Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,645

This is the grave of Ignatius Donnelly.

Born in 1831 in Philadelphia, Donnelly was raised by Irish immigrants. Donnelly went to good schools, then went into the law and read for the bar under Benjamin Brewster, who would later be Attorney General in the Arthur administration. He was admitted to the bar in 1852 and soon became involved in politics. To say the least, Donnelly would have an unusual political career. At this time he was a Democrat and got involved in local politics. But he also was a dreamer and a schemer. This was the era of reform movements and Donnelly was interested in utopian communities and cooperative housing arrangements.

In 1857, Donnelly and his wife moved to Minnesota Territory. Supposedly, there was some kind financial scandal that he got caught up in back home but details about this are sketchy. He tried to start a utopian community out in Minnesota and, as always, it failed, leaving him with quite a bit of debt. He had turned to the Republican Party by this time and ran for the territorial legislature shortly after getting there. He didn’t win his first race for the territorial legislature. But he had a great skill–oratory. The guy was a convincing speaker and as such, was placed on the Republican ticket as lieutenant governor in 1860. Disgust with the treason of Democrats led to a sweeping Republican victory and he served in that role until 1863, when he left for Congress. He was in the House for three terms, from 1863-69. He wasn’t particularly interesting in Washington. A good Republican vote. He was a big supporter of the Freedmen’s Bureau and wanted the federal government to engage in a mass education campaign for the ex-slaves so that they could support themselves and fight for their own rights. Too bad even Republicans were too scared of a strong central government at that time to do this kind of basic thing. Then he went back home and ended up back in the state legislature in 1874, serving a couple of terms.

But Donnelly’s real contribution was as one of the great weirdoes of American history. He combined what generally were good reform politics (he was a big women’s suffrage supporter among other things) with some wild theories about the world that he wrote about. He became famous for these theories too. By this time, he was mostly supporting himself through his law practice and spending his free time writing. One of his biggest theories was about Atlantis. He believed it was a real continent that was lost during Noah’s Flood. He basically thought this mythical continent was the home of humans of most races, including all the great ancient civilizations. Also, the Irish. He theorized that there was a red-headed race there that eventually moved out and settled in what became known as Ireland. This was all quack stuff but he published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882 and it was a big seller for fake archaeology. Also, the Garden of Eden was in Atlantis, ancient Egypt was the great settler movement from Atlantis, etc. It’s insane. It spawned a whole bunch of other books too, some by him and some by other quacks trying to think through what ancient civilizations meant.

Another of his lunatic books was 1883’s Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, which sounds like the name of a shitty Netflix show. He expounded a theory here that 12,000 years ago, a comet hit the United States. This destroyed an already advanced human civilization by forcing everyone to live in caves. Thus, the Earth has a huge lost set of civilization markers, from engineering to literature. He used what he knew about American geology to “prove” his point. He also used ideas around the sun from ancient cultures to hypothesize that the reason for this heliocentrism was that people had lived in caves for so long as they awaited the comet’s dust to dissipate.

This reminds me that next to the Bissell Brothers brewery in Portland, Maine, there is a Museum of Cryptozoology. I have looked at this and wondered if I should just walk in one of these days when I am up there to see what in the living hell is going on. Maybe I will.

Donnelly also got in on the Shakespeare plays not actually written by Shakespeare bit, one of the weirdest and longest lasting conspiracy theories in history. He was on the Francis Bacon Wrote Them All team. He actually managed to get his book about this published in England. Then he went over there to do a book tour about it and the English press absolutely savaged him and the book was a complete failure.

Donnelly not surprisingly became a big supporter of the Populists. He basically came up with the Omaha Platform that was a short and to the point statement of their goals. Being an astoundingly good public speaker, he could really rouse the troops too. He lambasted both political parties for their corruption and the media for selling out the public. He became a big promoter of the Grange movement in the 1870s and believed the future struggle in the nation was not North vs. South, but East vs. West, between monopolists on one side and the everyday farmer on the other.

In 1892, as these movements formed into the Populists, Donnelly gave a speech at the St. Louis Industrial Conference, which brought together the various political reform movements of the era, from suffragists to the remnants of the Knights of Labor to the Farmers Alliance. Donnelly’s speech would become the preamble of the People’s Party platform. It is worth revisiting:

The conditions which surround us best justify our cooperation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench.¹

The people are demoralized; most of the States have been compelled to isolate the voters at the polling places to prevent universal intimidation and bribery. 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, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down, and they are rapidly degenerating into European conditions. The fruits of the toil of millions are badly 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. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires. The national power to create money is appropriated to enrich bond-holders; a vast public debt payable in legal-tender currency has been funded into gold-bearing bonds, thereby adding millions to the burdens of the people.

Donnelly ran for governor of Minnesota that year as well, but lost. He supported Bryan in 1896, continued to write his various crank theories about this and that, and died in 1901. He was 69 years old.

Ignatius Donnelly is buried in Calvary Cemetery, St. Paul, Minnesota.

If you would like this series to visit other people influential in the Populist movement, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Charles Macune is in Fort Worth, Texas and James Weaver is in Des Moines, Iowa. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.