Donnelly, Ignatius

(1831–1901) social reformer, politician, author; born in Philadelphia. A lawyer with utopian aspirations, he moved to Minnesota (1856) to promote a land development scheme known as Nininger City; when that failed, he switched to farming and also to politics. Said to have been a spellbinding speaker, he joined the Republican Party because of its stand against slavery and got himself elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (Minn., 1863–69). He supported the Radical Republicans in their harsh policy to the defeated Confederate states and was instrumental in establishing the National Bureau of Education to help people of all color obtain an education. In the years that followed, he became ever more radical and erratic as he jumped between causes and parties, attacking capitalists for exploiting the masses, joining the Grange, forming the Independent Anti-Monopoly Party (1877), forming the Populist Party (1891), running unsuccessfully for Congress, attacking the South for preserving "the color line," calling for a graduated income tax, denouncing anti-Semitism, and predicting class warfare. He was ahead of the times on many of these issues but he lacked the ability to get things done. Through it all, he published several remarkable books, including a futuristic novel, Caesar's Column (1891), predicting a 20th-century U.S.A. dominated by the rich and corrupt. He also wrote the highly popular Atlantis: the Antediluvian World (1882), a mishmash of pseudoscholarly "evidence" for the lost Atlantis, and The Great Cryptogram (1888), in which he "proved" that Francis Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare.