Notes
1Without question Mr. Dooley was at his most "sordid and . . . stupid" in a sequence of fiery jingo sketches, published in the Chicago Journal in the late winter of 1898, (which as it happens Howells almost certainly did not read). I discuss these sketches here, rather than in my study proper, because Dunne obviously had early second thoughts about them, and chose never to reprint any of them in book form.
Since early 1895, Mr. Dooley like many other Americana had watched the developing crisis in Cuba with mixed feelings about how Washington should respond, if at all; but when a mysterious explosion destroyed the battleship Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, and killed 258 American sailors, the furious salonon keeper closed ranks for the time being with Hearst, Medill, and the other war hawkjournalists. As Charles Fanning justly puts it, the six Journal sketches that ran from February 19 through March26
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"mark the low point in the Dooley canon," for in them he abandons his usual "cool and neutral" stance and "becomes one more loud irrational voice expressing cruelly simplified hatred of Spain and anger at President McKinley. . . in a tone of heavy-handed sarcasm [and] through petty, ignoble rhetorical ploys" (190). Thus Mr. Dooley assures Mr. Hennessy with ponderous irony that McKinley will not call for war until the American business community sees a profit in it, or the Spaniards make the mistake of attacking one or another of our "sacred institutions" like Mark Hanna:
Th’ counthry’s good name had been made as common as th’ r’road to th’ pawnshop. But that ain’t an institution. A ship’s been blowed up an’ a lot iv seventeen-dollar-a-month la-ads is floatin’ face downward in th’ water, but they ain’t institutions. A man’s come along an’ batted Willum McKinley on th’ head, but he ain’t an institution, thank th’ Lord (February 26, 1898, qtd. in Fanning, 191-92).
Indeed the craven president had better apologize to Spain, Mr. Dooley sneers, because the dead sailors are
mussin’ up th’ beach iv a frindlypower... .[Let theml be dumped intoa trinch an’ nawthin’ more said about. They’re on’y a lot iv poor, foolish Irishmen that wint to sea because they cudden’t find wurruk ashore an’ they’re better dead. (February 19, 1898, qtd. in Fanning 191)
Dunne continued in this hot-headed vein through March, but fortunately the Mr. Dooley whom the world came to know best reasserted himself by early April. He turned his attention now to America’s war preparations, and to the Cuban campaign itself after hostilities were declared on April 25; and in the process, he brought his renewed satiric powers to bear on a host of eminently deserving targets among the new celebrities of the war effort: vainglorious do-nothing officers like General Nelson Miles, bungling Washington functionaries, and self-promoting politicians, publishers, and war correspondents. Mr. Dooley’s enthusiasm for his "Cousin George" Dewey as a no-nonsense fighting man among so many incompetents and posturers won strong approval from Dunne’s rapidly widening audience; but so did the saloon keeper’s lower-keyed commentaries on the unheroic aspects of the four-month war, in which he put the jingo episode farther and farther behind him.
Hardly had the United States wrested sovereignty in the
Philippines from Spain when it became known that the peace treaty, belying our ostensible
war aims, brushed aside the islanders’ hopes for genuine independence. Emilio
Aguinaldo, a Philippine insurgent leader who had aided our occupying forces earlier, now
headed a determined, effective guerilla movement against them. Not subdued until 1901, it
was a bitter ongoing reminder to Dunne and many of his compatriots of the hypocrisy of the
republic’s new imperialist policy. Mr. Dooley’s sketches undercutting this
policy began attracting widespread support even before they were syndicated, and Mr.
Dooley in Peace and in War was published, late in 1898. As a national oracle, the
Archey Road saloon keeper was still subject to assorted human failings, but never again
would they ally him with the Yellow press.
2To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Dooley has never yet been called
a racist, nor should he be; but it would be misleading to claim that he is a wholly
untainted, implausible paragon of enlightenment on ethnic tensions, any more than
Huckleberry Finn is. Mr. Dooley speaks the language of his time and place, including
several of its terms that have long since become ethnically offensive. More importantly,
however, sketch after sketch shows him as a clear-sighted, even caustic critic of bigotry
in practically all of its turn-of-
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the-century forms. He roundly scorns the myth of Anglo-Saxon supremacy and calls attention often to the brutal discrimination suffered by blacks, Indians, and Asians at home and the exploitation of native populations overseas (e.g. Law 59ff, Observations 49, Says 50).
