Donnelly, Ignatius (1831–1901)

US social reformer, politician, and author. He joined the Republican Party because of its stand against slavery and was elected to the US House of Representatives for Minnesota, 1863–69). However, his political career was stymied by his jumping between causes and parties.

He was born in Philadelphia. A lawyer with utopian aspirations, he moved to Minnesota (1856) to promote a land development scheme known as Nininger City and, when that failed, he switched to farming and politics. He supported the Radical Republicans in their harsh policy towards the defeated Confederate states. He became increasingly radical and erratic. He attacked capitalists for exploiting the masses, formed the Independent Anti-Monopoly Party (1877) and the Populist Party (1891). He ran unsuccessfully for Congress, attacked the South for preserving ‘the colour line’, called for a graduated income tax, denounced anti-Semitism, and predicted class warfare. Many of his ideas were ahead of their time, but he lacked the ability to get things done. He published several remarkable books, including a futuristic novel, Caesar's Column (1891), which predicted a 20th-century USA dominated by the rich and corrupt. He also wrote the highly popular Atlantis: the Antediluvian World (1882), a mishmash of pseudo-scholarly ‘evidence’ for the lost Atlantis, and The Great Cryptogram (1888), in which he ‘proved’ that Francis Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare.