He is almost
unknown today except among a small group of in-the-know devotees, but at one
time the populist politician, spiritualist, novelist, and amateur scientist Ignatius
Loyola Donnelly (1831-1901), “the Sage of Nininger,” was someone to be reckoned
with. Among other things, he has been
described as “America’s Prince of Cranks” and “the Apostle of Discontent.” (Walter Monfried, “America’s ‘Prince of
Cranks’,” The Milwaukee Journal, May
15, 1953, 8.)
 |
| The Apostle of Discontent |
The son of an
Irish immigrant who died young, Donnelly was raised by his mother and sent to
the best schools she could afford, where apparently he imbibed the socialism
that was captivating the intelligentsia of the day. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in
1852. In 1855 he married Katherine
McCaffrey.
It is not known
at what point in the 1850s Donnelly formally left the Catholic Church and
became a spiritualist, but it was probably immediately after his marriage; “Many
leading socialists of the day looked to religion for ways to define society
according to principles both religious and socialist.” (Dr. Julian Strube, “How
Socialism Helped to Seed the Landscape of Modern Religion,” Aeon, 14,
November 2017.) In the mid-1850s he left
the practice of law and began a career in real estate speculation.
In 1857 “amidst
rumors of financial scandal,” Donnelly moved to Minnesota where he and some
partners attempted to establish the City of Nininger. This was one of the utopian socialist
communities springing up at the time, most of them either inspired by or based
directly on the program developed in France by François Marie Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and revised and promoted in the
United States by Albert Brisbane (1809-1890).
 |
| David Émile Durkheim |
Donnelly was
heavily influenced by Fourierism, also called “Associationism,” which later
provided the basis of the fascist-socialist version of solidarism developed by
David Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). Heinrich
Pesch, S.J. corrected Durkheim’s pseudo religion (as Fulton Sheen pointed out,
Durkheim believed that God is a “divinized society” and religion consists of
the group’s worship of itself) and brought it in line with Thomist philosophy
and Catholic doctrine, but the damage had been done. Even today, some solidarists and others insist
on interpreting Pesch’s work (and thus Catholic social thought) as a form of
socialism instead of as socialism’s opponent and remedy.
The Panic of 1857
caused the effort to establish a socialist utopia at Nininger to fail and left
Donnelly deeply in debt. As so many had
before and since, Donnelly decided to go into politics to make his fortune . .
. again.
The Sage of
Nininger eventually served as one of the first Lieutenant Governors of
Minnesota, then in Congress, then as a state senator, and then as a state
representative. Interestingly, his
offices declined in status as people became more aware of his “esoteric” ideas
expressed in his speeches, novels, and works of pseudoscience, such as his
best-known work, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882).
 |
| Guido "von" List |
Madame Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891)
cited Donnelly’s book several times in her theosophical
treatise, The Secret Doctrine. (Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, The Synthesis of
Science, Religion, and Philosophy. New York: The Theosophical Society, 1888,
II.221n, II.266n, II.276n, II.333, II.334, II.741n, II.745, II.746n,
II.761n, II.782, II.782n, II.786n, II.791, II.792-793.) Donnelly’s theories of an Aryan Master Race
may have influenced Nazi ideology by way of Blavatsky’s theosophy which spawned
the ariosophy (Aryan-Theosophy) of Guido “von” List (1849-1919).
Donnelly followed
up Atlantis a year later with Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel. Both books appear to have influenced the work
of Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979), whose book Worlds in Collision
(1950) is generally rejected by serious scholars.
 |
| Henry George |
The Apostle of
Discontent was one of the earlier converts to the doctrines of the agrarian
socialist Henry George (1839-1897), whose bestselling (eventually) book, Progress
and Poverty was published in 1879, and which soon after inspired the founding of the Fabian Society.
