Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (3 page)

The country was in the middle of an immigration boom as the revolutions of the 1840s threw thousands of farmers from central Europe off their land and out of their countries. Nininger, who’d made himself rich through real estate speculation in Minnesota, had bought for a little less than $25,000 a parcel of land along a bend in the Mississippi twenty-five miles south of St. Paul. Nininger proposed that he himself handle the sale of the land, while Donnelly, with his natural eloquence and boundless enthusiasm, would pitch the project, now called Nininger,
to newly arrived immigrants. Ignatius and Katherine Donnelly moved to St. Paul, and he embarked on a sales campaign that was notably vigorous even by the go-go standards of the time.

“There will be in the Fall of 1856 established in Philadelphia, New York, and other Eastern cities, a great Emigration Association,” Donnelly wrote in the original Statement of Organization for the city of Nininger. “Nininger City will be the depot in which all the interests of this huge operation will centre.” Donnelly promised that Nininger would feature both a ferry dock and a railroad link, making the town the transportation hub between St. Paul and the rest of the Midwest. To Nininger, farmers from the distant St. Croix valley would send their produce for shipment to the wider world. Nininger would be a planned, scientific community, a thoroughly modern frontier city.

“Western towns have heretofore grown by chance,” Donnelly wrote, “Nininger will be the first to prove what combination and concentrated effort can do to assist nature.”

Eventually, some five hundred people took him up on it. In time, Nininger built a library and a music hall. Donnelly told Katherine that he wasn’t sure what to do with himself now that he’d made his fortune. In May 1856, he waxed lyrical to the Minnesota Historical Society about the inexorable march of civilization and the role he had played in it. At which point, approximately, the roof fell in.

It was the Panic of 1857 that did it. The Minnesota land boom of the 1850s—of which Nininger was a perfect example—had been financed by money borrowed from eastern speculators by the local banks. When these loans were called in, the banks responded by calling in their own paper, and an avalanche of foreclosures buried towns like Nininger. The panic also scared the federal government out of the land-grant business, which was crucial to the development of the smaller railroads. When
the Nininger and St. Peter Railroad Line failed, it not only ended Nininger’s chance to be a rail hub but made plans for the Mississippi ferry untenable as well.

Donnelly did all he could to keep the dream alive. He offered to carry his neighbors’ mortgages for them. He tried, vainly, to have Nininger declared the seat of Dakota County. The town became something of a joke; one columnist in St. Paul claimed he would sell his stock in the railroad for $4 even though it had cost him $5 to buy it. Gradually, the people of Nininger moved on. Ignatius Donnelly, however, stayed. In his big house, brooding over the collapse of his dream, he planned his next move. He read widely and with an astonishing catholicity of interest. He decided to go back into politics.

Donnelly found himself drawn to the nascent Republicans, in no small part because of the fervor with which the new party opposed slavery. In 1857 and again in 1858, he lost elections to the territorial senate. In 1858, Minnesota was admitted to the Union, and Donnelly’s career took off.

The election of 1859 was the first manifest demonstration of the burgeoning power of the Republican party. Donnelly campaigned tirelessly across the state; his gift for drama served him well. He allied himself with the powerful Minnesota Republican Alexander Ramsey, and in 1859, when Ramsey was swept into the governorship, Donnelly was elected lieutenant governor on the same ticket. He was twenty-eight years old. Contemporary photos show a meaty young man in the usual high collar, with a restless ambition in his eyes. He found the post of lieutenant governor constraining and, if Ramsey thought that he was escaping his rambunctious subordinate when the Minnesota legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1862, he was sadly mistaken. That same year, Ignatius Donnelly was elected to the House of Representatives from the Second District of Minnesota.

For the next four years, Donnelly’s career was remarkably like that of any other Republican congressman of the time, if a bit louder and more garish. After the war, he threw himself into the issues surrounding Reconstruction, and he worked on land-use matters that were important back home. He also haunted the Library of Congress, reading as omnivorously as ever. He began to ponder questions far from the politics of the day, although he took care to get himself reelected twice. Not long after his reelection in 1866, however, his feud with Ramsey exploded and left his political career in ruins, in no small part because Ignatius Donnelly could never bring himself to shut up.

