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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to Broadway Nation, the podcast that explores the remarkable history of the Broadway musical with a particular focus on the immigrant, Jewish, queer, and black artist who invented it.

[0:19] David Armstrong: No one looms larger in the history of early Broadway than the Irish-American writer, composer, lyricist, director, choreographer, producer, actor, singer, dancer, and musical theater legend George M. Cohan, who is often called the father of the musical comedy. It's no mistake that Cohan is the one and only Broadway figure to have a statue in the center of Times Square. I'm David Armstrong, and my guest today is author Elizabeth T. Craft, whose terrific new book, Yankee Doodle Dandy, George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage, is the first book about Cohan in 50 years. As you will hear, Elizabeth Craft situates Cohan as a central figure in the invention of the Broadway musical, and illustrates how his plays, musicals, songs, and persona indelibly shaped the American cultural landscape of his day, and more than a hundred years later, continue to have enduring resonance.

If you enjoy this podcast, I invite you to become a patron of Broadway Nation, and join individuals such as longtime patron Juan J. Neumeister, whose generous support helps to make this podcast possible. For everyone interested, there'll be information at the end of the episode about how you too can become a patron. Here we go. Elizabeth Craft, welcome to Broadway Nation. It is so great to have you here today to talk about your new book, Yankee Doodle Dandy, George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage.

[1:47] Elizabeth Craft: Thank you so much, David. It's great to be here. I, of course, have a great affinity for George M. Cohan. We've done several podcast episodes about him, and I indeed wrote a musical about him. I'm always thrilled to see any new scholarship that comes out, and your book is so comprehensive and so terrific. It's the latest entry in the Oxford Press's Broadway Legacy Series. Several of the books in that series have been featured on this podcast, including Dominic McHugh's Meredith Wilson book, Kevin Winkler was here to talk about his Tommy Toon book, and upcoming will be Joshua Rosenblum, who has a new book on Maltby and Shire. It's a really amazing series. Talk just a little bit about that series. How did you get involved with that?

[2:35] Elizabeth Craft: It is a great series. I'm honored to be in the company of some of the other books that you've mentioned. I got involved when the series editor Jeffrey Block was talking about Cohan at a conference and sharing some of my work, and he and I struck up a conversation, and it became clear it was a fantastic fit for the series. I mean, who's a bigger Broadway legacy than George M. Cohan? But it was a long time from that first conversation to the end of the book. It was a big project. Cohan did a lot. It took many years. Jeffrey was great to work with, and the folks at the press were terrific. It's wonderful to see it in print.

[3:10] David Armstrong: I'm happy to say Jeffrey has also been a guest on this podcast, talking about his own books and the series as well. I'm going to quote him, actually. Jeffrey does the foreword to your book, and he opens with a reference to the famous songwriter Double Threats, people like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, Stephen Sondheim, who have multiple talents. Those people I just mentioned write the music and the lyrics, and then there's people like Oscar Hammerstein who write the lyrics and the book. But as you point out, and Jeffrey does as well, less than a handful have done all three of those jobs. It's very unusual. Cohan is rather remarkable in all of the many hats he wore.

[3:45] David Armstrong: And on top of the writing, he then sings, dances, and stars in the shows and produces them as well. It's truly phenomenal. We really have nobody, although I'll quote Jeffrey Block here, it would take another 100 years for a major Broadway figure to arrive who could demonstrate a comparable number of Cohan's varied off and onstage talents. And of course, he's referring to Lin-Manuel Miranda. That is not the last time that Lin-Manuel Miranda will be compared to Cohan in your book.

[4:13] Elizabeth Craft: It's funny because I have researched and written about both of them. My other work, many of my articles and chapters are on Miranda and his shows. And in many ways, I came to Cohan through Miranda. I had become enamored with In the Heights. I was working on a bigger project on how members of various ethnic immigrant American groups have told their stories on stage. And I was struck by these remarkable parallels between Miranda and Cohan. Both are so amazingly multi-talented. No one does all of the things that you just described in the Broadway world. Creators and songwriters who are also star performers, especially in Cohan's case, producer and theater owner, they both revolutionized the musical in their respective eras by drawing on Black popular music.

In Cohan's case, by drawing upon ragtime and in Miranda's hip-hop. Both Black popular musics that had been frequently denigrated at the time that seemed to revitalize the musical and both really have seemed to epitomize the American dream. Family members of theirs came to the United States seeking a better life, and they achieved this astronomical artistic and financial success. And then they both have this larger-than-life cultural presence. They're very savvy with publicity and print media for Cohan and social media for Miranda. And they both seem to capture the spirit of their respective eras. It really is remarkable, the parallel between them a hundred years apart.