3Blair distinguished between "Dunne pretending to be Dooley, and Dooley acting like a fool"; the former, clearly, was the magisterial Mr. Dooley who "could crack a joke with a point to it," "be ironic," and evince a conscious "talent.., for fun" (249-50). Drawing this distinction of course does not quite amount to a flat assertion that the speaker is less credibly realistic in his wise, witty capacity than in his foolish one; but still the implication is clear that the wise, witty Mr. Dooley is essentially a mere mouthpiece, the author too flimsily disguised to go unrecognized—and as such, in "amusing contrast" to the more oafish Mr. Dooley who invites our condescension, as "a victim of his limited environment" (247, 250).
Dunne did not make a secret of the fact that he sometimes found writing the sketches wearisome (Ellis 105-7), and I do not suggest that he never let fatigue, impatience, or the simple pressure of a deadline tempt him into taking liberties with the credibility of the character; but on the very rare occasions when this may have happened, he was about as likely to overstate Mr. Dooley’s innocent foolishness as his breadth of learning. For example, although we know that the saloon keeper has been raised as a Roman Catholic, who admires his parish priest and still attends church at least occasionally, Dunne once presents him as so honestly ignorant about Catholic ritual that he says "alkali" for acolyte; and at the other extreme, Dunne gives Mr. Dooley an equally implausible smattering of his own knowledge of recondite legal terminology, which almost certainly never appeared in newspaper or magazine accounts written for the general public, and which Dunne himself could only have picked up as a working journalist, and through personal acquaintance with many lawyers in Chicago and New York (e.g., Opinions 7 1-2, Observations 92-3).
All things considered, however, I find the supposed two
Mr. Dooleys virtually impossible to separate, for any attempt to do so is fraught with
ambiguities. As the saloon keeper’s weeks of ardent jingoism in early 1898 certainly
show (n.. 1), it is possible for him to "act like a fool" because he is
voicing one of Dunne’s own less considered opinions; for all we know that may be the
case in a few other instances as well, for example, with the character’s abiding
grudge against "th’ pro-fissors." But more pervasive ambiguities arise
because the saloon keeper arguably shows himself to be shrewd, informed, and ironic in so
many contexts where Blair and Yates take him to be credulous and unaware; I address this
point at length above.
4Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
(II.
2 17-20)
5Compare the original language:
Let
humble Allen, with an awkward shame,
Do good by stealth, and
blush to find it fame.
(Pope,
Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue I 136-37)
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal . . . .
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Let us, then, be up and doing . . .
(Longfellow, "A Psalm of Life," 11. 5-6, 33)
"Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!" he said.
(Whittier, "Barbara Frietchie," II. 42-3)
. . . a bold peasantry,
their country’s pride,
When once destroyed,
can never be supplied.
(Goldsmith,
"The Deserted Village," 11. 55-6)
Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.
(Webster, "Second Speech on Foote’s Resolution," January 26, 1830)
6To show the full context for Yates’ charges, I reprint here the full paragraph in which they appear (86-7): The conscientious, thoughtful type of citizen was a postulate of the Wilsonian-Progressive spokesmen. Richard Hofstadter says of the Progressives:
At the core of their conception of politics was a figure quite as old-fashioned as the figure of the little competitive entrepreneur who represented the most commonly accepted economic ideal. This old-fashioned character was the Man of Good Will, the same innocent, bespectacled, and mustached figure we see in the cartoons today labeled John Q. Public— a white collar or small business voter-taxpayer with perhaps a modest home in the suburbs. William Graham Sumner had depicted him a generation earlier as "The forgotten man," and Woodrow Wilson idealised him as "the man on the make. . ." [260].
The leading trait of this ideal citizen was rationality; . . . he would study the issues and think them through, rather than learn about them through pursuing his needs. Furthermore, it was assumed that somehow he would really be capable of informing himself in ample detail about the many issues he would have to pass on, and that he could master their intricacies sufficiently to pass intelligent judgment [261].
Dunne, in causing Dooley to admit his own ignorance of complex issues, is debunking the Progressive ideal of the intelligent, "well-informed" citizen at the same time as he satirizes the other type of common man in the person of Hennessy. Not only does Mr. Dooley’s reason desert him at times—as when he wants to throw bricks at various old enemies—hut he can’t possibly keep well informed. All he reads is the "pa-apers," and the data in his mind are a weird mixture of truth and misinformation. Here, suggests Dunne, is the "ideal" citizen of the liberals as he really is.
