HARD TIMES IN THE SIXTH WARD:
Mr. Dooley on the Depression of the 1890s

James DeMuth

"Yes, I know th' wur-ruk iv relief is goin' on," Mr. Dooley impatiently admitted on January 23, 1897, during the fourth winter of the 1890s' depression, "but what th'lad-ads need is th' relief iv wur-wuk"(EP, Jan. 30, 1897).¹ The need for work had been pressing for years. From the bank panic of April, 1893, until the declaration of war with Spain in April, 1898, the nation had suffered unemployment estimated as high as 3,000,000.² Not until the Great Depression would the country again endure hard times as long and severe as the depression of the nineties.

In those distressful years, a young Chicago journalist, Finley Peter Dunne, created an elderly Irish-American saloon keeper, Mr. Dooley, to voice both the dismay and the patience, the anger and the hope of a working-class immigrant ward. To buttress Mr. Dooley's authority as a community spokesman, Dunne endowed him with a forty-year residence in Chicago, longer than most native Chicagoans could claim, and with an active political life in his democratic precinct. Mr. Dooley knew Chicago well and, by virtue of his age, experience, and community status, could interpret convincingly the distant events of his newspaper as they bore on the lives of his neighbors; the characteristic lead of Mr. Dooley's weekly column in the Chicago Evening Post was "I see be th' pa-apers that . . ." and his exposition of these news events was ironic and irreverent.

Mr. Dooley's column began to appear weekly during the late autumn of 1893 when the effects of the deepening nationwide depression, delayed in Chicago by the economic stimulus of the World's Fair, became startlingly apparent. As the proprietor of a small saloon in the Sixth Ward, or Bridgeport as it was and still is known, Mr. Dooley was positioned in the heart of the economic misery. This area had originally been settled by Irish canal and railroad laborers whose sons now toiled in its lumberyards, mills and packing plants. Throughout Chicago, but especially in Bridgeport, the Irish suffered the layoffs and evictions of the 1890s in disproportion to their numbers because more of them were unskilled laborers than was true of some other population groups; the 1890 census identified 34 percent of the Chicago Irish as unskilled laborers compared to 18 percent of the Germans and 6 percent of the native-born.3 The Irish of Chicago were among the first victims of the depression and Mr. Dooley, a saloon keeper in a "shanty Irish" ward, was close to them. It was the "dismal winter" of 1893, when hundreds of

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homeless men were sleeping in the halls and basement of City Hall, in the city prisons and on the floors of taverns, as well as the violent summer of the Pullman strike in 1894 that determined what Mr. Dooley would say and with what edge of outrage his words would bite.

During that winter of 1893-94 when Mr. Dooley was acquiring his public voice in response to the intense misery of the sudden and widespread economic depression, another keen observer of the distress and champion of the hapless in Chicago was the English editor and social reformer William T. Stead whose outsider's view of Chicago corroborated Mr. Dooley's unconventional insider's wisdom of how things really worked. Stead had been in Chicago for the World's Fair and had stayed on at the request of settlement house workers, municipal reformers, church officials and other civic-minded people to investigate and report the widespread vice in Chicago's Levee district. Though he led some public campaigns against prostitution and drunkenness, when he published his indictments in the sensational book If Christ Came to Chicago, Stead impugned the character of his sponsors and charged that by their selfish indifference to public welfare they fostered the vicious conditions of which they complained. Finding no organized public relief for the homeless and hungry in that winter of 1893–94, few private charities and many indifferent churches. Stead shocked Chicagoans by identifying and praising two effective and responsible agencies of public welfare: the Democratic Party which provided charity in exchange for votes in the wards it controlled, and the saloon keepers who generously provided a free lunch with a nickel beer (and, often, with no purchase) and who allowed vagrants to sleep the night on their floors.4 As a Democrat, former precinct captain, and saloon keeper, Mr. Dooley was one of Stead's responsible and sensitive Chicagoans. Though differing in tone, Mr. Dooley and William T. Stead are quite similar in substance; they both interpret the hard times morally as a test of character and hold Chicagoans responsible to the ideal of charity. That ideal in the Mr. Dooley columns is concrete, embodied in the good works of the parish priest, Father Kelly. To emphasize the value of charity and point to its persistent need, Mr. Dooley would frequently compare the present distress with earlier "bust" periods when the priest's selfless service was demanded:

Sivinty-four was a hard winter fr th' r-road. Th' mills was shut down an' ye cud've stood half th' population iv some iv th' precints on their heads an' got nothin' but five days' notices out iv thim. Th' night came cold, an' bechune relievin' th' sick an' giv'n extremunction to th' dyin' n' comfortin' th' widows an' orphans th' little priest was sore pressed frim week's end to week's end. They was smallpox in wan part iv th' wa-ard an' diphtheria in an other, an' bechune th' two there was starvation an' cold an' not enough blankets on th'bed. (EP, Dec. 5, 1896)

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Father Kelly exemplified charity in his parish by extending his good works to the vicious and virtuous alike, showing by example the obligation in hard times to relieve misery unconditionally without first judging merit.

