What is The Last President by Ingersoll Lockwood about?
1900: or, The Last President is a short novel by American author Ingersoll Lockwood, published in 1896. Set in the near-future year 1900, it describes the aftermath of a presidential election in which an unconventional, populist candidate from the West — backed by the poor, the indebted, and the disenfranchised — defeats the established order and triggers panic in New York City. The wealthy flee Fifth Avenue, the stock market collapses, and the city descends toward anarchy. The novel is a product of the anxious political climate of the 1890s, when agrarian populism, the silver currency debate, and the rise of figures like William Jennings Bryan seemed to threaten the financial establishment. It gained renewed attention in 2017 when readers noted apparent similarities between its fictional president and Donald Trump.
What genre is The Last President?
The Last President is a short work of political fiction, sometimes classified as political satire or speculative fiction. It belongs to a tradition of late-19th-century near-future political allegory: Lockwood is writing not a realistic prediction but a nightmare scenario for the American financial and social establishment, projecting their fears about populist politics onto a fictional future election. Its closest literary relatives are the political novels of Anthony Trollope and the social warnings of Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column (1890), which imagined a similar collapse of civic order. The book is short — closer to a novella or extended pamphlet than a full novel.
How long is The Last President?
The Last President summary
The novel opens with the outcome of the 1900 presidential election: a candidate described as a man of the people — a Westerner, unconventional, backed by farmers, laborers, debtors, and the enemies of the financial establishment — has won. The reaction in New York City is immediate and visceral. Wealthy residents of Fifth Avenue begin to leave in carriages, afraid of what the new administration will mean for their fortunes. Police are deployed to protect the wealthier neighborhoods as crowds gather in the streets.
The new President is a disruptive figure whose election represents, to the establishment, a repudiation of the entire social and financial order. He is associated with silver currency over gold — a reference to the actual political debate of the era, in which agrarian populists like William Jennings Bryan argued for bimetallic currency as a way to relieve rural debt and challenge the power of Eastern banks.
As the novel proceeds, order deteriorates. The language of class warfare intensifies. The established political class scrambles to contain a transition of power it did not believe possible and cannot control. The stock market, the banks, and the social clubs of the wealthy are threatened.
The novel does not tell a conventional story so much as present a series of scenes demonstrating what the author believes would happen to American civilization if the wrong kind of man won the presidency. It is a fantasy of catastrophe from the perspective of the threatened establishment, and it makes no secret of where its sympathies lie. The poor and dispossessed who celebrate the new President are depicted with contempt; the wealthy fleeing Fifth Avenue with a kind of elegiac sympathy.
The title's phrase — "the last president" — implies that this election represents the end of the American republic as the establishment understood it. The winner is not the last man to hold the office so much as the last one before the fall of everything that came before.
How does The Last President end?
Key figures in The Last President
The new President — The unnamed (or thinly veiled) populist candidate whose election sets the events in motion. He is depicted as a disruptive outsider whose association with the poor and the agrarian West makes him threatening to the financial establishment.
The citizens of Fifth Avenue — The wealthy New Yorkers who flee their homes at news of the election result. They function less as characters than as symbols of the established order under threat.
The crowd — The urban poor, debtors, and workers who celebrate the new President. Depicted by Lockwood from the perspective of the establishment — as a threatening, irrational mass rather than as individual people.
Ingersoll Lockwood (implied narrator) — The novel's voice is that of a sympathetic observer mourning the end of a certain kind of American civilization.
Quotes from The Last President by Ingersoll Lockwood
As a short public domain text from 1896, verified quotations from The Last President are limited. The following is confirmed from the work.
"Give us back the marrow of our bones which you have used to grease the wheels of your chariots."
This line, spoken by the crowd to the financial establishment, captures the novel's central conflict: the rage of the indebted poor directed at the wealthy who profited from their labor. The full text is freely available in the public domain.
Frequently asked questions
Did The Last President predict Donald Trump?
The claim that Ingersoll Lockwood's 1896 novel predicted Trump's presidency went viral in 2017, based on several apparent coincidences: the fictional president is a populist from New York, his election causes chaos beginning on Fifth Avenue, and Lockwood's earlier Baron Trump books feature a young, adventurous boy named Baron with a German last name. The resemblances are striking as coincidence but do not constitute prediction — Lockwood was writing about the political anxieties of his own era, specifically the agrarian populism of William Jennings Bryan and the fear of silver-currency reform. The connections are real enough as cultural curiosity but should not be taken as genuine prophecy.
Who was Ingersoll Lockwood?
Ingersoll Lockwood (1841–1918) was an American lawyer, diplomat, and author. He served as a U.S. consul in several European countries and later practiced law in New York. His literary output includes the two Baron Trump children's adventure novels and The Last President, all published in the 1890s. His work was largely forgotten after his death and remained obscure until the Trump-era viral moment brought all three texts to sudden public attention.
What political events does The Last President refer to?
The novel is a direct response to the political crisis of the 1890s United States. The great depression of 1893 had devastated rural farmers and workers. The Populist Party had risen to national prominence demanding silver currency, railroad regulation, and direct election of senators. William Jennings Bryan — a populist from Nebraska who made his famous "Cross of Gold" speech in 1896 — was the direct model for the fictional candidate whose election Lockwood imagined. The novel is essentially a wealthy Easterner's nightmare about what would happen if Bryan or someone like him actually won.
Is The Last President in the public domain?
Yes. The Last President was published in 1896 and is fully in the public domain. The text is freely available online through Project Gutenberg and other digital archives. Multiple inexpensive print editions have been published in the years since its viral rediscovery, often bundled with the Baron Trump books.
What are the Baron Trump books by Ingersoll Lockwood?
The Baron Trump books — Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump and His Wonderful Dog Bulger (1889) and Baron Trump's Marvellous Underground Journey (1893) — are children's adventure novels featuring a wealthy, adventurous boy named Baron Trump who travels to fantastical underground worlds. They gained viral attention alongside The Last President because of the name coincidence and certain plot details (Baron travels with his dog and seeks adventure guided by a character called "The Don"). The books are entertaining Victorian adventure stories with no intended connection to modern politics.
How short is The Last President compared to a normal novel?
The Last President is very short — approximately 80 to 100 pages depending on the edition, which puts it at roughly the length of a novella or a long short story. It reads less like a novel with traditional plot and character development and more like a political pamphlet written in narrative form. The text can be read in a single sitting of an hour or two. Its brevity means that the full viral experience of reading "the book that predicted Trump" takes very little time.
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