Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 461: Billiken Blues LIVE at Institute 193 (w/ special guests Jesse Montgomery and Devin Thomas O'Shea)

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Live show recorded on 8/14/26 at Institute 193 in Lexington, Kentucky, with authors Jesse Montgomery and Devin Thomas O'Shea Video of the show can be found at our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty/posts/trillbillies-w-169238145 Buy Jesse's book here: https://uncpress.org/9781469693965/it-is-not-enough-to-survive/ Buy Devin's book here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2770-the-veiled-prophet

Can you give me something else? I had sounded great yesterday, I'd be honest with me. What y'all think? You should read about the real-life UK mascot, the Kentucky Bobcat. A last-minute bill from the state legislature allowed nighttime hunting to bobcats with night goggles and thermal equipment. Even though experts don't know exactly how many of the shy felines are out there. In my opinion, this is true sportsmanship.

Our President Trump is trying to keep a ceasefire with Iran. All Iran knows to do is kill and destroy and tear up anything that they can. All Iran leaders hate Israel and they hate America too. So if Trump thinks these heathens will stop at attacking our ships, he's badly fooled. They will stop at nothing. They will stop at nothing to destroy every ship they can. He cannot negotiate with people that have no common. sense. That is why

it cannot negotiate with Democrats with no common sense who don't have enough mind to know which bathroom to go to. Long time reader, first time caller. I'm wondering about the coach over in Wise County, Virginia, who hasn't been seen since he walked into the woods.

I hadn't heard any updates on that. Curious minds want to know. Thank you. I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. I called Speak Your Peace Over two weeks ago and told them And told you when Senator Tillis and Senator Corning claimed they wouldn't vote for Todd Blanche to be Attorney General Unless Blanche signed a paper saying Trump's $1.9 billion weaponization fund is dead and gone

He signed some sort of paper But he left it open so Trump and his sons will still be excluded From being audited by the IRS Cornyn and Tillis sold out nothing's changed How could Terry Adams be running for magistrate in District 3 if he's living in the housing projects in Weitzburg? We're knocking the rust off tonight. I'm sick and tired of hearing shooting the bull commercials on 95.1

and I'm sure other people are tired of it too. They need to take it off. Nobody's interested in that stuff. Editor's note. Are you sure nobody's interested in that stuff? Seems strange the station's programmers would air that show twice each week if there wasn't quite a bit of interest and a positive response. Hey, down front. I'm sorry to tell you this speaker piece, but this would be the last time I'm calling in.

Wait a minute, I'm sorry. I suddenly caught the Donald Trump. This is your last chance syndrome. Yet again, he's lied about what's going on in Iran and how this is our last chance to surrender and open the straight of whore moves. He's done this morose. than five times now. Last one. The convenient marty up at the intersection at Dean is sitting right in the middle of the world. Yet, yet, yet, they don't keep their shelves a third of the way full of merchandise. I just don't understand. I really don't. See if we still remember how to do

this. Switching it up on me like that. Welcome, everybody. We have a great show for you playing tonight. Thanks all for coming out. We have a couple of guests in the back of the building that are currently esteemed and... Enjoying the red carpet treatment. That's right. We're going to bring them back on here in just a little bit, and we'll talk about their books. You can purchase their books at some point this evening over here. But before we get to that, before we get to our guests, we need to.

to like cover a few bases. We haven't done a live show in a little in a minute. So we're knocking the rust up. We've not done a live show in what? Four years? Four years? Six years just us. Yeah. So anytime you're like in a public space, you got to

cover the bases. You know, you got to make sure that we all know what to do in the event that something unforeseen or spontaneous occurs, right? Nobody likes to talk about it, but we have to. Should we tell them, Tom?

Let's get down to brass tacks. If God forbid. And this looks like a pretty chill crowd, so I don't see a whole lot of, I don't know, maybe in the back a little bit. We need a plan for if there's a live shooter. Okay? I didn't want to say it.

I didn't want to say it. We need a plan for if there is a mass shooter in this, establishment I think the risk is low but never zero in America. We were going to popcorn some ideas of what to do if that were to

occur, but we're a little pressed on time, so Tom and I went to the brainstorming room, the writer's room, and we came up with three roles that everyone should have in a mass shooting. A little spoiler here, I'm team possum. that will possum routine

so that's one of the roles yes the second role would be human shield so we've got some takers we've got some people who are into that you don't really want to volunteer for that so possum's human shields and we need some heroes

so and we can't all be heroes all right there is a limited amount of spaces for each of those well thank you selflessly sacrificing yourself. But yeah, there are, I don't know, mass shooting is a strange thing. There's usually, like I said,

there's about three roles, but sometimes there could be a fourth role. Nobody talks about a getaway man. A getaway driver. There's no, there is no getaway driver in a mass shooting. Never. And they turn the gun on themselves.

Not because they're at the end of the rope or whatever. but it's a logistical failure it's a gap in planning but we weren't sure how a a joke about a we got a good show for you now we got a good show for you but I thought we'd try it

we'll see what happens we haven't done a live show in about four years a lot has changed culturally and spiritually and socially in those four years I mean just did Lexington alone we have an art gallery now. Let's give it up for Institute 193. I'm being told

that they've actually been here for about 15 years. We said no mass shootings in the back. You can't shoot your six shooters off. You have to put those back under your chairs. Lots changed. We've got an art gallery now.

But there's something I really wanted to talk about, and this is related to art. I don't know how many of you are for a came from out of town, how many of you live here in Lexington? How many of you are from Lexington? You live here. Lexington's, okay, well represent. I bet ten of you or so.

