Mr. Dooley

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Mr. Dooley

"Mr. Dooley" was a product of the 1890s, a time when a memorable fictional character was likely to come not only from the pages of a novel or a play but also from a column in the newspaper. Chicago-born newspaper writer Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936) created "Mr. Martin J. Dooley" as his satirical mouthpiece. Dooley was a saloon-keeper whose pronouncements on current events, both local and international, couched in a vivid, albeit questionable "Irish" dialect, were as humorous as they were pointed. Not until the country discovered a genuine "cracker-barrel philosopher" in cowboy Will Rogers was there a more popular commentator on war and peace, politics, and the passing parade.

By devising "Mr. Dooley" to express his thoughts and opinions, Dunne also managed to give voice to the disenfranchised blue-collar population of Irish immigrants who were beginning to form an important part of Chicago life at the turn of the twentieth century. Although his own father, a carpenter, was an immigrant from Ireland, Finley Peter Dunne himself did not live a working-class existence. As Paul Green has pointed out in his introduction to one of Dunne's books, "(Dunne was) more interested in writing about his people than living with them." He was born in Chicago in 1867, and grew up comfortably middle class. In 1884, the Chicago Telegram hired Dunne as an office boy and reporter. With this job, the young man began a 15-year stretch of journalism which would see him employed at half a dozen windy city newspapers. It was not until 1892 that Dunne started experimenting with Irish dialect because, as he later explained, "It occurred to me that 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." Nevertheless, it was not until a year later, after failing to create much of a stir with two other Irish characters, that Dunne hit upon the brainstorm of Martin J. Dooley, middle-aged bartender and commentator on matters both local and national. A self-described saloon-keeper and Doctor of Philosophy, Mr. Dooley proved instantly popular with Dunne's readers, and the writer supplied them with his best Dooley columns over the next seven years.

The down-to-earth Mr. Dooley looked with a clear eye at social conditions in his Bridgeport neighborhood, and he saw what was going on all around him in Chicago as a microcosm of larger world events. Dunne's columns would range from poking fun at politics—as when Dooley ran for mayor with the campaign slogan "Rayform the Rayformers"—to letting Dooley bear witness to vignettes illustrating the harsh life of the marginalized immigrants who frequented his establishment. The columns proved so successful that over the years they were frequently collected in book form. Although Dunne's unauthentic dialect usage was criticized in Ireland, where his books were never popular, the important thing about his columns was the satirical message. Dunne eventually wrote over 300 columns, but those generally considered the best were the ones he wrote while he was still close to his ethnic roots in Chicago. The first Dooley book, published in 1898, was Mr. Dooley: In Peace and in War. Its success was immediate and so pronounced that it enabled Dunne to relocate to Manhattan, where he was able to reach a wider readership and attain greater national attention, but Mr. Dooley seemed to lose something of the spirit which had first sparked his success.

Nevertheless, Dunne enjoyed continued popularity, not only with Mr. Dooley but with other articles, columns, and books, until his death in New York in 1936. Dunne continued to affect popular culture posthumously, albeit indirectly, by having sired successful screenwriter Philip Dunne, whose distinguished credits include the Oscar winning How Green Was My Valley (1941). "The past," Dunne once wrote, "always looks better than it was because it isn't here." Although very much a product of his era, Dunne's writings stand the test of time, in part because, for better or worse, the topics that are worth poking fun at rarely change or disappear. To cite just one example, Dunne once defined a fanatic as "A man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case."

—Preston Neal Jones