This point is made emphatically in Mr. Dooley's account of his cooperation with Father Kelly in finding food, clothing, and a job for "th' man Carey down th' sthreet that nobody likes, him bein' a natoryous infidel." Father Kelly heard of the case, appealed to Martin Dooley, and together they "wint down th' sthreet an' rough an' tumbled ivery coal dealer, butcher, grocer an' baker—most iv thim broke thimsilves—till we had a wagonload iv stuff" Delivering their goods, Mr. Dooley and Father Kelly endured Carey's harangue on the lies and stupidities of the Bible until Father Kelly interrupted to give an ironic blessing: "What talk have ye? Go an' starve no more." Leaving Carey, Mr. Dooley and Father Kelly met Keough, a rich man and pillar of the church, one who frequently passed the collection plate at mass. Father Kelly asked Keough to give Carey a job; Keough objected that Carey was a heathen and wicked; Father Kelly agreed yet insisted on the job because it was not "me privilege fr to visit tormint upon th' sinful" (EP, Jan. 30.1897).

Father Kelly's example was repeated in the often anonymous acts of individual charity by his parishioners, for example, Tim Hennessy whose wife had him "r-runnin' be night an' day with a pound of tay or a flannel shirt or a this-or-that or th' other thing, an' this on'y two weeks ago, whin th' weather was war-rum she tol' me Mrs. Grogan was as ongrateful as a cow an' smelled so iv gin ye cud have th' deeleeryum thremens if ye sat with her f'r an hour." "What ye shud do,"Mr. Dooley ironically advised," is to get ye're wife to join an organized charity. Th' throuble with her is she gives to onworthy people an' in a haphazard way that tinds to make paupers" (EP, Dec. 5, 1896).

The organized charity of which Mr. Dooley was most scornful was the Relief and Aid Society, a voluntary association formed by prominent citizens after the Great Fire of 1871. The funds of this society were administered by the Chicago police department with a percentage skimmed for profit. But it was not police graft that disturbed Mr. Dooley just as it was not Democratic Party graft that disturbed William T. Stead; rather, it was the disdain of the contributors who would not respond immediately and personally to the distress of their community: "To think that a man can square himsilf with his conscience be givin' wan thousan' dollars to a polisman an' tellin' him to disthribute it! Why don't they get th' poor up in a cage in Lincoln Park an' hand thim food on th' ind iv a window pole, if they're afraid they'll bite" (EP, Jan 30, 1897).

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In his moral interpretation of the depression, Mr. Dooley saw the hard times as a challenge to Chicagoans to reach across the barriers of class and prejudice in recognition of their common distress. He criticized the Relief and Aid Society for its impersonal righteousness, for the demonstration by its methods that its members were exempt from the distress and in a privileged position to judge those afflicted. This arrogance, exhibited in the manner of the leading citizens, also poisoned the community life of Bridgeport. Mr. Dooley's most severe criticism was of those Bridgeport neighbors who exacted humiliation as the price for their alms, motives that often reached back to the class prejudices of their Irish counties.

In one incident of this enduring prejudice, "that pompous little fat ol' washerwoman" Mrs. Cassidy exulted in her opportunity as head of the Ladies' Aid Society to call on Mrs. Matthew Hagan. The Hagans had been a family of modest property and respectable status in Mrs. Cassidy's Irish county—Matthew Hagan's father had been the schoolmaster—and Mrs. Cassidy now smugly informed Mrs. Hagan of her duty "f'r to investigate ye'er case duly an' rayport thereon" (EP, Nov. 30, 1895). Her affront was infuriating because Matthew Hagan had suffered for defending the rights of Bridgeport workingmen; he had been blacklisted for participating in the Pullman strike of the previous summer. Immigration to the New World, in Mr. Dooley's unsentimental view, did not make Cassidys and Hagans equal nor did it inspire brotherhood among workingmen.