Most of you came from out of town, it sounds like, right? All right. Okay. Well, then you won't be familiar with the latest massive loss we've experienced here in Lexington. For many years, I guess it was like 2003 or 24, there was a mural of one jelly roll. Jelly roll. It was at the corner of Maxwell and Broadway overlooking the Wildcat

liquor parking lot and Rupp Arena. But they took it down. They took it down. Yes, yes. We see we got some dinners and a roll nation in here. I've been told that along with the Bayou tapestry, it's been

acquired by the British Museum. But Keelan said they might be looking into putting it in here. But Chris, pull me up a photo. Prove me up a photo here for you, for those of you not. There we go.

It's here. That was before he lost the way. That was when Bunny X-O-X-X-O-X- still in his life. Yeah. They put this up because he was doing a show here. And I guess they wanted

to make him feel like things were okay. They were actually okay. But I don't know. What's really funny about the mural coming down was that it synced up entirely with the... Hey, in the back.

It synced up with the announcement of his divorce from... Bunny XOXO, which is her Christian name or government name, I think. It's Belgian or something. But we wanted to do a little bit of maybe crowd participation. You know, like I said, this is, a Paul has fallen over Lexington

since they took this mural down. And so we need something to replace it. The thing is, and I think the reason this doesn't quite work as a mural, is that, This should be good. Murals have to be of martyrs generally, right? A good mural is of a martyr, right? Bobby Sands, you know.

Yeah. Che Guevar. Right. Che Guevar is someone who dies or fights for their cause or something, right? That's my daughter, by the way. She's getting a diaper change. But but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but,

We're extensively still with us. So we wanted to kind of get y'all's idea, and we'll send them to the mayor, Mayor Gorman, about what a good mural would be to put in this liquor store parking line. So we came up with three potential martyrs, all right? And we're going to need you to, again, signal to us which one you think.

This is very scientific. So first up, Chris, could you hit the button? Charlie Kurt. You knew it, you knew it. Charlie Kirk? Yeah? No? We're not carrying the flame.

Hold on. Hold on. Let's have a little discussion about this, real quick. It's not dismissing out of hand. The gums would take at least a week. That's some serious work. What's that?

Oh, yeah, I think so. We could probably put her on there. I think so. kind of in a you know it's kind of like has anybody ever been to Henry Clay's grave here his like wife is buried in a mausoleum but she's kind of pushed over in the corner yeah yeah

okay so we got Charlie Kirk that's our first second martyr you know who this is all right this is this is a United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson

I think this is the best photo I could find of him. It is the last moment of his life. I do think it would be the best mural. Painting this, it's a little avant-garde. You know what I'm saying? That's right. Yes, impressionistic, yes. And so we've got a martyr

for, what was Charlie, a martyr for? Free speech, right? Free speech. Bullying college kids. Yeah. That's a good thing to... Noble cause. Brian is a martyr for $8,000 deductibles. He died for a good cause, though, in a good place. But the third group of martyrs here is...

And we cheated a little on this one. This is really seven martyrs, but... We grouped them together like the Eastern Orthodox Church groups. saints together. This is, and I couldn't find a photo of them at all. And I don't even know how many there were, probably four to seven. And they

died, they died for science, right? They died for exploration and discovery. So, yeah, so I don't know. So, all right, we're going to do a vote here. Charlie Kirk. No.

No. Crickets. Crickets. Shit. All right. We're done with Kirk. Man, I really looked forward to seeing that. I was like, I'm going to go to the mayor's office. I'm going to say, this is what we need.

I want to get the Hal Rogers Parkway renamed the Charlie Kirkway. Uh-huh. I think every road in Kentucky should be named after Charlie in some way. All right, so not Charlie, though. All right, Brian Thompson. Okay. Strong contender. All right.

Strong contender. The Ocean Gate 7. I'd say that one won out. I think we got to run those last two back. It's neck and that. Oh, you have to do like a tiebreaker? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, all right.

Brian Thompson. The Titan Heroes. Okay. We know who it is. It's Brian Thompson. Let's bring it up, Chris. Oh, shit. Wait, wait, wait.

You give it away. Way! My tab, gay sex, Tribalese Institute. When you look for gay sex, that's when you type in. All right, all right. Well, we'll get word to the mayor. Thanks so much, you all. We have a great show for you tonight.

We're going to take just a minute or two break, and then we're going to bring out Jesse Montgomery to talk about his book, which you can pick up over here. So don't go anywhere. Just hang time for a second. All right, welcome back, everybody. everybody, we are joined with our good friend Jesse Montgomery.

It's making feel well. How's you going? Jesse's written a very good book. It is not enough to survive the Young Patriot's story. And we're going to talk a little bit with him about his book, and then we're going to bring Devin out

to talk about his book about the veiled prophets. And then we are going to do a little bit of... God knows what happens. Yeah, yeah. And it's all in. No-hold barred. Badlam. That's right.

So, so, So yeah, Tom, I think you had some things kind of teed up. He threw it at me earlier with the Synth. A history of the Young Patriots Organization. The White Appalachian Southern members of Fred Hampton's Rainbow Coalition, along with the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panthers and the Young Lords organization. It is not enough to survive as an extensively researched and tightly composed examination. It's the kind of things I write about my friends.

of the organization, the time and place they existed in Chicago from 1968 to 1973, and an expertly constructed discussion of the meaning of culture, class, identity, community, and the often colorful characters that made up that membership. Further, it is not enough to survive traces the political arc of the hillbilly diaspora, at times conservative, and at times rooted in the labor militancy of the Appalachian coal miners and their fight against the companies, and how they're move away from the coal mines of the mountain south or sharecropping to the wartime factories of the Midwest allowed many of them to find common cause with black laborers from all over the south who made the same migration around the

same time to seek work in the same places. Too often the work wouldn't materialize and the people in Jesse's story wound up instead Chicago slums working as day laborers and socializing in country bars listening to the music of their youth and harkening to the past they left behind. It is in these places and through that cultural and artistic lens, country music and southern cultural in general, plays a big role here, that the young patriot spawns. So with that said, Jesse, question number one.