[5:42] David Armstrong: Exactly. You talked a little bit about this, but I want to hear just a little more about what then inspired you to delve so deeply into Cohan, again, a figure from a hundred years ago.

[5:52] Elizabeth Craft: Well, I always, like many Americans, knew Cohan without knowing Cohan. I grew up singing these songs, You're a Grand Old Flag. You're a grand old flag, you're a high-flying flag, and forever in peace may you wave. The Yankee Doodle Boy. I'm a Yankee Doodle dandy, Yankee Doodle do or die. I talk about in the book how I'm not sure how I first even heard these songs. There was a huge Fourth of July celebration in the small town that I grew up in. I loved the Fourth of July, and I had this Wasting America take. I loved these tunes. Then I became more interested in musical theater, and I eventually became a scholar of music and musical theater. And I rediscovered Cohan, but this time as, oh, he's the person that wrote these tunes.

And in fact, they're from Broadway shows, which I had never known, and I think a lot of people don't. And I was also fascinated to find out that this person who I knew from these patriotic songs also was an Irish American at a time when the Irish weren't particularly welcome in the U.S., who wrote these Irish American-themed shows. So this set me on a journey. I started learning more about him, and I went to look at the archive that houses the biggest Cohan collection, the Museum of the City of New York. And reading through the scripts and looking at the music there, most of it stores in orchestral parts because there aren't really full scores. A lot of it wasn't made for preservation. I was just drawn into this world and totally hooked and fascinated by the way that he constructed this Yankee Doodle persona, fascinated by his shows, and fascinated by this really interesting historical era.

[7:29] David Armstrong: A couple things jump out at me, what you're just saying. People know these songs, and as you said, they don't know they're from musicals. And what's interesting is they're actually book songs in the musicals. Yankee Doodle Dandy is the I Want song. Before there really were I Want songs, he's sort of inventing that genre to a certain extent. And even Grand Old Flag comes out of the story and the plot of the show that says that George Washington, Jr.

[7:55] Elizabeth Craft: Yes, that's right. George Washington, Jr.

[7:59] David Armstrong: And like lots of great Broadway songs, they become divorced from the shows that they're in. They exist outside of them. But it's interesting to go back and see where they came from, which you take us on a tour of that in your book.

[8:06] Elizabeth Craft: Yeah, they weren't just stuck in there. They weren't pre-written for something else as popular songs. They were written for these characters, for these shows. They've gone in the opposite direction in many ways of other songs of his time.

[8:18] David Armstrong: Absolutely. I want to hear a little bit more about the research. But first, let me ask you, this book is not really a biography. How do you describe it?

[8:27] Elizabeth Craft: That's right. It's not a life story. It's not strictly chronological. There are a couple of other biographies. The last one from 1973 by John McCabe is quite good. I, for my book, was quite interested in his public role and looking at Cohan as a central public figure of his day and looking at his impact on Broadway and American society, most of all through his shows and songs, but also through his writings, performances, and media portrayals of him.

[9:01] David Armstrong: And the research that you did at the Museum of the City of New York, what kind of shape is this material in? And how much of it is there? Are all his shows extant? Do almost all the songs exist in some form? How did you wade through that?

[9:11] Elizabeth Craft: They're not preserved in a way that would make it easy to access.

[9:15] Elizabeth Craft: That's right. You can't just go to a library and check out a published script of Little Johnny Jones the way you can for some later mid-century Broadway classics. And so to even read the material, I went to the Museum of the City of New York and other libraries, a whole long list that have preserved some of the music, some of the scripts. When I was working at the Museum of the City of New York, I was working on site, but they've since been digitizing that collection. Some of the materials were also housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Schubert Archive in New York for his business papers in particular, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

So I did a lot of legwork to find a lot of these scripts. And when I would read them, especially for the earlier ones from earlier in his career, what you're looking at is not necessarily a definitive version of the script. It's just a typescript, frequently with handwritten annotations of what actors were making notes to themselves about what they're supposed to be doing. These were meant to be used. Part of the challenge and part of the fun was trying to figure out which one came first, which one came later, you know, maybe when it went out on tour or was revived later on, which one would Cohan consider the most definitive or authentic to the extent that there was such a thing. These are kind of anachronistic ideas.

