewer]

Okay, here's a proposal also for any historians who are interested in this. And this will also almost certainly betray my ignorance. This probably exists. These guys are charging into war right on their horses. They're getting shot. We're like, they're so crazy. What's going on with the horses? Like the horses are dying.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Oh yeah.

But like, where's the.

[Host/Interviewer]

I would.

[Co-host/Contributor]

My proposal. This is stupid. My proposal is for someone to write something about the horses. Please.

[Host/Interviewer]

Cuz I am not a horse girl.

[Co-host/Contributor]

But I do wanna know what the

[Host/Interviewer]

economy horses in war is, please.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I think, Yeah, I think that it was a very casual sort of like

[Co-host/Contributor]

another horse got shot because they're a giant bullet sponge.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

But like, yeah, it does seem very ineffective. My big takeaway, this is in the

[Co-host/Contributor]

Civil War sort of like historical sense.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

This is the trans Mississippian theater. Most of the Civil War stuff is

[Co-host/Contributor]

happening in your east coast, you know, around Richmond and, you know, all of Bull Run, all that stuff.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And then there's this, like, sort of side craziness happening out on the other

[Co-host/Contributor]

side of the Mississippi river and that

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

there's, like, a ton of people getting marched to death in the heat. Like, half of fighting the Civil War

[Co-host/Contributor]

is just, like, getting somewhere and not dying of thirst or hunger.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And I do wonder if, like. Yeah, what was, like, the horse situation? Because I bet they also looted a

[Co-host/Contributor]

bunch of horses from, like.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Imagine a horse hanging out in a, like, beautiful farm.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And then, like, Alonzo Slayback just hikes over the fence and it's like, hey, buddy, we're gonna go charge into battle for slavery together.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah. First step, imagine you're a horse is hilarious. Second step, you're about to experience horror.

Horror.

[Host/Interviewer]

So I'm adding animal death to our

[Co-host/Contributor]

list of sensitive content notes on this, which I think the first time we've had to do that.

[Host/Interviewer]

Sure.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Happy to be a friend.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It's my fault, to be clear.

Yeah, absolutely.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Gotta give people fair warning.

[Host/Interviewer]

And part of this also, I will add, is that the Civil War thing. The Civil War thing.

[Co-host/Contributor]

The Civil War.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

That whole thing.

[Host/Interviewer]

That whole thing is, as Megan Nelson said, part of this is that, like, we are often missing the fact that the Civil War is, in large part being fought over. Like, is there going to be slavery in the West? Like, not just free state slave states, north, south stuff, but, like, there's an expansion westward. And they're being like, well, what's gonna happen out there? And so Missouri is a space in which that is, in particular is very important, like, the. What's happening in this expansion. So that's also why some of these people feel so strongly, because they're like, people are moving through here, they're moving west, they're gonna go in that direction. And we need to know what our economic situation is going to look like as a result of that as well. So, I mean, I don't know whether it's a useful dimension here, but I

[Claire Aubin]

think it's an interesting one in terms

[Host/Interviewer]

of thinking, like, why does this man care so much?

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

No, that's a beautiful thing to bring up because. And this is the most obnoxious thing

[Co-host/Contributor]

that a Civil War history person can

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

say, but, like, that conflict is super active still.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It's, like, encoded in the American DNA.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And especially, as you're saying, the people who end up on the border of

[Co-host/Contributor]

Missouri, in Kansas are radicalized on both sides.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

If you are a free soiler and an abolitionist, the most Profound thing you can do is move to Kansas and

[Co-host/Contributor]

try to start setting up a anti slavery government in the new territories that are coming about.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And likewise Missouri becomes a absolutely insane

[Co-host/Contributor]

place for pro slavery forces. Right.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

If you look at a map of like the Civil War, Missouri is always like shaded differently. We're not really sure if it was part of the Confederacy or not. And that is because, and this is still true today, St. Louis is a very progressive, beautiful city with a rich history of socialists, especially German socialists who

[Co-host/Contributor]

come over from the failure of the 48 revolutions. They settle in St. Louis and they

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

take up the Civil War mantle as like the slave owner is the exact

[Co-host/Contributor]

same oppressive dictatorship as the monarchy and the church and they gotta go.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And so St. Louis becomes this Union loyal Abraham Lincoln pro set of both ammunition guns, strategic location on the river and the rest of Missouri is totally controlled by the most psychotic pro slavery guys around. There's a governor named David Rice Acheson who when they were sacking Lawrence, he went to the site of the battle and personally fired a cannon at Lawrence. So like Missouri is at war with Kansas itself. It's an interesting set of politics because

[Co-host/Contributor]

that's also where the Potawatomi massacre happens with John Brown.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

This is like still encoded in the

[Co-host/Contributor]

state in a profound way. I was writing about how for the

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

nation Missouri politics is totally dominated by

[Co-host/Contributor]

Republicans and this reactionary, you know, right

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

wing ethos and that St. Louis makes

[Co-host/Contributor]

up 40% of the GDP. All of the like, when you think of Missouri, you're mostly thinking about St. Louis or Kansas City. And yet we're totally dominated by the rural hinterlands. It's just the same dynamic.

[Host/Interviewer]

What gets slayback into the Confederacy? Like what makes him someone who is interested? Like we know he's pro slavery, but do you know why he like decides that this is going to be one of his things?

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I mean, maybe to get a little psychoanalytic with it, but I think it's the loss of his father.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Okay.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I think that him being fatherless made him want to join a masculinist sort of chivalry cult. And that like at the time there is also another secret society called the

[Co-host/Contributor]

Knights of the Golden Circle, which was a proto Confederate secret society.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

There's a whole masculine cult of like trying to indoctrinate young men into the sort of Confederacy pipeline. Because slavery has more had its eyes set on Mexico and spreading into South America.

[Co-host/Contributor]

They needed a lot of guys on horseback to go and do a lot of brutal stuff in order to make that happen. And therefore, I think you get this culture of masculinist, like, pro slavery.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

This is what it means to be

[Co-host/Contributor]

a knight and to fight for beauty and blah, blah, blah, which is just proto master race stuff.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Claire Aubin]

I mean, it does actually make a lot of sense. And I don't think that it takes

[Host/Interviewer]

a lot of psychoanalytic thinking to be like, people miss a certain kind of structure or feel that they lack a certain kind of structure and then seek it out somewhere else. And it happens to be in a moment when there's a group being like, hey, we're dudes and we would love you to come and hang out with us.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah. And we got secrets.

We got secrets.

[Host/Interviewer]

And, you know, if you do this, you get to ride horses, like, and be really hyper macho.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Absolutely. You get a saber, you get a gun.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

A cool hat. Amazing. Because there's also rival sort of abolitionist organizations.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I've also written about the Turner Halls, which the Germans brought over that were like the first gymnasiums where you could get, like, absolutely swole and then, like, drink a ton of beer and like, hang out and talk German philosophy and about how much you want to kill a slave owner.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

So there's also a war for the youthful masculine sort of power that's happening

[Co-host/Contributor]

in the lead up.

