Eight years after this man wrote the preamble to the Omaha Platform, he was the running mate for Wharton Barker of the People's Party in the 1900 presidential election.  
The title character of a novel by this man has a dream where he receives a bottle whose liquid, when applied to iron, turns the iron into gold.  This man left Philadelphia to found a town named for his partner, John Nininger.  To prove one theory, this man read through a corpus of text counting the frequencies of words such as "Nicholas" and "Francis" versus words such as "William" and "spur".  This "Prince of Cranks" argued in The Cipher in the Plays and on the Tombstone that Francis Bacon was the true author of the plays of William Shakespeare.  The narrator of one of his novels approaches New York City by airship to find it controlled by a financial oligarchy in the far-off year of 1988.  Eight years after this man wrote the preamble to the Omaha Platform, he was the running mate for Wharton Barker of the People's Party in the 1900 presidential election.  For 10 points, name this writer and Minnesota Populist who wrote the utopian novel Caesar's Column.
The title character of a novel by this man has a dream where he receives a bottle whose liquid, when applied to iron, turns the iron into gold.  
Ignatius Donnelly [or Ignatius Loyola Donnelly]