1900; or, The last President

A political nightmare from 1896, imagining America in the year 1900 under a populist president. When a fiery outsider seizes the White House through sheer charisma and anti-establishment fury, the wealthy elite watch in horror as 50,000 workers descend on Washington with red flags and revolutionary slogans. Banks close. The rich flee to their country estates. Factory owners are dragged from their homes by angry mobs. In this vision of democratic collapse, the common people rise up, and the social order disintegrates. Lockwood, writing at the height of Populist Party anxiety, crafted what he saw as a warning: what happens when the wrong man convinces the wrong masses that they deserve everything. The book has since become a strange artifact, eerie in its superficial resemblance to modern political divisions, though Lockwood could not have imagined that readers a century later would find his fever dream strangely familiar.