Mr. Dooley's skepticism disposed him to interpret hard times at those periods when privilege was solidified and intensified. Though he extolled exemplary acts of generosity and sympathy, his leading theme was that hard times incited those in privileged positions to exert their authority more arbitrarily, flaunt their wealth more ostentatiously and oppress their fellowmen more shamelessly. One of the most conspicuous and outrageous of such revealing episodes was the Bradley-Martin costume ball in New York City on February 10, 1897. When Mr. Bradley-Martin was denounced from the pulpit of St. George's Episcopal Church in New York City by Dr. William Rainsford for flagrantly wasting $300,000, he smugly replied that he was aiding the unemployed by putting money into circulation in a time of need.⁵

Dr. Dooley commented that the incident reminded him of a time during the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s when a wealthy landlord, one "Willum Fitzgerald Dorsey, justice iv th' peace, mimber iv Parlymint," continued giving lavish parties while exacting his usual rents from the starving tenants. Finally one desperate tenant murdered the arrogant Dorsey, leading Mr. Dooley to conclude that "Dorsey was a fool":

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He might've evicted twinty thousand tinants an' lived to joke about it over his bottle. 'Twas th' music iv th' band an' th' dancing' on th' hill an' th' lights th' Galway man seen whin he wint up th' muddy road with his babby in his arrums that done th' business f'r Dorsey. (EP, Feb. 6, 1897)

By evoking these bitter memories of the famine years, Mr. Dooley cast the present industrial depression in stark terms of greed, cruelty and despair. The capitalists of his day were disclaiming responsibility for the employment of their workers or relief of their distress; in Chicago, Cyrus McCormick boasted that "[N]othing promotes efficiency in a plant better than an extra man for every job, waiting in a long line at the hiring gate."⁶ By comparing the impersonal capitalist-laborer relation and the intimate landlord-tenant relation, Mr. Dooley sought to instruct his readers that production and profit could ultimately be secured only by the bonds of mutual respect and dignity.

Of all the Chicago capitalists whom Mr. Dooley scrutinized in these years, the one who most aroused his anger was George Pullman in the summer 1894. During the first year of the depression, from the bank panic of April, 1893, until the Pullman workers went out on strike on May 11, 1894, one-third of the Pullman workforce had been dismissed, including all forty-three members of the committee that asked for arbitration on May 9, and the wages for the remaining workers had been reduced 30 to 40 percent. The savings in wages for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1894, was $2,752,018, and the dividend for the same period, a record dividend for the company, was $2,880,000; the conclusion was inescapable that the dividend had come directly from the wage savings. Furthermore, the company carried an undistributed profit of $25,000,000 on its books, a figure that had swollen over the years because of the favorable tax rate the company enjoyed from the Illinois State Board of Equalization; Pullman Company paid only 14 percent of the taxes due on its grossly undervalued property.⁷

The affliction of the Pullman workers was especially galling to them because most lived as Pullman's tenants in his model company town of Pullman, Illinois, a community he had established on the north shore of Lake Calumet in 1880, and had since loudly advertised as the social panacea that would "eliminate all that was ugly, discordant and demoralizing."⁸ During the time of layoffs and wage reductions, the rents and fees in Pullman were strictly maintained at the rates necessary to yield the Pullman Land Company the y/i percent return on its $5,000,000 investment. Since the Pullman Company deducted all charges against its workers from their paychecks, some workers were getting as little as 7¢ a week cash, and others were in debt and getting nothing. Chicago newspapers printed several pathetic stories of families who lived in darkened, cold houses and who were on the verge of

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starvation, each family trying to satisfy its debts to its landlord-employer.

Matters came to crisis in June, 1894. After a futile, month-long strike, the Pullman workers turned to the new American Railway Union, an industrial union organized under the leadership of Eugene Debs the previous year. It had negotiated a satisfactory settlement of its two week strike against the Great Northern Railway in April and was now holding its first national convention in Chicago. The Pullman workers appealed to the convention for an industry-wide boycott in support of their strike, an appeal that gained irresistible force in the simple, quiet testimony of Pullman seamstress Jennie Curtis. In her speech to the assembly. Miss Curtis explained her misfortune. Her father had recently died after thirteen years employment with Pullman Company. On the day of his burial, company agents demanded sixty dollars in back rent and evicted her. Her seamstress work was reduced to part-time, and most of her wages were withheld as installments on the overdue rent.9 Realizing that such cases were common among Pullman workers and that the situation of the strikers was desperate, the convention approved a motion for an industry-wide boycott on June 22. After a final effort at arbitration failed, the boycott was called on June 26, and by June 29 over 150,000 workers were out on boycott.

