Mr. Dooley Says

He was able to cast the barbed harpoon of criticism at the ponderous behavior and misbehavior of a raw and often raucous democracy without getting jerked out of the whale boat. Occasionally in secondhand book stores I pick up one of the Mr.

They give a nostalgic pleasure, displaying the attitudes and. Dooley's Opinions and Mr. First Page Preview View Large. Sign in to access your subscriptions Sign in to your personal account. Create a free personal account to download free article PDFs, sign up for alerts, and more. Purchase access Subscribe to the journal. Dooley's most famous quotations. A number of lawsuits brought in the wake of the war dealt with the issue of whether the Constitution applied with full force in the former Spanish colonies annexed by the United States, none of which had been granted an organized government by Congress.

This question was known as whether the Constitution follows the flag.

Mr. Dooley Says by Finley Peter Dunne

The justices' written opinions were difficult to understand, and the court deeply divided, but the net effect was to hold that the Constitution did not follow the flag. The decisions gave Mr. Dooley an opportunity to puncture the court's ivory-tower reputation, "no matter whether the constitution follows the flag or not, the Supreme Court follows the election returns". The year saw a steady stream of high-quality Dooley pieces written by Dunne, with the barkeeper philosopher commenting on the events of the day, including King Edward's coronation , Arthur Conan Doyle 's tales of Sherlock Holmes , and Arctic exploration.

But most were on American politics. That Dunne was often a guest of Roosevelt at the White House did not spare the president from being skewered by Dooley, nor was the former Rough Rider's aggressive foreign policy spared. Dunne disliked imperialism, and was outraged by the actions of U. Everywhere, happiness, content, love of the step-mother country, except in places where there are people. The presidential campaign of , as Roosevelt sought election in his own right, brought Mr.

• Finley Peter Dunne Quotes (Author of Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War).
• 101 Amazing Nelson Mandela Facts.
• Mr. Dooley in Peace and War (1898).

Dooley ample opportunity to comment. The bartender mocked those who wished to be vice presidential candidate on Roosevelt's ticket, alleging that the Republicans "found a man from Wisconsin who was in drink and almost nominated him when his wife came in and dragged him away. They got Senator Fairbanks to accept Twenty years from now the country will be full of young fellows looking as though they'd graduated from a German college.

Dunne had never found the actual writing of the Dooley pieces difficult, once he got started—it was finding that initial inspiration, and putting himself in a suitable frame of mind to compose, that he found increasingly hard after Aware that the columns were reaching an audience of millions and would be reviewed by critics when placed in book form, Dunne was reluctant to release pieces he considered substandard, and defended his position strongly in correspondence with the syndicators.

In , he joined with Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens in forming The American Magazine , a project that occupied time and energy, especially since his regular column, "In the Interpreter's House", contained musings like Mr. Dooley's but without brogue or barroom. This allowed Dunne to make his points without tedious dialect. Thus, the Dooley columns continued only irregularly, occupying parts of each year from to Dooley could be found behind his bar, his sayings remained at a high standard.

Roosevelt remained a target, friend, and White House host, one who took seriously what Mr. Dooley said and corresponded with Dunne about it. In , after the publication of Upton Sinclair 's muckraking The Jungle , about the unsanitary horrors of the meatpacking trade, Dooley summed up the objections of the packers to the book, "if they had a blind man in the Health Department, a few competent friends on the Federal Bench, and [corrupt Illinois senator] Farmer Bill Lorimer to protect the cattle interests of the Great West, they cared not who made the novels of our country.

Dooley stated that were he an ex-president, the publican would try to do something really hard and likely to take up the remainder of his days, "I'd thry to be President again". None of the columns after Dunne joined The American Magazine attracted the attention the earlier ones had, but Mr. Dooley continued to comment on the issues of the day. Andrew Carnegie was a repeated target, as was John D.

Rockefeller , whom Dooley summed up with "he never done anything wrong, save in the way of business" [r] [64] In , during the debates over the Payne—Aldrich Tariff , Dunne examined the bill and came out of it with an exotic item called "divvy-divvy", which Mr. Dooley allowed, "was let in as a compliment to [Finance Committee chairman] Senator Aldrich. Although Dunne was a strong supporter of Roosevelt in the contentious presidential election, Mr. Dooley retained his customary above-the-fray attitude, mocking Roosevelt's excited oratory with Dooley feeling there was a large fire somewhere, a mystery solved when he opens the newspaper and learns "much to my relief, that it was not my pants but the Republic that was on fire".

