The astronomer can tell to a second the beginning of an eclipse a thousand years ahead. The chemist makes no mistakes; when he puts together certain atoms of matter, he knows and announces beforehand what the result will be. . . . Of course there can be no such certainty in predicting social phenomena, for the factors are so complex that unexpected results are sure to make their appearance. Nevertheless there are certain tendencies in history, which may give us some clew to the hereafter. It is this ground I propose to occupy.

After the Irish-American journalist David Goodman Croly successfully predicted the Panic of 1783 and the results of several political elections, he hung up his newspaperman’s hat and went into the forecasting business. Glimpses of the Future (1888) is an attempt to “begin scraping my little hole through the fence which separates us from the future” in order to extend the sightlines of us “pigmies of the present”. Croly never claimed to be an oracle — although, in this volume, adopts the pseudonym “Sir Oracle” — and is only interested in commenting on “the drift of things”. He is wary of utopia, charging a lineage of writers (from Plato down to Edward Bellamy) with indulging “their fancy for ideal social states”. Instead, he casts an eye on history’s countercurrents, the tendency to regress as well as progress. He believes his work should “be read now and judged in the year 2000”.

The book takes the form of dialog, a Q and A between a statesman, publicist, voter, churchman, social reformer, ethnologist, linguist, economist, merchant, trader, journalist, Nevadian (who speaks of irrigation), and Sir Oracle. And some of the predictions do seem truly oracular, especially for a person writing in 1888. In terms of politics, Sir Oracle worries about “the accumulation of wealth in a few hands”, how “the middle class . . . will become reduced in numbers”, and a coming era when “there will be no more cheap land”. He suspects that “California is destined to have a dense population”; he believes that the US will soon annex Hawai‘i. He fears Germany above all other nations and speaks of “the coming international war”. In terms of foreign policy, he predicts that “the United States will some day take its place among the nations as a great power in international questions”; domestically, he worries that the postal service will be treated as a for-profit venture, when it should really operate as a public service. He foresees the successful opening of a Panama Canal, suspects that “the drift of things is towards the emancipation of women”, and worries that daily newspapers will be absorbed into journalistic monopolies. He augurs that the jet-setting age will soon be upon us: “If the aerostat should become as cheap for travellers as the sailing vessel, why may not man become migratory, like the birds, occupying the more mountainous regions and sea-coast in summer and more tropical climes in winter.” On the relation of the sexes, he laments — despite the civilizational benefits of monogamous marriage — that “we have promiscuity, polyandry, and polygamy right here in New York”, and suspects that these practices may one day become more socially tolerated. He has no time for one Mr. Fanciful, who suggests that narcotics akin to opium, nitrous oxide, and cocaine could one day allow us to actively control our dreams, and thus prevent a third of one’s life being lost to unproductive sleep.

Elsewhere, the oracle’s crystal ball leads him astray — and the contemporary reader sometimes sighs with relief, sometimes moans with regret. “We will never confer the right of suffrage upon the blacks, the mongrels of Mexico or Central America, or the Hawaiians”, he states, before predicting the inevitable invasion of New York by the English, French, or German navy, and the acquisition of Mexico and Canada by the United States. He believes that the US will introduce universal monetary and measurement systems to the world, but that fiat money will never become popular (“the paper fiction is invariably killed by the fact that you cannot exchange something for nothing”). Due to the rise of electric light, Mr. Fanciful suggests that we will soon work at night in the summers, to avoid the heat of day, and that a six-hour workday will become the norm. Sir Oracle suspects we will also master geoengineering, discovering methods to keep the temperature above freezing and below ninety degrees Fahrenheit in every country on earth. He advocates for stirpiculture and “forbid[ing] conjugal unions that are likely to result in criminal, insane, or diseased offspring”. The Oracle is not quite as anti-Semitic as his interlocutors, the Ethnologist and Journalist in particular (the latter describes how “the bulk of the Continental press is openly or secretly under control of the Jews”), but advocates treating Jewish Americans fairly, if only because “the Jew is getting ready to be absorbed into communities where he is treated as an equal”.

Born in Ireland in 1829, Croly worked for New York’s Evening Post and Herald, before becoming managing editor of the World. He is perhaps best known for coining the word “miscegenation” in his co-authored Civil War–era pamphlet, The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (1864). The text initially appears to be “one of the most fearless documents in the archive of nineteenth century abolitionist writing”, claims Mark Sussman, for it argued that multiracial people can be “superior, mentally, physically, and morally, to those pure or unmixed”. Abolitionists championed the radical argument; anti-slavery newspapers ran glowing reviews. The intentions behind the pamphlet, however, were anything but transparent — Croly conceived it as a false flag hoax to undermine the abolitionist movement and influence the presidential election, moving voters away from Abraham Lincoln toward George B. McClellan. He failed in this goal, but “miscegenation” as a term had a damaging afterlife — for it hinged on the possibility of racial purity. It seemed Croly found it easier to imagine an era of aerial travel than to conceive of a time when every individual would be treated with equality and respect, regardless of their ancestry.