On their part, the railroads had worked deliberately to provoke the boycott that the American Railway Union had endorsed. Through their General Managers' Association, an organization formed in May in response to the Great Northern strike and representing the management of 90 percent of all rail traffic, the railroads asked Attorney General Richard Olney to appoint their lawyer Edwin Walker to a new post of Assistant Attorney General for Chicago. When the American Railway Union passed the boycott resolution, the General Managers' Association directed that Pullman cars be attached to nearly every train, including those carrying federal mail; the compliant Mr. Walker then requested an injunction which was promptly granted.¹⁰

The American Railway Union defied the injunction and on July 3, over the strong objections of Illinois governor John Altgeld and Chicago mayor John Hopkins, President Cleveland called out the army from Fort Sheridan to police the Chicago yards. On July 6, the first day on which soldiers fired openly into a crowd that would not disperse, Eugene Debs was arrested; on July 9, he called an end to the violence by conceding the defeat of the boycott.

The major Chicago newspapers, Dunne's Evening Post among them, condemned the strike violence and supported President Cleveland's mobilization of the army as necessary for public order, though there was

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no property damage or personal injury until July 4, the first day the army was on patrol. Governor Altgeld and Eugene Debs were castigated in editorials and vilified in cartoons as arsonists and reptiles. Within this rabid editorial policy, Mr. Dooley had little room for expression and and kept his silence during much of the strike's period. He only commented at length twice, first on July 7, the day following Debs's arrest, and next on August 25, soon after George Pullman had ignored Governor Altgeld's second appeal to him for charity in relief of the suffering families in Pullman: "I assumed," Governor Altgeld wrote in mid-August, "that even if they were wrong and had been foolish, you would not be willing to see them perish."¹¹ George Pullman did not reply.

In neither of his comments did Mr. Dooley endorse the demands of the strikers; he ignored their economic grievances to concentrate on the conspicuous and editorially acceptable target of George Pullman's intransigence and petulance. Pullman's absolute refusal to negotiate had aroused wide criticism, both in Chicago and outside, provoking even Mark Hanna to denounce him as "[T]hat damn fool Pullman!" "Any man who won't meet his employees half way in these times," Hanna had gone on to exclaim, "is an ass."¹²

Mr. Dooley agreed and, in the July 7 column, burlesqued Pullman's severe response to the strike. Fulminating over the disruption the strike had caused in Pullman's supply of lemons and ice, Mr. Dooley parodied Pullman's vehemence: "Order out th' sojers,' says I, 'an' tache th' miscreents what th' 'ell." He went on to ridicule President Cleveland's invocation of constitutional authority as a mere cover for Pullman's economic privilege: "This here Pullman makes th' sleepin' ca-ars an' th' constitution looks afther Pullman. He have a good time iv it. He don't need to look afther himsilf." And he concluded his travesty of Pullman's legal defense by mocking Pullman's cowardice in leaving Chicago to escape the subpoena requested by Debs's lawyer Clarence Darrow: "thin he puts on his hat an' lams away. 'Gintlemin,' says he, 'I must be off,' he says. 'Go an' kill each other,' he says. 'Fight it out,' he says. 'Defind th' constitution,' he says. 'Me own is not of the best' " (EP, July 7, 1894).

The burlesque tone of this monologue is the tone we usually identify with Mr. Dooley, especially with the Mr. Dooley of the later, nationally syndicated columns. His portrayals of Theodore Roosevelt, Admiral George Dewey, Andrew Carnegie and other prominent figures were of this exaggerated, mocking character. With George Pullman in 1894, though, Mr. Dooley's good humor was soon exhausted. By August 25, the date of his second column on Pullman, strikers had been killed, strike leaders had been black-listed, only 1600 of the 3260 people

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employed in April had been rehired, and Pullman had refused twice to contribute to a relief fund for women and children.¹³ In light of those conditions, Dunne made the plight of the Pullman families remind Mr. Dooley of the horrors of the Irish famine years:

Glory be to Gawd, I can scarce go out f'r a wa-alk f'r pity at seein' th' little wans settin' on th' stoops an' th' women with thim lines in th' fa-ace that I seen but wanst befure, in our parish over beyant, with th' potatoes that was kilt be th' frost an' th' oats rotted with th' dhrivin' rain. (EP, Aug. 25, 1894)

In this time of anguish that reminded him of the famine years, Mr. Dooley was heartened by the charity of the poor. He told of Tim Dorsey's wife sharing the fortune of Tim's first day of work in six months by giving a loaf of bread and a ham to a Polish family. This simply stated vignette of the poor reaching across barriers of ethnic prejudice contrasted sharply with George Pullman's greed, vulgarity and cruel indifference:

'Th' women an' childhren is dyin' iv hunger,' they sa-ays. 'They've done no wrong,' they sa-ays. 'Will ye not put out ye'er hand to help them?' they saays. 'Ah, what th' 'ell,' says George. 'What th' 'ell,' he says. (EP, Aug. 25, 1894)

In the years following 1894, Dunne increasingly came to feel that the tone of the second George Pullman column was more severe and its condemnation more explicit than was usual for Mr. Dooley. Although it was an admired and frequently quoted piece in the months following its publication and although the Post typesetters had applauded Dunne when he had gone to proofread their copy, an event Dunne later recalled as the most moving of his life, still he refused to include the column in the Evening Post selections of his first two books.¹⁴ However, the difference between the George Pullman column and the others was a difference of tone, not of purpose; the burlesque style served often to isolate, exaggerate and condemn the "what th' 'ell" attitude of various Chicago capitalists.

A particularly shocking example of this attitude was revealed in the summer of 1895, when workmen from Chicago's water department discovered that the major packing houses—Swift and Company, Armour and Company, and Morris and Company—had tapped the main water line with illegal, unmetered lines to divert water to their plants, nearly exhausting the water supply of Lake township on the South Side and, in one instance, tapping water directly from a fire hydrant.¹⁵ Mr. Dooley expressed little surprise at this chicanery: "Th' pa-apers say 'tis exthordinary that ladin' citizens sh'd hook th' dhrink, but I know a thing or two about this ladin' citizen." To expose this leading citizen's greed and selfishness so that the theft of public water

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was no surprise ("I suppose 'tis because they wasn't annything else they cud take"), Mr. Dooley told an apocryphal story of Nelson Morris, the millionaire German immigrant who, in response to his brother Max's plea for help, reluctantly employed him in the shovel gang at his packing plant's salt house:

'That there man Max ye sint me is no good,' he says. 'What's th' matther iv him?' says th' millionaire. 'He's not sthrong enough,' says th' boss. 'Thin fire him,' says th' brother. (EP, Sept. 7, 1895)

As his caricature of Nelson Morris illustrates, Mr. Dooley enjoyed a freedom from editorial policies that restricted his creator. Constrained by his newspaper's conservative, Republican sympathies during the week, Finley Peter Dunne could, in Mr. Dooley's guise, voice his indignation, name those responsible for public misery and, often, by contrasting them with simple, decent people of his ward, spotlight harshly their indifference to the community's welfare.¹⁶ One of these culprits was Stuyvesant Fish. In the early summer of 1895, Fish had an iron fence built along the entire length of the Illinois Central's lakefront right-of-way and ordered that people be charged ten cents to cross the tracks at the one depot with a crossing bridge. Pondering the effect of this policy on the lives of South Side Chicagoans, Mr. Dooley told of Mrs. Mulligan's trek from Bridgeport to the lake to give her feverish baby a ride on a steamboat. The street cars would charge her five cents each way, the steamboat would be ten cents and so, with their twenty-five cents, Mrs. Mulligan could just afford the treat for her child: "'Tis ixpinsive,' she says, 'but 'tis betther than to have th' poor chick sufferin' an' I'm goin' to do it.'" When Mr. Mulligan arrived, she discovered the fence, the single depot, and the ten-cent crossing fee: "Ye see, th' man Fish had tol' thim not to let annywan to go to his lake, th' wan he made, d'ye mind, on th' sicond day" (EP, Aug. 10, 1895).

This account of a capitalist's arrogance ended, as did the second of George Pullman columns, with the victim's death. Here, however, as in other columns, Dunne suppressed the pathos of suffering by having Mr. Dooley speak with such tight understatement that the moral force of his condemnation was redoubled:

"I hope th' Illinye Cinthral'll be kinder to Mulligan's baby in th' nix'wurruld than its been in this, fr unless me eyes have gone back on me they'll be another sthring iv crape on Mulligan's dure tomorrah momin'."(EP, Aug. 10, 1895)

In these parables of oppression and suffering, Mr. Dooley defined the moral failing of capitalism as exposed starkly in hard times: the owners of the means of production enjoyed an arbitrary authority secure from

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the discipline of law; indeed, the law and its agents served their interest. Of George Pullman, Mr. Dooley concluded: "He owns towns an' min. . . .th' constitootion, Jawn, provides f'r Pullman" (EP, July 7, 1894). The criminal greed of stealing water from the city, bribing legislatures and city councils for right of way concessions and franchises, and distorting property values to avoid taxes are identified and condemned by Mr. Dooley by the standards of honesty, dignity, and genuine charity which he found among his neighbors in Bridgeport. The citizens of Bridgeport might not always have acted on these ideals, they might have humiliated their neighbors by questioning their worthiness to receive charity, but they were always kept aware of the standards and held accountable to them by their community leader Father Kelly. The capitalists lacked a comparable moral exemplar.