Your book traces the outward migration of Appalachian Hillbillies, many of them from coal mining or sharecropping families, to the wartime factories of the bit, I guess I said that, or particularly Chicago in the case of your book. So maybe let's start there to talk a little bit about the landscape,

what the landscape was like back home that necessitated that migration. Thank you, Tom, Terrence. Lovely introduction. Yeah, so the story of the young patriots, folks who might be familiar with them, you know, know them from their work with the Black Panthers and this kind of surprising sort of counterintuitive solidarity that they put together in Chicago. But the book really focuses on how the work that they were doing and the kind of politics they were able to envision is a product. of this migration from the south, but particularly Appalachia, the Upland South to the cities of the north.

So judging from the jelly roll mural recognition in the audience, people here probably have this sort of migration as part of your family history, folks moving north for work in factories and stuff like that. The story of like Appalachian out migration is really part of the much broader, much bigger, rural to urban shift that goes on throughout the 20th century in America, like 60% of people in 1900 in rural areas, and then by 1975 that sounded like 25%. So there's this huge demographic resortment that goes on, and it's particularly intense in Appalachia because of the mining industry. And there's a sort of, you know, there's a mono economy there in the coal fields, and when the demand for

physical labor, manpower goes down, people just have to leave. There's no other work to absorb it. So I think like between 1950 and 1980, the core counties of like Harlan, Bell, Pike, Perry County, they lose like 40% of their population

essentially in like 30 years or something like that. And those folks leave for cities in the north. For manufacturing jobs, they follow pathways that People had tried in earlier generations for war work and stuff like that. But this story really kicks off because waves of migrants are rolling into cities in the late 50s, early 60s, and there's no work.

The work is drying up. So this is kind of like bleeding edge of deindustrialization. Factories are actually starting to move down to the south. And so the folks in this group are really like young people, very young people, like early 20s, sometimes teenagers who are kind of encountering this world, the crummy conditions they're living in, the lack of jobs in the cities they've arrived in and their parents have brought them to,

and they're feeling at a loss, they're discombobulated in what rushes in, but the Black Panther Party, SDS, radical student organizing, and presents this, like, new world, new way of solving problems for them. I remember, it was about 15 years ago, a book came out about the Young Patriots. Just as a brief for what were the Young Patriots, how does your book build on that previous book that had come out? Yeah, great book by James Tracy and Amy Sunny called Hillbilly Nationalists

that looks at a bunch of radical white working class groups that popped up in the late 60s and early 70s. And the Young Patriots were, so the Rainbow Coalition, which was headed up by Fred Hampton in Chicago, was this network of radical, you know, we say working class organizations, but they're really like, you know, out of work, lumpen proletariat. That's, you know, the Panthers use that term from Marx and Ingalls. But young people out of work outside the formal economy who are trying to build class power. regard, you know, even though they're out, they're often, like, unemployed. And the Patriots, the Patriots, like, they form in this neighborhood called Uptown in Chicago where there's all

kinds of, like, crazy shit and, like, urban renewal projects going on and stuff like that. And they come out of an organization, an earlier radical community organizing, a group called Join, that's kind of a coalition of students and poor people, and the poor people kick the students out, and then the remaining group becomes the young patriots. And they're like really like they're a left-wing militant organization by of and four poor and working class people, right? So it really is like a story of self-organization, of poor people trying to determine their own priorities,

figure out what needs to happen in their neighborhood. And one of the, I like to think about them as a radical community organizing group because they were trying to, you know, they're trying to build like food. pantries and health clinics and police the police in their own neighborhood and it was kind of as a criticism of the liberal social service groups that were operating at the time so they're like radical in the sense that they're making

this kind of progressive critique of liberalism of the war on poverty of social work in the city of Chicago and trying to figure out how to do it on their own and so they link up with the Black Panther party yeah exactly I really love this photo Amazing photo. This is from Resurrection City, big protests, like the last big protest of the civil rights movement. Yeah. It's a great poster.

With the cops in the background. Amazing outfits, too. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, Jesse, something that you talk a lot about in this book is how the beer joints and the honky tongs and the cultural markers and country music and these things sort of helped galvanize the identity that helped young patriots. spawn. I was wondering if you can maybe talk about that piece of it a little bit. Yeah, totally.

Yeah, there are like two chapters in the book that are really about the cultural politics of this group and how they were trying to produce radical white working class hillbilly culture in Chicago. This neighborhood uptown that these people land in, you know, there are all of these hillbilly ghettos as they were termed in the press, these neighborhoods in all these cities in America at the time. but in Chicago it's uptown and they're like 40 to 50,000 migrant white southerners clustered in this neighborhood and so like the bars play country music they have country music bands around they have like little Abner paintings on the you know they're really trying to like retool to bring in

this clientele and the Patriots one of the one of their like real commitments is like they were trying to produce a radical politics that was of their neighborhood and of their milieu. And so they spent a lot of time organizing in bars, specifically country music bars, and they developed this whole kind of rap about how country music had this sort of secret, contradictory politics. They were super committed to trying to think about culture as it existed in their lives rather than impose or like, you know, figure out the correct culture that the students for a democratic society were bringing in and saying, like, here's the politically correct line or whatever. They were really trying to kind of think through the contradictions of their own

lives as it presented to them. And like, we can talk about the, the use of the Confederate flag later. It's really like a piece of that. But they, they love, you know, they love country music. They made music and played it. They, they, like, named things after Hank Williams and their neighborhood whenever they could, they got a chance. They were like sort of secular saints for these people. And I think part of that too is that they learned a lot about themselves through music. That was like an avenue of culture that felt like theirs that they could identify with. And, you know, as I was saying, like, these are really young folks in the city cut off from, you know, education. Most of them had high school level education.

