Quote of the Day (Finley Peter Dunne, on How Irish-Americans Took to American Football Over a Century Ago)

"I seen th' Dorgan la-ad comin' up th' sthreet yesterdah in his futball clothes,--a pair iv matthresses on his legs, a pillow behind, a mask over his nose, an' a bushel measure iv hair on his head. He was followed by thee men with bottles, Dr. Ryan, an' th' Dorgan fam'ly. I jined thim. They was a big crowd on th' peerary,--a bigger crowd than ye cud get to go f'r to see a prize fight. Both sides had their frinds that give th' colledge cries. Says wan crowd: 'Take an ax, an ax, an ax to thim. Hooroo, hooroo, hellabaloo. Christyan Bro-others!' an' th' other says, 'Hit thim, saw thim, gnaw thim, chaw thim, Saint Alo-ysius!' Well, afther awhile they got down to wur-ruk. 'Sivin, eighteen, two, four,' says a la-ad. I've seen people go mad over figures durin' th' free silver campaign, but I niver see figures make a man want f'r to go out an' kill his fellow-men befure.”—Irish-American journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), “Mr. Dooley on the Game of Football,” in Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War (2001)

Quote of the Day (Finley Peter Dunne, With Still-Relevant Predictions of VP Duties)

“Aside fr’m the ar’joos duties iv looking afther the prisidint’s health, it is th’ business iv the vice-prisidint to preside over th’ deliberations iv th' Sinit….It is his jooty to rigorously enforce th' rules iv th' Sinit. There ar-re none. Th' Sinit is ruled by courtesy, like th’ longshoreman's union."—Irish-American newspaper columnist and political satirist Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), Dissertations by Mr. Dooley (1906)

Change those possessive adjectives from male to female, and this, more or less, is still what Joe Biden’s eagerly awaited VP pick should expect, if the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee wins this November.

With both major party nominees over 70 years old, “looking afther the prisidint’s health” is going to be a greater preoccupation than usual for their running mates….

Quote of the Day (Finley Peter Dunne, on Miracles and Wall Street)

“Miracles are laughed at by a nation that reads thirty million newspapers a day an’ supports Wall Street.”—Irish-American journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), Mr. Dooley's Philosophy (1900)

I wish Finley Peter Dunne had tried a lighter touch in his use of dialect. Between all the exaggerated misspellings and contractions, it becomes difficult to read his pieces at any length. In the case of this quote, for instance, the auto-correct function of my word processing program kept changing what I typed so much that I finally gave up. 

Maybe it did you a favor, Faithful Reader. At his best, this Chicago newspaper columnist could be among the most bitingly funny of American writers. Assessing Theodore Roosevelt’s memoir The Rough Riders, for instance, Martin Dooley, the bartender and mouthpiece for Dunne’s jibes, noted that it might have better called Alone in Cuba.  More than a few people have quoted his phrases while being blissfully unaware of the original source (e.g., “Politics ain’t beanbag” and “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”).

But the quote above really made me nod in agreement. More than a century removed from the robber barons—the fat cats that T.R. lambasted as “malefactors of great wealth”—America is still trying to make sense of Wall Street.

One American who tried but failed was H.R. Haldeman, best known to history as among the palace guard who abetted Richard Nixon in covering up Watergate—and who went to jail for the offense. As the President’s Chief of Staff and a former ad man, Haldeman had zero sympathy for anti-capitalist sentiments. But even he threw up his hands at the bipolar tendencies of The Street.

Fifty years ago this week, for instance, the nation’s weak economy, combined with growing unrest of the Vietnam War, led to a market crash, from a prior high of around 1,000 to 630. (How quaint, those numbers seem now!) Then, just the mere announcement of a dinner at the White House, in which the President and his economic advisers explained administration policy to Wall Street and industry leaders, was enough to produce a 31-point gain, the largest in history to that point.

You can practically see Haldeman shake his head as his notes in the diary he faithfully kept as Nixon’s Chief of Staff, “Really neurotic.”

