Free Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce Page A

Oxford Union. It became the great cause of the rest of his life. He wrote a couple of bizarre works of speculative fiction, but he came back to Bacon and Shakespeare in 1899, with
The Cipher in the Plays, and on the Tombstone.
By now, Donnelly was arguing that Bacon had written not only Shakespeare’s plays but those of Christopher Marlowe, and the novels of Miguel de Cervantes.
    Donnelly fell into obscurity, burying himself in the splintering rural Populist movements at the turn of the century. His wife died and, in 1898, he married again, to a woman forty years younger, which caused no little scandal among the society set in St. Paul. On New Year’s Day, 1901, at the house of his new father-in-law, the Sage of Nininger died. He was sixty-nine years old. It was the first day of the twentieth century.
    He was himself alone. He joined science to the popular culture in such a way that his work remains the ur-text for almostall treatments of Atlantis to this day. In 1969, the folksinger Donovan had a hit single called “Atlantis” in which he relates, almost by rote, the story of Atlantis as it’s told in Donnelly’s book, although Donnelly didn’t go so far as to croon, as Donovan does over an endless coda, “my ante-di-looov-i-ahn bay-beeee!” The refinements Donnelly wrought in the art of pseudoscience were advances as profound as were Darwin’s refinements of actual science. In many ways, Ignatius Donnelly helped create the modern counterhistory that America was born to have.
    Donnelly was the perfect American crank. When
Ragnarok
failed, he didn’t write three more books trying to get it to succeed. He moved along to debunking Shakespeare. He didn’t care what the accepted wisdom was, nor did he insist that his work be included in it. He seemed to realize that the struggle to be respectable renders a crank worthless to the culture. The crank must always live where the wild imagination exists. The crank pushes and prods but does not insist that his ideas be judged by standards that do not apply. The crank lives in a place of undomesticated ideas, where the dinosaurs do not wear saddles.
    It’s always been there, in the oldest folk songs, in the whispered politics of the colonial tavern, in the angry speeches at the grange hall, in the constant rise of fringe religions, and in the persistence of theories about who’s really in charge and what they’re doing. There are gray spaces in the promises of freedom that made inevitable the rise of a country of the mind wilder and freer than the actual republic, what the critic Greil Marcus calls “the old, weird America.” That country has its own music, its own language, its own politics, and its own popular culture. It has its own laws of reality. Ignatius Donnelly didn’t discover Atlantis off the coast of the Azores. He discovered Atlantis in this country of the mind, in the willingness of Americans to believe.
    What Donnelly did was to keep this counterhistory in itsproper place as a subtext, as grace notes, as the niggling little doubts that are as firmly in the democratic tradition as any campaign speech is. After all, sometimes there
are
wheels within wheels. Sometimes people are keeping real secrets, and sometimes those secrets involve actual events that are as cosmically lunatic as anything Ignatius Donnelly ever dreamed up. We should always listen to our inner Donnellys. But we shouldn’t always take their advice.

    A brief word, then, about politics.
    It will appear to most readers that the politics in this book concerns the various activities of the modern American right. This would seem to make the work something of a piece with Richard Hofstadter’s in the 1960s. However, we are emerging from a period of unprecedented monopoly by modern American conservatism—what some people call “movement conservatism”—over the institutions of government.
    The long, slow march from the debacle of the Goldwater campaign in 1964 through the triumph of Ronald