A prophet of globalisation: Ignatius Donnelly

On the very same day in 1901 that Australian became a federation a former United States congressman who insisted that Francis Bacon had written the plays of Shakespeare died in Minnesota.

Initially it would appear hard to imagine two more seemingly unrelated centenaries. There is a powerful connection though since the congressman in question - Ignatius Loyola Donnelly – enjoyed a strong antipodean following. Without ever setting foot in Australia, he helped to colour the political culture that took hold after federation.

Donnelly’s support for Francis Bacon, while not without influence on the Australian literary scene of the day (the novelist Joseph Furphy referred to Donnelly when describing Shakespeare as a "vile old impostor "), formed part of a wider heretical bent that extended far beyond the byways of Elizabethan literature to take in a dark populist vision of the future that seemed all too plausible to many Australians, particularly those of a pro-Labor disposition.

Ignatius Donnelly was tireless in tapping into the powerful American - and Australian - dream of being a small independent property owner. Born in Philadelphia in 1831, he studied law before seeking wealth through land speculation. He set up Nininger City, Minnesota, which was boosted as a future Chicago but went bust in 1857 and never recovered.

A fluent public speaker, Donnelly gravitated to national politics during the heady prelude to the Civil War. A Democrat and then a Republican, he served three terms in Congress before being squeezed out in an internal party feud.

When the American economy moved into overdrive after the Civil War Donnelly gradually renounced the GOP, experience as a Washington lobbyist convincing him that American politics was now dominated by a struggle "between the few who seek to grasp all power and wealth, and the many who seek to preserve their rights as American citizens and freemen". He embraced third party politics, serving intermittingly as a state legislator in Minnesota where he campaigned for anti-monopoly laws and other forms of public intervention directed against predatory banking, timber, milling and railroad interests.

A bibliophile as well as an orator, Donnelly generated income by writing books which championed "unusual and unproved theories". In Atlantis (1882) he posited the existence of a large, long vanished, mid-Atlantic island from where, he argued, civilization had radiated to the other continents. A second book attributed deposits of gravel on the earth’s surface to an earlier contact with a mighty comet. In The Great Cryptogram (1888) he demonstrated to his own satisfaction that Francis Bacon was the author of Shakespeare’s plays.

In the early 1890s, responding to mounting agrarian discontent, Donnelly helped to form the People’s party and advocated paper money, a graduated income tax and low interest rates. He was mentioned as a possible presidential candidate but had too be content with a failed bid for the vice presidency.

The gospel of discontent was proclaimed in two novels published by Donnelly. Caesar’s Column presented the populists’ vision of hell and The Golden Bottle portrayed their version of heaven. As might be expected, Caesar’s Column was the more gripping read. Projecting ahead to 1988, it imagines Europe and the United States in the clutches of an "unbridled plutocracy" of monopolists, financiers and bankers. This avaricious elite flaunts its wealth on Jules Verne-like technological marvels and a private army while ruthlessly manipulating and exploiting a debased and impoverished working class.

Caesar’s Column

culminates with Donnelly depicting scenes of looting and carnage instigated by an underground resistance group known as the Brotherhood of Destruction. A few survivors attain redemption by solemnly renouncing the sin of usury. The resulting reenchantment of the United States with the disappearance of mortgage foreclosures on farms is the theme of The Golden Bottle. Following the nightmare of Caesar’s Column Donnelly’s countervailing dream of a universal republic of small proprietors was intended to seem all the more alluring.

Donnelly’s novels seized the popular imagination at a time when, as now, future economic prospects for "plain people" seemed increasingly harsh and impersonal. Caesar’s Column in particular sold hundred of thousands of copies throughout the world.

Australians were some of Donnelly’s keenest readers. The decade before federation was marked by violent strikes, banking crises and unstable employment. Against this backdrop Donnelly loomed large as a credible prophet of doom. He helped to colour the literary aura that energised the Australian labour movement in the days of its youthful innocence.

.Before going to Paraguay William Lane publicised (and, apparently, plagiarised) Caesar’s Column and pastoral workers in Wagga were urged to buy copies. The Golden Bottle was enthusiastically reviewed and serialised in the Brisbane Worker. The Bulletin correctly identified Donnelly as one of the principal authors read by the Australian labour movement - many unionists were, or wished to be, small farmers as well. Henry Lawson wrote a sketch in which a slovenly farmer in western New South Wales is shown trying to keep abreast of "all the great social and political questions of the day" by reading Donnelly.

Donnelly’s lurid imagination appealed to working-class Australian readers but his actual political methods and the policy measures he advocated to curb plutocracy were, in marked contrast, utterly prosaic. He much preferred the ballot box to insurrection, monetary and credit reform to class warfare.

When the Labor Party emerged as a political force, Donnelly’s pervasive influence helped to consolidate its instinctive belief that its real foe in Australia was not capitalism in general but rather a clandestine band of financiers and bankers ("the Money Power") who were bent on exploiting manufacturers, small business people and farmers as well as factory hands. This populist mindset, along with other compatible non-Marxist influences, helped to ensure that from the outset Labor never pursued a comprehensive vision of socialism based on undiluted notions of class struggle.

Donnelly died on 1 January 1901 but his fears lived on in the young faraway nation that came into existence on the same day. A decade later, for example, his nightmares about financial cliques formed part of the background to Labor’s decision to establish the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

After the First World War, which saw a justified upsurge of concern about the power of international lenders, new editions of Caesar’s Column were published by Coles Book Arcade in Melbourne. Frank Anstey, a mentor of John Curtin’s, expressed similar fears in his wartime tract The Kingdom of Shylock.

Suspicion of bankers and prevailing credit arrangements, with its anti-semitic and Anglophobic trappings, long haunted the Labor imagination. During the Great Depression Labor’s obsession with the Money Power culminated in Jack Lang’s crusade against Otto Niemeyer and the Bank of England. It was not until the 1980s that Labor fully exorcised its phobia about the Money Power when the then Treasurer embraced financial deregulation.

Labor’s current crop of leaders are no longer haunted by Donnelly’s dystopic visions but the fears that their predecessors once stoked are far from dead, having now dramatically resurfaced at the grassroots level among people who are, or feel, menaced by big corporations and seemingly irreversible trends in the world economy.

Although his name means nothing to the average young anti-IMF or anti-WTO protester Donnelly in fact presented a late nineteenth-century formulation of the same fears that agitate supporters of the current anti-globalisation movement. A melodramatic novel, rather than the internet or visual media images, was used to popularise a similar message. Readers of Caesar’s Column were presented with a menacing picture of a growing gulf between plutocrats and the powerless as a "vast conspiracy against mankind … organised on two continents" sought "possession of the world". The clash between demonstrators and the police in Seattle and Prague or outside the Crown Casino in Melbourne would fit neatly into one of its opening chapters.

In the centenary of his death Ignatius Donnelly remains a strangely relevant figure. He was one of the many lonely prophets who have emerged from North America to influence other societies with aspirations to democracy, including Australia. He dramatised issues and concerns that will, in one recycled form or another, remain alive for as long as we confront impersonal forces which are always new and yet always the same.