Sickened by the carnage of World War I, and by the growing suspicion and intolerance with which Americans regarded each other, Dunne ended the Dooley series in He was urged by many to resurrect the Dooley series, but was reluctant, as the publication of the eighth Dooley collection that year, Mr.

Mr. Dooley's Opinions and Mr. Dooley Says

It was not until that Dunne, driven by financial need, began to work on Dooley again, first by shortening old columns for re-syndication, and then, during the presidential campaign, writing new ones for the newspapers, with Mr. Dooley's tavern transformed by Prohibition into a speakeasy. Beginning early in the year, these appeared on a weekly basis but ended in the final days of the campaign, and conflict with the syndicator when Dunne was unable to produce expected columns put an end to original Mr. Although prominently featured, these new columns did not generate a great deal of interest.

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Nevertheless, Dunne was encouraged enough to agree, in , to do a regular Dooley piece for the weekly Liberty magazine. These appeared regularly for six months, and then Dunne ended the arrangement. Ellis speculated that Dunne may no longer have been in financial need, or knew that the pieces were not up to the standards he had earlier set. Dunne's friendship with some of the figures associated with the scandals of the Harding administration , such as Harry Daugherty and Edward Doheny , made it difficult for Mr.

Dooley to keep up his pose of disinterested outsider, and Dunne indirectly defended Daugherty in one piece. Dooley column was "On the Farmer's Woes", appearing in the July 3, issue. Soon after the series with Liberty ended, Dunne received a large bequest from his friend Payne Whitney , relieving him of the need to work. Thereafter, Dunne gave up professional writing, with the exception of an infrequent guest editorial or column, and did not write any more Dooley pieces; he died in Dooley on Roosevelt's rebuke to General Miles for criticizing the verdict in the Schley—Sampson controversy [72].

Over columns and thirty years, Dunne's use of Irish dialect remained fairly consistent. He avoided stereotypically Irish words like begorrah. The word "my" becomes "me" in the mouth of Dooley, and "by" becomes "be", but these are more grammatical distortions than vowel shifts. The letter "y" is often used to begin constructions beginning with multiple vowels, like "-ious" and "-iate", thus they become "-yus" gloryus and "-yate" humilyate and when added next to consonants or diphthongs can distort the word in a way confusing to the reader villain becomes villyan; giant becomes joynt.

Pronouncing it at Dreyfus's trial gets Zola "thrun The authenticity of Dunne's use of dialect was controversial even in his own lifetime. Dunne's partisans claimed that it was genuine Roscommon dialect, phonetically transcribed.

Mr. Dooley's Opinions and Mr. Dooley Says | JAMA Internal Medicine | JAMA Network

But Dunne never called it such, making it clear in the columns that Mr. Dooley had been in America for many years, and so his dialect would have been modified by decades of exposure to an Archey Road wherein was known every way of speaking heard from Armagh to Bantry Bay , and more besides. Dunne was not always consistent in his usages, and spells Dooley's favorite subject, "polytics", "polliticks", "pollytics" and correctly.

According to Ellis, while Dunne was no philologist , he had a good ear, and the biographer considered the Dooley pieces the outstanding use of Irish-American dialect in written form. Dooley in Peace and in War , averred that scholars in Ireland have stated that Dunne did not capture the dialect, and have written that the Dooley pieces were not popular there. Eliminate the brogue and the pieces stand out as what they were: Scholars have differed on the issue of what is to be made of Mr.

Dooley and the often bizarre things Dunne placed in his mouth: Walter Blair, in his volume on American humor, considered Mr. Dooley too much of a provincial innocent to grasp that referring to the president so familiarly might be a solecism. Many Dooley pieces commence "I see by the papers", that is, the newspapers Dooley subscribes to for his customers to read and which the bartender peruses at slack times, constituting a major source of information for him. Blair contended that Dooley knows only what he reads in the Evening Post and other papers, and gullibly believes quotations he has heard without attribution from his customer Hogan were made up by that bookish patron.