With sheet music and then especially with newspaper clippings, I learned a lot from things that librarians had clipped and kept in folders of the reviews and other publicity at the time. And this material, newspapers, were not meant to be long-lasting things. I would be looking at a newspaper article and sometimes it's crumpling in my hand as I'm reading it, thinking I'm going to be the last person to see this. But I was also tremendously helped by the increasing availability of digitized newspapers and magazines. This study would be very different 20, 30, 40 years ago. This allowed me to see how people were talking about Cohan in the press and not just in New York, where we're more likely to have access to some of those big papers, but also in small towns across the United States.

It's been a surprise to me as I've delved into the world of research that for most of the 20th century, but certainly the early part of the 20th century, stories about Broadway figures are replicated in every newspaper across the country. In tiny little hamlets, there'll be a story about the Ziegfeld Follies opening that week. They were the big cultural icons of the time. Cohan's life is partly pre-sound film and partly post-sound film, and they were the big stars of the early 20th century.

[11:54] David Armstrong: And as you say, they toured in Cohan, especially toured all over the place. For most of Cohan's Broadway period, the shows really only run 40 or 80 performances on Broadway, and then they go on tour and they tour all over the country and they tour for years sometimes. And then a lot of times they would come back to Broadway. That was really important in Cohan's career. Frequently, his shows did better on the road than they did on Broadway and in New York. So he's so associated with Broadway and for a very good reason. But he really relied upon the road, which is what he would call tours, and considered that an extension and part of Broadway. It was all the same thing to the theater makers of that day and the producers of that day, really?

[12:35] Elizabeth Craft: Yes, absolutely. How many songs did he write?

[12:38] Elizabeth Craft: Upwards of 400 and maybe even more. He started writing in the late 19th century as a teenager. He started writing songs and selling them to sheet music publishers and then wrote songs. Even when he wasn't writing a lot of shows anymore, he continued to write songs through the 1930s and up until his death in 1942. One of the things I appreciate about your book is you inform us about this oeuvre of songwriting well beyond the dozen or so songs that are in George M on the cast album of George M or on the cast album of my show, Yankee Doodle Dandy. And even there, we tried to go off the beaten track a little bit. But there's dozens and dozens more, and I've enjoyed your bringing them forward for us.

Even though we know the patriotic songs the best, and give my regards to Broadway over there, Mary's a grand old name, there are a handful that folks seem to still know. But he wrote so many and a lot of really great ones and in a lot of different styles, not just the patriotic kinds of songs.

[13:42] David Armstrong: Tell us a little bit about the website that you created to go along with your book. Because it's so hard, you know, much of this material, if you're writing about Oklahoma, people probably know the songs and they can go easily access the cast album. But folks don't really know all of Cohan's songs. And so I have a companion website along with the book that includes audio and video examples of songs and other material I talk about in the book.

[14:09] Elizabeth Craft: So folks can go there and check it out for themselves, hear what I'm talking about.

[14:13] David Armstrong: It's really delightful and very helpful, especially with the songs that we are not as familiar with. To have that reference point right at your fingertips is really great.

[14:22] David Armstrong: Tell me, have you ever heard this melody?

[14:48] ♪ Musical number: "Yankee Doodle Dandy" — performed by George M. Cohan ♪

[17:28] Elizabeth Craft: Yes, I was very lucky that a few years before this book, or several years, I guess, before this book came out, the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra issued an album of Cohan's music, You're a Grand Old Rag. And the conductor, Rick Benjamin, really does it right. He presents the songs with the instrumentation they would have been heard during the era. It brings the songs to life. For anybody wanting to listen to Cohan, I encourage them to check that album out. It's one of the things that got me hooked on Cohan.

[17:49] David Armstrong: Absolutely. It's a great album. As you say, he uses the original orchestrations, which he has hunted down from various archives and things. And you get to hear a full orchestra play it the way it would have sounded in 1905 or 1911 or whatever year we're talking about.

[18:02] Elizabeth Craft: Yep, exactly.

[18:06] David Armstrong: In the introduction to your book, you write that you were born roughly a century after Cohan, but yet you found the parallels between his life and your own to be striking. How so? What struck you about the parallels?

[18:27] Elizabeth Craft: Both were these periods of rapid change, of industrial or technological change, developments in communication, mass immigration, immigrants coming in in large numbers, urbanization, folks moving to cities, and considerable anxiety around these changes and a lot of debate over what the United States was and what it should be with all of the changes afoot. That's been true throughout my lifetime, and it certainly continues to be a lot of debate today. It was very interesting to me to look at folks having similar debates, similar angst, dealing with such seismic change in a relatively short amount of time. I think about how much Cohan experienced in his decades on Earth and how much things had changed during that time.