[Host/Interviewer]

Question, is that a possible solution?

[Co-host/Contributor]

Okay, wait.

[Host/Interviewer]

To the manosphere. But I think I'm just proposing basically, Hasan Piker versus the manosphere, which a

[Co-host/Contributor]

million people have already done. So I am not coming up with anything new.

[Host/Interviewer]

Hasan Piker is question mark. The Turner Hall.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yes.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I think we're on to something here.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I think we're getting there. Yeah, I think so. Honestly, in a big way, Claire, what you're saying is Slayback is a lot like the clavicular of his era and that he's looksmaxing, but that involved a

[Co-host/Contributor]

sort of different set of qualities back then. Yeah, yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

Looks maxing, not thought maxing. And that's.

[Co-host/Contributor]

That's the enemy of looksmaxing in a big way. Actually thinking things through or being critical in any way.

[Host/Interviewer]

You can tell listeners that we are both at the end of our semesters right now, so the.

[Co-host/Contributor]

The insanity has really set in.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Just doing free association about current politics

[Co-host/Contributor]

and Dune looks maxing the manosphere, the Civil War, who knows?

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Who knows?

[Co-host/Contributor]

Trains.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

No, no, no, no, no, no. We're coming up with some good stuff.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I hope people are writing this down.

Yeah. If anyone's listening, please come back to

[Host/Interviewer]

me when you have, for me, created

[Co-host/Contributor]

a good structural framework for what's happening. In this episode.

[Host/Interviewer]

Okay, so he's in the Confederate Army. He's started this thing. Slaybacks Cavalry Regiment.

[Co-host/Contributor]

What's happening with that?

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I think that he distinguished himself in battle over and over again by being one of the craziest white boys to ever do it.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Of just, like, charging into battle.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

They were like, somebody get this guy

[Co-host/Contributor]

a bunch of other guys on horses to sort of command.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And so you get Slayback's Lancers, which

[Co-host/Contributor]

is important for later in the Veiled Prophet society stuff.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

There's a, like, military Orientalist cavalry section

[Co-host/Contributor]

that's called the Bengal Lancers. And I think that this is a nod to that, but also Orientalist. So.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah, we can talk about that more in just a second because I. I mean, you talk about Orientalism actually, like, a lot in the book, but the.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It's.

[Host/Interviewer]

It is. Some of it is wild when you get to the veiled prophets of how much they're like. Like, let's do some mysterious Eastern things.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yes, absolutely.

Let's make up some history, guys. It's time.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

It's like European mythology is washed. I want to be a sultan.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

Like, the men crave the Ottoman Empire.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah. In a big way.

Okay.

[Host/Interviewer]

So he has this crazy regiment. They do all this stuff. They're at a bunch of battles, like we have written here. They were at the battle of Pilot Knob. Pilot Knob, Is that right?

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah. It's an interesting.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I didn't.

Pilot Knob. Interesting.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Okay.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Freud would say something about that, too.

[Host/Interviewer]

Psychoanalytically, we can.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

A bunch of men fighting over the Pilot Knob.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Interesting. Okay.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

This is in the sort of, like,

[Co-host/Contributor]

southern western corner of Missouri is where

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

most of this stuff is going on. This theater is mostly locked down. What's happening is that the Union has a bunch of strongholds like in St.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Louis and the forts in Missouri and along the river.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Basically locked up because of the heroism

[Co-host/Contributor]

of The German socialist 48ers who kept the armory that was in downtown St. Louis out of the hands of the Confederacy.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And so this whole theater that's happening with old Pap Price, who was the

[Co-host/Contributor]

sort of Confederate leader here, it is

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

an annoyance, and it is kind of rightfully a sideshow to, like, the real

[Co-host/Contributor]

action of, like, the Confederate army might take the Capitol, that kind of thing.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

But there's a lot of battles. There's a lot of running around, stealing

[Co-host/Contributor]

what you can from farms and like,

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

threatening to, you know, siege a military base. The Confederates, I think, from people smarter

[Co-host/Contributor]

than me, have criticized this part as,

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

like, they kind of rejected what won

[Co-host/Contributor]

the Revolutionary War of like doing some guerrilla theater, hijacking, like supply lines. Right.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

They're like, nah, we would rather have,

[Co-host/Contributor]

like, a big battle and like, kind of do the formal military thing.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And I think a lot of people

[Co-host/Contributor]

say that was a mistake and that they could have been more effective the other way.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

In any case, Alonzo becomes a big

[Co-host/Contributor]

wheel in this machine along with Joe Shelby, who is his commanding officer.

[Host/Interviewer]

I mean, also, when we say mistake, we mean mistaken asterisks. As in, like, some would consider it a mistake.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Oh, yeah. Some would consider it a mistake. Hypothetically. It's also. Yeah, it's a mitzvah that they were not getting more effective.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It is like, yeah, mistake as in. And they would consider it a mistake. We're like, keep going. Great job, guys.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Great job, guys.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

Don't continue only doing battles.

Absolutely.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I mean, I also think it speaks to a certain amount of hubris that

[Co-host/Contributor]

some of the Confederate officers had about

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

that we were going to militarily outflank

[Co-host/Contributor]

and like, do a big wraparound maneuver that just didn't happen, basically.

Yeah. Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Thank God.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah. I mean, this lasts until the end of the Civil War. Doing all this stuff. And then he goes to me, goes to Mexico. Is kind of.

[Co-host/Contributor]

He's like, exiled kind of in Mexico. Is that the best way to describe this?

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah. Does exiled sound too negative or. It's safe to say. This is another thing that I think is an important juncture is just like, Alonzo Slayback, Joe Shelby. They are afraid that the Union army is going to come through and just be like, all right, buddy, up against the wall.

[Co-host/Contributor]

And then that's it.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

That there's going to be mass executions or you're going to end up in a jail and you're going to get

[Co-host/Contributor]

dysentery and it's just going to be a whole mess.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And so they basically devise a plan of, like, we are going to nobly and in a sort of poetic way,

[Co-host/Contributor]

leave the country that we just got our asses kicked in and then, like,

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

try to may do something down in Mexico. Following this pattern of thought that the

[Co-host/Contributor]

pro slavery forces were heading coded into the Knights of the golden Circle, which was like, what we really need to

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

do is just spread slavery one way or another.

[Host/Interviewer]

I mean, it's a, I think, a common tale actually, of guys who strike out and are like, time to go to Thailand.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

You know, like, well, I've sort of been disgraced here.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Let's try it over again.

