The Minnesota politician presents a riddle for historians. He was a beloved populist but also a crackpot conspiracist. Were his politics tainted by his strange beliefs?
US congressman, writer, and scientist Ignatius Loyola Donnelly (1831–1901), circa 1863. He was the member of the US House of Representatives from Minnesota’s Second Congressional District. An engraving by G.E. Perine.(Photo by Kean Collection/Getty Images)
The Minnesota politician and writer Ignatius Donnelly is primarily remembered because of three strange books that earned him the nickname “the Prince of Cranks.” In Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), an improbable bestseller, Donnelly assembled a vast dossier of circumstantial evidence from archaeology, the natural sciences, and philology to argue that the mythical sunken island actually existed—and, moreover, that every human civilization could be traced back to it. A year later, he published Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, in which he speculated that the uppermost layer of the earth’s crust was formed not by glacial action, as scientific consensus held, but by a comet that passed close to our planet, spewing gravel over it; he further asserted that memories of this near-collision were recorded in the stories of Phaeton, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Ragnarok, among other myths, and that the darkness caused by clouds of dust led to the emergence of sun worship in many societies. In The Great Cryptogram (1888), Donnelly purported to have discovered a secret code in the First Folio that, when deciphered, proved that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays. The failure of the book, which Donnelly promoted enthusiastically, made him a laughingstock on both sides of the Atlantic.
If not for these unorthodox writings, Donnelly would probably be best known for his energetic efforts on behalf of late-19th-century agrarian and labor movements. Although he began his political career as a Republican, he grew critical of the party’s strengthening ties to business, as he was opposed to exploitative interest rates and the railroad companies’ monopoly over grain supply chains. Donnelly expressed his fears about inequality and uncompetitive economic practices in his first novel, Caesar’s Column (1889), a dystopian story set in New York City in 1988 that combined science fiction (giant air balloons that allow for speedy transatlantic travel, tablet-like devices on which users can access newspapers from all over the world) with the political prophesizing of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Whereas Looking Backward predicted a technocratic resolution to the conflict between capital and labor, Caesar’s Column envisioned a country that tore itself apart through greed, fear, and resentment.
Caesar’s Column became a sort of bible for the Populist movement, which emerged shortly after the book’s publication. Donnelly was chosen to compose the preamble to the 1892 platform of the People’s Party, the movement’s political arm, before that year’s presidential election. In the preamble, which some newspapers called a “Second Declaration of Independence,” Donnelly laid out the crises facing the country, many of which still feel urgent:
Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized…. The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection…. The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn despise the Republic and endanger liberty.
Since his death in 1901, Donnelly’s political legacy has been mixed. Pro-labor historians have celebrated him for his fiery rhetoric, while some liberals have condemned him for the same reason. But he has also attracted attention from writers who have wondered how this man with such strange intellectual pursuits maintained a fairly successful political career. The fascination Donnelly inspires derives in large part from the uneasy juxtaposition of his principled politics and his absurd speculations. We’re familiar these days with politicians who peddle conspiracy theories while running for office, along with their supporters who take these theories even further and, in a kind of domino effect, seem susceptible to other falsehoods. But Donnelly presents a more curious puzzle. He wasn’t the political voice of Atlantis or Shakespeare conspiracists; no such constituencies existed. His wild ideas seem to have been kept wholly separate from his political activities.
Richard Hofstadter argued in The Age of Reform that Donnelly’s political rhetoric (and the rhetoric of Populists more generally) had a conspiratorial cast, pitting ordinary people against a corrupt elite that was rigging the system. To some extent, this also applies to Donnelly’s writings. He took pride in being an outsider, and he resented intellectual authorities—professors, scientists—who he believed suppressed his ideas because of snobbery and self-interest. But he didn’t say, for instance, that financiers were part of some ancient Atlantean cabal or that celestial bodies exerted influence on earthly events through occult forces. He wasn’t an occultist at all but rather a self-educated—and enormously self-confident—armchair scientist. (Although Donnelly has the unfortunate distinction of being the founder of modern Atlantis studies, it was the spiritualist Helena Blavatsky who first attributed mystical powers to the lost continent.)
Some historians have tried to avoid the difficulties posed by Donnelly’s two careers by ignoring one of them. Martin Ridge, who in an admiring 1962 biography discusses Donnelly’s political battles and shifting alliances in minute detail, breezes over his books, as if to suggest that the less said about them, the better. Zachary Michael Jack, a professor at North Central College in Illinois, explicitly rejects this approach in The Strange Genius of Ignatius Donnelly: The Populist Who Debunked Shakespeare and Found Atlantis. Jack focuses primarily on Donnelly’s writings, summarizing them and recounting their reception, but he also follows Donnelly’s political activity from the publication of Atlantis in 1882, when Donnelly was 50, until his death 19 years later.