And that was one of the aspects I really enjoyed about the project. The resonance to what's happening in our contemporary world today, I mean, literally today, are phenomenal, especially when it comes to dealing with issues of immigration, which, as I make the point in my work, are so central to the invention of the Broadway musical. It doesn't happen without the sort of broad, open-door immigration that America was participating in at the time. Of course, Cohan is not an immigrant himself. In fact, he's a third generation. His grandparents were Irish immigrants. But even so, he doesn't get out from under that stigma.

[19:37] David Armstrong: Help us understand what the position of Irish immigrants, or in this case, grandchildren of immigrants, was in America in this late 19th century to early 20th century period.

[19:45] Elizabeth Craft: That's a great question. It's hard for us to grasp now because the entire understanding of race was different at that time period. So now we would frequently use the term ethnicity to describe different immigrant groups. But, folks, at that time, that was not a term that was invented or used. During Cohan's early life in the late 19th century into the early 20th century, the Irish and the United States were nominally white. They were white by legal definitions, but they were also considered to be Celts, racially distinct from Anglo-Americans, the so-called old stock of the nation. Historian Matthew Fry Jacobson, in his book, Whiteness of a Different Color, European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, describes a system of difference by which one might be both white and racially distinct from other whites.

Towards the end of Cohan's life, after the Immigration Act of 1924, that act drastically reduced immigration, especially from countries considered less desirable. After that, the thinking on race in the United States started shifting. Different European immigrant groups, like Celts and Slavs and so on, who had been seen as racially distinct, became consolidated into whiteness as they were seen to be fully assimilating. But this was a shift and this contextualizes and I think is critical to understanding Cohan and the way that he was broadcasting this patriotic persona and the pushback he sometimes got and to understanding what's going on among the characters of his shows. And on top of being only nominally white, these Irish immigrants were also Catholic.

Irish Catholics were seen as undesirable additions to the nation and unassimilable, not really able to fully integrate into U.S. society. And you feature that cartoon in your book, that political cartoon, where they're throwing everybody into the so-called melting pot, but the Irish are not able to go into it because they're too different.

[21:33] Yes, there's this one Irishman who's, in that case, he's an Irish nationalist, part of an Irish-American nationalist organization, who's not being a good American. He can't be melted with the others. That speaks to the concerns about these Irish immigrants. They were not well off. They often left Ireland. We think of the potato famine, but there were also other economic push factors. So they were coming here without much. The Catholicism, they were part of a different religion and one that was often seen as a threat to American allegiance and American democracy. You get this idea of the influence of the Pope. And again, their ties to home and the Irish nationalist movement, the movement for independence in British-ruled Ireland, leaves people very concerned about the influx of Irish immigrants.

And we see some, as you mentioned, there's one example in the book, there are so many that I came across in my research, these very ugly caricatures and often very ugly racial caricatures of the Irish in the late 19th and early 20th century.

[22:50] Elizabeth Craft: I appreciate it because it is so hard for us to understand. It's hard to explain to students, you know, especially from both the racial aspect and the religious aspect, that the way people view Muslims today as being this other is very similar to the way the Catholics were being viewed at the time. And folks coming up from Central and South America. Partly it's hard to explain because the Irish were such a big success story. Eventually. And Cohan is part of that story. He's not the only one, but folks like him are part of the ones who are why we think of the Irish as so patriotic and think of them as just great Americans and were part of that story. It's a bigger story than this book. Other historians have written about how the Irish became white or became assimilated or been subsumed into this. But he plays a giant role in reframing them, redefining them.

[23:22] David Armstrong: Yes, absolutely. The four Cohans, George's family, become a vaudeville act. They rise to pretty significant stardom even within this world. And many other Irish performers did as well. How were they able to navigate that contradiction in we're not accepted, but we can be stars?

[23:42] Elizabeth Craft: Yes, there were a lot of Irish performers in the 19th century for a lot of reasons. One very basic one is that they already spoke the language. So this was an occupation that was accessible to them. Jerry Cohan, George's father, was the first one in the family in the theater. His wife, Helen, who was called Nellie, joined him. And then their two children. And they brought them around on their tours across the country. Jerry performed in blackface minstrelsy, which was not uncommon for Irish and for other performers. He performed also in Irish-themed entertainment like the Hibernican, which was a form of entertainment that combined variety-style skits with a moving panorama. It offered audiences this visual tour of Ireland with songs and dances.