[Host/Interviewer]

But somewhere where their economy is less strong than my one. And I can just do whatever and hopefully it'll be fine.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Which is also an egotistical mistake because they do not understand the politics of

[Co-host/Contributor]

Mexico when they're going down towards Mexico City. Sure. And I'm not a expert in Mexican history, unfortunately.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

It's really, really fascinating the political mess

[Co-host/Contributor]

that they end up in in Mexico City with Emperor Maximilian on the throne.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And then sort of the stirrings of

[Co-host/Contributor]

the Mexican republic are sort of like churning out in the ungovernable, big expansive areas, especially along the border.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And so they have. Imagine a supply line of ex confederates. Alonzo is like writing a little poem

[Co-host/Contributor]

about burying the stars and bars in the bedrocks of the Rio Grande, which actually became a hit. He's basically writing like, call me maybe of the time. That's such a dated reference. Sorry.

I'm gonna find this poem.

[Host/Interviewer]

The burial of Shelby's flag.

[Co-host/Contributor]

That's it. Joe Shelby, huh?

[Host/Interviewer]

It sounds horrible already just reading this. I'm sorry, I can't.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I can't do this.

[Host/Interviewer]

Continue. I'm not doing it. I'm not doing a ceremonial reading of this.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It's awful.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I mean, it is awful. And there is like a sort of sing songy poetry style that's hyper popular at this moment. That has a lot to do with Lord Byron.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Lord Byron, like popped off when he started doing just like non stop rhyming couplets and like big long poems too. And Alenzo Slayback loved all of that stuff.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

It is very sing song.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It's very on the nose, you know, saccharine.

[Host/Interviewer]

Four of the same rhyme in a row is happening a lot here. We got ride side, divide and tide.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Beautiful, sir.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Thank you.

[Host/Interviewer]

Things are often said on this show that like sentences that have never been said before. And I do think Lord Byron popped

[Co-host/Contributor]

off is he did okay.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

He was right about the Eldren Marbles. They shouldn't have been looting them.

[Co-host/Contributor]

He was goated, okay, by Lord Byron.

So he goes, they go to Mexico

[Host/Interviewer]

and they do this weird tourist thing.

[Co-host/Contributor]

But also.

[Host/Interviewer]

So part of what I found difficult with researching this guy is like, how much random lore there is. That seems unlikely, right? Like there's some magazine that I don't think is. Well, I don't know. I don't know if I should say this, but I don't know if it's, you know, reputable. This article that I read said that he becomes the Duke of Oaxaca. And I couldn't find that anywhere else interesting. And I was like, that can't be real. I'll Send it to you, Duke of Oaxaca.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Interesting.

[Host/Interviewer]

They also said that his. His family was, like, French nobility.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah. But they're like. But he's, like, of a noble line. And, like, all this stuff where I'm

[Co-host/Contributor]

kind of like, that's.

[Host/Interviewer]

I don't think this is real. I think this person is buying what

[Co-host/Contributor]

this obvious, like, psychopath fraud guy is selling, essentially.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

You're telling me a sort of crazy poet cavalry officer would invent some mythology

[Co-host/Contributor]

about himself, like, who's obsessed with chivalry.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Obsessed with chivalry. Like, born in Plum Grove.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Plum Grove is like, you're in a rural spot even back then.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I mean, so it makes sense that he's adding a little bit of flourish

[Co-host/Contributor]

to his story in general.

[Host/Interviewer]

Sure.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

We also have to imagine, as they're caravanning down, the local sort of, like, powers that be in, like, the rural Mexican hinterland are, like, stealing horses and

[Co-host/Contributor]

guns and stuff off of them, sort of rooking them for a bunch of money.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And they get to Mexico City, and also, Lon is completely sick the entire time.

[Co-host/Contributor]

So they're carrying him on a stretcher the entire way, which is very funny.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

They get to Mexico City.

[Host/Interviewer]

Glorious.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Gloriously. At first they were like, maybe we're

[Co-host/Contributor]

gonna sack Mexico City. And then they got there, like, halfway there, and they're like, we're gonna limp into Mexico City, barely hanging on.

Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

They get in. They get put up at a hotel.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Emperor Maximilian has a bunch of politics between the officers where they're basically like,

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

yeah, just hang out, rack up a hotel, bill, whatever, you know, I'll get you a little plot of land way far away that I kind of can't control anyway, that you can, like, go

[Co-host/Contributor]

and set up a slave colony called the New Virginia Colony.

[Host/Interviewer]

Unoriginal.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Very unoriginal.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Uninspired. That's like, we get it, dog. It's. We know, we know.

We understand what you're about.

Okay, yeah, we get it.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

But this does end up kind of

[Co-host/Contributor]

working for a minute.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

They end up spending a lot of time in Mexico City. As Emperor Maximilian is, like, still trying to hold the disparate factions of Mexico

[Co-host/Contributor]

under, like, the colonialist thumb.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

This is kind of a way of, like, well, here you can have a little colony at the edge to, like,

[Co-host/Contributor]

settle things down out there for me.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And Lon starts writing to his mum

[Co-host/Contributor]

about how, you know, successful everything is going.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And he's getting a lot of information about new kinds of products that are

[Co-host/Contributor]

coming out of South America and, like, entering sort of the global trade system, which then becomes Important. When his mother has to bribe him

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

back to the United States with the

[Co-host/Contributor]

equivalent of, like, $500 to be like,

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

they're not going to shoot you for.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It's understandable that you were worried about that. But everybody's getting forgiven if you go and take, like, the ironclad oath. Everything is basically.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

This is, I think, like, two or

[Co-host/Contributor]

three years after the war ends, he's down there for a sizable amount of time.

[Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

I mean, he meets his mom in Cuba at one point because he's like, I'm not coming back to the US you can come down here. Also crazy. Don't love that. That he's like, all right, lady, just come to Cuba. We'll figure it out there. Weird.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Weird.

[Host/Interviewer]

And she gets him. I think that's part of the bribery thing, is then she's like, all right, come back. It's gonna be chill.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Come back. Your wife and I think, son, at

[Co-host/Contributor]

this point, like, you gotta step up and become a father. You can't be hanging out in Mexico this whole time.

[Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And this is also, you know, he's being bribed back. And also, I think it's clear that the Mexican Republic is about to, like,

[Co-host/Contributor]

burst forth and, like, dethrone Maximilian. And, yeah, he's gonna get it pretty soon. And I think everybody kind of knew. That's when the. The new Virginia colony collapses. And not long after Lon leaves, I

[Host/Interviewer]

will add, we are talking about Maximilian, the First of Mexico, not the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian. Different one. Different times, different places.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Sure.

Just as a side note, if anyone is curious about that, they're like, I

[Host/Interviewer]

didn't know about his Mexico arc.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Different. Yeah, A different one.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

That would be interesting if that was like. And then I had a little sojourn

[Co-host/Contributor]

down into Mexico to be the king,

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

as I'm so good at doing.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

So he comes back to the U.S. he starts this political and legal career.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

He's a lawyer because, you know, he studied law before this, before the war. That's what he was doing. If people can remember back through all the twists and turns this conversation has taken them on.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

No, no, no, Straight. We're setting up a beautiful arc towards

[Co-host/Contributor]

becoming basically Bill the Butcher from Gangs of New York. Right.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah. A Slaybackian journey is actually what we've taken everyone.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Absolutely.