Strange Genius provides thorough historical background to Atlantis, Ragnarok, and The Great Cryptogram to show that Donnelly’s crackpot ideas didn’t emerge out of nowhere but were in conversation with contemporary scientific and popular discourse. Jack also shows that, for the most part, the reactions to Donnelly’s books followed ideological affinities: Newspapers that were sympathetic to his politics tended to be open-minded about his theories, while politically hostile papers relentlessly attacked him as a fool. Although Jack presents both aspects of Donnelly side by side, he makes little effort to connect them or to search for common motivations. There were, however, some noteworthy similarities between Ignatius Donnelly, champion of the common man, and Ignatius Donnelly, failed discoverer of history’s secrets.
Donnelly’s political career was long, winding, and full of arduous fights. As a Radical Republican congressman, he represented Minnesota’s Second District between 1863 and 1869; his biggest achievements were helping to establish an early federal department of education and giving a speech so raucous that it was probably responsible for the Republicans’ withdrawing an article of impeachment against Andrew Johnson concerning the president’s use of “improper language.” In the speech, Donnelly responded to an insult from Illinois Representative Elihu Washburne with grotesque imagery, as his fellow Republicans cheered him on from the floor of the House:
If there be in our midst one low, sordid, vulgar soul; one barren, mediocre intelligence; one heart callous to every kindly sentiment and every generous impulse, one tongue leprous with slander; one mouth which like unto a den of foul beast giving forth deadly odors; if there be one character which, while blotched and spotted all over, yet raves and rants and blackguards like a prostitute; if there be here one bold, bad, empty, bellowing demagogue, it is the gentleman from Illinois.
Donnelly lost his 1868 reelection campaign and soon broke with Republicans over their support of tariffs; now back at his Minnesota farm, he decided that such protections hurt farmers. He never served in Washington again, though he ran for national or statewide office in nearly every election cycle for the rest of his life and won six terms in the state Legislature between 1874 and 1898. He also never reconciled with the Republicans, associating at one time or another with the Anti-Monopoly, Greenback Labor, Farmer Labor, Farmers’ Alliance, and People’s parties. Soliciting a nomination from the Democrats during a congressional run in 1870, he insisted on his independence from his former party: “If a platform is demanded, I plant myself on the platform of Ignatius Donnelly.”
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When he wasn’t campaigning or legislating, Donnelly farmed, edited a newspaper he’d founded called The Anti-Monopolist, and traveled the regional lecture circuit, speaking about his time in Washington and about American humor. During the winter of 1881, out of office and with little to do, he researched and wrote Atlantis in just a few months. (Donnelly always composed at a furious pace, even writing his 1892 novel The Golden Bottle—an allegory about monetary policy in which a Kansas man discovers a means to produce unlimited amounts of gold—as a kind of stunt while running as the People’s Party candidate for governor of Minnesota.) It’s somewhat unclear where Donnelly got the idea for Atlantis, though Jack points to some possible inspirations: Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), in which the Nautilus passes over the ruins of Atlantis, and the HMS Challenger expedition (1872–76), which probed the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Still, the speed of Donnelly’s composition and the wide-ranging conclusions he drew suggest that he may have been thinking about Atlantis for quite some time.
What Albert Einstein said of Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950), a controversial work of pseudoscience that drew comparisons to Donnelly’s writings, also applies to Atlantis: “It is not a bad book…. The only trouble with it is, it is crazy.” Atlantis impressed reviewers—its lucid, engaging prose was a positive reflection of the skills Donnelly had honed on the stump—and became a hit. It even set off a small nationwide fad. In 1883, Mardi Gras was Atlantis-themed, as was Baltimore’s annual Oriole Pageant.
But Donnelly’s style of reasoning is familiar to anyone who has read about pseudoscience or conspiracy theories: Evidence that undercuts the thesis is conveniently ignored; coincidence and speculation become incontrovertible fact. Drawing freely on the work of famed philologists such as Max Müller and George Smith, Donnelly argued that the stories about Atlantis recounted in Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias were actually “a plain and reasonable history” that offered a key to all mythologies and many unsolved mysteries. Perplexing similarities in the cultures of Europe, North Africa, Asia, and the Americas—flood stories, bows and arrows, pyramids and obelisks, gold and silver money, cultivated seedless bananas, depictions of what appear to be elephants in Native American art—could be explained by positing their common origin in an extraordinary society that spread its knowledge to much of the world through colonization before disappearing in an environmental catastrophe. “I cannot believe that the great inventions were duplicated spontaneously…in different countries,” he insisted.