It was no secret in Minnesota that Donnelly had his eye on Ramsey’s seat in the Senate. It certainly was no secret to Ramsey, who had long ago become fed up with Donnelly, and who was now enraged at his rival’s scheming. One of Ramsey’s most influential supporters was a lumber tycoon from Minneapolis, William Washburne, whose brother, Elihu, was a powerful Republican congressman from Illinois. In March 1868, Donnelly wrote a letter home to one of his constituents in which he railed against Elihu Washburne’s opposition to a piece of land-grant legislation.

On April 18, Congressman Washburne replied, blistering Donnelly in the
St. Paul Press.
He called Donnelly “an office-beggar,” charged him with official corruption, and hinted ominously that he was hiding a criminal past. In response, Donnelly went completely up the wall.

By modern standards, under which campaign advisers can lose their jobs for calling the other candidate a “monster,” the speech is inconceivable. Donnelly spoke for an hour. He ripped into all Washburnes. He made merciless fun of Elihu Washburne’s reputation for fiscal prudence and personal rectitude. Three times, the Speaker of the House tried to gavel him to
order. Donnelly went sailing on, finally reaching a crescendo of personal derision that made the florid sentiments of “The Mourner’s Vision” read like e. e. cummings.

“If there be in our midst one low, sordid, vulgar soul … one tongue leprous with slander; one mouth which is like unto a den of foul beasts giving forth deadly odors; if there be one character which, while blotched and spotted all over, yet raves and rants and blackguards like a prostitute; if there be one bold, bad, empty, bellowing demagogue, it is the gentleman from Illinois.”

The resulting campaign was a brawl. The Republican primary was shot through with violence. Ultimately, Ramsey County found itself with two conventions in the same hall, which resulted in complete chaos and one terrifying moment when the floor seemed ready to give way. Donnelly lost the statewide nomination. He ran anyway and lost. By the winter of 1880, after losing another congressional race, Donnelly lamented to his diary, “My life had been a failure and a mistake.”

Donnelly went home to the big house in what had been the city of Nininger. Although he would flit from one political cause to another for the rest of his life, he spent most of his time thinking and writing, and, improbably, making himself one of the most famous men in America.

During his time in Washington, on those long afternoons when he played hooky from his job in the Congress, Donnelly had buried himself in the booming scientific literature of the age, and in the pseudoscientific literature—both fictional and purportedly not—that was its inevitable by-product. Donnelly had fallen in love with the work of Jules Verne, especially
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
, which had been published to great acclaim in 1870, and which features a visit by Captain Nemo and his submarine to the ruins of a lost city beneath the waves. Donnelly gathered an enormous amount of material and
set himself to work to dig a legend out of the dim prehistory. From the library in his Minnesota farmhouse, with its potbellied stove and its rumpled daybed in one corner, Ignatius Donnelly set out to find Atlantis.

It was best known from its brief appearances in
Timaeus
and
Critias
, two of Plato’s dialogues. These were Donnelly’s jumping-off point. He proposed that the ancient island had existed, just east of the Azores, at the point where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean. He argued that Atlantis was the source of all civilization, and that its culture had established itself everywhere from Mexico to the Caspian Sea. The gods and goddesses of all the ancient myths, from Zeus to Odin to Vishnu and back again, were merely the Atlantean kings and queens. He credited Atlantean culture for everything from Bronze Age weaponry in Europe, to the Mayan calendar, to the Phoenician alphabet. He wrote that the island had vanished in a sudden cataclysm, but that some Atlanteans escaped, spreading out across the world and telling the story of their fate.