Norris Yates, in his The American Humorist , argued that Dooley is entirely reliant on the papers for information, and has understood them badly. He wrote that Mr. Dooley is intended to be the opposite of the well-informed citizen sought by the Progressive Movement , and that his comments contain more truth than he knows.

Rees, in his journal article on Mr. Dooley, suggested that the barkeeper is intended to act in full awareness of how fantastic his words can be; he is expanding on what he has seen in the papers, turning it into a pointed story for the entertainment and edification of Hennessy, and himself.

Dooley's apparent misrenderings of the literary quotations Hogan has supposedly regaled him with are, most frequently, too pointed to be mere muddling from the uneducated mind, [78] for example alluding to Gray's Elegy in stating, while discussing high-society gossip, "No one wants to hear what Hogan calls, 'The short and simple scandals of the poor'. Dooley claims not to read books, this is not true as he reviews at least two, Roosevelt's tale of his time in Cuba and Sinclair's The Jungle. Occasionally Hennessy is fooled into believing what Dooley has spoken is literally so, forcing the publican to explain to his customer that what he has said was "a joke.

I med it up. For Dunne, the Dooley pieces were a burden, but one that brought him fame and money, neither of which was enough to keep him at his desk once he gained the Whitney legacy. Understanding that readers were having trouble with the Irish dialect, he experimented with translating the columns into ordinary English, but published none in that form. In , The New Republic noted in an article, "if you try quoting Mr.

Dooley's brogue to the average listener you will be rewarded with a look of intense pain. But if you translate Mr. Dooley into ordinary English nearly everything precipitates out as pure wisdom. Were the American-Irish brogue of Mr. Dooley still a living and growing language there might be no doubt about it, but Mr. Dooley's language has become at least obsolescent, and that puts the future of the Dooley essay in serious question. Furnas regretted that "a Presidential year always makes Dooleyites feel frustrated.

In we need Mr. Dooley to deal adequately with such things as public-opinion polls; Mr. Truman's opinion of primaries; the spring swarming of the Kennedys in Minnesota; [and] the problem [of] whether Mr. Nixon should invite Checkers back into the act". Lowe stated that Dooley "set the model for an ethnic spokesman who could be entertaining and informative at the same time using humor to mask a subversive form of humor and get a message across. Then, the Irish made it, and they found his brogue and dialect embarrassing.

Scholars have not agreed on the extent to which Dunne through Dooley influenced the era: Mack is an Anglo-Saxon. An' I'm an Anglo-Saxon. I'm wan iv th' hottest Anglo-Saxons that iver come out iv Anglo-Saxony. Dooley in Peace and in War. This we r-read in spite iv th' cinsor. Th' question is which side he has crost to. On Friday he was on th' north side in th' mornin' an' on th' south side at night, an' in th' river at noon. We heerd nawthin' Sathurdah mornin'.

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Th' presumption is that they was nawthin' to hear. Therefore it is aisy to imagine Gin'ral Buller, findin' his position on th' north side ontenable an' his position on th' south side onbearable, is thransportin' his troops up th' river on rafts an' is now engagin' th' inimy between Spitzozone an' Rottenfontein, two imminsely sthrong points. All this dimonsthrates th' footility an' foolishness iv attimptin' to carry a frontal position agains' large, well-fed Dutchmen with mud in th' fr-ront iv thim.

Afther this sthroke 'twud be aisy f'r to get th' foorces iv Fr-rinch, Gatacre, Methoon, an' Winston Churchill together some afthernoon, invite th' inimy to a band concert, surround an' massacree thim. He's too good a man. All excipt you, Hinnissy. Ye'll vote f'r Bryan? Dooley, "d'ye know, I suspicted ye might. At night Mack dhrops in. Ordher Sampson to sail north as fast as he can, an' lay in a supply iv ice. Th' summer's comin' on. Insthruct Schley to put on all steam, an' thin put it off again, an' call us up be telephone. R-rush eighty-three millyon throops an' four mules to Tampa, to Mobile, to Chickenmaha, to Coney Island, to Ireland, to th' divvle, an' r-rush thim back again.

Ordher Sampson to pick up th' cable at Lincoln Par-rk, an' run into th' bar-rn.