Finley Peter Dunne's Mr. Dooley

... was a fictional Chicago bartender at the turn of the (previous) century, when "the mass media" consisted of daily newspapers--the height of communication technology, with information gathered by telegraph, set in type by machine, printed by high-speed steam-powered presses, and delivered by an army of newsboys shouting "Extra!"

  As a bartender, Dooley was the next line of "mass communication": He was a combination broadcaster and editorial commentator, reading the headlines and arguing about the news of the day with the patrons of his tavern. (He "spoke" in Dunne's typographical equivalent of a stage-Irish brogue.)

  How important was the newspaper to the people of the 1890s, back before radio, television and the Internet?

  One day Mr.Dooley summarized the role of the newspaper in a column titled "On Newspaper Publicity," including the following passage:

---

Th' newspaper does ivrything for us.

It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks,

commands th' milishy,

controls th' legislachure,

baptizes th' young,

marries th' foolish,

comforts th' afflicted,

afflicts th' comfortable,

buries th' dead,

an' roasts thim afterward.

If something in that quotation sounds famiiar, you may have heard it from a different Irishman at the movies, or from many other places, from the page to the pulpit. If you find a source before 1900, please let me know! Just write to dooley@stepno.com

--for the full text, see pages 227-231 in
Mr. Dooley at his Best
by F.P. Dunne;
ed. by Elmer Ellis,
Anchor Books, 1969 (selections from one of Dunne's earlier anthologies)

 

Web-published by bob stepno, for "Digital Culture," October 2000