Mr. Dooley (or Martin J. Dooley) is a fictional Irish immigrant bartender created by American journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne. Dooley was the subject of many Dunne columns between 1893 and 1915, and again in 1924 and 1926. Dunne's essays contain the bartender's commentary on various topics (often national or international affairs). They became extremely popular during the 1898 Spanish–American War and remained so afterwards; they are collected in several books. The essays are in the form of conversations in Irish dialect between Mr. Dooley, who in the columns owns a tavern in the Bridgeport area of Chicago, and one of the fictional bar's patrons (in later years, usually Malachi Hennessy) with most of the column a monologue by Dooley. The pieces are not widely remembered, but originated lasting sayings such as "the Supreme Court follows the election returns".
Mr. Dooley was invented by Dunne to replace a similar character whose real-life analogue had objected. By having the garrulous bartender speak in dialect and live in an unfashionable area of Chicago, Dunne gained a freedom of expression he often did not have in standard English. The first four years of the weekly column made Mr. Dooley popular in Chicago, but little noticed elsewhere. Dunne was a rapidly rising newspaperman, and the pieces mainly appeared in the Chicago paper for which he worked. During that time, Dunne detailed the daily life of Bridgeport through Dooley's lips, painting a portrait of ethnic urban life unparalleled in 19th-century American literature.
Dunne's bartender came to wider attention with the wartime columns, and the Dooley pieces were soon in newspapers nationwide. Both the columns and the books collecting them gained national acclaim. Beginning around 1905, Dunne had increasing trouble finding time and inspiration for new columns, and they ended in 1915, except for a brief resurrection in the mid-1920s. Even in Dunne's own time (he died in 1936), his work was becoming obscure in part due to his use of dialect, and the unusual spellings that it required have proved a lasting barrier for potential readers.
Chronology
Beginnings
Peter Dunne was born on July 10, 1867, in Chicago, the son of Irish immigrants; he added the first name "Finley", his mother's last name at birth, in his early twenties. A precocious boy, he did well in elementary school but finished last in his high school class of 50, possibly because of the death of his mother, and was sent to work at about age 17 in 1884. Dunne got a menial job on the Chicago Tribune, where superiors soon noticed his street smarts, and made him police reporter. Over the next few years, Dunne worked for several Chicago papers, gaining in salary and responsibility, and by 1888 at age 21 was city editor and a political writer for the Chicago Times.
While at the Times, Dunne may have made his first experiments in Irish dialect: an anonymous police reform series published in January 1889. "Officer Quinn and his Friends" features an Irish-American policeman who digs up a suspicious footprint in the snow. Quinn means to take it to the station but is sidetracked at a saloon, emerging several hours later to find the evidence melted. The writer of the Quinn pieces uses unneeded Irishisms, and his spelling is often awkward. When Dunne took a new job with the Tribune later in 1889, the use of Irish dialect in stories followed him; one account of a conversation between two Irish-American members of the city council is rendered as they would have spoken it. He first signed his name to Irish dialect pieces in the second half of 1890, in a series about real-life Colonel Thomas Jefferson Dolan, a small-time Democratic hanger-on. The series, which ended when Dunne left for the Chicago Herald in late 1890, contains elements of the Dooley stories, including mostly being told from a single perspective (an alter ego for Dunne), as well as painting a detailed portrait of the Irish-American scene. By then, Dunne had polished his use of Irish dialect.
The early 1890s saw an increasing use of dialect in Chicago's newspapers, sometimes to mock, but more often to give voice to the immigrant communities that filled Chicago's neighborhoods, and whose worth was being appreciated. By 1892, Dunne, who was still only aged 25, was editorial chairman of the Chicago Evening Post. Its management was marketing (unsuccessfully, as it proved) a smaller-size weekly edition to compete with the large Sunday papers. Cornelius McAuliff, Dunne's editor, asked him to write a humorous piece for each edition of the new periodical. Accordingly, Dunne wrote for the Sunday Post on December 4, 1892, a piece in Irish dialect called "Frank's Visit to Grover", concerning the efforts of former congressman Frank Lawler to gain appointment as Chicago's postmaster, a political plum to be awarded by the new president, Grover Cleveland. Lawler's visit to New York to see Cleveland is described by another Irishman, Alderman Johnny Powers—Cleveland promises the post (Lawler did not in real life receive it) before Lawler and the president-elect settle down to drinking and shooting pool.
In the December 11, 1892 Sunday paper, Dunne wrote another dialect column, this time set in the upscale Dearborn Street saloon of Colonel Malachi McNeary (in all columns but the first spelled McNeery). That barkeeper was based on James McGarry, owner of a saloon near Chicago's newspaper district; Dunne and other journalists would drink there and write their stories. Beginning in the second McNeery column, the listener for his monologues is Johnny McKenna, a real-life figure, who was a Republican in a mostly Democratic Irish community, and who often received government jobs as a token of bipartisanship. The World's Columbian Exposition was the major event of 1893 in Chicago, and McNeery was used as a mouthpiece for Dunne's commentary on the events and sights of the fair. For example, McNeery views a meeting of the fair's Board of Lady Managers, chaired by Bertha Palmer, who in the column proves incapable of stopping an argument between the members.