7The small but significant role that distortions—linguistic and logical as well as factual—play in the sketches argues for a further slight modification of Blair. In Native American Humor (1937) he identified Dunne and Mr. Dooley as the last representatives of
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the nineteenth century "Literary Comedians," whose nationally oriented humor had first appeared in the Civil War era (102-24). Dunne’s work has so much continuity with theirs that the identification is clearly reasonable; still, the Archey Road sketches also diverge from the earlier pattern in several noteworthy ways.
As Blair himself pointed out (I 17n.), nearly all of the Literary Comedians specialized in pseudo-rustic vernacular that conveyed little or no sense of locality, whereas Mr. Dooley’s artfully modulated brogue, among other considerations, gave him unimpeachable credentials as an immigrant Irishman in Chicago. And this contrast in dialects contributed to a larger one: although the Literary Comedians regularly ridiculed the sentimental and melodramatic excesses of Gilded Age romanticism, and thereby supported the new cause of American fictional realism, none of these fellow-traveling humorists went further, as Dunne was to do in his sketches, to produce genuinely realistic fiction themselves.
Moreover, his free-ranging improvisations at times took Mr. Dooley’s discourse beyond the boundaries even of realism, toward the expressionist-modernist realm of Joycean word play, double think, and the surreal. Dunne’s sophisticated array of language experiments—most of them more or less disguised as attempts to render the saloon keeper’s brogue mispronunciations accurately on the printed page—included multilingual puns, portmanteau words, and other kinds of richly associative neologisms and double entendres, which only George Washington Harris among the earlier American humorists had begun to work with. Charles Farrar Browne, Henry Wheeler Shaw, and the other Literary Comedians had earned their reputations as "phunny phellows" largely by basing their dialect humor on verbal slapstick for its own sake, relying on such devices as far-fetched grammar and syntax errors and grotesque cacography; Dunne in contrast tailored his much more imaginative linguistic tricks to fit particular contexts and thus underscore the central themes of a given sketch. (For an extended study of these feats of language, which Joyce himself was to acknowledge admiringly in Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and elsewhere [Eckley 148-49], see my "An Anatomy of Mr. Dooley’s Brogue," Studies in American Humor 5 (n.s.) (1986): 145-57.)
And Fanning finds the sketches essentially modern in another respect. Dunne owes most, this commentator argues, not to the Literary Comedians, nor to any earlier humorist prototypes, but to the immediate "environment that produced him—big city journalism" (19). Fanning limits his argument mainly to portraying the favorable climate for urban dialect writing that the youthful Dunne found as a reporter and editor around 1890 (20). But other obvious evidence makes the argument all the more convincing: the great majority of dialect sketches that Dunne went on to write were commentaries pointedly based on current news in the nation’s papers. And perhaps we should see further corroboration of Fanning even in the mocking, irreverent attitude that Mr. Dooley holds to so steadfastly in the humorous and satiric pieces. This attitude of course was hardly unknown among the earlier dialect philosophers; but from all accounts it was especially conspicuous in Chicago’s Tribune, Herald, and Post newsrooms in Dunne’s era, and in the after-hours haunts he shared with his colleagues, from McGarry’s Dearborn Street bar to the Whitechapel Club.