[24:31] David Armstrong: Exactly. Almost like an Irish minstrel show.

[24:34] Elizabeth Craft: One of the really neat things that I looked at in my research was Jerry's sketchbook, which is housed at the Harvard Theater Collection. The stereotypes of the Irish that he was drawing upon, the ideas of the Irish as lazy or drunken, this was the humor. This contextualizes what George later was trying to get away from and was trying to break off from. Jerry and the family got into variety and then vaudeville entertainment. As vaudeville was becoming more family-friendly, it was being cleaned up to appeal to not just working-class audiences but the middle class and especially women and children. And the four Cohans as this family act fit those needs perfectly. George learned a lot very quickly through his experience of being a childhood performer.

He was touring the nation with his family, playing violin and getting on stage, trying out material for a range of audiences, watching his father write material for their act. Later, he was writing things to contribute himself. And he got the opportunity to see so much other theater. He got to see melodrama plays, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and many of the famous performers of the late 19th century. By his own telling, he wrote an autobiography. He liked to tell the story of his life a lot. And he describes himself as enormously ambitious. He wanted to go to New York and make it in the so-called legitimate theater, which a lot of folks think of as being plays rather than musicals. But at this time, it just meant anything that was not vaudeville, whether it was play or musical fare. But he brought a lot of vaudeville with him when he did that.

[26:10] David Armstrong: That spark, that ambition to jump from vaudeville to Broadway takes off really early and really quickly.

[26:18] Elizabeth Craft: Yes.

[26:19] David Armstrong: And your first section of your book is called The Flag-Waving Patriot. And as you said, you don't go through George's career chronologically, but we do get to his first Broadway show with this topic. So it's sort of roughly chronological.

[26:33] Elizabeth Craft: That's right. And right from the beginning, he creates a really full-scale musical comedy that has almost all of the elements that we think of today in a musical comedy. It's hard to define the first of anything. There is no first musical. But I think in many ways this is the first show, if we went back to see it today, we would go, oh, that's a musical comedy. That is recognizable to us as being the same thing as Guys and Dolls.

[27:01] David Armstrong: I agree. He somehow arrives at this form drawing on a bunch of influences and so many precursors to him, Weber and Fields and Harrigan and Hart. So describe to us this first show. Again, it's not even his first show. There's a couple before that, but this is his breakout hit. And it's called Little Johnny Jones. Just describe this show to us a little bit and what Cohan's place in it was.

[27:24] Elizabeth Craft: It was a 1904 show. Little Johnny Jones is a jockey who is in love with an heiress named Goldie Gates. Johnny Jones travels to London to ride in the English Derby, and Goldie's aunt is there as well. She is working on arranging a marriage for her niece to a British earl, but Goldie doesn't want to marry a British earl, and she intervenes. She, unbeknownst to her aunt, goes to London. She poses as various figures, including the earl himself, to thwart this arranged marriage. And Goldie, by the way, was played by Cohan's first wife, Ethel Levy, and this was a great role. It had cross-dressing, mistaken identity, all of that fun stuff. She plays like four different characters in it, really just what a tour de force performance.

[28:11] David Armstrong: All with different accents, the French accent, the British accent, absolutely.

[28:15] Elizabeth Craft: And Cohan is playing Johnny, and he's the one that sings the Yankee Doodle Boy. I'm the kid that saw the candy. I'm a Yankee Doodle Danny. I'm glad I am. I'm a real-life Yankee Doodle. Made my name and fame and boodle, just like Mr. Doodle did by riding on a pony. I love to listen to the Dixie Strain. I long to see the girl I left behind, and that ain't a Josh. She's a Yankee, by gosh. Anything about a Yankee that's a phony. I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy. A Yankee Doodle do or die. A real-life nephew of my Uncle Sam's. Born on the 4th of July. I've got a Yankee Doodle sweetheart. She's my Yankee Doodle Joy. Yankee Doodle came to London just to ride the ponies. I am that Yankee Doodle Boy.

[29:24] Elizabeth Craft: And he is there to win the English Derby. The American is going to win the Derby. He's the jockey of the day, and it's based on a real character, sort of ripped from the headlines, right? I'm just singing these lines. Real-life nephew of my Uncle Sam's.