The simple and extreme class contrast in the Mr. Dooley columns between the generous poor and the selfish rich, a contrast Dunne used for its rhetorical clarity, placed Mr. Dooley in a position of skeptical mistrust of the various reforms offered during the nineties. In his comments on the movement for municipal ownership of utilities, on trust busting, and on the Populist platform which captured the Democratic Party in the campaign of 1896, Mr. Dooley mocked the folly of reform. The truth, he asserted, is that authority will always be twisted to serve the advantage of the authorities and that no mechanical reform, the currency issue of the 1896 campaign being the most conspicuous example, could alter the perennial relation between exploiter and exploited. The world, Mr. Dooley's deep experience told him, would likely always be divided between the few Irish landlords and their many hungry tenants.

This skepticism could be very amusing and enlightening when Mr. Dooley dismissed the idealistic program of reformers to reveal the actual rules of the game and name the players who held marked cards. On the question of municipal ownership of public utilities and transportation, for example, Mr. Dooley endorsed reform for the ironic reason that "'Twill make things good in politics again" by opening previously unimagined treasures of patronage. Mr. Dooley predicted that William J. O'Brian, Bridgeport's alderman, would be president of the street car company; Johnny Powers, the notoriously corrupt alderman of the nineteenth ward, would head the gashouse; and "Bathhouse John" Coughlin, alderman of Chicago's vice district, the first ward, would control the telephone company.

Before a primary election, Mr. Dooley imagined, these public servants would meet to review the political loyalties of their employees and decide which of them should be punished by dismissal. The day after

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the primaries, the board would again meet to raise fares and gas prices:

'"The people'll kick,' says Powers. 'Iv coorse they will,' says O'Brien." Mr. Dooley concluded that the choice between public and private ownership resolved to a simple question: "It's only a question iv who does th' robbin' " (EP, Oct. 16, 1897). Similarly, on the question of whether trusts are illegal combinations which should be broken into competing trade units, Mr. Dooley announced that "to me it looks jus' th' diffrence between a man bein' robbed be wan sthrong ar-rm man at a time an' bein' sarched be twinty" (EP, Feb. 4, 1899).

All of the reform issues of the 1890s became concentrated in the presidential campaign of 1896. The campaign began with the Democratic convention in Chicago rejecting a resolution commending the Cleveland administration and endorsing the thirty-six year old Nebraska congressman, William Jennings Bryan, who, in the debate on the commendation resolution, had delivered his eloquent "Cross of Gold" speech advocating the unlimited coinage of silver and defending the agrarian interests as the primary source of national wealth, security and moral character. The convention adopted a platform calling for the coinage of silver at a rate of sixteen silver dollars to each gold dollar, a tariff for revenue only, the direct election of United States senators and an income tax. These reforms had earlier been adopted in the 1891 platform of the People's or Populist Party and, in 1896, that party endorsed Bryan as its nominee. This endorsement led the Chicago Tribune to name the Democrats the "Popocrats."¹⁷

The underlying economic issue which the Democratic reforms addressed was the maldistribution of income, an inequality made more severe by the deflationary gold standard, the high protective tariffs of the McKinley Act, the nine years of drought in the trans-Mississippi plains, and the three years of industrial depression since 1893. Though the Populist Party represented the agricultural and mining interests of the trans-Mississippi West and William Jennings Bryan was a candidate of that region, the Chicago workingmen also suffered from inadequate income, tariff-inflated prices, and economic depression. Unskilled laborers in Chicago earned about $1.25 a day and journeymen about $3.00, but much of their work was seasonal; the meatpacking plants operated only in the winter and construction was only possible in fair weather. Over a year of ordinary employment, a Chicago workingmen might expect an average income of about 9 to 10 dollars a week.¹⁸ As Mr. Dooley wryly noted, "th' on'y problem in Ar-rchey r-road is how manny times does round steak go into twelve at wan dollar-an-a-half a day."¹⁹