of that. And art, writing, music, it's like something that they look to as a source of strength, but also kind of like to figure out who they were and why they were in the city and what kind of traditions they might draw on to do the work that like the Black Panthers were doing. So country music was like a resource for them as well. Before we get too far away from the Confederate flag, I find that endlessly fascinating, this reappropriation of it. I think at the behest of Fred Hampton the Panthers initially? It's unclear when exactly it happened and why. But yeah, the Patriots, if you know about them,

they're most famous because they wore the Confederate flag next to free Huey patches on their jackets, some of those images up there. And this was a controversial decision, and later on in their life they stopped doing it. But the reason, yeah, the reason they did it, I think you're spot-up. on there, Tom, is that they were attempting to sort of, I would say, like, rather than force

the flag to mean something else, they were trying to basically disrupt it, to draw people into this conversation they wanted to have about radical politics and then, like, force it to designify or something to be, you know, to be a professor, the de termant, the French, you know, the surrealists, how they would try and, like, break open the signification of the thing. So they would, like, force it into some other kind of. meaning but they were not like they were they were never trying to kind of like create an alternative interpretation and then like fly the flag proudly or something like that and say now this stands for like a new you know new South and

the North kind of thing they really just wanted it to kind of these two symbols to be in some kind of productive tension with one another and force people in their neighborhood to ask questions and that's what they basically said is that it was like mostly for folks that they were encountering in the bars who would be who wouldn't think twice about seeing the Confederate flag, but we're really confused about the Black Panther patch. But I think that's kind of true of their approach to culture more generally as they were like, look, if you're working with popular culture, mass culture,

popular or mass working class culture, it's given to you in a certain way, and you can wish it was something else, or you can try and kind of refigure it and crack it open. But it was very provocative. But the Panthers, I mean, the Chicago Panthers, some of those guys were really far out. And they were intrigued by Bobby Lee, especially,

who shows up in some of these images, this weird gamble that the Patriots were doing. Like, I think they also got the provocation of it and saw that as a useful tool. Well, it was, I remember when that book came out about the Young Patriots, about 15 years, or 10 years ago, I can't remember when it came out. Maybe like in late Obama.

Is it the urban race... I'm sorry. I was saying, urban race rebels. Yeah, that's the one. It definitely kind of got pulled into the discourse around like Hillbilly elegy and like white working class

communities and how they can engage politically trying to change their communities and trying to change the political system and all this. I guess kind of like you know, wrapping up here like what is what are some lessons we can take from the Young Patriots story?

And maybe like what is their legacy? Yeah, I think the book came out. It's an interesting history because the book kind of came out around Occupy, but then you're right. It gets like re-encountered when Trump is rising. And people are like, can this history of radical hillbilly organizers teach us how to appeal to white working class vote, the Democratic Party to get people to vote for Hillary Clinton?

I think the answer there is no, right? And I think that that is not the point of James and Amy's. book. But when I think about the Patriots, like one thing I would say, you know, they're a short-lived group. They last for about five years, but they inherit the work done by earlier groups in Uptown, and they kind of, the work of the Patriots, and they go away, gets picked up by other groups, too. And I think one lesson to kind of take from them, or when we're thinking about their significance, is like they are an example, and I think this is true of plenty of groups, activist organizations, in Appalachia of, you know,

groups of people who capitalism has passed them by, the sort of the movement of industry has left these people behind, but they're not, you know, but they're left with a legacy of organization, they're left with radical history, and so they start to organize however they can, right? So you can think about the roving pickets in eastern Kentucky who were doing crazy wildcat strikes and blowing up bridges and stuff like that

when the union took their cards away, their health cards away. And then you can look at these people who wound up in the cities and weren't going to take it, essentially. They were poor, they were living in shitty apartments. They were under threat to get pushed out of their neighborhood through urban renewal. And rather than acquiesce or rather than, you know, and get a job and move out into the suburbs, they said, all right, we're going to do whatever we can to organize.

And the shape of that organizing takes on pretty crazy contours. And I think the Confederate flag thing is a good example. But I see them as, I think part of the legacy is just the creativity and complexity and contradictions of self-organizing workers in America and folks who are refusing to kind of give up and thank you Tom tightly composed yeah yeah and then I think but I think I think some other kind of things to take away today when we're thinking is like these folks get to a really radical political position and analysis from like getting kicked around by the cops living and coming apartments and it's through like that is the

moment or experience that like opens them up to a new kind of politics and then getting brought into organizing, transforms them into radicals, revolutionaries, whatever you kind of want to call it. So I think that it should also, I think, you know, it's tempting to kind of despair that the movement is not as organized as we wish it was,

et cetera, but a lot of these experiences, you've got to think about people being opened up to the possibility of getting organized in this thing, outliving whatever its current iteration is. So a few things to think about. Well, good. Well, the book is It is Not Enough to Survive, the Young Patriot

Story. Jesse Montgomery, thanks so much for telling us about it. Devin? We get Devin O'Shea out here. Let's give it up for Devin. What's up? We're going to be able to talk a little bit about there's a connective thread

between y'all's two books. It's not immediately apparent because a lot of your book, Devin, takes place in the 19th century, in the early 20th century. That's true. It's a good time. But it was striking because we're going to get to action, of course. But on the cover of the book, that aesthetic of, like, hand-drawn sort of, like, activist symbols, that's a very action civil rights group in St. Louis kind of thing in the same era.

Yeah. So it all has, like, a same branding. So, Devin is from St. Louis. He's written a book called The Veiled Prophet. I forgot my copy at home with all my notes and questions. So this is going to go real, real good. Yeah, right. So let's just start with the basics, Devin.