If Donnelly was making a political argument in Atlantis, it was that people have the same fundamental (albeit narrow) capacities, that the differences among us emerge primarily because of culture, and that inequality could be surmounted by spreading the fruits of culture as widely and fairly as possible. Donnelly subscribed to elements of the racial science of his era; he tended to depict Blacks and Jews in stereotypical ways, and, like many 19th-century Americans, he believed in manifest destiny. Yet he was a kind of egalitarian who felt that all citizens, regardless of ethnicity or wealth, could be educated, that they therefore deserved to be educated, and that public education was the best means for fostering equality and protecting a citizenry from predation. He believed in the importance of what we’d now call equality of opportunity, which clearly motivated his work uniting farmers and laborers against what he saw as corrupt political parties and their greedy economic masters.
Although Donnelly credited Atlantis with many of the important technological and cultural achievements of antiquity, he did condemn it for introducing the use of gold money, which he deemed a superstition as unfounded and deleterious as bloodletting. He advocated for ending the gold standard and was skeptical of silver, realizing that the value of money arises out of societal consensus, not a substance’s inherent qualities.
Jack astutely notes the Atlantean themes in Caesar’s Column, which was published seven years after Atlantis and warns of a civilizational collapse stemming from the worship of lucre. The novel imagines America in 1988 as a country at war with itself. The rich have set up a police state and live in fearful luxury, while secret societies plan a violent overthrow of the oligarchy. When the revolution finally arrives—after some long and sentimental subplots—it’s a bloody, chaotic, drunken orgy of revenge. “Cruelty in the aristocrat was mirrored by cruelty in the workman,” observes the narrator, a white settler from Uganda named Gabriel Weltstein who travels to New York City to seek better prices for his colony’s wool. Caesar Lomellini, the leader of the proletarian Brotherhood of Destruction, oversees a reign of terror and demands that the dead be encased in concrete in Union Square. Caesar forces Weltstein to write an inscription for his monument, which Weltstein dedicates to “THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF MODERN CIVILIZATION.”
Weltstein and his new American friends escape via balloon back to Uganda (Donnelly had no qualms about the white colonization of Africa), where they start building a utopia based on compulsory public education, state-owned infrastructure, fiat currency, caps on wealth, a universal minimum wage, and fair trade, among other innovations. As Jack notes, Weltstein’s reforms resemble those called for by various groups that Donnelly had supported, including the Grangers, the Farmers’ Alliance, and the Knights of Labor. It’s no wonder that when the People’s Party was created in 1892, uniting various labor and agricultural movements, Donnelly became one of its leading figures.
The popularity of Atlantis spurred Donnelly to write Ragnarok, which used similar methods to argue that another cataclysm conveniently explained a range of myths, practices, and scientific mysteries. As soon as that book was published, Donnelly began his next project. In the late 1870s, he had become convinced that there was a cipher in the First Folio proving that Shakespeare hadn’t written the plays and poems attributed to him. In the mid-1880s, he worked on cracking this illusory code, dropping hints to the press about a monumental discovery in order to drum up public excitement.
A paradox underlies Donnelly’s efforts to discredit Shakespeare in The Great Cryptogram: He couldn’t believe that a glovemaker’s son was able to raise himself up to such heights, preferring instead to view Francis Bacon, a Cambridge-educated viscount, as the true literary genius. Yet Donnelly was a proud autodidact. Why did he deny that Shakespeare could be self-educated too? While Donnelly’s certainty in Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare’s plays may seem ludicrous today, it wasn’t so unusual in late-19th-century America. As James Shapiro recounts in Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, an excellent examination and debunking of the authorship controversy, the facts known about Shakespeare’s life—mostly involving unflattering financial matters—didn’t comport with Romantic ideas about artists. Shakespeare, from what could be gleaned from historical records, was uneducated, money-grubbing, and mean-spirited, wholly incapable of capturing the breadth of human experience, while Bacon (whose literary reputation was much greater then than it is now) was seen as magnanimous and ingenious.
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Donnelly may have thought that Shakespeare embodied the traits he impugned in railroad barons and bankers, but he was far from the only writer who wished Shakespeare had a nobler spirit than the archive suggested. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne helped the American playwright Delia Bacon (no relation to Francis) publish the first version of the Bacon hypothesis in the 1850s; later, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain became fully convinced Baconians. (Twain even falsely claimed in his memoirs that he was the publisher of The Great Cryptogram.)