During the 1896 campaign, most debate centered around the Demo-

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cratic Party's call for the expanded coinage of silver. This proposal would have greatly increased money in circulation and inflated prices for agricultural and mining products, reducing the burden of debt for farmers and mine owners. However, the appeal of an inflated currency faded quickly for workingmen faced with the prospect of rising prices and lagging wages. In covering the campaign for the Evening Post, Finley Peter Dunne soon perceived the limited regional appeal of Bryan's campaign and, by late September, Mr. Dooley was mocking the economic panacea of silver coinage and confidently predicting Bryan's defeat:

this young kid Bryan . . . goes out into th' counthry with a dollar in his hand an' he holds it up befure th' people an' says he: 'This buck is worth 53 cints to anny man that it's paid to, but I'll make it worth wan dollar to anny man that pays it out.' An' a lot iv people believe him, though not so many as believed him a month ago be eight or tin millions. (EP, Sept. 26, 1896)

Though a Democrat of forty years standing and one time captain of his precinct, the dubious Mr. Dooley decided not to vote for Bryan: "I don't want to vote f'r a play actor that wears a waiter's necktie an' has to stop thinkin' ivry time he talks" (EP, Sept. 26, 1896). Mr. Dooley's disaffection with Bryan and prediction of his likely defeat was dramatically confirmed two weeks later in the October 7 gold and silver parades in Chicago. On that day, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Chicago Fire, the Republican Party proposed a parade to celebrate the role of sound money in the city's rebuilding. The Democratic city council refused to declare this anniversary a public holiday, but the city's business leaders on their own authority closed the Stock Exchange and staged an unofficial parade. For five hours, thousands of Chicagoans marched through the business district carrying gold banners and wearing gold sashes and hats. That evening the Democrats held a silver parade which was poorly attended.

In his long comment on these parades, Mr. Dooley consoled the battered and exhausted silver Democrat Tim Hennessy, his patron and mostly silent auditor. After sympathizing with Hennessy's disappointment, Mr. Dooley chided him for not seeing the political truth within the charade of political reform:

"An' ye ma-arhed afther Willum J. O'Brien, didn't ye? Well, he's a good lad. If I didn't think so I wudden't say it until I got me strength back or cud buy a gun. But did Willium J. O'Brien march? Not Willie. He was on horseback." (EP, Oct. 10, 1896)

"Well," Mr. Hennessy blusteringly replied, "annyhow I proved me hathred iv capital." "So ye did," Mr. Dooley condescendingly returned. "So ye did. An' capital this afthernoon showed its hatred iv ye. Ye ought

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to match blisters to see which hates th' worst" (EP, Oct. 10, 1896).

Skeptical of altering the rivalry between capital and labor or of reforming politicians to serve the public interest rather than their own, Mr. Dooley dismissed the 1896 campaign as a mere struggle for power between "thim th' polis looks afther an' thim they ought to." But where, he plaintively asked, are the medium people, "th' poor divvies that don't owe annything an' have nothing' owin' to thim?" Pondering their anonymous, vulnerable position as the potential victims of organized capital or labor, Mr. Dooley advised his fellow citizens to observe the warning on the old sign in the Union depot: "Lind no money to sthrangers; bee-ware iv pickpockets" (EP, Aug. 15, 1896).

The campaign of 1896 persuaded Dunne that capital and labor shared a fundamental identity beneath their apparent rivalry. In succeeding years, he frequently had Mr. Dooley identify himself as a member of the "onforchnit middle class" and he contrasted that large group of people who "wurruk hard an' have no money" with the organized and predatory self-interests of capital and labor. In 1906, for example, in a column on the "labor question," Mr. Dooley asked why labor disturbances were increasing in frequency and violence? Many conditions had improved considerably from those of the 1890s. Good weather had returned to the Great Plains, the Alaskan gold strike had expanded the currency, and the Spanish-American War and Philippine Insurrection had stimulated production. Why, in these flush times, had the conflict between capital and labor become more strident? Why was labor now more militant than in the dark days of the nineties when Mr. Dooley had cynically defined a strike as the time when "th' la-ads lave off wurruk an' bate Germans an' thin go back to wurruk fr rajooced wages an' thank hivin f'r it" (EP, July 7, 1894). The answer now, Mr. Dooley saw, was labor and capital's conspiracy of interests; the conflict between capital and labor was their competition to exploit the middle-class:

They come in here undher me hospital roof, an' I furnish thim with cards, checks, an' refrishmints. 'Let's play without a limit,' says Labor. 'It's Dooley's money.' 'Go as far as ye like with Dooley's money,' says Capital. 'What have ye got?' Tve got a straight to Roosevelt,' says Labor. 'I've got ye beat,' says Capital. 'I've got a Supreme Court full of injunctions.' Manetime I've pawned me watch to pay fr th' game, an' I have to go to th' joolry-store on th' corner to buy a pound iv beef or a scuttle iv coal. No wan iver sthrikes in sympathy with me.²⁰

