He Skewered Politics and New York, Without Actually Existing

August 29, 2012, 11:12 am

By SAM ROBERTS

Henry James, Henry Adams and Theodore Roosevelt read him regularly. The historian Charles A. Beard said that given the toxic level of public controversies in the early 20th century, he “relaxed the tension of the ‘moral overstrain.'” The columnist Franklin P. Adams called his meditations “merely truth concealed in sugar-coated idiom and dialect” to conceal his loathing of injustice, sham and selfish stupidity. Through hundreds of columns beginning in 1893, he was a national sage and satirist laureate.

All that, and he didn't really exist.

He was Mr. Dooley, and he was a figment of the humorist Finley Peter Dunne's imagination - a saloonkeeper who rarely left Ch icago's South Side, where he opined in a barely decipherable Roscommon brogue in column-length commentaries that Dunne duly transcribed and published.

Mr. Dooley is credited with phrases that endured well beyond his own chimerical life or Dunne's, like “politics ain't beanbag” and saying that a newspaper's mission is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

A century ago this month, Mr. Dooley volunteered that living in New York City (which Mr. Dooley had never visited, but where Dunne had moved by then) would be too violent and intense for him.

“If I was younger an' more bullet-proof I'd take a chance,” he said with characteristic candor and understatement.

“There's no doubt it's the center of American civilization since Dead Horse Gulch quieted down,” Mr. Dooley asserted, in translation. “I'd like to see the late Jesse James or the Younger brothers on Broadway. If they didn't die of nervous prostration from the artil lery practice they'd go home to Missouri and spoil their reputation for truth and veracity by sitting around the fire after a hard night's work robbing a Missouri Pacific train and telling their comrades about the exploits of the New York police.”

As America's satirist laureate, Mr. Dooley dispensed wit and, armed with the benefits of observation and experience, he challenged conventional wisdom.

“Mr. Dooley continues to be the primary spokesman for the early 1900s, and for those consulting historians of that era,” said Grace Eckley, a Dunne biographer.

Which might have come as a surprise to Mr. Dooley.

“I know history isn't true,” he once explained to his perennial bar mate, Mr. Hennessy, “because it ain't like what I see every day in Halsted Street. History is a post-mortem examination.''

Among his fans was Theodore Roosevelt, of whom Mr. Dooley said: “Ye don't hear him hollerin' at posterity. Posterity don't begin to vote till a fter th' polls close.”

Politicians and national party conventions were fodder for his ruminations, but in The New York Times Magazine on Aug. 11, 1912, Mr. Dooley compared life in his often tedious Second City with the strenuousness of New York. “This throbbing home of joy never slows down,” he said of the First City.

Mr. Dooley's commentary on New York came as Mayor William F. Gaynor was warring with the police over corruption, lax supervision and erosion of civil liberties. He, in turn, was accused of hobbling and demoralizing the force and contributing to a crime wave.

New York, he said, “furnishes the only reading material worth printing” and “I wouldn't change it for anything.” He allowed as how “no place in the world offers a better prospect for a career to an ambitious young fellow who can deal from the bottom of the deck and is handy with a gun” than New York did. “No church is allowed to be open within 200 feet of a saloon” an d “everybody has more money than they can use.”

Still, decades before Johnny Carson denigrated New York on “The Tonight Show” or Sinatra rhapsodized about the city that never sleeps, Mr. Dooley complained that he might be ill at ease here, uncertain how to conduct himself or dress, and might even forget to carry a gun in a city that comes alive at night:

“When the first rays of the electric light sign peeps through the blinds and warns the sleeping New Yorker that night has come at last he saunters down to breakfast in his home in the hotel, drinks his customary bucket of Champagne, leisurely opens Black Hand letters and other invitations in the evening's mail, receives the summons of the divorce suit, sends the children off to the performance of ‘Salome,' and then, pasting his identification card in his hat and strapping on his brace of automatics under his swallow tail coat, strolls out to his faro bank or hop joint.”

Mr. Dooley's New York was a caricature where rich people ruled and cops were corrupt:

“The sharp cries of the hawkers of green goods and gold bricks rises above the laughter of the white garbed street sweeper when the millionaire's automobile runs over his foot,” the Second City philosopher said. He damned with feint praise the “police collectors, a fine soldierly body of men carrying familiar hand satchels,” who, he said, “regulate crime and they do it so well that it is now more regular and reliable on Broadway perhaps than anywhere else in the world.”

Until shortly after midnight, that is, when cops, diverted by assignments like suppressing baseball games and dangerous radicals, are ill-equipped to suppress the evening “cannonading.” He carped that street violence was too random. Instead, he mused, permits should be granted to accredited gang leaders, events should be listed in an amusement guide and perhaps when the season opens the governor or mayor “might be in duced to attend and throw in the first revolver.”

“If a man ever goes to New York, he seldom leaves it alive if he can help it,” Mr. Dooley said.

Mr. Dooley insisted that he didn't blame the police: “If you leave it optional with a policeman whether he'll send a fellow citizen to jail or take his money, what is there for a man of real feeling to do?”

While he admitted that most of what he knew about New York, a city of a little more than four million people then, came from newspapers, he also received intelligence from his cousin Miles, who lived here. Miles, Mr. Dooley reported, “said he liked the village quiet of Chicago, but life away from New York was like camping out.”

When pressed for details, Miles acknowledged that he had not been to the theater in 30 years and had never patronized an all-night restaurant or a gambling casino.

“After questioning the poor spirited fellow for a while,” Mr. Dooley concluded, “I made up m y mind that about four million of the people of New York might as well be living in Peewaukee for all they know of the gay life of the capital. Yes, sir, with all this reckless joy and easy reach they spend their time in working 10 hours a day, sending their children to school or church, struggling to pay the groceryman and playing the accordion in their little flats. But you never hear of them. In a city the size of New York, there ain't ever more than a thousand people whose lives are interesting enough to be work talking about and most of these deserve to be in jail.”