Finley Peter Dunne and Mr. Dooley: the Chicago Years
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University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, North America English Language and Literature 1978 Finley Peter Dunne and Mr. Dooley: The Chicago Years Charles Fanning Southern Illinois University Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Fanning, Charles, "Finley Peter Dunne and Mr. Dooley: The Chicago Years" (1978). Literature in English, North America. 23. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/23 FINLEY PETER DUNNE & MR. DOOLEY Charles Fanning FINLEY PETER DUJNNlE The Chicago Years The University Press of Kentucky Front endpaper: Bridgeport Area in the 1890s Back endpaper: Chicago in the 1890s Frontispiece: Finley Peter Dunne, about 1900. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society. The quotations on pp. 91, 139, and 172 from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats are reprinted with the kind permission of Macmillan Publishing Company. The quotation on p. 105 from Hogan's Goat by William Alfred, copyright @ 1958, 1966 by William Alfred, is reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. ISBN: 978-0-8131-5191-5 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-75483 Copyright @ 1978 by The University Press of Kentucky A statewide cooperative scholarly publishing agency serving Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Ofices: Lexington, Kentucky 40506 fop. Jane Frances This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS 1. CHICAGO BACKGROUNDS The Genesis of Mr. Dooley 1 2. MR. DOOLEY IN BRIDGEPORT The Creation of a Community 37 3. MR. DOOLEY IN BRIDGEPORT The Dissolution of a Community 67 4. THE IRISH IN AMERICAN POLITICS The View from Archer Avenue 105 5. CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN IN CHICAGO Dunne & Irish-American Nationalism 139 6. FROM BRIDGEPORT TO MANILA Mr. Dooley Becomes a National Sage 173 7. CONCLUSION 217 APPENDIX:An Annotated Chronology of Dunne's Dialect Pieces in the Chicago Evening Post 249 illustrations follow page 110 References to Chicago newspapers in both text and notes use the fol- lowing abbreviations and shortened forms: EP: Chicago Evening Post SP: Chicago Sunday Post Herald: Chicago Herald Times: Chicago Times Journal: Chicago Evening Journal T-H: Chicago Times-Herald News: Chicago Daily News Tribune: Chicago Tribune PREFACE EVERY four years editorial writers remember that Finley Peter Dunne created a bartender-philosopher named Martin Dooley, whose com- ments on national politics remain fresh enough for resurrection and application to the current presidential campaign. Historians and stu- dents of history remember further that this same Dooley delivered trenchant observations on a great variety of national and international topics to a large and enthusiastic American audience around the turn of the century. Some may even recall that it was Dooley's commentary on the Spanish-American War of 1898 that catapulted him into the prominent public position that was his until World War I. But few devotees of Mr. Dooley know anything about his origin in Chicago or about what he was like before he became a national celebrity. I have looked back over the early years-the Chicago years-of Mr. Dooley and his creator, Finley Peter Dunne, and have found a body of literature of sufficient extent and quality to warrant study. Dunne wrote well over 300 dialect pieces in Chicago in the 1890s, from which he selected 100 for his first two published collections, Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War (1898) and Mr. Dooley in the Hearts of His Coun- trymen (1899). As he never again returned to these pieces, all the rest remained buried in Chicago newspaper files for nearly eighty years. Happily, the best of these pieces have now been resurrected in two recent collection^.^ I have read all of Dunne's Chicago pieces in their original form and have dealt with them thematically here to illustrate the range and depth of his treatment of four subjects: the daily life of Chicago's working-class Irish community, the impact on that community of the process of assimilation into American life, the strange phenomenon of Irish nationalism as it affected the American Irish, and the view from an Irish ward of American city politics in the 1890s. In none of these areas has Dunne's contribution been sufficiently appreciated, and my hope is that he will now be reckoned a pioneer social historian and literary realist. In addition, I have tried to place the Dooley pieces, including the more familiar utterances about the Spanish-American War and Ameri- can imperialism, as products of Dunne's peculiar combination of backgrounds-his Irish inheritance, his life in a vibrant, expanding American city, and his place in the world