Even in Dunne's own time (he died in 1936), his work was becoming obscure in part due to his use of dialect, and the unusual spellings that it required have proved a lasting barrier for potential readers.

Beginning in the second McNeery column, the listener for his monologues is Johnny McKenna, a real-life figure, who was a Republican in a mostly Democratic Irish community, and who often received government jobs as a token of bipartisanship.

[10] The following day, Walsh asked Dunne to change the name, but the writer decided this would not be enough if the fictional saloon was kept as is; instead a humbler establishment (and bartender) in some remoter part of Chicago seemed called for.

[19] Dooley was one of the roughly 2,000,000 Irish people who emigrated to North America during the Great Famine (1845–49), coming across on one of the coffin ships, and later spoke of the hardships and deaths on the journey.

He worked in the typical occupations available to Irish of the time, as a laborer swinging a pickaxe and then driving horse-drawn wagons;[20][21] but found these employments not to his liking, as each was dominated by Irishmen from counties other than Roscommon.

[26] Dunne depicted Bridgeport as a community whose Irish nature is on the verge of dissolution as other ethnic groups move in, an evolution to which Dooley reacts in various ways ranging from resignation to near-panic.

"[32] Although he applauded such acts of individual charity, Dunne through Dooley denigrated charitable organizations, wondering that "a man can square himself with his conscience by giving one thousand dollars to a policeman and telling him to distribute it!

With Danny Duggan too shy to propose, Father Kelly acts on his behalf, resulting in "the dear little colleen trembling and crying, but holding on to him like a pair of ice tongs".

Both major candidates, McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan, were the butts of Mr. Dooley's wit about equally, and the bartender noted with regret the partisan anger that filled the nation.

[40] Dunne had been limited at his old position by Kohlsaat's insistence that his papers support President McKinley's efforts to settle differences with Spain over Cuba short of war.

That a battle had taken place was known, but as the American commander, Admiral George Dewey, was believed to have severed the cable lines, no word came to the United States, and the nation waited in suspense, fearing defeat.

[47] Mr. Dooley even reached the seats of power; Dunne's June 25, 1898 piece imagining a chaotic meeting of the president's cabinet was read to that body by Treasury Secretary Lyman Gage, a Chicagoan.

[h][49] The Journal supported the retention of the Spanish colonies taken during the war, including the Philippines, but Mr. Dooley dissented, anticipating that there would be far more advantage for Americans who would exploit the islands than for the Filipinos whose lot imperialists said they were anxious to improve.

A number of lawsuits brought in the wake of the 1898 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.

[57] The year 1902 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.

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.

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 1906, 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.

In 1906, 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.

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.

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.

[78] Dunne wrote in 1898 that Dooley "reads the newspapers with solemn care, heartily hates them, and accepts all they print for the sake of drowning Hennessy's rising protests against his logic".

[78] John O. 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.

In 1960 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".

[87] Journalism professor John M. Harrison argued that though Dunne's progressivism, of a non-Marxist sort, placed him at odds with others who urged change, "he was as effective as any writer of his time in keeping before the public mind those issues and questions that were the moving forces in the Progressive movement".

[86][w] In July 2016, Kevin D. Williamson used "politics ain't beanbag" (as he put it) to excuse the failure of unsuccessful contenders for the Republican presidential nomination to fulfill their promises and endorse the winner, Donald Trump.

Furnas argued that Dooley was read and accepted by a far wider audience in his time than was Twain, thus rousing "the suspicion that as between the two, Dunne better fitted the notion of a national humorist".

[15] Fanning wrote, "Dunne's expansion of the literary uses of the vernacular dialect voice is comparable, though on a smaller scale, to Mark Twain's decision to let Huck Finn tell his own story.

The essays were read on an almost weekly basis by millions of Americans during the Progressive Era, the age of Theodore Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Edison and J. P. Morgan.

We need to know that this precocious son of Irish immigrants—those despised bottom-rung unwashed of mid-nineteenth century—somehow developed a voice that was unique and strong, that was heard, that may well have influenced at its outset the very course of the twentieth—the "American"—century.