The past can be charming and the future can be thrilling. But what about the future according to the past? Here on the eve of the 57th presidential inaugural in American history we get an enchanting forecast of the future in the year 2001 from the official program of William McKinley’s second inauguration on March 4, 1901.

The creative fantasy is wildly wrong about some things. By 2001, machines called “automobiles” and “bicycles” would be obsolete. Our government would apparently have 336 senators and a “vice supreme court.” Strangely, the writer figured that by the new millennium, the imperial U.S. would have acquired Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, and Canada.

But the prescience is breathtaking in other areas. Two years before the