Summary: 1900: The Last President

The GIST

1900: The Last President by Ingersoll Lockwood is a very short political fantasy, first printed in 1896 as a thin, cheap, paper-bound pamphlet, in which an outsider riding a wave of popular anger wins the American presidency and the country begins to shake itself apart. Lockwood was a New York lawyer and novelist with a taste for the eccentric, better known in his day for children's adventures about a boy called Baron Trump. Here he turned to something darker: a cautionary tale about how fragile a republic can be when half the nation refuses to accept what the other half has voted for. The same work also circulates under the title 1900; or, The Last President, which is why library catalogues sometimes list it more than once.

It was no bestseller. The few surviving first editions are flimsy things, cheap to print and easy to lose, and for more than a century the story sat unread in a handful of special collections. Then, from late 2016, it found a second life online. Digitized copies of public-domain books had made it searchable by anyone, and readers who noticed the title, the New York setting and the author's other books began to treat it as a prediction. Downloads surged and kept surging through later election seasons, publishers rushed out new printed editions, and the price of an original climbed among collectors. Skeptics wondered at first whether the whole thing was a recent fabrication. It is not: copies printed in 1896 survive in library collections, more than a century older than the people it is said to foretell. Whether it is prophecy or simply a nervous satire of its own moment is the question that makes people pick it up today.

The Story

The tale opens on a single night: November 3, 1896, election night, in New York City. The returns are in, and they are not what the city's comfortable classes expected. The winner is a populist outsider, a candidate in the mould of the real-life William Jennings Bryan, carried to victory by the poor, the indebted and the disillusioned, people who believe the country's money and its government have been run for somebody else's benefit. Lockwood's first readers needed no introduction to such a figure. They were living through that very campaign, and the pamphlet asks them to imagine waking up to the outcome that half of them dreaded.

Lockwood sets his opening where the old order felt most at home. The Fifth Avenue Hotel was a famous gathering place for Republican power brokers, a building any New Yorker of the day would have recognised as a seat of influence, and it is there that the trouble begins. The choice is deliberate. The mob does not gather in some anonymous square; it comes to the doorstep of the men who are used to deciding elections. The news of the result brings crowds into the streets, and the crowds turn ugly. Lockwood writes of Socialists and Anarchists on the march, in language that echoes the newspaper headlines of his time, and of a city in which the well-to-do suddenly feel hunted. The streets fill with mobs. Behind closed doors, bankers, businessmen and politicians are seized by panic, convinced that the financial system and the social order are about to go under together.

From that night the story widens from one city to the whole nation. The new president comes to office promising to upend the institutions that the establishment holds sacred, and to move wealth away from those who have gathered it. Lockwood, a lawyer by training, tells this in a clipped, legalistic manner, less like a novel with heroes and villains than like a report from the near future. He is interested in the machinery of the republic: the reach of executive power, the constitutional process, and what becomes of both when a transfer of power is not accepted by every part of society. There are few intimate scenes and few individual characters to follow. The president himself is seen from a distance, through what he sets in motion and through the fear he inspires. The protagonist, if there is one, is the country itself, and the suspense lies in watching how much strain its institutions can take.

As the pages turn, the damage spreads from the streets to the economy. The later chapters describe the American banking system giving way, and the mood darkens from alarm to a sense that something cannot be put back. The title supplies the dread that hangs over the whole: this man, the story warns, may be the last to hold the office in the republic as its citizens have known it. By setting the reckoning in the year 1900, Lockwood chose a date that to his first readers was the future, but only just, close enough to feel like a warning and not a daydream. How far the unravelling goes, and what is left standing at the end, is for the reader to discover.

What It's Really About

To read this pamphlet well, it helps to know what was frightening people in 1896. The decade had been brutal. The Panic of 1893 had wrecked businesses, the long depression of the 1870s was within living memory, strikes and riots had filled the newspapers, and the country was split between city and countryside. The disorder Lockwood paints in his New York was an exaggeration of scenes his readers had already seen. The great quarrel was over money itself: whether the dollar should stay tied to gold, as bankers and the urban East wanted, or whether free silver should be coined to ease the burden on farmers and debtors. The 1896 election, fought on exactly that question, reshaped American party politics for decades.

Lockwood wrote from one side of that divide. His story is a satire aimed at the silver movement and at Bryan's candidacy, and it gives voice to the fears of the urban elite to which he belonged: that agrarian populism would bring ruin, that the mob was at the door, that the republic could not survive a president who owed nothing to its established institutions. Seen that way, the book is less a vision of the twenty-first century than a portrait of the nineteenth, a snapshot of class anxiety in the Gilded Age. New York is at the centre because it was Lockwood's own city and because, then as now, it was the nation's capital of finance and media. If the money men of Manhattan were not safe, the pamphlet implies, nobody was.

It also helps to know how little is known about the author. Lockwood was not a prominent public figure, and most of what survives about him comes from legal directories and passing notices in the literary press of the 1890s. He produced a run of speculative and eccentric stories in that decade, of which this pamphlet and the Baron Trump adventures are the ones anyone now remembers.

Its modern fame rests on something else. Readers linked the pamphlet to Lockwood's children's books, in which a young Baron Trump goes adventuring and visits Russia, and concluded that the author had somehow seen what was coming. Enthusiasts call his work prophetic. Skeptics answer that the name Trump was not unusual in the nineteenth century, that the children's stories and the political pamphlet were written in different genres for different audiences, and that much of what Lockwood foresaw never took place; the banking collapse of the later chapters, for one, matches nothing in the historical record. People are quick to find patterns in scattered coincidences, a habit of mind with its own name, apophenia, and the internet makes such patterns very hard to dislodge once they have spread. Interest in the pamphlet still rises and falls with the political news, and some modern editions now come with introductions that try to separate what the author intended from what later readers have seen in it.

What keeps the book interesting, with the prophecy talk set aside, is how familiar its tensions feel. A divided country, an outsider who speaks for the left-behind, an establishment that sees his victory as the end of everything, crowds in the streets of a great city: those ingredients belong to more than one era. Lockwood's lasting point is that a democracy depends on the willingness of the losers to accept the result, and on the trust that holds institutions together when passions run high.

Who Should Read It

This one is for the curious: readers drawn to literary oddities, to Gilded Age politics, or to the strange story of how a forgotten pamphlet became an online sensation. It takes very little time to read, and it rewards anyone who wants to judge the so-called prophecy for themselves. Students of American history will find in it a vivid, partisan record of how the election of 1896 looked to a frightened New Yorker. Come for the coincidence, and stay for the glimpse of an older America arguing over questions that have not gone away.