CHARACTERIZING THE HYPOTHETICAL: BLACK U.S. PRESIDENTS IN LITERARY POPULAR CULTURE DURING THE LATE-JIM CROW ERA

Abstract

In 1961, Attorney General Robert Kennedy famously predicted that a Negro could become President of the United States within thirty to forty years. He was inspired by the Presidential election of his brother, John F. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic. In 1964, during the Cold War, while grassroots activists successfully pressured the U.S. government to pursue civil and voting rights legislation, three white men attempted to hasten Robert Kennedy’s prediction. Berry Reece Jr. and Joe Sinnott serialized their comics, 1976 Pettigrew for President, in the Catholic children’s periodical, Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact. And Irving Wallace, a commercially successful novelist, published The Man. This dissertation does not interpret Barack Obama’s Presidency as validation of Kennedy’s prediction. Nor does it interpret Obama’s Presidency as the triumph of Reece, Sinnott, and Wallace’s formal, thematic, and political interventions in popular culture. Such interpretations are facile. Instead, this dissertation interprets 1976 Pettigrew for President, The Man, and Obama’s first Presidential memoir, A Promised Land (2020) as printed narratives that employ the trope of the first Black U.S. Presidency to produce knowledge about the U.S.'s liberal democracy. However indirectly, each narrative poses questions about the meaning and function of an idealized Black U.S. Presidency. Each narrative also propounds answers to its questions and promotes methods of verification. I propose that we refer to these forms of knowledge production in literature as “hypotheticals.” While charting the ways A Promised Land continues the democratic experiments initiated by 1976 Pettigrew for President and The Man, I argue that each printed narrative demonstrates how easily idealized Black U.S. Presidencies in literature can justify interlocking systems of oppression while purporting to symbolize national progress. I conclude this dissertation by proposing further study of other hypotheticals that employ the trope of the Black U.S. Presidency.