And don’t even get me started on how the market has performed since the pandemic outbreak. I don’t think I understood Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s great quote in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage—“I despise the bubble popularity that is won without merit and lost without crime”—until I understood how much “bubble,” in all its irrationality, has been associated with Wall Street. Nearly two months ago, for instance, U.S. stocks rallied at the thought that the pandemic might be slowing.

You might think, as the death toll reaches 100,000, that investors might be a bit more careful this time. No such luck. With an announcement looming that U.S. jobless claims would pass 40 million, Wall Street rallied again over the belief that reopened markets would set everything right again.

Well, let’s see how that turns out, okay?

(The image accompanying this post is a cartoon, “Wall Street bubbles - Always the same," which appeared in the May 22, 1901 issue of the British satirical magazine Puck. The cartoon shows American financier J. P. Morgan as a bull, blowing soap bubbles for eager investors. Several bubbles are labeled, "Inflated values." The image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division, under the digital ID cph.3g07880)

New York’s ‘Hometown Newspaper’ on Death Watch

“Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ the banks, commands the milishy, conthrols the ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim afterward.   They ain’t annythihng it don’t turn its hand to fr’m explainin’ th’ docthrine iv thransubstantiation to composin’ saleratus biskit.”—American humorist (and journalist) Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), Observations by Mr. Dooley (1902)

I came across this quote in a letter to the New York Times in May 20165 from Miranda Dunne, granddaughter of Finley Peter Dunne, the Chicago columnist who created Irish immigrant bartender "Mr. Dooley." But I happened upon it on a singularly awful day in the recent history of the tabloid press: the announcement that the New York Daily News was laying off half its newsroom staff. 

The paper that long carried the motto "New York's Hometown Newspaper" was one of the two newspapers bought by my blue-collar immigrant family when I was a kid. The years haven’t been kind to The Daily News or the other paper we habitually read, The Bergen Record.  (These days, the latter—sold over a year ago by the North Jersey Media Group, the umbrella organization long owned by the Borg family—looks like just another pallid property of its new owner, Gannett--especially so given its own draconian round of cuts.)

I never achieved my youthful ambition of writing for a newspaper, and now that I am in a job where I often have to deal with the results of news articles, I am more skeptical than I was before of the notion that reporters and editors try to exclude any preconceptions from affecting their coverage.

But I continue to read newspapers every day, in the form I always read it—newsprint—and I can’t imagine living without them. Their outright disappearance would amount to a total eclipse of American freedom, as far as I'm concerned, since no trained cadre would be around to mind the vast chicken coop that constitutes the American political system.

Its glory was epitomized by Jim Bishop, who practically swooned at the tactile atmosphere when he became a copy boy at the paper, imbibing the press room in all its glory: 

“Silence,” he recalled in his memoir, A Bishop’s Confession. “The sound of dust settling…I waited. It came—the dull tentative growl of presses. It was slow. It gathered confidence. The hollow sound, like a train approaching a tunnel, hit its stride, and the floor, the walls, the ceiling trembled as though in fear of the news they spawned.” (Bishop would move on to the New York Mirror before becoming a columnist and the author of books on the deaths of major historical figures like Lincoln, Christ, JFK, and Martin Luther King Jr.)

Nearly 30 years ago, in a continuing ed writing class, our instructor, Paula, a onetime reporter for the News, asked us to judge six different sets of unnamed leads for the same story—one from the News and the other from the New York Times. The winner in each case turned out to be the Daily News. 

Though Paula might have been forgiven for rooting for her old employer, I think she had something more elevated in mind. She wanted to remind us not to let a reputation for global or national coverage, no matter how well-deserved, color our judgment of what constituted good or bad writing—particularly at the local level, which The Good Gray Lady has never really made a priority.

The tone of the leads chosen by Paula was punchy. It was the scrappy voice of the working class that the News carved out as a niche—and not only against the Times: For the past 40 years, it has been the centrist-to-liberal counterweight to Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing New York Post.

Founded in 1919, the News, as the first American tabloid, basked in the supernova energy of the city in the 1920s. You didn’t go to the News for stock-market stats or news—most of its readers were lucky to rub two nickels together, let alone invest them. It wasn’t trying to influence national leaders, either. Its staff writers, especially at the start, weren’t college boys, let alone Ivy Leaguers. 

But its readers were happy with a formula that might best be described as S+S=S(quared)—in other words, Sex plus Sensationalism equals Success. The particular variations in it helped continue the tradition: comic strips, columns, gossips, sports, and the latest ax murder.

Most of all, there were those headlines. Some must have made its inventors double over in laughter (e.g., when Long Island Auto Mechanic-Turned-Lothario Joey Buttafuoco got his hand caught in the cookie jar yet again, this time for soliciting sex from an undercover policewoman: “SO JOEY, HOW’S TRICKS?”). At least one has been credited with helping ensure that a GOP incumbent President would lose in the next fall election ("FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD")

The paper’s moment of truth has been coming for a while—many would say since the 114-day 1962-63 newspaper strike, which helped kill four other papers. Automation was the point of dispute then, and now another technological factor—the Internet—has come into play.

Nearly 25 years ago, when the paper also looked on life support following the financial machinations of its owner at the time, Robert Maxwell, a former co-worker at my company recounted his onetime News colleagues’ determination: “They were all saying, ‘Just try to kill us.’” I can only hope that this same never-say-die spirit gets today’s staffers through their own current crisis.

Quote of the Day (Finley Peter Dunne, on Immigrants Who Forget Their Roots)

“An Anglo-Saxon, Hinnissy, is a German that's forgot who was his parents. They're a lot iv thim in this counthry. There must be as manny as two in Boston: they'se wan up in Maine, an' another lives at Bogg's Ferry in New York State, an' dhrives a milk wagon. Mack is an Anglo-Saxon. His folks come fr'm th' County Armagh, an' their naytional Anglo-Saxon hymn is 'O'Donnell Aboo.' Teddy Rosenfelt is another Anglo-Saxon. An' I'm an Anglo-Saxon. I'm wan iv th' hottest Anglo-Saxons that iver come out iv Anglo-Saxony. Th' name iv Dooley has been th' proudest Anglo-Saxon name in th' County Roscommon f'r many years."— Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War (1898)

The Irish-American humorist Finley Peter Dunne was born 150 years ago today in Chicago. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, his 750-word pieces in the Chicago Evening Post and the Chicago Journal, featuring the bachelor saloonkeeper Martin Dooley, his millworker friend Malachi Hennessy, and Chicago’s working-class community of Bridgeport, became must reading for thousands—including an unlikely fan in Washington.

That would be “Teddy Rosenfelt”—better known, of course, as Theodore Roosevelt—who found himself a not-infrequent target of the anti-imperialist Dunne. (When Roosevelt quickly followed up his victory at San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War with his account of the group he commanded, The Rough Riders, Mr. Dooley thought it might have more accurately been called Alone in Cuba.)

Had one of this nation’s current crop of Republicans—say, Rudolph Giuliani, Chris Christie, or What’s His Name in the White House—been similarly lampooned, we might expect a defensive reaction at a press conference, or a tweet about the humorist being “overrated.” Not TR, though. 

Instead, he wrote the satirist: “I regret to state that my family and intimate friends are delighted with your review of my book. Now I think you owe me one; and I shall expect that when you next come east you pay me a visit. I have long wanted the chance of making your acquaintance.”

The two met at the 1900 Republican National Convention, where “Rosenfelt” gave him the scoop of scoops: he would accept the party’s nomination as Vice-President, if it were offered. Nor did TR forget him once he assumed the Presidency: in 1902, he sent the newspaper columnist a congratulatory note on his marriage.

The passage I’ve quoted from above provides one reason why Dunne is not read as much today as he once was: thick layers of dialect that can even give contemporary Irish-Americans pause. But it also shows another way in which he has hardly dated at all: views on subjects that remain an enduring part of the American experience: immigration, philanthropy, foreign wars, and the disconnect between the elite and the working class.

Quote of the Day (Finley Peter Dunne's 'Mr. Dooley,' on Being a Would-Be Parent)

" ‘Ye know a lot about it,' said Mr. Hennessy. 'I do,' said Mr. Dooley. 'Not bein' an' author I'm a gr-reat critic."—Finley Peter Dunne, "Mr. Dooley On the Bringing Up of Children," San Francisco Call, October 9, 1904