What is the veiled prophet? I'm sure most of you aren't familiar with St. Louis. If you are, maybe you've not heard of the Vail Prophet. You've not passed through the arch or not. But what is the veiled prophet? He's a guy who is like the mascot of a men's group that started in 1878. So like a fraternity, pretty much. A fraternity of...

A secret society. A secret society. And that the mascot is... He's got some literary sort of background, but in the context of when he comes about, it's impossible to deny that he is a Ku Klux Klanzman, especially from like the first wave of the clan and he's sort of skated through St. Louis history probably because of like the industrialization and stuff

and then he gets to probably the entry point for everyone is when Mrs. Schmidt went down, Kimmy Schmidt. Yeah, actually let's click the thing Chris. I had this okay. Ah, there you go. So Ellie, that's her name right? Kemper, right. The Office?

Is that what show she was on? Best. She was Aaron from the Office. Erin from the Office. She was... Herons is pretending like he doesn't know every episode of the Office right now. Okay, I really haven't watched The Office.

I don't think I've watched a single episode. But, okay, she's not the one who married Jim. No. That would be epic. That would be pretty cool. Yeah, she was involved with Andy. Okay. Okay, all right.

He's like a worst character. Is he the one that spilled the chili? No, that's a different character. All right. All right. Maybe you haven't seen it. Not watched it. Yeah.

So she's from St. Louis. Her family is like Kemper Industries. It's like something out of a Batman movie or something. Like, what do they do? The Kemper family is in charge of Commerce Bank. And so they're financiers. And so, especially in Kansas City, the Kemper's are very big. But if you start looking around at Washington University,

the art museum is the Kemper Art Museum and then Commerce Bank sponsors a bunch of stuff so they're... About Kemper Furniture of Hazard, Kentucky. Yeah, I wonder maybe they're like also kind of into yeah modernist furniture and stuff and restoring things. I don't know they got enough money to do whatever they want

well so you're noticing a trend here. This is a really powerful family with connections and that's what the failed profit society was, right? It was a group of really powerful people with connections, right? Yeah, it definitely starts out as like the coolest club to belong to in 1878, because it's also, it is commemorating the summer in which the 1877 general strike in St. Louis

took over the entire city, and I think there is connective tissue, of course, because this is a, the Vailed Prophet is designed to break multiracial solidarity. And so the 1877 strike is a multiracial coalition. Very weird for the time. This is like the end of reconstruction.

And the next year they start the club kind of to do an end zone dance. I'm like, yeah, we busted up the St. Louis commune. And then we're going to make the police chief who crushed the strike, the first Vailed Prophet. And also we're going to signal that he's coming to town to shoot striking trolley workers and shit.

Yeah. So there's several different ingredients that go into the veiled profit like whole aesthetic. KKK is one of them. The clan is one. The clan. It's a big one. Mardi Gras. Marty Grau is another big influence. An oriental is

that's not my word. I did not. It does sound like a word you're not supposed to say. Eastern and Asian influences is what they would have, I guess. In Claude Woods' book, Development of Rest, he talks a lot about in the Delta Commission

how a lot of the planter class in the Mississippi Delta kind of would give themselves name like the Grand Petrition. Oh, yeah. And the reason that, like, you have Cairo, Illinois, and Memphis, Tennessee, and all these places, they had to envision the Delta as this sort of renewed Egyptology. They're sick fucks. Yeah.

Kind of, yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And that, like, that does make sense because it's like, if you are getting a, if you're a Victorian dandy teenager being sent to the university to, like, learn about stuff, you're reading 1001 Arabian Nights,

and it's the sexiest thing you've ever read. It's like, there's a lot of sex in that book, and it's very salacious. And that was another thing of, like, I think that's why there's also, like, in Freemasonry, there's the Shriners who are also Orients, list, of course. But there's, like, worship in Victorian guy logic over,

wanting to, like, Christian thoughts that you're not supposed to have can happen in the Orient. You can just dress it up in, like, Aladdin set decor. And then you can be like, the king is kind of a dickhead and is getting us involved in endless conquest wars. Yeah. So when you think of the Vailed Prophet Society, it's basically like the, was the Christmas Adventures Club?

from one battle after another. Absolutely. But with KKK pageantry. Yeah, instead of Santa Claus, it is the veiled prophet of Khorasan who comes to St. Louis on a magic carpet. And he selects the city not, like, he goes to Egypt and says, like, no, we don't want to do Egypt. That's been done. And then he goes to France and it's like, these people, no way. St.

Ironically. Absolutely, yeah. Paris has washed. This was kind of during the Klan's gay period, but wasn't. It was definitely the most vibrant period of... They would name, they would have these

like really effete names for the months. Yeah. Oh, I've never heard of that. Yeah, like June was like wonderful. Yeah, wonderful. Yeah, yeah. These guys did love whimsy.

Yeah. And also the first, like, this, they're patterned off of Montegra Cruz and like in the 1880s, it would be Gauche to have a woman play Demeter up on the float. That's like not a place for a woman. And so you have to get like Henry Shaw slave owner

up there to like dress up as Demeter. Yeah, that's pretty cool, right? They were doing cool stuff. Now these people, these people, you'll find this out in Debbett's book, were instrumental in constructing the world order after World War II, essentially? The Cold War. You don't say.

I mean, the book really kind of does a good job of showing how weirdos and freaks have been at the heart of constructing how bad the world is. Yeah, and especially when they're trying to have fun. There's a weird thing with the Montegra angle because, like, in New Orleans, or if in the history of Montague it's like that's the anarchic space you get to open that really is supposed to be a pressure release valve

for how abusive and restrictive the medieval church and the medieval monarchy is and then all of the peasants are supposed to be able to drink and fuck and like become barn animals for a day

before Lent starts and the Vailed Prophet guys and this happened in New Orleans also are like, well, what if we got to do all of the party and you guys got to watch? And that was just how it was. Everybody was like, okay, fine, you party. We'll just watch.