[Host/Interviewer]

He also publishes a book of his poems. Is this right?

[Co-host/Contributor]

Absolutely.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

The Shelby's flag poem becomes, like, really popular.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Like, it gets printed in newspapers all over.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

This is like, the ideology of the

[Co-host/Contributor]

Lost cause is literally being created by guys like Alonzo who are very upset

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

about the loss and are getting their way in every, like, division of the United States.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Like they're.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I don't know what it required to become a lawyer back then, but it didn't seem like it was too hard

[Co-host/Contributor]

for him to just step into a super prominent role in St. Louis after coming back from Mexico. His brother is down in New Orleans, who's also become a big finance guy and he's gotten tied in with the

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

mystic crew of Comus.

[Co-host/Contributor]

And in New Orleans, at the same time, there's a lot of clan activity. There's the Democratic clubs, which were not democratic. They were actually very bad. Or like the Knights of the White Camellia.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

All of these sort of like clubs

[Co-host/Contributor]

and men's clubs are. They're a very effective social technology of the time.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Basically, you're making a union for rich

[Co-host/Contributor]

people or rich and powerful people and like exerting power on the post reconstruction landscape.

[Host/Interviewer]

Secret societies are. Unions for rich people is a really good take. That's a really good take.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I do think about them that way.

[Host/Interviewer]

If you said actually the Illuminati are just a union.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

They are. They're kind of a union of.

[Co-host/Contributor]

They're real and they're a union.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

The Rothschilds and Beyonce and the aliens

[Co-host/Contributor]

that they don't tell us about, they're all sort of in a union called the Illuminati. Yeah,

[Host/Interviewer]

they have great jackets and oh,

[Co-host/Contributor]

the swag is unbelievable. Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

So I mean, also part of this is, I think I would be remiss if I don't mention that, like, as you said, they get basically whatever they want. Like these Confederates or former Confederates get off essentially scot free, which is one of the.

[Claire Aubin]

There are many sins upon which I

[Host/Interviewer]

think the United States is founded. But I think it's not controversial amongst historians and Americanists particular to say that, like, not making the south actually pay meaningfully and the individuals within the south pay for the Civil War. Like, actually. Actually pay for it. Like, sure, there's Reconstruction. We're like, well, we do all this stuff which then later they claw back in a lot of really terrifying ways.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Absolutely.

[Host/Interviewer]

Is like one of the foundational errors of our country of being like, well, they're doing this sort of, let's reach across the aisle and let's have some unity here. And it's sor. Well, unfortunately, that leads to people being able to publish books of Byronic romantic poetry about how glorious it was that they believed human beings should be enslaved. And everyone goes, that's a good poem.

[Co-host/Contributor]

That's Great. Yeah, we love it.

[Host/Interviewer]

That's like a really. When you start to grapple with that, a really deeply horrifying and upsetting thing to understand about the United States. And also fuck this guy who's part of it.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah, absolutely. Who's doing his best to spread that ideology and to basically have lost the war and then to still be prosecuting it. Like Shelby and Alonzo Swaback continued to

[Co-host/Contributor]

call themselves confederates for the rest of their lives.

[Host/Interviewer]

Whack.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah, very whack.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

But, you know, he comes back to St. Louis and becomes a lawyer. But what Alonzo is very good at is actually stirring up a mob of

[Co-host/Contributor]

like getting a bunch of guys together to go and stand around voting booths on like the day that some.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

A little bit of democracy has happening

[Co-host/Contributor]

in order to, like, intimidate people or to pack a courtroom full of, you know, half drunk sort of morons to yell at somebody.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And Lon himself is a very loud, always taking the stage, decrying, you know, the. At the time, Missouri had the Drake

[Co-host/Contributor]

Constitution, which was like written by the abolitionist forces. And like, in the aftermath of the

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

war, black schools are being built. The Freedmen's Bureau is. I mean, it's trying to become the country that we want.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Right. All inclusive and rights based, law of the land.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And then there's all these crazy people

[Co-host/Contributor]

in the hinterlands who are doing what then becomes the first wave of the clan, which is to take the plantation violence and have it re erupt in night raids and to wear a costume that basically gives you the power of the plantation owner.

[Claire Aubin]

Hi, haters, it's Claire popping in with my regular shout out to tell you about other multitude shows you might want to listen to this week. I want to talk about Spirits, which is the first ever multitude show to invite me to be a guest on it. Spirits is a history and comedy podcast focused on everything folklore, mythology and the occult. Extremely sick, told through the lens of feminism, queerness and modern adulthood. Every week, mythology buffs and childhood best

[Host/Interviewer]

friends Julia and Amanda get together to

[Claire Aubin]

learn about a different story from mythology and folklore over drinks. That's everything from the mythological origins of major franchises like Lord of the Rings and Wonder Woman to modern urban legends, to a roundup of werewolf stories from around the world.

[Host/Interviewer]

Like I said, they had me on the show a couple of years ago to talk about Nazi zombies and it was.

[Claire Aubin]

Is honestly really, really great. So great, in fact, that I assigned it to my students as extra credit last year. Sorry. If you're one of those students, go do your readings.

[Host/Interviewer]

Stop listening to Podcasts well, you can listen to my podcast, but you know,

[Claire Aubin]

do your homework first. You can start listening to spirits with any of the nearly 500 episodes they've released.

[Host/Interviewer]

There's so much to enjoy, whether you're

[Claire Aubin]

here for analyses of mental health and mythology or creepy modern ghost stories, you can dive [e-mail] or search for spirits in the same app you're using right

[Host/Interviewer]

now to listen to me. Yappy you.

[Claire Aubin]

If there's anything this podcast proves over and over again, it's that some historical figures could probably have done with a visit to a psychiatrist. Luckily for you, tochiatry exists now. If you've been stuck on a six month wait list for a psychiatrist or are bouncing between online mental health sites trying to find medication support, Tochiatry was built for you. It's virtual psychiatry that actually fits your life and your insurance. Tochiatry is a 100% online psychiatry practice that provides comprehensive evaluations and diagnoses and ongoing medication management for conditions like anxiety, depression, ptsd, insomnia, and more. Unlike therapy only apps, Talkiatry is psychiatry. That means you're seeing a medical provider who can diagnose mental health conditions and prescribe medication when it's appropriate. All their 600 plus clinicians are in network with major insurers so you can use your existing insurance instead of paying monthly subscriptions or out of network fees. You'll meet with an experienced licensed psychiatrist who takes the time to understand what's going on, builds a personalized treatment plan, and can prescribe medication when it's right for you. Your care stays consistent and evidence based. More than 300,000 patients have already found high quality psychiatric care through tochiatry. Head to tokiatry.com TGS and complete the short assessment to get matched with an in network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's tochiatry.com TGS to get matched in minutes.

