This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.Imagine this: A tech guy has revolutionized the world with an innovation that unleashes unimaginable productivity, and brought himself unimaginable wealth. An imperial president, empowered by the Supreme Court to wield unchecked authority, seeks a third term in office, or else to pass the reins on to his son. Congress has been reduced to little more than a rubber stamp for the president and a trading floor for business transactions.Things bump along under this order, until twin calamities produce a crisis. First, the president sparks a global backlash against the United States by starting an ill-judged trade war due to suspected business interests and a long-standing grudge against England. Second, the new technology suddenly fails to deliver its benefits. A presidential election unfolds amid the ensuing economic collapse.The Democratic and Socialist Parties, long thought dead, begin to organize and challenge the president. The union seems newly fragile; New England considers seceding. The president tries to quash dissenters with brute force and sweetheart deals (conveniently, a “late revolt” in one place allows him to confiscate rebels’ property and offer it to those who fall in line). He sends the military into the urban strongholds of his opponents. The tech guy, an unlikely hero to masses of common people, sees his chance to oust the president. He makes his way not to Washington but to Wall Street, to buy up distressed American assets. He stabilizes the markets, restores confidence, grows even more rich (it pays to buy low), and seems poised to win the election.Before and on Election Day, though, there is chaos: riots, smashed voting machines, irregular returns, jailed politicians, contradictory court decisions. The president’s son is elected, but charges of fraud and bribery create a cloud of doubt that hangs over his victory. Inauguration Day comes, and in a dramatic twist, the chief justice refuses to administer the oath of office. A court decision invalidates the election, and the contest is thrown to Congress. Violence engulfs the Capitol as Congress rushes into action. Order is restored, but only after crowds and constables clash outside the chamber and car bombs rip through the area. When the dust settles, the tech guy is chosen to be the president, and a new order takes shape, as corrupt and compromised as the old.This is not a projection of what might happen in 2028, but the elaborate imaginings of Henry Dwight Sedgwick in “The American Coup d’Etat of 1961,” published in the November 1904 issue of The Atlantic. Written around the time of Theodore Roosevelt’s reelection that year, the story’s grim portrait of the American future offered bitter comment on the expansionist, corporate America of Sedgwick’s day. Sedgwick, the scion of a patrician northeastern family, was one of a group of upper-crust intellectuals who feared that the country was being lost to crass materialism, corruption, and imperial ambitions.Although Roosevelt was one of their own—a patrician himself who’d graduated from Harvard two years before Sedgwick—he embodied something of the new values that genteel critics feared. As Sedgwick had written two years earlier in the magazine, American industrial society made “men of great vigor, virility, and capacity,” but did not “tend to make manners and behavior gracious and admirable, nor actions just and dutiful.” For Sedgwick, who would later take to the pages of The Atlantic to reflect on “What a Gentleman Was,” the industrial virtues were hollow. And Roosevelt, with his muscular embrace of imperialism and swaggering displays of executive power, fit Sedgwick’s description of a nation that prized vigor over grace. While Roosevelt did enact policies to take on Big Business and fought corruption, Sedgwick seemed to worry about the way he was expanding federal and executive power to do so.To register his protest, Sedgwick turned to what was by 1904 a familiar way of commenting on the present: describing the future. The shifting paradigms of American life (industrial expansion, urban growth, new technologies), not to mention the runaway success of Edward Bellamy’s utopian portrait of Boston in the year 2000, Looking Backward (published in 1888), had sparked a fresh wave of imaginative reflections on worlds to come. Even the former Atlantic editor William Dean Howells, celebrated as a pioneer of modern realism, got in on the act with his novel A Traveller from Altruria, in 1894.Although a minor, forgotten contribution to the genre, Sedgwick’s story offers a stark view of where he believed the country was headed. He writes as a future historian or journalist narrating a progression of political events. That does not, to be clear, make for light reading. The plot begins with a businessman, Campbell, who popularizes “subsoil batteries” that seem to release “radioelectric discharges” into the soil and make even the driest deserts bloom. The president in question is President Schmidt, who rules without any challenge to his power in a one-party, Republican state. The actual coup of 1961 is too complex to rehearse in full, but concludes with the ascendancy of Campbell as president and high ruler of the empire, while Americans, in the story’s caustic coda, congratulate themselves on upholding the Constitution.The effect is a fable of an America that’s lost its moorings, and a citizenry that convinces itself it’s still living under the same constitutional order, even as that order grows unrecognizable.Imagine that.