Well, okay, so I mentioned it before. This guy, Clark Clifford, a lot of your book is about him. He was like Truman's right-hand guy and was very instrumental in building like the Cold War world order after World War II. But, you know, and this gets into Jesse's book a little bit, or is some connective tissue, the veiled profit by sort of virtue of its actions throughout the 20th century did bring into reality an opposition movement called action.

And so I want to talk a little bit about action because they were very important, instrumental in, as you say in your book, the most important day in veiled profit history, which was when the prophet was unveiled in front of a large group of people. So what was action, and who was Percy Green? Percy Green is like St. Louis's big civil rights icon. This is an African-American man who had gotten a start at McDonald-Douglas doing aerospace construction.

He was like one of the only engineers. And then he famously broke off from the more tepid civil rights movement. The core sit-in sort of, Percy called that the T-N-Ean. cookies part of the civil rights movement and he wanted to do something bigger. And so as the arch was being constructed and it was just sort of two little pillars. Twin Towers kind of. It was a twin towers. And then it was symbolically different and they were doing different kind of sacrifices there

at the moment. While they had a all-white construction crew and this was a big federal project. And so Percy Green and another white activist, Richard DeLay, climbed one of the little legs and occupied it and sort of like turned the arch from this symbol of Western expansionism and they gave way to the West and manifest destiny and all that stuff into like a civil rights icon. He was protesting that this isn't fair that St. Louis is at least half black and there should be good jobs. The deindustrialization that we were just talking about that was happening in St. Louis

on the north side. And so calling attention to that, the bleeding edge of it was like, it needed like a grand symbolic, you know, protests. And so the arch was one, and then the action was also like intentionally integrated so that like white protesters would get arrested in the place of Percy Green or Ivory Perry. And so they looked around for like the next most salient capital sort of symbol. and it's definitely the Vailed Prophet because, as Percy Green had pointed it out, there was no better way to get in front of every executive in St. Louis all at once, except at the Vailed Profit Ball,

where they're all hanging out. Seems like a strategic error. You probably don't want to gather all in one place. That is the problem of having a secret society of evil guys. It's like, well, they got us all in one spot at certain places, which is strange. So then, I guess they don't want, it would be lame to zoom into the Christmas Adventurers club. That would really take the panache out of the bunker, you know.

And so in 1972, this was after years and years of action protests, disrupting the Vailer Profits Society has a ball, a debutante ball, and then a parade, the Fourth of July parade, usually, but it's like changed. And so they would disrupt the parade, they would handcuff, themselves and like do a little skit out on the street where somebody that has like society painted on their chest like lays down and then somebody who's dressed in a doctor's coat and like social justice written on the back comes out and like revives them to get like a very basic message like so that everybody gets what we're talking about and so three

female action protesters got into the ball we don't know like why how they got the tickets still. There was an anonymous tipster, gave them three tickets to the ball. And it was in a big auditorium, and there's like a stage on one side, and then there's a big balcony around the top. And so the three debutante action protesters go up to the top, and right before they're about to crown the queen of love and beauty, two of the protesters start throwing leaflets out and screaming down with the VP up on the balcony. Everybody's kind of like looking up and freaked out, but they're still doing the, like, rounds. There's still somebody doing, like, the debutante walk.

And Jenna Scott, one of the protesters, grabbed an electrical cord that was hanging from the ceiling, and she rappled down onto the floor, except that the electrical cord broke midway, and she fell and busted a rib. And then, like, there's all this stuff going on. A guy comes over and is like, are you okay? you just fell out of the balcony.

Asked Abe Lincoln the same thing. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, well, so she pops up and she's like, I got to get a phone call. And so she's just like, ducks behind the stage. I got to take this. I got somebody who's calling me. That's why I fell out of the balcony.

But she's using this as an excuse to get back behind all of the guard guys that are around the veiled profit and then around the back of the stage and she comes out and she unveils the VP and it's Tom K. Smith, the vice president

of Monsanto Corporation at the height of Agent Orange production right in the middle of the Vietnam War. It's kind of like a perfect guy. Because a lot of like missiles and, you know, weapons of destruction were mass destruction,

We're built in St. Louis during this time, right? Yeah, we've got beer, so we got the Anheuser-Bush-up. That's what I was referring to, yeah. That's like the fun one. And then it's like, you look a little past the beer. It's like, what else are they doing over there? And especially in the 60s and 70s, it's aerospace jets for Vietnam, which I just learned Old Mac is like the CEO, Titan of McDonnell Douglas, and he was really into, he funded

at Washu a parapsychology department. and he was interested in trying to figure out how to read minds. And then you look at all of the jets that they produced, and they're all called phantoms and voodoo's. I'm like, is there something there? Like, what the fuck is going on? Anyway. Well, if you read Devon's book, there's all kinds of crazy stuff in it.