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[Host/Interviewer]

Speaking of costumes, we will need at some point to talk about what he does with this power when he comes back to St. Louis. Right. That's not a good segue. But you said the word costume and I thought we should probably talk about the group that your book is about.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Excellent segue, actually. Yes.

[Host/Interviewer]

So we're, you know, that's a very professional thing I'm doing here. What happens that makes him slash. Why does the Veiled Prophet come into existence? Like, why does he found it? What's happening? Why does he go from I love secret societies to like, it's time for me to make a secret society of my own.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yes, it's time to pop off the. I mean, the first thing, the first thing is that his brother down in New Orleans, him and his brother are both really hooked into the mystic crew of Comus.

[Co-host/Contributor]

And there is this.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

One of the parades in the post

[Co-host/Contributor]

war era is Lalla Rook, which is

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

a poem by Thomas Moore, who was also a big.

[Co-host/Contributor]

One of Lord Byron's best friends, who

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

wrote this poem and invented this character based on some Islamic folklo based around

[Co-host/Contributor]

Al Muqana, who is the veiled one.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And he has got a veil on

[Co-host/Contributor]

because in the Islamic lore, he has had a gnostic sort of experience. He's like glimpsed God and it's like scarred his face. And if you look him in the eye, he could do all crazy things.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And so he has to wear a veil. He's the villain of the poem. But at the same time, you have the first wave of the clan that is doing more improvisational costuming than what

[Co-host/Contributor]

we typically associate with the Ku Klux

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Klan, because all of our view of

[Co-host/Contributor]

it is like tainted by the second wave that a much more standard uniform, basically.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And so in the post war era, there is a fight over what kind

[Co-host/Contributor]

of economic system is going to.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

There's no more slavery, therefore everyone must have a wage.

[Co-host/Contributor]

And so then the wage system becomes the territory that we're fighting over. Well, in 1877, it's the great railroad strike, right? Railroad workers are like some of the most.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

They're the equivalent of truck drivers in

[Co-host/Contributor]

the United States now of how important they are and how they could shut down the system if they all just didn't go to work. Right? And so in 1877, massive railroad strike up and down the lines all through

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, going closer and

[Co-host/Contributor]

closer to the Terminus Point in St. Louis. And this freaked everyone out in St. Louis, including many of the elites, like

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Alonzo, prominent, pretty rich lawyer who, like,

[Co-host/Contributor]

kind of flees the city during the seven days that the workers basically control the whole city.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

This involved a lot of parading.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It involved a lot of, like a festival sort of atmosphere of the railroaders go on strike, then the Coopers also go, and then the foundry workers and the roustabouts on the levee, who are primarily African American, doing some of the worst labor available, which is just hauling stuff on and off steamboats.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

All of these workers get together, regardless

[Co-host/Contributor]

of race, and exercise their power. The strike does not succeed, of course, but it does freak everybody out.

[Host/Interviewer]

And how beautiful that we are recording this on May 1st. First May Day.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Absolutely.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

We're working on May 1st, huh?

[Host/Interviewer]

Well, damn. But my job did unionize yesterday, so,

[Co-host/Contributor]

you know, hey, I'm in a Union as of 12 hours ago.

There we go. Yes, absolutely. As AM I.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

At St. Louis University.

[Co-host/Contributor]

All power to the people.

Hell yeah, brother.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah, it is. I mean, it does. This is a very forgotten moment, especially in the St. Louis story of itself. Thinking about the general strike is not

[Co-host/Contributor]

something that is, like, part of the curriculum.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

It's almost written about in an embarrassed way.

[Co-host/Contributor]

And it's only recently. Mark Krueger's book about this is very good, but it's about, you know, this was one of the first worker councils,

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

the executive committee that basically ran as the de facto government for a couple

[Co-host/Contributor]

days in St. Louis. So you basically had a communist government suddenly erupt out of nowhere.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And in the aftermath of that, the elites in St. Louis needed to show the people that that cannot happen anymore. And the way to do that in

[Co-host/Contributor]

this era is to parade and to have a, like, display of force in the streets.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And so Alonzo, being the poetic spirit that he is, takes the idea that

[Co-host/Contributor]

he saw down in New Orleans of a man in a veil who looks like a Ku Kluxer and sort of dodges around the Grant administration's prohibitions on covering your face in public.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Public getting rid of the first wave

[Co-host/Contributor]

of the clan was a big federal ordeal. They had to go and lock up a bunch of people.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

You weren't allowed to wear face coverings on the highways.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It was like a big Effort to get rid of this. And so there's a way to weasel around it. If you just make a parade character and say that we're celebrating the Veiled Prophet, who's also the police chief who also broke the strike. And he's standing on a float. Sure, sure. Right as you do.

[Host/Interviewer]

Uh huh.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And he's standing on a float beside

[Co-host/Contributor]

a man dressed in an executioner's hood with a big butcher's block and a bloody sort of like, runoff coming off the top of it. And so we're doing a very subtle set of messaging about what's going on here.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah. And you're sort of like. And this kooky guy that I'm being is not a threat to anyone.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Not a threat.

[Host/Interviewer]

He's a fun.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Cool.

[Host/Interviewer]

We're just kind of doing a spooky secret society parade thing. Because a classic behavior of secret societies is to just have parades where everyone sees them.

[Co-host/Contributor]

You know, it is.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

It's truly the most paradoxical thing. It's like they're riffing on the New Orleans Mondi Gras thing, which is like, yeah, the Rex Comus Protus. They all are like secret clubs that

[Co-host/Contributor]

you have to be invited to and masquerading.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

But it's like setting off a bunch of fireworks to be like, I have clandestine knowledge about the occult. And you're like, okay, all right, calm down, brother, that's fine.

[Host/Interviewer]

But people are like, into it though, right? Like, this as an institution exists until like, recently.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Right.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Claire, if you want to come out to St. Louis in December, we could go to the Veiled Prophet ball, which they have a couple days before Christmas every year.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Unfortunately, there's going to be a photo of us outside that. That says, do not allow these two into.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah, I think.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I don't know if I'm invited. I might have to shave the beard off and like, put on a disguise or something.

They like disguises.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

They do. They would appreciate that.

[Host/Interviewer]

Perhaps I'm going in and Groucho glasses and seeing if they.

[Co-host/Contributor]

If they'll recognize me a little.

Yeah. Mustang.

[Host/Interviewer]

Ish.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Like, hello, fellow secret society Scooby Doo style villain outfit.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

What's up, fellow occultists?

[Co-host/Contributor]

How do you do, fellow kids?

It's a good plan.

[Host/Interviewer]

So this still exists, like this kooky, weird thing that he starts or helps to start.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

Still exists to this day. And they're like, like, don't look at it too closely. It's, it's fine, guys.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Don't look at it. But you got to know about it

[Co-host/Contributor]

also, for Some reason.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

It's this paradoxical sort of thing because there's a tremendous amount of power in

[Co-host/Contributor]

saying we have secret occult knowledge and don't cross us.

[Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

There's a weird part of the history

[Co-host/Contributor]

that I think is really fascinating is in the first few years of the parade where Alonzo is in charge of. Of inventing a tradition. Right. Of, like, this is called, like, an archaic affectation where you say, I'm not

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

just making this up. I actually discovered something that's like 40,000

[Co-host/Contributor]

years old, and now we're just going to, like, bring it forth as opposed

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

to making a costume.

[Co-host/Contributor]

And then a bunch of parade floats. Actually, they bought the parade floats from the mystic crew of Comus and had them shipped up on the Mississippi river because a bunch of the barge barons were in the First Veiled Prophet Society. So you got a discount on your parade equipment.

Well, part of this is like, sort

[Host/Interviewer]

of like the camp aspect of it is very funny. And also the sort of, like, to demystify secret societies to some degree. All you have to do is explain the economies of them, like, which are so lame.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Right. Like, you had a buddy who had a parade float that he would sell

[Host/Interviewer]

to you cheap, and then now that's your parade float. And it's like, that's actually so incredibly uncool.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Uncool. Not sexy or occult at all.

[Co-host/Contributor]

No. You have to do some sort of magic ritual.

[Host/Interviewer]

It comes out of a cauldron or something. At minimum, a fire has to be involved, at least.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah, yeah. There's a bunch of interesting stuff about, like, dues payments are, like, a big

[Co-host/Contributor]

part of secret society problems of, like,

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

the organization going into debt and needing

[Co-host/Contributor]

to, like, gather a bunch of funds.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

This is also why this organization evolved and has been able to perpetuate itself. Not necessarily because of that First Veiled Prophet guy. That was actually, like, a little too much for everybody. So in the first few years, they

[Co-host/Contributor]

started, like, dialing it back and kind of like trying to figure out a better guy.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Or, like, maybe he's friendly and more

[Co-host/Contributor]

like Santa Claus and less like a

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

murderous villain who says in the newspaper that he's coming to town to shoot striking trolley workers who's giving K kkk. They use a KKK stamp to represent

[Co-host/Contributor]

him in the first iteration. Very cool, guys. Thank you very much.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Except nobody actually knew about that for,

[Co-host/Contributor]

like, a hundred years. Like, that was a totally. Until newspapers got digitalized, we didn't know that it was the same stamp or nobody had made that connection. Useful to know.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

But the real Thing that makes it solid enough to perpetuate is that it

[Co-host/Contributor]

develops also a ball, a dance. And there's a belle of the ball who is crowned. Of course, it's Susie Slayback is the first belle of the ball. Alonzo's daughter.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And then that slowly evolves, especially when

[Co-host/Contributor]

they get into a financial crisis towards the end of the 1880s. It becomes a debutante ritual. And then you invent the queen of love and beauty, which our favorite actress from the office was crowned in 1999. And it kind of has like really done some serious damage to her career or at least the public perception of it.

[Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

Because they were like, oh, you were the belle of the ball at this racist ass society.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

Secret society thing in St. Louis that was literally invented in the first place to break the backs of striking workers.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Mm, sick.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Cool.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yes.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

An interesting thing on the resume.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah, yeah. Kimmy Schmidt is less fun and quirky now, unfortunately.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah. I think that that is part of why that is such an effective.

[Co-host/Contributor]

This is the primary way that everyone comes to the veiled prophet stuff is through that scandal and that like that she has a sort of wholesome Persona

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

and I think is a talented and interesting actress.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Sure.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

There's too much hate towards the 19

[Co-host/Contributor]

year old girls that get crowned queen.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

The hate needs to be trained on their parents and the people that keep perpetuating this thing.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Totally.

You know, her family's in charge of the Commerce bank fortune and so like you can criticize them and like that's a worthy target.

[Host/Interviewer]

Totally.

[Co-host/Contributor]

But it's just like easy to be like, oh yeah, I wrote a book about the thing that Ellie Kemper got in trouble about.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah, of course. To be like, well, that's how they're gonna first encounter this. But actually maybe let that just be like the initial first lay here and then be like, yeah, it's actually way worse than you're imagining. And it's. Her involvement in any of it is not important at all. Actually.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It's the other stuff that matters here.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

It's that the guy who founded it

[Co-host/Contributor]

is an ex confederate, like psycho who is drunk on power and like did

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

it in order to one of the parades way back at the beginning.

[Co-host/Contributor]

The panorama of progress is basically a ranking of the races.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And so he gets in a bunch of trouble for being racist towards my

[Co-host/Contributor]

people, the Irish, or I'm American, but whatever,

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

he offends the Irish.

[Co-host/Contributor]

At a time when the Irish vote is starting to exercise some political power in the city.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

He's sort of like stepping on toes

[Co-host/Contributor]

on his way up the ladder more

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

and more, but has successfully basically planted a clan character as the mascot of St. Louis.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It's like the veiled prophet celebration is

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

meant to draw people into the city to spend some money. Right.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Of like, it's attached to the agricultural and mechanical fare. So farmers come in, you sell all the turnips that you've been producing for the entire year, and then you got a big wad of cash and that's like. That circulates capital in a really effective way. Way. And the Veiled Prophet basically says there's no workers and there's no African Americans who are going to give you any trouble when you come and visit here. It's a explicitly racist telegraphing of that, which sucks.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah. Using that as sort of insurance for people to say, like, don't worry about that. It's not going to be an issue because we have this freaky guy who's the. The mascot of our city who just proves even is telegraphing that in this, like you say, in this sort of like, implicit way where people are like, okay, it's fin. Fine.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

This place is basically run by a clan adjacent group. Whether they are or not. That's the way that it's going to be interpreted by people outside of St. Louis.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

This was such an effective thing that Kansas City tried to do the same

[Co-host/Contributor]

thing around the same time, but they invented King Kiki.

So drag name.

They're all drag names.

They're all drag names.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

It's also very interesting because at this time it would be improper for a woman to be on a float.

[Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And so if there's ever like a goddess like Demeter who had to be

[Co-host/Contributor]

represented in the veiled prophet parade, that

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

would have to be a guy dressed as a woman. The, like, most conservative wholesaler in the

[Co-host/Contributor]

city, basically dressed as a Greek goddess.

[Host/Interviewer]

Once again, it's all gender on this show.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It is. It all comes back. Yeah, it's tr. Yeah. There's so much gender stuff in, like, the debutante ball stuff, man. It goes on for forever.

[Host/Interviewer]

Even the, like, the veiled orientalist aspect of all of this stuff. You got this sexy guy kind of hidden thing where this episode could be so long. We do need to talk about one thing because I want to make sure that we have time for this.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Sure.

[Host/Interviewer]

His death is crazy.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It's cuckoo.

The way that he dies is cuckoo.

Yes.

