Cohan first impressed Broadway with this persona in the 1904 "Little Johnny Jones," which contained the memorable songs "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "[I'm] A Yankee Doodle Dandy." Although its previews were unsuccessful, Cohan did some energetic rewriting on the road and brought the show back to New York for a moderately successful run that season. The plot, which concerned an American jockey unjustly accused of throwing a British horse race, was a "perfect vehicle," in Stanley Green's words, both for Cohan's brash charisma and for the newly rising patriotism of that era. Cohan's next show, "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," a vehicle for popular singer-comedienne Fay Templeton, was also a hit. In the 1906 "George Washington, Jr.," with the song "[You're] A Grand Old Flag" in the score, Cohan had a third success. Cohan's creative drive at that time was remarkable; Atkinson describes him as being capable of writing 140 pages of a script at one sitting, at night after performing a show, and of cutting it by almost two-thirds to fit into one act of a play. Cohan's early shows marked the peak of his inventiveness as a creator of musical theater; in later efforts, although still writing hit songs at times, he tended to repeat his familiar plot formulas and rehash his attitudes. When he did, as in the early drama "Popularity," he often failed. (He rewrote "Popularity," adding songs, to turn it into the successful "The Man Who Owns Broadway.") Yet he had made a permanent contribution to American musical theater by bringing a youthful new exuberance to it, and he reaped the rewards of that contribution for many years. In 1917, and not in the context of a show, he wrote one of his most influential songs, "Over There," a tremendously singable revamped bugle call which became perhaps the most familiar patriotic tune during two world wars. In 1919, however, Cohan's reputation took a downturn as a result of his choosing the wrong side in an important political issue, the Actors' Equity strike of that year. Although known primarily as a stage performer rather than a writer or businessman, Cohan identified with management and publicly vowed to fight the strikers with all the resources at his command. Actors' Equity was victorious. After that point, not only did Cohan, who had previously been considered one of the most generous men in show business, have a horde of new enemies, but he could only appear on a Broadway stage by obtaining special permission from Equity (which Equity charitably gave). Bitter, Cohan renounced old friendships, quit the Friars and Lambs clubs, and dissolved his partnership with Harris. His creative verve diminished. He still wrote and performed in musicals, but less successfully and less often than before; the straight plays "The Tavern" (1920) and "The Song and Dance Man" (1923) were among his few, and small, successes of the post-1919 period. In addition to his political problems, Cohan found that his style of songwriting and playwrighting had been surpassed by newer, more sophisticated stars such as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and Rodgers and Hart. "I guess people don't understand me no more," he said, as quoted by David Ewen in THE COMPLETE BOOK OF THE AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATER, "and I don't understand them." In 1932, he was notably snubbed by cast and crew when he went to Hollywood to film a Rodgers and Hart musical, THE PHANTOM PRESIDENT. Nevertheless, he was still rich, famous, and widely honored. back to page 1 continue to page 3