It is true that many of the Literary Comedians had drifted in and out of journalistic careers themselves but in a slower-paced, more provincial, largely pre-industrial America, where their celebrated "horse sense," a virtue that bespoke leisurely observation and reflection, was still at a premium. (By contrast, Dunne and his fellow newsmen plied their frenetic trade in an atmosphere that was already strongly suggestive of The Front Page.) Certainly Mr. Dooley often displays a gift like that of the earlier vernacular humorists, for shrewd homespun aphorisms; but in the increasingly discordant, dynamic, unstable world of the young twentieth century, it is as if the saloon keeper gets fewer chances than these precursors enjoyed to ruminate at leisure on the human scene, and
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consequently sometimes chooses instead to affect to dispense with horse sense altogether, for the sake of satiric mockery. At any rate some of this philosopher-clown’s most characteristic utterances, when abstracted from their contexts, are tinged with dadaistic non sequiturs and self-contradiction—as in his report that the Spanish fleet is "bombardin’ Boston, at Cadiz, in San June de Matzoon, and.., headed south to attack and seize Armour’s glue facthory" (Peace 31), or that "in this counthry a man is presoomed to be guilty until he’s proved guilty an’ afther that he’s presoomed to be innocent" (qtd. in Choice of Law xxii), or when he tells Mr. Hennessy that this eerie exchange between the prosecuting attorney and an expert witness has just taken place during a local murder trial:
"But," says th’ lawyer f’r th’ State, "measurin’ th’ vat with gas,— an I lave it to ye whether this is not th’ on’y fair test,—an’ supposin’ that two feet acrost is akel to tin feet sideways,. . . thin ar-re not human teeth often found in counthry sausage?" "In th’ winter," says th’ professer. "But th’ sisymoid bone is sometimes seen in th’ fut, sometimes worn as a watch-charm." (qtd. in Fanning 223-23)
Mr. Dooley of course has his wits about him, whenever he diverts himself and befuddles Mr. Hennessy with bizarre parodies like these; in his customary sardonic way, the saloon keeper is only putting on display the latest examples of patriotic flummery, the wild fallacies that can haunt the popular imagination, and the Wonderland illogic of more than a few legal procedures, in a period that is readying itself to espouse frankly the values of existential relativism and the absurd.
8When he puts words into the mouths of Uncle Mike or Hogan that he prefers not to claim directly, in effect we see Mr. Dooley following his creator’s lead in making use of alter egos— and the parallel applies not just because Dunne began by using the saloon keeper himself as a safe outlet for potentially risky political commentary. For as Barbara Schaaf shrewdly observes, Dunne evidently brought Father Kelly into the sketches later in order to offset, and preserve, Mr. Dooley’s occasional philistinism; the author could assign particularly urbane, cultivated opinions to the educated priest, so that the saloon keeper could quote them with a certain respect, but avoid having to present them, less plausibly, as his own (86; also Yates 94).
The situation with Hogan of course is a little more complicated: as we have been seeing, Mr. Dooley is not so great a philistine that Dunne needed to introduce this third party in order to acquaint his main character with books. Rather, to repeat, it makes much better sense for us to see Mr. Dooley’s invoking Hogan as one of his conspiciously satiric ploys, which lets him scoff at bookish affectations and slily play down his own plausible degree of literacy at the same time. (Possibly the saloonkeeper’s obviously self-taught literacy will strike fewer readers as implausible once we reflect that his creator’s great breadth of literary knowledge owed almost nothing to formal schooling either).
Works Cited
Bander, Edward J. Mr. Dooley and Mr. Dunne: The
Literary Life of a Chicago Catholic. Charlottesville: Michie, 1981.
Blair, Walter. Horse Sense in American Humor: From Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash. New
York: Russell and Russell, 1942.
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_____. Native American Humor. New York: American Book, 1937; rpt. San Francisco: Chandler, 1960.
Dunne, Finley Peter. Dissertations by Mr. Dooley. New
York: Harper, 1906.
_____. Mr. Dooley and the Chicago Irish: An Anthology. Ed. Charles Fanning. New
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_____. Mr. Dooley at His Best. Ed. Elmer Ellis. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1938.
_____. Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898.
_____. Mr. Dooley in the Hearts of His Countrymen. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899.
_____. Mr. Dooley on Making a Will and Other Necessary Evils. New York: Charles
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_____. Mr. Dooley on the Choice of Law. Ed. Edward J. Bander. Charlottesville,
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_____. Mr. Dooley Says. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1910.
_____. Mr. Dooley’s Opinions. New York: R. H. Russell, 1901.
_____. Mr. Dooley’s Philosophy. New York: R. H. Russell, 1900.
_____. Observations of Mr. Dooley. New York: R. H. Russell, 1902.
_____. The World of Mr. Dooley. Ed. Louis Filler. New York: Collier Books, 1962.
Eckley, Grace. Finley Peter Dunne. Boston: Twayne, 1981.
Ellis, Elmer. Mr. Dooley ‘s America: A Life of Finley Peter Dunne. New York:
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Howells, William Dean. "Certain of the Chicago School of Fiction." North
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Kelleher, John V. "Mr. Dooley and the Same Old World." Atlantic 177 (June
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