[Host/Interviewer]

And it starts.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Starts with an argument about a newspaper. With a newspaper.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah, exactly. This is apropos because you're talking about Mark twain and like St. Louis and the west is still in the public perception. This is in 1882. And St. Louis and the west are like, still the crazy sort of like, anything can happen out there. There's violence and sexual danger and like.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Like, booze and horses and cowboy stuff is still going on on the frontier.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And so Alonzo is exercising his political power.

[Co-host/Contributor]

He is trying to get one of

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

his buddies elected to the state congress. And the Joseph Pulitzer run. St. Louis Post Dispatch gives some light criticism to the candidate. I think. I can't remember what he called it.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Them.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

It was like a bump on a

[Co-host/Contributor]

log or something like that.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

There was, like, a not very offensive sort of exchange of words in the paper. And Alonzo, who had a open, communicative

[Co-host/Contributor]

relationship with the editor, the managing editor,

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

decides to go to the Post Dispatch office to have a word about this incident. And the story that comes out afterwards is that like. Like, Alonzo simply showed up and wanted

[Co-host/Contributor]

to talk to the managing editor, and

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

then the managing editor just shot him

[Co-host/Contributor]

right in the gut. And it's like,

[Host/Interviewer]

what?

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

What? Yeah, they were like. It was totally like, we just. We had no idea what was going on.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And then it turns out later, as they. They have to have a trial, they

[Co-host/Contributor]

put the managing editor on trial and Joseph Polk Pulitzer. This is like a big scandal.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And, like, it adds to the Mark Twain ethos of just, like, the stuff that's going on out there. It's only so many years removed from duels becoming illegal. There's a island in the Mississippi river

[Co-host/Contributor]

called Bloody island where a bunch of rich guys would go and shoot each

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

other in order to settle disputes. Abraham Lincoln famously almost got into a sword fight out there with a guy, but then he demonstrated how. How far his reach was because he's

[Co-host/Contributor]

a giant tall guy. He, like, cut the branch of a tree.

[Host/Interviewer]

Lincoln.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah, Lincoln.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

He, like, cut the. The branch of a tree and it fell. And the guy was like, all right, never mind.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I don't want to sword fight you.

At first, I thought you were talking about the other guy. And I was like, there was a guy who was tall enough that he intimidated. Famously tall Abraham Lincoln. I'm so sad that basketball wasn't happening.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah. There was a Paul Bunyan figure that

[Co-host/Contributor]

sort of intimidated Little Lincoln, as he was known. Yeah, His.

His Trump nickname.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Absolutely.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Little Abraham Lincoln.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Little Abraham Lincoln.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Short stuff.

[Co-host/Contributor]

But there's.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah. So, like, duels are still happening or were recently, even despite being illegal.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Like, to be like, well, the way

[Host/Interviewer]

we solve this is by shooting or stabbing each other in A mutually agreed upon way is like, not that wild.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Like of a.

[Host/Interviewer]

Of a proposition.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah. And the like. I think it's important that, like, Alonzo did a lot of violence during the Civil War. He killed a lot of people. He famously bludgeoned a union officer in order to escape jail. When he was briefly captured, I saw

[Host/Interviewer]

he attacked him with a bucket.

[Co-host/Contributor]

With a bucket?

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Imagine getting crowned with a bucket and

[Co-host/Contributor]

then like, a guy takes off down the river.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Crazy.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

So this is a person who is very, very willing to engage in, like, you know, serious violence. And he's being like, nah, I just want to have a little chat and say that you should apologize.

[Co-host/Contributor]

I'm a rich guy who just wants to chat.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And I also am packing. I got that thing on me.

[Host/Interviewer]

And I'm famous for having little regard

[Co-host/Contributor]

for my own life.

Yes. Right.

Aha.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And I will not be disgraced in the newspaper.

[Co-host/Contributor]

This rag, the Post Dispatch.

Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Which this is what came out is like, this was barely even a duel. Because what happened was Alonzo and his other lawyer friend showed up. Both of them had a Glock on him. And they go into the office. The managing editor has a gun ready

[Co-host/Contributor]

to go, too, because he's like, alonzo

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Slaback's gonna come in here, as he has done before, and he's gonna bitch

[Co-host/Contributor]

at me and probably threaten to kill me. And I just gotta have it out.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And then, as we found out in the trial, what happened was Alonzo showed up, shows up. He's about to get for his gun. He probably pointed it or, like, had it out, but it jammed because he never cleaned it.

[Co-host/Contributor]

And then the managing editor got got. So that's it.

And that's the story of Alonzo Slave's life.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And then everybody had a big funeral for him where they just were like,

[Co-host/Contributor]

this guy was amazing. We loved him so much.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And we're so sad that these corrupt

[Co-host/Contributor]

journalists are murdering our, like, beloved founding fathers of St. Louis civic life.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

The managing editor had to leave.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Joseph Pulitzer had to be like, I'm really sorry that that happened to that guy, but he was trying to kill one of my employees. It was self defense. Very cool and normal.

[Host/Interviewer]

Does it feel good to be someone who, you know, one of the main ways you're known in the world is as a journalist to be like. Like, I'm taking my revenge.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah.

[Co-host/Contributor]

And you got shot twice.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah. It is.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Resurrected you to kill you, actually.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I mean, it is like, such a. Interesting because there is this sense of just like. Especially for entitled, hyper, wealthy people with all of the power. It's like, what do they spend their days doing? They're on Twitter, like, complaining about. Journalists are, like, making plans to take

[Co-host/Contributor]

over the Washington Post and liquidate it.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Like, even when you have all of

[Co-host/Contributor]

that power, even when you're at the very top of the pyramid, the thing

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

that you hate the most is when

[Co-host/Contributor]

somebody is, like, basically evaluating how you're acting in society and being a little critical of it.

[Host/Interviewer]

Sure.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

And for that, you are willing to

[Co-host/Contributor]

duel if you're somebody like Alonzo and

[Host/Interviewer]

badly in his case.

[Co-host/Contributor]

And badly. Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Clean your gun.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Come on.

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

At minimum.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

At minimum, they didn't teach you anything

[Co-host/Contributor]

in the Confederate Army.

Yeah, I guess not.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

That also speaks to his continued hubris

[Co-host/Contributor]

of just like, well, of course I'll just be able to, like, put a bullet in this managing editor. And then I don't know what the plan was after that either. If he was going to say that he was trying to shoot first.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

This all comes back to Star wars

[Co-host/Contributor]

anyway, you know, what a full circle moment, actually. Blonde Sleep playback. Star wars character George Lucas.

[Host/Interviewer]

If you're a listener, he's not a listener.

[Co-host/Contributor]

If you're a listener, though, if you're

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

a listener, for you. Yeah.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Check it out, George.

If someone can get this to George Lucas.

Yes.

You will get a year of free access to our Patreon, which is not worth very many dollars.

Absolutely. That's a beautiful gift of knowledge and entertainment. Yeah.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

You got Lon Slayback, King Kiki.

[Co-host/Contributor]

You know, there's other characters in there.