of Chicago journalism. My comparison of Dunne's editorials and Dooley pieces on similar subjects is meant to establish the often radical divergence of opinion between Editor Dunne and his cantankerous creation, a divergence that I see as another example of the self-destructive contradictions in the lives of so many successful American writers. I quote extensively from the dialect pieces themselves because, to paraphrase Robert Frost on poetry, the flavor of Mr. Dooley is what gets lost in translation. My greatest debt in writing this book is to Thomas N. Brown, who introduced me to Mr. Dooley and gave so generously of his time and knowledge through the various stages of this project. In addition, his own writing about the American Irish provided an unapproachable model of combined scholarship and grace. I am grateful also to Daniel Hoffman of the University of Pennsylvania for his considerate direc- tion of the dissertation on Finley Peter Dunne that constituted the earliest form of this book. Most of my research consisted of examination of a number of Chicago newspapers and periodicals, on microfilm or in bound form at the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Public Library, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Illinois State Historical Library at Springfield. Special thanks are due to the librarians at these institu- tiocs. For the illustrations, I am indebted to the Graphics Division staff of the Chicago Historical Society and to Mary Ann Johnson and Sheilamae O'Hara of Jane Addams' Hull-House, all of whom were extremely helpful. Also, I want to thank Ellen Skerrett for sharing her knowledge of Chicago geography and parish history. For their heartening encouragement of my work, I am grateful to Lawrence J. McCaffrey and Andrew M. Greeley, two Chicago in- heritors of Mr. Dooley's wit and passion for truth. Most of all, heart- felt thanks to my wife Jane Frances for her textual criticism, map- making, encouragement, and understanding. CHICAGO BACKGROUNDS The $imsis of Mr. Dooley Other cities have produced other humorists, but Chicago appears to be the right atmosphere for a humorist to grow up in. After he has grown up, has suffered enough from his environment, so to speak, he may go elsewhere with personal safety, but it is doubtful if he will ever do anything better than what Chicago has given him to do. THOMAS L. MASSON ' This page intentionally left blank ONFEBRUARY 24, 1890, the United States Congress crowned Chicago the archetypal American city by appointing her hostess for the national celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the dis- covery of America by Christopher Columbus. On April 30, 1893, one year behind schedule, President Grover Cleveland and Chicago Mayor Carter H. Harrison officially opened the World's Columbian Exposi- tion, a fairyland extravaganza of plaster and whitewash in Jackson Park on the shores of Lake Michigan. Unfortunately, that sunny spring of self-congratulation was followed by the worst winter of poverty, homelessness, and starvation in the city's history-the "Black Winter" of 1893-1894, when thousands froze on the streets and fought for sleeping space in the corridors of city hall. This wrenching contrast was typical of Chicago in the 1890s, a stormy, sprawling monster of a place, stuffed to bursting with uncon- scionable extremes. The sparkling lake was fed by typhoid-breeding backwater sloughs. Michigan Avenue mansions backed up against miles of squalid, cold-water tenements. Pioneer skyscrapers of the heralded Chicago School of architecture looked down over grim, utili- tarian steel mills and stockyards. In 1893 the city boasted two hundred millionaires while thousands lived below the subsistence level. She also had a university, an opera house, an art institute, a symphony orchestra, several research libraries, and an academy of sciences-all brand new since 1885, all attempts to lay a veneer of instant culture over the bloody butcher's block that was her real defining symbol. Of course, these gestures failed to fool anyone, for they were forced to compete for newspaper coverage with labor disputes about sweatshop conditions and working children, with seasonal starvation and poverty crises, periodic typhoid epidemics and a soaring infant mortality rate, and abundant examples of citywide corruption from stinking back alleys to the city council chamber. Most of these powerful ironies were traceable to incredible explo- sions of population, economics, and industry. Between her two defining spectacles, the Chicago Fire of 1871 and the World's Fair of 1893, Chicago grew from 300,000 to 1.3 million souls, many of them new immigrants. In the same years she became a world leader in grain, lumber, and meat-packing, banking, investments, and finance, manu- facture and merchandising.