Mr. Dooley's 1906 criticism of both capital and labor was consistent with his more one-sided criticisms of capital in the 1890s; in both times, and throughout his career as a public wit, the principle which had clarified Mr. Dooley's satire was the principle of community. Mr. Dooley would identify and ridicule those individuals or groups who

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opposed their self-interest to the community's welfare, those who lacked the spirit of charity and instead expressed, as in Mr. Dooley's damning characterization of George Pullman, the attitude of "what th' 'ell."

Mr. Dooley even saw this attitude in some of the apparently selfless reforms proposed; for example, he described the Civic Federation, or "Civic Featheration," as he mockingly called it, as the organized effort of privileged, native-born citizens to frustrate the immigrants' political authority and economic opportunity.²¹ Mr. Dooley only endorsed one reform, the settlement house movement, and he proposed an ironic extension of its benefits:

I'd put up a social colony like Hull House down town near th' banks an' th' boord iv thrade an' th' stock exchange. I'd have ladin' citizens come in an' larn be contact with poor an' honest people th' advantage iv a life they've on'y heard iv. I think th' Hull House idee is right, but I'd apply it diffrent. A man wurrkin' in a bank all day thryin' to get money anny way he can, how's he goin' to know anny diffrent? What he needs is to be cheered up, have th' pi-anny played to him be nice lookin' girls and find out somethin' iv th' beauties iv honest poverty be con-varsin' with poor an' honest people. (EP, Jan.15,1898)

Mr. Dooley's appreciation of Hull House as a model of health, pleasure and virtue clearly reveals his conservative humorous temperament. We find amusing in Mr. Dooley's comments his identification and ridicule of those people and ideas which do not fit the ordinary, commonsensical patterns of decent living. We respond to his sympathy for his neighbors, we trust his understanding of how a community works, and we welcome his satiric portrayal of new-fangled ideas and self-important people. As a conservative spokesman at the end of a century that had regularly experienced the alternation of economic boom and bust, Mr. Dooley did not expect to be delivered into a new world by means of political platforms, moral crusades, business trusts or labor unions; he simply expressed the hope that Bridgeport would weather that storm with its "beauties iv honest poverty" intact.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, RIVER FALLS

NOTES

    ¹Chicago Evening Post, January 30, 1897. Hereafter all quotations from the Evening Post columns will be identified in parentheses within the text.
    ²Lloyd Lewis, Chicago: The History of Its Reputation, Part I (New York: Harcourt, 1929), p. 218.
    ³Barbara C. Schaaf, Mr. Dooley's Chicago (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1977), p. 205.
    ⁴William T. Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago! (Chicago: Laird and Lee, 1894), p. 142.
    ⁵Charles Fanning, Finley Peter Dunne and Mr. Dooley: The Chicago Years (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1978), p. 96.

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   ⁶Finis Farr, Chicago: A Personal History of America's Most American City (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1973), p. 216.
    ⁷I have drawn my information on the Pullman strike from the following sources: Emmett Dedmon, Fabulous Chicago (New York: Random House, 1953), pp. 239–244; Farr, pp. 210–216; Ray Ginger, "A Compulsory Heaven at Pullman," Altgeld's America (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1958); Lewis, pp. 220–222; Edgar Lee Masters, The Tale of Chicago (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1933) pp. 264–268; Schaaf, pp. 337–347.
    ⁸Dedmon, p. 239.
    ⁹Farr, p. 212.
    ¹⁰Farr, p. 213.
    ¹¹Masters, p. 265.
    ¹²Schaaf, p. 340.
    ¹³Masters, p. 264.
    ¹⁴Elmer Ellis, Mr. Dooley's America (New York: Knopf, 1941), pp. 83–88.
    ¹⁵Schaaf, pp. 350-351.
    ¹⁶Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley Remembers, ed. Philip Dunne (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), p. 270.
    ¹⁷Masters, p. 272.
    ¹⁸Schaaf, p. 205.
    ¹⁹Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley's Philosophy (New York: R. H. Russell, 1900), p. 29.
    ²⁰Finley Peter Dunne, Dissertations by Mr. Dooley (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906), p. 64.
    ²¹Finley Peter Dunne, Observations by Mr. Dooley (New York: R. H. Russell, 1902), p. 168.

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