Born in Chicago of emigrant parents, the journalist Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936) spoke fluent American, like most of his readers.
He first adopted the Hiberno-English patois in his newspaper columns as a defensive ruse, to confuse lawyers: “It had 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 [did it]”.
But in the process, he invented “Mr Dooley”, a retired policeman turned saloon keeper, who not only became one of the more popular characters in column-writing history but also perhaps the most influential.
At the height of his fame, in the years either side of 1900, Martin J Dooley’s thoughts were read at weekly cabinet meetings in the White House. Fans later included James Joyce, who eventually wrote a ballad in his honour.
A Game of Two Calves (and several cows): Frank McNally on Patrick Kavanagh’s imagination, mysterious street names, and a bovine legend
Detour de Force – Frank McNally on William Bulfin’s unwitting side-trip into literary history
Barroom Bard – Frank McNally on the fictional Mr Dooley, whose thoughts were once required reading in the White House
The definite article – Brian Maye on Michael Joseph O’Rahilly, The O’Rahilly
In the original vernacular, Mr Dooley can he hard to read today. Speaking in what Dunne considered a broad Roscommon accent, he says “iv” instead of “of”, for example, and “ast” instead of “asked”. He never “celebrates” something: he “cillybrates” it instead.
It was his underlying wit and wisdom, however, that made him so popular, crossing ethnic divides. Some of Dooley’s pronouncements have since become popular aphorisms.
It may have been he – not the often-credited Tipp O’Neill, although debate continues - who first said: “All politics is local.” But it is generally agreed that Mr Dooley originated the idea of journalism as something that should “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”.
That first appeared in a parody of the Catholic catechism’s Works of Mercy: “Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis force an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy [militia], controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim atherward.”
Although most of the wisecracks were Dunne’s own, there was a real-life Mr Dooley. He was the bowler-hatted, occasionally outspoken Jim McGarry, who held forth to customers from behind the counter of a bar in Dearborn Street.
A regular who enjoyed baiting him was the local politician John J “Jawn” McKenna. And in early versions of Dunne’s Chicago Post column, McGarry was thinly disguised as a “Colonel McNeery”, while McKenna was not disguised at all.
But McGarry hated the caricature and let the Post’s publisher know. Thereafter, the saloon keeper became Dooley and his sidekick Hennessy, or “Hinnessy” as the former always pronounced it.
The bar was relocated too, from the central district to Archer Avenue, aka “Archey Road”, on the city’s south side, where the shanty Irish lived.
If the man who inspired him failed to appreciate it, other targets of Mr Dooley’s satire did see the funny side. The most notable of those was Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, a frequent butt of Dooley’s jokes, who nevertheless enjoyed them.
Before becoming US president, Roosevelt commanded a company in the Spanish-American war and wrote a self-aggrandising account if it, mocked by Dooley.
A game Roosevelt wrote to Dunne saying: “I regret to say that my family and intimate friends are delighted with your review of my book” and invited him to visit at his Governor’s house in New York. After William McKinley’s assassination propelled Roosevelt into the White House, Dunne was a regular guest there too.
The first published collection of the columns, Mr Dooley in Peace and War (1899) became a national best-seller, establishing its hero’s image as stoic philosopher, unmoved by jingoism and war fever.
His world view later struck a chord with James Joyce who in 1916, sitting out a greater conflict in neutral Zurich, wrote the ballad Dooleysprudence, endorsing the character’s cheerful indifference:
“Who is the meek philosopher who doesn’t care a damn/About the yellow peril or problem of Siam/And disbelieves that British tar is water from life’s fount/And will not gulp the gospel of the German on the Mount?
“It’s Mr Dooley/Mr Dooley/The broadest brain our country ever knew/’The curse of Moses/On both your houses’/Cries Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.”
Joyce confirmed his fandom in Finnegans Wake (1939), where “the dooley boy and the hinnessy” combine to mock the Duke of Wellington.
Both characters are also commemorated by pubs, of course, but in Boston rather than Chicago.
In the former city late one night a few years ago, I visited a bar called Mr Dooley’s and, although unaware of the name’s derivation then, soon found myself quoting Spinoza in a debate with a local atheist. The philosophical spirit must have been infectious.
As I now know, that was one of a chain of Boston pubs founded by a Dunne-admiring Kerryman. One of the others is called Hennessy’s.
Mr Dooley’s spiritual home remains Chicago, however. And despite the brogue, according to Philip Dunne – a son of the journalist – the character was essentially American, his Irishness “entirely incidental”.
Quoting this, Dunne biographer Grace Eckley recalled an event when she and others read extracts from Mr Dooley.
The Iowa-born Eckley didn’t attempt his accent, but a fellow American speaker did and missed badly, sounding more like “Fiddler of the Roof”. Somehow this took nothing from the character, she said:
“Done in pure Irish brogue, Yiddish, or my own rather Harvard English, it matters not one whit: it is still Mr Dooley.”