What was actually ludicrous was Donnelly’s claim that he had discovered a key—which involved assigning numerical values to words as they appear on the pages of the First Folio—that yielded Bacon’s secret history of Elizabethan court intrigue (as well as an allegation that Shakespeare had syphilis). “Whole, grammatical sentences emerge in [Donnelly’s] decipherment,” Jack writes, “though some allowance must be made for homonyms, puns,” and other infelicities. (For example, in “Seas ill says that More low or Shak’st spur never writ a word of them,” “Seas ill” is Robert Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster; “More low” is Christopher Marlowe; and “Shak’st spur” is the Bard.) As in Atlantis and Ragnarok, Donnelly was amassing spurious evidence to support an unshakable belief. Not long after the book’s publication, a Minnesota newspaper editor published a devastating satire that showed the dubiousness of Donnelly’s methods, which could be manipulated to yield a message from the Folio that no one ever encoded: “Donnelly, the author, politician and mountebanke, will worke out the secret of this play.”
Donnelly was humiliated by the negative reception of The Great Cryptogram when it was published in 1888—even some fellow Baconians disavowed the book—and suffered a close loss in that year’s election for a state House seat. He quickly recovered from these failures, as he always did. Caesar’s Column, written just after the election and initially published under a pseudonym, was his biggest hit, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. He subsequently had some success running for the Minnesota Legislature, serving three terms in the 1890s, two of them as a member of the People’s Party.
Even after the embarrassment of The Great Cryptogram, Donnelly refused to admit that he was wrong about the Baconian cipher, publishing another book on it in 1899. The next year, he was nominated to be the vice presidential candidate on the People’s Party ticket. Following his death on January 1, 1901, less than two months after the election, even his longtime enemies in the Minnesota press conceded that “he was and is entitled to be recognized as an eminent man.” More recent verdicts have been harsher. The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke called Donnelly “the patron saint of the peddlers of UFO/parapsychology mind rot.” J.M. Tyree, a British essayist, wrote that Donnelly was “quite possibly the greatest failure who ever lived,” which overlooks Donnelly’s book sales, positive reputation among Midwesterners, and occasional electoral successes. (It also suggests a lack of familiarity with Lyndon LaRouche, who himself never won a single election and whose followers never attained statewide or national office.)
It’s easy to dismiss Donnelly for his crankery, and Jack works hard to present his subject as one worthy of study. He succeeds in this goal by showing Donnelly’s importance to the late-19th-century reform movements he participated in, tracing the relation of Donnelly’s nonfiction work to broader intellectual currents (even as Donnelly’s imagination led him down many dead ends), and highlighting the literary merits of his novels, especially Caesar’s Column.
But Jack also argues that Donnelly is still relevant because of his influence on modern scholarship. “Many of Donnelly’s most compelling theories have proven prescient,” he writes in his introduction, mentioning a recent volume on “Francis Bacon’s contribution to Shakespeare” that was endorsed by Mark Rylance (yes, one of the most prominent Shakespearean actors is a Shakespeare skeptic) and a Dutch geologist “whose research suggests a lost continent beneath Italy and Greece.” Both of these are decidedly speculative (if not fringe), and neither has much to do with Donnelly: The Bacon book uses computer analysis to argue that Bacon may have contributed to passages in a handful of Shakespeare’s plays, while the lost continent beneath Italy and Greece would have disappeared tens of millions of years before Donnelly thought Atlantis did. And the claim for Donnelly’s “prescience” is hardly necessary; many people have found him interesting precisely because of his errors. (Much of the fun of intellectual history, at least for me, is in trying to understand why people hold bizarre-seeming beliefs.)
In the rest of the book, Jack never clarifies what he himself believes. Although he usually lets Donnelly’s contemporary critics get the last word, he seems reluctant to say that Donnelly was wrong. Perhaps he assumes that this goes without saying. Sadly, I think it might be an irresponsible position to take, because Jack risks appearing as a fellow traveler rather than a historian. Being a professor or having a book published by an academic press doesn’t make you immune to crackpot ideas, even ones as outlandish as Donnelly’s: Since the middle of the 20th century, for example, plenty of credentialed oceanographers, geologists, and archaeologists—inspired by Donnelly or his acolytes—have staked their reputations on finding Atlantis. Jack owes it to readers to tell them just what he thinks.
Andrew KatzensteinAndrew Katzenstein’s work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Harper's, and elsewhere.