Ignatius Donnelly, Prince of Cranks

The Sage of Nininger

The opposite of a Ren­aissance man, pre­sum­ably, would be someone who tried his hand at a number of different things and failed at all of them. Mostly forgotten today, Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901) is worth a second look because he is quite possibly the greatest failure who ever lived. Donnelly, a best-selling writer and reform-minded congressman from Minnesota, might be dubbed the Great American Failure. Among the things that Donnelly failed to do were: build a city, reform American politics, reveal the facts about Atlantis, discover a secret code in Shakespeare, and prove that the world’s gravel deposits were the result of a collision with a comet. His dire political prophecies of class warfare and the imminent collapse of civilization also failed to come true.

Donnelly genuinely believed he was a genius, and that, by applying his mental powers to any problem, no matter how tangled or intractable, and regardless of the established body of relevant scholarship or scientific tradition, he could solve it with a fresh look. He was a kind of secular prophet, a combination of demagogue and revivalist tent-preacher, destined, he believed, to do great things. If Donnelly were alive today, he would probably be a “guru” on the lecture circuit, fervently putting forward his latest Theory of Everything. Congressman, master orator, pseudoscientist, student of comparative myth­ology, crackpot geologist, fu­turist, amateur literary sleuth, bogus cryptologist, Donnelly did it all with a charmingly boundless en­ergy and a voracious intellectual ap­petite that utterly out­stripped his real abilities. One of Donnelly’s nick­names, meant mock­­ingly, was “The Sage of Nininger,” after the town he at­tempted to establish failed due
to an economic crisis that wiped out the capital for the venture. (Other nicknames used to taunt Donnelly were “The Prince of Cranks” and, because of his po­litical rabble-rousing, “The Apostle of Discontent.”)

Yet Donnelly’s influence still shows up in a number of unexpected places. Along with that of Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells, Donnelly’s speculative futurism in his 1890 novel Caesar’s Column must be included in the origins of the science fiction genre as a whole and, more specifically, that sci-fi subset which includes the dystopian novel—nightmare vi­sions of societies gone irreparably wrong. Donnelly also wrote two other novels, one of which, Doctor Huguet (1891), featured the original Black Like Me plot, where a liberal white intellectual is magically transformed overnight into a poor black man and forced to endure the horror of racism first-hand.

Donnelly’s pseudoscientific re­search, on the other hand, spawn­ed theories that people believe to this day. His book about the lost continent, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) remains in print thanks to the...