You'll get to read about how the Vilt Prophet might have been involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., which I didn't know about before reading your book. book. And, but what is the Vail profit up to today? Other than, you know, giving Ellie Kemper you know, you know, pageantry gigs to put on our CV. What are they doing? What do they do up to these things? Well, yeah, the calculus has really changed because of

Ellie Kemper. Now there is the information that I have on background is that they are really trying to still be like, how can the queenship be seen as a civic thing. And how can we turn our guy who everybody says is a Klansman into like not a Klansman? So they're rebranding. They're trying a lot of rebranding. Two years

ago they came out and told St. Louis Public Radio. They were like, okay, we get it. Everybody hates this thing. We're going to get rid of the guy. Okay? You win. We're getting rid of the Valed Prophet. And everybody is like, okay, we're renaming our organization

VP St. Louis. and the VP don't stand for anything. They're just letters. It's high concept. Yeah, it's kind of like we're retroactively destroying meaning. And so then everybody was like, fine, I guess the guy is not in the club anymore. And then the December ball rolled around again, and there's a big picture of a guy up on the stage crowning the queens,

and he really looks like the veiled prophet. But that's the Grand Oracle, dude. That's not the Vailed Prophet. That's a different guy. He doesn't have a veil. He's got a little mask on. So he's different. Except Grand Oracle was like a moniker for the Vailed Prophet.

They're just... They're gentrifying the Vailed Prophet essentially. Yeah, and they're like insulting everyone in the process of doing that. They're saying, like, you dumb rubs are going to be easily fooled by our... are slight re-brand. And so they're, yeah, they're still holding their monthly meetings and they're going to have another ball. But I think that they are struggling to get young women

to want to be in the debutante ball, which is strange. Why not? Well, if they get Pam from the office, maybe that'll help them a little bit. Absolutely. She's also, I think, a St. Louis. There's a bunch of office people who are from St. Louis. Interesting. It's weird.

Phil. I'll watch the show. You've convinced me. Oh, and I'll also buy the book. Devin O'Shea, thanks so much for telling us about your book. Okay, for the last segment of this evening's show, we wanted to kind of take it back a little bit. We've not done this segment in a while. It's an older Trillilley segment.

How many day ones we got in here? like four all right nice well maybe you're familiar with this segment it's called profiles and courage we've

we've we've profiled people who've thought they were gods om Setti we've profiled people who thought they could talk to gods the Reverend Spear

who created the God machine tonight we're going to profile an actual God And this, you know, this is relevant to St. Louis. It's also got a Chicago tie-in as well. We are going to be talking about the Billigan. Are you familiar with the Billigan, Devin? Yes, I am.

All right. You guys St. Louis University grads in the house. Any sluzers in here? Let's get a photo up here, Chris. Let's see if I can get a photo of the Billigan. Oh, wait, go back. Oh shit. There we go.

There's the Billigan. All right. This is a cool dude. Sort of. It's a mascot, yeah, for St. Louis University. It's a mascot for like several different institutions in St. Louis. Most notably St. Louis. Right.

But I don't know. I didn't really know much about it before I looked into it. But there was like a folklorist in like the 1940s who was car. wandering through Alaska as folklorers do. They go to Alaska. And found these like carved ivory things that people said that the Inuit had been carving for centuries. And, you know, this folklore had asked around, like, is that true?

You know, and apparently they had not been carving these things for centuries. These were created in 1908. So this was like the viral meme of its day. And it was so viral, it made it all the way up to the Inuit in Alaska. It's a pretty good metric for if your meme is good. But the Billiken was created in 1908 by a woman named Florence Pretz, who said it came to her in a dream. And, yeah, 1908, it was a good year. The year the music died.

The year the music died. William Howard Taft. Stuck in a bathtub, I think. Big year. There was also, I think, a panic around that same time. Back then there was panics. Bank runs, panics. Bank runs, panics.

They had, this was before recessions. It was a depression light, essentially. This was like the social, economic milieu of the. the day, right? Howard Tafted in a bathtub. Music's dead. Music is dead. And there's a panic. But the spiritual

milieu of the day, this was a time of kooky religious innovations, okay? I don't know, are you all familiar with the new thought movement? You've heard about the new thought movement. Kind of. Was this also part of the fad of having

somebody with a bunch of magnets come over to your house and wave them over? you. Actually, yes. Okay, good. It was. Because this was also in the same milieu with, like, spiritualism, the Fox sisters, Dan Aykroyd's

dad and grandfather. Dan Aykroyd's dad. It runs in the family. Apparently, I'm told that slimer from Ghostbusters was based on a real thing that happened during a seance. That's true. Which would mean that slimer is a nepo, baby.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's a jobs program in perspective. Madam Blavatsky, theosophy, even Mormonism, right? Pentecostalism. These are interesting days. A woman in Buffalo left

$152,000 to a ghost named John Gil Forres. Same year. All right. How's he going to spend that money? Are you like... That's why they were having bank panics and runs, whatnot.

People were leaving money to ghosts. Okay? This was the time of the mind cure craze. People thought that if you had a physical element, you were sick, all you had to do was think good and well. Positive mental attitude. Yeah, positive mental and sin free. Kevin Gates thought.

Kevin Gates thought. If you start a car battery with your bare hands. The guy who invented positive mental attitude was the arch nemesis of the young patriots, by the way. Is Chicago crazy guy? Yeah. Who was it? W. Clement Stone.

Total psycho. Interesting. Combined insurance. He was an insurance baron. I think there was a Kempir as well. But yeah, he totally funded parapsychological. Of course it's, yeah. We really didn't know if there was Chicago tie in.

We were just hoping someone would arise. Crazy insurance. Yeah. Okay. He's got a great name too. Yeah. What was it? W. Clement Stone.

With the name like that, you're going to need some. positive thinking, I think. Yeah. This is the spiritual milieu of the day, okay? So we've got economic, trying times, spiritually trying times.

And materially, dolls were being produced artisanally at a bespoke level, but I don't think they were being mass produced at the time, or at least no one was

craven enough to fully go the extra mile until this woman named Florence Pretz came along who like I said this is 1908 she said she saw the Billiken in a dream and she said that and again I'm

I did not use this word this is the word that Florence used your own thin ice here we go yeah get ready to clip she said that it looked oriental and the reason why

was she thought she had been Japanese in a previous life. That tracks. Yeah. Well, back then, like, that was like how people said, like,

I have a Cherokee, great-great-grandmother. Back then, everyone had a Japanese. That would be Occidental. Yeah. Right, right. Did the Billiken have clothes on

when he came to her in the dream? Or was like, he showed up like this? I think he showed up like this. What does that look like to you? Kind of like a troll doll? A troll-down. From the 90.

But, but a Vesucian. nature. But he's in nature, yeah. Like he lives on TV dinners, or... Can goods. Can goods. Is that a benevolent expression on his face, or is that a menacing grin? He's kind of doing the Calvin peeing on the...

Yeah. It's like the anti-stinker face. Uh-huh. Calvin peeing on Haber Taps. Yeah, okay. But Florence is looking hot. Come on. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, she does. She looks great. I mean, so this is 1908. She took the name from a poem by a man named Bliss Carmen, who is Canadian. And she began writing poems of her own about the Billiken. People needed national, you know, national morale. The year was the music was... But they came up with an initial...

entire Billican philosophy, right? They call it the good luck God or the God of things as they ought to be. The Billican, okay, so the owner of the Billican is instructed to tickle his toes and watch him smile. This is the frequency,

though. Tell him the frequency. You're supposed to do it every 10 minutes. How involved is that? You know, Muslims pray to me a couple times a day. Christians pray on Christmas and Easter. Amen.

That's a little involved. Well, look at this guy. He doesn't have much of a brain, so he doesn't have much of a long-term memory. You need to pray a lot to him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's not going to remember it. It is a big commitment,

tickling toes every ten minutes. It's a big one. The Billiken was also billed as an amateur psychiatrist as he was the sure cure for the following. The blues, the solemn filling, the grouch, the hoodoo, Hard luck melancholia, the downy, the down and out, and the bass bacillus. I don't know what that was in 1908.

I don't know how I wanted to know. It sounds like it's all describing depression, but in like very, like, this is depression from when you're in gambling debt, or this one is when your cousin has been, like, run over by a tractor. Bloddenham addiction. These are old-timey depression. Those are just words you would say in your 40s radio. voice, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The hoodoo germ, hard luck bali colia.

Grouch. When you try and, like, go horse trade and you're not, you don't know how to trade horses very well. You've got to go tickle that. That's when you get the hoodoo germ. You tickle its feet. So, Pretz licensed the patent for the Billiken for $30 a month

to the Billiken Company out of Chicago, which was made of three investors, who wanted to take her idea and make millions of dollars, which they did. They took her idea and they ran with it. But very much like the Beanie Baby of the 90s, the whole thing sort of sputtered out within a few years. There was an abilic in bubble.

They sort of collapsed. How did we go from panic to bubble? Well, back then, you know, the metabolism of the economy He worked a little bit different. You could get ulcers. You get, you know, indigestion. As an aside, somewhere in between 1911 and 12,

that's when they made the Billiken, the mascot of St. Louis University. No one knows why or how. Was it before it went bust, or were they like, actually, we're going to make Beanie Babies, like, the main mascot of our thing. Yeah, they've been talking about that for Florida State. They're going to do that with Beanie Babies. Immediately cash flows from the store.

You're selling those. to everybody. I think it was after it went bust is when they made the billigan. That's kind of... You couldn't give them more. Yeah, I don't know about that. It's not very imposing as a mascot.

Yeah. You don't think that's threatening? Broke dick, former gods are mascot. That's the mascot. I've passed that on campus quite a lot. This is where I teach, by the way. If you saw that thing in a dream, I think it's kind of cute.

is nipples protruding, come on. Yeah. Jeez. His toes are hiding his crotch. Very strange. But before the billigan crash, Florence Pritz was already feeling pretty jaded and disillusioned.

I mean, she'd only licensed it for $30, which, I don't know. To me, in 1908, that's probably a lot of money. Get your house, a car, a washer, and drive. Yeah. Be sitting good. Yeah, houses were $9.

in 1908. Maybe that's why Slew was like, oh, this is a discount symbol. Come on. Yeah, they got it on cheap. Yeah, they got it on cheap, right. They bought low. So just 18 months after the Billikins' first appearance, the Chicago Daily Tribune Raina story.

Creator cast off Billiken, Ms. Florence Pretz, says Idol no longer brings her luck. She seeks profit in dollars. Chicago manufacturers reply, royalties are paid as due. The article goes on to talk about how she felt like she was not paid what she would owed. And the article poses the age-old question, would you smash a Billigan if you had a chance? Damn.

Would you smash? Well, wait. It's... Obviously, yes. Come on. He's magic, and he's the god of the way things should be. He's a generous lover. Well, Ms. Florence Pritz said I certainly would. So, I mean, we kind of already knew that. Yeah, yeah.

So the Billikins' legacy, this is one of the first dolls, not literally, but like mass-produced. Like we get Barbie from the Billikin. Like, it was like a big, it was a huge craze. This thing was massive. And you, you know,

you had people walking around in debt, probably, because they had bought so many blankets. This is like the NFT. Listen, there are people in America right now that have ruined their lives with gnomes. That's true. Absolutely. They start off, they start off just asking for fruit.

Trinkets or something. Quickly rationed them. That is how we got the Great Depression, by the way. We got two indebted to gnomes. To gnomes and bilicans. But this takes us back to the Alaska Inuit, which in these beautifully carved ivory pieces. To me, the Billiken is a tale about how you can imitate art, but life can't always imitate you. Let's give it up.

Thank you all so much for coming out tonight. Thanks, everybody. Please get the books over here. I don't know who's doing the merge table, but someone will be doing the merge table. And thank you all so much for coming. And yeah, we'll see you. Thanks, Institute 193.

Yeah, tip your bartender. Thanks, Jesse, thanks, Devin. And enjoy Lexington. Woo!