Finley Peter Dunne

Finley Peter Dunne (born Peter Dunne; July 10, 1867 – April 24, 1936) was an American humorist, journalist and writer from Chicago. In 1898 Dunne published Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War, his first collection of the nationally syndicated Mr. Dooley sketches. Written as though speaking with the thick verbiage and accent of an Irish immigrant from County Roscommon, Dunne's fictional "Mr. Dooley" expounded upon political and social issues of the day from behind the bar of his South Side Chicago Irish pub. Dunne's sly humor and political acumen won the support of President Theodore Roosevelt, a frequent target of Mr. Dooley's barbs. Dunne's newspaper column became so popular and such a litmus test of public opinion that they were read each week at White House cabinet meetings.

Born to Irish immigrant parents and raised in Chicago, Dunne went to work for newspapers as a teenager. In the late 19th century, he and Eugene Field garnered attention for the humorous columns they separately published in the Chicago Daily News. Dunne also continued as a reporter, often covering politics, moving to a series of Chicago papers.

Peter Dunne (he later added as his first name Finley, his mother's maiden name) was born in Chicago on July 10, 1867, to Ellen Finley and Peter Dunne, a carpenter, both of whom had been born in Ireland. He was born with his twin brother John, who died in infancy. Peter was the fifth of the seven Dunne children who would survive to adulthood. Ellen Dunne was well-read, and created a bookish environment for her children. The Dunne family had many Catholic priests and one such relative suggested the bright boy be trained as a clergyman, but the elder Peter Dunne refused, saying there would be no children forced to become priests in his family. Recognizing Peter's potential, his parents sent him to high school, the only Dunne boy to attend. His mother had become ill with tuberculosis as young Peter finished grade school and she died while he was at West Division High School. Likely due to his loss, Dunne finished last in his class, though he shone in the school's literary society and as a debater. Dunne had taken the college-track curriculum at West Division, but his poor grades scuttled any such plans. He found a job as office boy at the Chicago Telegram and started work there in 1884, just before his seventeenth birthday.

Through his relatives and as a local boy, Dunne was thoroughly familiar with the local police courts and firehouses. When superiors realized he could write, he was promoted to reporter and sent to cover the police department. His writing talent became clear to newspaper rivals perusing the pages of the Telegram, and Chicago Daily News managing editor Harry Ten Eyck White lured him away in 1885 at an increase in salary. The Telegram barely made ends meet; the Daily News was by far the most successful newspaper in Chicago. Instead of longer editorials, White preferred pithy comments ranging from sentence to paragraph length, and gave Dunne training in this. Some of the elements of Dunne's experience at the Daily News may have resonated in his later Mr. Dooley pieces. Editor White, a humorist of local note and a racing fan, had invented a character, "the horse reporter", who dispensed earthy wisdom to a Chicago newsroom's visitors, and had written a series of sketches about an Irish family living on Archer Avenue, Dooley's future home. Also on the Daily News staff was Eugene Field, a humorist and easily the best-paid journalist in Chicago from the 1880s until his 1895 death. Field's work tended to be noncontroversial, contrasting with the Dooley pieces, but Field's success proved that newspaper humor could pay.

Editor White assigned Dunne to general news reporting and tried to allow him to write special features, which he preferred, disliking the need for legwork in general reporting. Sometime before 1886 Dunne had taken his mother's maiden name as his middle name, and in 1888, reversed the two names, for Finley Peter Dunne.

Dunne's city was at this time baseball-mad over the success of the Chicago White Stockings, and in the spring of 1887, the Daily News started covering baseball games (rather than merely printing the final score). White assigned Dunne. Both at home games and on the road, Dunne sent commentary, usually of the first six innings or so, the most that could be set in type before the six o'clock edition, the final one for the day (the scores from the later innings were punched into the printing plate). According to James DeMuth in his book on Chicago newspaper humorists, Dunne, together with Chicago Herald sports reporter Charles Seymour, "largely shaped the modern forms of American sportswriting". Rather than dry summaries, as had been common to that point, Seymour and Dunne adopted ballplayer slang as technical terms. One term that Dunne is credited with coining is southpaw to describe a left-handed pitcher; in the White Stockings ballpark, a pitcher faced west as he threw to the plate there; thus he threw with the arm on the south side. Dunne was no baseball fan, and saw that many players were well-muscled, but ignorant; this would cause his most famous literary creation, Mr. Dooley, to remark of one young player's career, "fractions drove him from school, and the vagrancy laws drove him to baseball".

In January 1888, Dunne was hired away from the Daily News by the Chicago Times. That paper had been in decline since the death of its longtime editor, Wilbur F. Storey and new management was seeking to revitalize its staff by raiding other papers. Dunne saw the potential for further advancement in an election year. Historian Charles Fanning deemed Dunne's coverage of the Republican and Democratic national conventions "brilliant" and Times management must have agreed, for they made him city editor, although only aged 21.

Dunne was city editor for less than a year before leaving for a position at the Chicago Tribune. During that time the Times published a number of pieces containing Irish dialect, although their authorship cannot be ascribed to Dunne with certainty, as they do not bear a byline. It was while holding that position that Dunne had his greatest scoop: breaking the Cronin case. Alexander Sullivan, local head of the Clan-na-Gael, was borrowing funds from it for market speculation, something loudly opposed by a member, Dr. John Patrick Cronin, who subsequently vanished after climbing into a vehicle of men who said his services were needed. Few took much note of the doctor's absence until Dunne learned of the Clan situation, which had escaped press notice. Dunne pushed for an investigation of Cronin's disappearance, and a police detective, Daniel Coughlin, was assigned, who did little work on the incident before announcing there was no evidence of foul play, and continued his indolence once Cronin's badly beaten body was discovered. Dunne became suspicious of the policeman and had him watched. Through contacts, Dunne discovered that Coughlin had hired a horse and buggy matching the description of that which had taken Cronin, and stopped the presses. Coughlin was arrested, but his murder conviction was reversed on appeal, and he was acquitted in a retrial. Despite his journalistic coup, Dunne was forced out at the Times due to a power struggle among the publishers. His next post at the Tribune, as a reporter, was a step down.