One of the most influential socialist books published in the U.S. in the
nineteenth century — the other being Edward Bellamy’s “nationalist fantasy” Looking
Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) — Progress and Poverty’s program appeared
simple and straightforward: the abolition of private property in land by taking
away all power of control or receipt of any form of income from land
ownership. People could still “own” land
privately by holding legal title, but the “ownership” would be
meaningless. As George described his
proposal,
What I, therefore, propose, as
the simple yet sovereign remedy, . . . is — to
appropriate rent by taxation.
In this way the State may become the universal landlord without
calling herself so, and without assuming a single new function. In form, the ownership of land would remain just as now. No owner of land need be dispossessed, and no
restriction need be placed upon the amount of land any one could hold. For, rent being taken by the State in taxes, land, no matter in whose name
it stood, or in what parcels it was held, would be really common property, and every member of the
community would participate in the advantages of its ownership. (Henry George, Progress and Poverty. New York: The Robert Schalkenbach Foundation,
1935, 406.)
 |
| William Jennings Bryan |
According to
George, the abolition of private property in land would solve all social
problems and usher in the Kingdom of God on Earth, the common goal of
proponents of “the Democratic Religion” of socialism. Interestingly, neither Bellamy nor George
called their respective systems “socialism.” The term was coming into disrepute due to condemnations
by civil and religious leaders who objected to the idea that Church, State, and
Family should all be merged into a single monolithic entity to achieve “true
Christianity.”
Donnelly himself preferred
the term “populism,” although he hated “the Great Commoner” William Jennings
Bryan (1860-1925). This was probably
because Bryan was opposed to George’s proposals, as he made clear on more than
one occasion, one of them extremely embarrassing to George, who had made a
public announcement of Bryan’s alleged endorsement (“A Denial from Bryan,” The Daily Star, October 19, 1897, 1).
In addition to
his inventive and revisionist ideas concerning the high Neolithic civilization
that he claimed existed before the Flood, Donnelly espoused a number of other
innovative theories, many of them presented in fictional form. (Eric F.
Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny:
A History of Modern American Reform.
New York: Vintage Books, 1956, 49.) These included (as Edmund Boisgilbert), Caesar’s
Column (1890); Doctor Huguet: A Novel
(1891); (as Ignatius Donnelly) The Golden
Bottle, or, The Story of Ephraim Benezet of Kansas (1892).
 |
| Willy Shakesberg . . . what's in a name? |
What put the seal
on Donnelly’s extravagant ideas as far as most people were concerned, however,
was the publication of a series of books in which Donnelly explained how
Shakespeare’s plays were really written by Francis Bacon, and that the texts
conveyed occult messages from Bacon to his disciples in the future. These were The Shakespeare Myth (1887), The
Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in Shakespeare’s Plays (1888), and
The Cipher in the Plays, and on the
Tombstone (1899).
In pursuit of
this idea, Donnelly traveled to England to arrange for the publication of an
English edition of The Great Cryptogram.
While there, he gave a speech at the Oxford Union. His thesis, “Resolved, that the works of
William Shakespeare were composed by Francis Bacon,” was put to a vote. The resolution was not adopted, and Donnelly
was discredited in the eyes of the academic community. The English edition was a complete failure.
One reviewer
described Donnelly’s cypher as “a worthless and
silly piece of nonsense. . . . the work of a crank or a humbug.” As the reviewer concluded, “Such men as Mr.
Donnelly can thrive only when the ignorant and the
curious support them.” (Arthur Mark Cummings, “Letters to Theodore, IX,” Boston Evening Transcript, July 3, 1888,
10.)
In 1898 at the age
of sixty-seven, Donnelly married his nineteen-year old secretary, Marian
Hanson. On his death in 1901, he was
characterized as ruled “by his imagination more than logic.” (“Ignatius
Donnelly,” The Toledo Weekly Blade,
January 10, 1901, 4.) His obituary noted
that, “though he was a man of great mental powers he was dominated by the
erratic and unfounded.” (Ibid.)
Perhaps the most
amazing, even weird thing about Donnelly, however, was his influence on the
interpretation of Catholic social teaching, as we will see in the next posting on this subject.
#30#
