Harry Truman and the Year 2000 (1950)

The year 1950, (as we are wont to do with "round" numbered years), provided plenty of predictions of what the second half of the 20th century held.

An angry editorial critical of President Harry Truman, (a Missouri native), and his vision for the year 2000 appeared in the January 6, 1950 Sedalia Democrat (Sedalia, MO). An excerpt appears below. You can read the entire article here.

Mr. Stalin and the Moscow planners never offered the comrades anything nearly as good as what Mr. Truman promises. The pie he puts in the sky would really be worth waiting for, if it could be had by the year 2000.

In international affairs, there will be world peace. The atom will be under international control. The United Nations will be a going concern and will have forces to preserve international law and order. World commerce will be regullated under the new International Trade Organization. Other nations will share America's prosperity through an expanded Point Four Program of technical assistance to under-developed countries. Communism will be suppressed, not by force of arms, but by an appeal to the minds and hearts of men.

See also:
Subject: Politics
Lyndon B. Johnson on 2063 A.D. (1963)
Hubert H. Humphrey's Future (1967)
Hubert H. Humphrey's Year 2000 (1967)
Negro President by Year 2000 (1965)

Negro President by Year 2000 (1965)

The July 19, 1965 Delta Democrat-Times (Greenville, MS) ran a piece by Lyle Wilson proclaiming that by the year 2000, "there will be a Negro president of the United States, a Negro on the Supreme Court, [and] one or more in the U.S. Senate." The full text appears below.

Leftwing political realists in both major political parties are looking eagerly beyond the era of appointment of Negroes to high federal office to the time when there will be a Negro president of the United States, a Negro on the Supreme Court, one or more in the U.S. Senate.

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y., cited the trend after his brother was elected president. In an address aimed at the emerging African nations, Kennedy said; "And now we have an Irish Catholic as president of the United States. The same kind of progress can be made by U.S. Negroes."

Kennedy related the political rise of Irish American Roman Catholics in the United States to the possibilities open to American Negroes, Sen. Jacob Javits, R-N.Y., was encouraged by the 1957 (Eisenhower administration) civil rights legislation to predict that there would be a Negro cabinet member, a Negro president or a Negro vice president by the year 2000.

Writing in the magazine Esquire, Javits said that as of 1958, the immediate goal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was to be the election in 1960 of three Negro congressmen from Mississippi and one each from North Carolina and South Carolina. NAACP didn't make it in 1960 but has mounted a continuing campaign.

Javits wrote that he hoped and believed that U.S. Negroes would attain the suggested political heights on the basis of practical political considerations.

"Once the (civil rights) fight has won for Negroes in the South their constitutional right to vote," Javits wrote, "and once they learn to take the full responsibility of voting, this country may well witness a ballot box revolution in many southern states."

Javits believes that 30 to 40 Negroes will be elected to the 107th Congress which will convene in January, 2001. He wrote that Negro leaders had told him that it would be possible to nominate a Negro to the Supreme Court in 1968 and that there would be by then a Negro member of the U.S. Senate.

Well before 2000, Javits expects a Negro to be elected mayor in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. He wrote in 1958 that he expected school desegregation to be completed by 1965, Javits calculations are based on a steady increase of the Negro vote for local and federal office under protection of federal law.

Another consideration is the population shift of Negroes to the great northern and eastern cities. A result of such a shift can be seen in New York City where the Borough of Manhattan elected in 1953 and re-elected in 1957 a Negro named Hulan Jack to be borough president, Jack, in effect, is mayor of the island of Manhattan, the one the Indians sold.

By now that important job is 100 per cent segregated. New York's commitment to politics on the basis of race and religion apparently has reserved forever the Manhattan Borough presidency for a Negro.

New York politicians see no harm in that kind of segregation.

Javits estimated that by 2000 one out of four persons in New York City will be Negroes, one of three in Chicago and one of two in Los Angeles. The political impact of that would be considerable.

See also:
Future Shock - Skin Color (1972)
Future "Brotherhood" (1976)

2008 Presidential Campaign (1908)

It seems that American political campaigns start earlier and earlier with each political cycle.

However, if you thought the 2008 presidential race started early, check out this article from the April 16, 1908 Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA) titled, "'Count' Opens Campaign for Presidency in Year 2008." An excerpt along with the piece in its entirety appear below.

Charles Vaden Barton, "the count," one of the choicest cranks that ever infested the capital, has arrived from Seattle to open his campaign to elect himself president in 2008. He announces that he is the John the Baptist of the millennium, and as he has special arrangements by which he beats the undertakers and cannot die, he can start his presidential campaign a long time ahead and work up sentiment gradually. So he is starting 100 years ahead, and expects that by the time he is elected the millennium will begin coincident with his inauguration.

See also:
Lyndon B. Johnson on 2063 A.D. (1963)
Hubert H. Humphrey's Future (1967)
Hubert H. Humphrey's Year 2000 (1967)
Governor Knight and the Videophone (Oakland Tribune, 1955)
Edmund G. Brown's Californifuture (1963)
Television: Medium of the Future (1949)
Fruition of Ideals of Democracy (1923)