When the Sunday Post was discontinued because of financial losses, the McNeery columns were moved to the Saturday edition because of their popularity. This local fame came with some annoyance to McNeery's real-life analogue, McGarry, who found himself called McNeery, and even stared at by a Swedish immigrant, a nationality held in disdain by Chicago Irish. One afternoon, when Dunne was in McGarry's tavern, the journalist found him uncommunicative, until his sudden explosion, "You can't put printer's ink on me with impunity," announcing that he intended to see Dunne's publisher, John R. Walsh. According to Grace Eckley in her volume on Dunne's works, the political positions McNeery was made to espouse were contrary to those of some of McGarry's customers, placing him in an uncomfortable position. The following day, Walsh asked Dunne to change the name, but the writer decided this would not be enough if the fictional saloon was kept as is; instead a humbler establishment (and bartender) in some remoter part of Chicago seemed called for. McKenna, unlike McGarry, was enjoying the attention, and, hearing of the problem, took Dunne to his heavily Irish neighborhood of Bridgeport, introducing him to locals there. Moving the venue to Bridgeport had advantages. A "shanty Irish" barkeeper could be permitted greater freedom of expression than McNeery, for to more urbane Chicagoans, Bridgeporters were unsophisticated, humorous hicks. As Dunne later put it, "while it might be dangerous to call an alderman a thief in English no one could sue if a comic Irishman denounced the statesman as a thief". McGarry's heavy brogue featured in McNeery's speech, and was retained in the move to Bridgeport.
Dunne introduced the change in his column on October 7, 1893. McNeery was depicted as having gone home to Ireland, and the bereft McKenna, seeking companionship, enters the Bridgeport saloon of Martin J. Dooley, located on Archer Avenue (to become famous as "Archey Road"), in which he had not been in some years, but where Mr. Dooley greets him as if they had parted the day before. Dooley serves him two drinks and an earful on local affairs—McKenna speaks only two brief sentences, one of which is his greeting. Dunne later stated that at first, he viewed the Dooley pieces as just another weekly feature, done hurriedly in an hour without much attempt at polish.
Local man of wisdom (1893–1898) Over the first few months of weekly Mr. Dooley columns, in 1893 and 1894, the character of Dooley began to take shape. The backstory that Dunne gave Dooley began with the future bartender's birth in County Roscommon, Ireland (where McGarry was born), about sixty years previously. Dooley was one of the roughly 2,000,000 Irish people who emigrated to North America during the Great Famine (1845–49), coming across on one of the coffin ships, and later spoke of the hardships and deaths on the journey. Arriving in New York, he tried Pittsburgh and St. Louis, and settled in Chicago in the early 1850s. He worked in the typical occupations available to Irish of the time, as a laborer swinging a pickaxe and then driving horse-drawn wagons; but found these employments not to his liking, as each was dominated by Irishmen from counties other than Roscommon. He remains suspicious of, or even hostile towards, men from certain other counties, with "sheep-stealin' Mayo men" heading the list. Tiring of employed labor, he established a bar on Archer Avenue, spending the Civil War there. His bar became the sort of community tavern around which, together with home and church, Irish life revolved. He interested himself in Democratic Party politics, and after a successful two-year term as a precinct captain between 1873 and 1875, was mentioned for the post of city alderman but was not selected to be a candidate. He remains a bachelor, running his bar which caters to rolling mill workers employed nearby, and dubs himself a "saloonkeeper and Doctor of Philosophy".
Although Mr. Dooley would become famous for his commentary on national affairs, the columns of the first years were generally more local in scope. Through the lips of Dooley, Dunne built a detailed view of Bridgeport, a vibrant community with its own idiosyncrasies and with important local figures. According to historian Charles Fanning, this made Bridgeport "the most solidly realized ethnic neighborhood in nineteenth-century American literature". In the first year, less than half of the columns were political in nature, but this proportion increased as Dunne used Dooley as a weapon for reform of the corrupt city council; according to Dunne's biographer, Elmer Ellis, "over the eight years from 1892 to 1900 there was no single force for improvement more important than the Dooley essays". Dunne depicted Bridgeport as a community whose Irish nature is on the verge of dissolution as other ethnic groups move in, an evolution to which Dooley reacts in various ways ranging from resignation to near-panic.
Commerce from the Columbian Exposition had helped shield Chicago from the gloom of the economic Panic of 1893, which enveloped much of the rest of the nation, but after the exposition closed, the winter of 1893–94 saw much unemployment, suffering and starvation. As Irish immigrants were disproportionately employed as laborers, and had less education than other ethnic groups, Bridgeport was hit especially hard by the depression, and this was reflected in the columns. Dunne's anger especially focused on George Pullman, whose wage cuts for his workers (while not cutting the rents of their houses, which his company owned) helped provoke the Pullman Strike of 1894. In his column of August 25, Dunne wrote,