The book is a carefully crafted political polemic. That Donnelly reached his conclusions before gathering his data is obvious from the start, but his brief is closely argued from an impossibly dense synthesis of dozens of sources. Using his research into underwater topography, and using secondary sources to extrapolate Plato nearly to the moon, Donnelly argues first that there is geologic evidence for an island’s having once been exactly where Donnelly thought Atlantis had been. He then dips into comparative mythology, arguing that flood narratives common to many religions are derived from a dim memory of the events described by Plato. At one point, Donnelly attributes the biblical story of the Tower of Babel to the Atlanteans’ attempt to keep their heads literally above water.

He uses his research into anthropology and history to posit a common source for Egyptian and pre-Columbian American
culture. “All the converging lines of civilization,” Donnelly writes, “lead to Atlantis…. The Roman civilization was simply a development and perfection of the civilization possessed by all the European populations; it was drawn from the common fountain of Atlantis.” Donnelly connects the development of all civilization to Atlantis, citing the fact that Hindus and Aztecs developed similar board games, and that all civilizations eventually discover how to brew fermented spirits. The fourth part of the book is an exercise in comparative mythology; Donnelly concludes by describing how the Atlantean remnant fanned out across the world after their island sank. He rests much of his case on recent archaeological works and arguing, essentially, that, if we can find Pompeii, we can find Atlantis. “We are on the threshold,” he exclaims. “Who shall say that one hundred years from now the great museums of the world may not be adorned with gems, statues, arms and implements from Atlantis, while the libraries of the world shall contain translations of its inscriptions, throwing new light upon all the past history of the human race, and all the great problems which now perplex the thinkers of our day!”

Harper & Brothers in New York published
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
in February 1882. It became an overnight sensation. The book went through twenty-three editions in eight years, and a revised edition was published as late as 1949. Donnelly corresponded on the topic with William Gladstone, then the prime minister of England. Charles Darwin also wrote, but only to tell Donnelly that he was somewhat skeptical, probably because Donnelly’s theory of an Atlantean source for civilization made a hash of Darwin’s theories. On the other hand, Donnelly also heard from a distant cousin who was a bishop in Ireland. He deplored Donnelly’s blithe dismissal of the biblical accounts of practically everything.

The popular press ate Donnelly up. (One reviewer even cited
Atlantis
as reinforcing the biblical account of Genesis, which showed at least that Donnelly’s work meant different things to different people.) The
St. Paul Dispatch
, the paper that had stood for him in his battles against Ramsey and the Washburnes, called Atlantis “one of the notable books of the decade, nay, of the century.” Donnelly embarked on a career as a lecturer that would continue until his death. He got rave reviews.

“A stupendous speculator in cosmogony,” gushed the
London Daily News.
“One of the most remarkable men of this age,” agreed the
St. Louis Critic.
And, doubling down on both of them, the
New York Star
called Donnelly “the most unique figure in our national history.”

T
his is
a great country, in no small part because it is the best country ever devised in which to be a public crank. Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should people hold nutty ideas, but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right up there on the mantelpiece. This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. In fact, it’s the only country to enshrine that right in its founding documents.

After all, the founders were men of the Enlightenment, fashioning a country out of new ideas—or out of old ones that they’d liberated from centuries of religious internment. The historian Charles Freeman points out that “Christian thought … often gave irrationality the status of a universal ‘truth’ to the exclusion of those truths to be found through reason. So the uneducated was preferred to the educated, and the miracle to the operation of the natural laws.”

In America, the founders were trying to get away from all
that, to raise a nation of educated people. But they were not trying to do so by establishing an orthodoxy of their own to replace the one at which they were chipping away. They believed they were creating a culture within which the mind could roam to its wildest limits because the government they had devised included sufficient safeguards to keep the experiment from running amok. In 1830, in a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, James Madison admitted: “We have, it is true, occasional fevers; but they are of the transient kind, flying off through the surface, without preying on the vitals. A Government like ours has so many safety valves … that it carries within itself a relief against the infirmities from which the best of human Institutions can not be exempt.” The founders devised the best country ever in which to go completely around the bend. It’s just that making a living at it used to be harder work.