[Host/Interviewer]

Susie Slayback is also a movie character kind of name, so.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

Her in there, too. Why not?

[Co-host/Contributor]

Absolutely.

[Host/Interviewer]

I think this is a great place to stop there. As I said, there are so many other things we could have talked about and continue to talk about on this front, but it's only so long and eventually people will stop listening, and I can't do this.

[Co-host/Contributor]

How dare they? We've got more to say, though.

[Host/Interviewer]

And if you want to know more. And I'm not just like, like, you know, razzing you up here, Veiled Prophet, your book is very, very good and talks about, like, so much more. He's just, like, the precursor to a lot of these things. The book opens with talking about him and his whole deal, but, like, what he founds and what it grows into and how it gets used and how it interacts with St. Louis and. And St. Louis history and all this stuff is, like, I think, so engrossing and so interesting. And it is just funny that this, like the. From Jump it's crazy. Like, the guy who comes up with it is bananas. And then it just continues on, you know, a pace from there. So thank you for this.

[Co-host/Contributor]

That's very high praise. Thank you very much.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

That it is so entertaining and crazy

[Co-host/Contributor]

is like, it feels like a jackpot because, like you say, like, this is not the most powerful version of the Veiled Prophet. Society is not at the beginning.

[Host/Interviewer]

No.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

It becomes like, hooked into the CIA

[Co-host/Contributor]

and involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King. And there's other guys like Tom Dooley and Clark Clifford. And like, it's just.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Then you get all the way caught

[Co-host/Contributor]

up to the Michael Brown protests. And the McCloskeys.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yes.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Who I think are the spiritual inheritors

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

of the Alonzo ethos.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Gun wielding rich people.

[Host/Interviewer]

I mean, in that you have a photo of them in the book.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

Where I was like, oh, yeah. I mean, I guess this does. You know, if nothing else, you really have proved, both in the book and then in this episode, how cursed of

[Co-host/Contributor]

a place St. Louis is covered in blood. It really is. Like, not even metaphorically. Like, it's just every single inch of

[Host/Interviewer]

it has had something horrifying happen, essentially.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah. It is haunted. It is a haunted city from the past that St. Louis refuses to deal with in any structural way, partly because

[Co-host/Contributor]

of the way the United States politics works in general.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

But it also has encoded into it,

[Co-host/Contributor]

and I am a stalwarts believer in

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

this, that there is the socialist 48ers who helped win the Civil War. That is also encoded here in the emancipatory worker movements in the 1930s and

[Co-host/Contributor]

then the civil rights protesters against the Veiled Prophet. And that continues into the Black Lives Matter being birthed in Ferguson. It's like there's also this strong counter current to all of this horribly evil stuff. I'm always a little worried that, like, the book gives a overall negative impression of St. Louis. And I would like to assure the listeners that we have very beautiful punishment

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

parks, a lot of very interesting architecture. The food scene punches way above what you would expect. And there's so many different kinds of

[Co-host/Contributor]

people who live in San. It's like a beautiful place to visit. Come see the arch. Come on. It would be cool.

They've got an arch.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

We got an arch. You got an arch, Nashville?

[Co-host/Contributor]

No.

Well.

[Host/Interviewer]

And why would you only need one?

[Co-host/Contributor]

You only need one, really?

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

We got there first and you got it.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Yeah.

[Host/Interviewer]

I mean, it is also worth saying that we, like a city, can be both horrifyingly haunted and cursed and covered in blood. And all of these things. And also, as you are rightly pointing out, offering all of these glimpses of like optimistic futures. Like there are all of these things where you say, okay, well this is the birthplace of these other civil rights struggles, or all of these things happen and they coalesce in a place that you wouldn't necessarily expect but is actually very central. It's like this sort of like with Minnesota, right, where you're like, actually a bunch of stuff is happening in Minnesota and it's a very interesting space for that.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Like.

[Host/Interviewer]

Like that can offer some optimistic futurity. Whether that's real or not. That's. Maybe that's just my. Maybe that's just my imagination.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

No, not at all. I think that's a brilliant thing to point out because it is in these lesser understood areas of the country where the contradictions heighten in a more interesting way and become more explicit than they

[Co-host/Contributor]

can in like the citadels of capital in like LA and New York. It's like, like.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

No, it's actually in this sort of understudied areas where St. Louis and places like Baltimore and Minnesota and all of these places mint symbols of the country

[Co-host/Contributor]

because they're like, I think where the fractures of capital happen, they happen at the fringes first and then it sort of spreads to the rest of the system. And it's weird how it works that way. Or there is, I think, a lot to gain from studying small. You know, I always say that St.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Louis is too big not to pay

[Co-host/Contributor]

attention to and too small to care about. So it's like caught right in the middle there.

[Host/Interviewer]

That's a good line.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Thank you.

[Host/Interviewer]

Yeah, everybody start paying attention to the interior, please.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Yeah.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Flyover Country.

Thank you so, so much for coming

[Host/Interviewer]

on to this show.

[Claire Aubin]

Where can people find you online if they would like to do that or

[Host/Interviewer]

if you would like them to do that?

[Co-host/Contributor]

Absolutely.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

I'm basically on everything at devont o' Shea and you can pick up your copy of the Veiled Prophet from any of the Haymarket vendors that they have listed on their site. And leviathan Bookstore in St. Louis also, you can pre order through their site

[Co-host/Contributor]

or order from them. A beautiful local business.

[Host/Interviewer]

You know what you can also do, if you want to do a double, triple, etc whammy for everybody, you can use the TGS bookshop.org our storefront thing on there and route it through Leviathan.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Oh, beautiful.

[Host/Interviewer]

Because you can. With bookshop.org you can like select the bookshop you're supporting or if you want to buy from a specific bookshop. You can also do that so that your money goes more directly to those people. And we will link as always, as we do with everyone who comes on the show. We'll link all of this here for people to get to very easily.

[Co-host/Contributor]

Amazing.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Amazing.

[Co-host/Contributor]

That is such a good idea.

So there you go.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Damn.

[Host/Interviewer]

Oh hey.

[Co-host/Contributor]

It's like you're a professional at this.

It's crazy, you know, Some might say, not me.

[Devin Thomas O'Shea]

Some might say you're a professional. You got it.

[Co-host/Contributor]

And that's a great place to end.

[Claire Aubin]

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of this Guy Sucked. A member of the Multitude Podcast Collective. This episode was Hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guest Devin Thomas O', Shea, and edited by Mothman fan Julia Sheffini. All of our theme music was written and produced by California King Marshall Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes, including two extra episodes per month, and access to our full archive of episodes, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or to our [e-mail] this guy sucked. You can also support TGS by giving us a 5 star rating or a review. Wherever you're listening to the show or just by telling a friend or two

[Host/Interviewer]

or three, some guy at a bar, I don't know.

[Claire Aubin]

It's up to you to check the show out.

[Host/Interviewer]

That would rock.

[Claire Aubin]

See you next week.