[29:37] Elizabeth Craft: Cohan himself claimed to be born on the Fourth of July. So he's depicting not only the character, but he's writing this character that's supposed to closely align with himself, with his own autobiography. And he will continue to do that throughout his career. He's always sort of blurring the line between his own actual life and personality and the characters he's playing on stage. Absolutely. That was all part of his Yankee Doodle persona. Pretty early on in his career, he broadcast himself as Yankee Doodle Cohan. This show and several others after it, Cohan became known for this flag waving. And a critic wrote, he capitalized this and started writing whole flag songs and flag ballets and flag plays.

He's always there waving the flag. This show and some of the others often celebrated American-ness at the expense of the European characters. And that's where a lot of the humor comes from. Almost always, they're railing against this practice of wealthy Americans marrying British or European nobility, financially propping up the European nobility and raising the social status of the American family. He repeats a kind of similar formula with the American Idea, George Washington Jr., the Yankee Prince. In all of them, there's a parental figure trying to set up their child with a member of the European nobility, but love prevails. And the moral is that you don't marry the silly Europeans. Marry a good old American, even if they are a member of the lower class.

Which is interesting. Cohan is a contemporary of Teddy Roosevelt. You show us that there's a great deal of symbiosis between these two giant public figures. What do you see as the connection between them?

[31:19] David Armstrong: Sometimes, like this international marriage thing, it seemed like Cohan was just broadcasting Roosevelt's ideas. Roosevelt was one of the ones who really didn't like this phenomenon of the American money leaving the country. These were both, as you said, larger than life figures who embodied the spirit of the times. They both had their own adjectival forms. Anything related to Cohan was Cohanesque. Anything related to Roosevelt was Rooseveltian. They both were up-to-date, straight talkers, doers who also wanted a wholesome, clean morality. They both were very savvy in handling the press and how they were presenting themselves in the press. And they both helped shape what it meant to be American in this era.

One of the things that I talk about in the book is Roosevelt's idea of true Americanism. He talks about what it means to be American. And this involves many things. One was that immigrants should be fully American, that if you come to the United States, you need to leave behind any other allegiance or identity that you have. And in many ways, Cohan seems to be Teddy Roosevelt's ideal immigrant. There he is singing patriotic songs, traipsing around the stage, sometimes literally folding a flag. But Cohan would also include, even in his early shows as secondary characters and in his later shows, more often as primary characters, these Irish Americans in particular. He kind of pushed on Roosevelt a little bit, said, well, we're not going to totally give up our identity. These characters can still be Irish and be American.

[33:03] Elizabeth Craft: One thing that struck me, too, is that even though Cohan is the star of these shows, he's writing, he's directing, he's the title character in nearly every one of them, he's very generous with creating parts for other actors and surrounding himself with a company of great performers. He doesn't hog the stage in the way you might think he would.

[33:29] David Armstrong: That's a great observation, and it's something that stood out at the time, that that was something that he and his partner Sam Harris were committed to and their shows became known for, is creating this wealth of good parts. They weren't just star vehicles, even though George was often, as you said, starring in them. They were ensemble vehicles, if you will. And of course, part of that was because, especially in the early shows, he was writing parts for his family. His mother and his father and his sister would often be in them with him. Yep. Then for a while, his first wife. And his wife. Exactly. Yeah. So, in a way, he wants to feature them. He wants to showcase them. But I feel like it's part of his theatrical nature, too, to create this vibrant group of characters.

[34:11] Elizabeth Craft: I think so. And I think we see a similar thing even in the few shows that he's not himself starring in. Similar to that, the songs are written for the show. They're not pre-existing songs, by and large, that are just thrown in or interpolated, as scholars would say. He's writing the shows to function as shows. To tell a story.

[34:28] David Armstrong: Exactly. He is very much part of this idea that will then get picked up and refined and developed and mature, but the idea that we're going to try to bring all the elements together to tell a story. Yes. These shows are hard to revive in many ways. The humor is dated. Sometimes there are racial and ethnic language or references that would not be considered acceptable today, and with good reason. But as shows, they hold up. You can read them. And when I was in the archives, I would be reading the scripts and chuckling. The humor is still there. They're still good reads. Little Johnny Jones is one of the only ones of his that's ever been revived, with varying success. But you can stage it. Now, this flag-waving aspect, which he becomes totally identified with, today people might look askance at it. But even in its day, especially critics were not always kind to Cohan. His shows were big hits, but they were almost never critical hits.

[35:16] Elizabeth Craft: Yes. And there were quite a few critics, especially early on, who really hated Cohan and all that he stood for and all of his works. The one that despised him the most was James Metcalf at Life Magazine. He called Cohan the inculcator of the chewing gum standard of taste, and complained that he was making money off patriotism. He found Cohan's shows cheap. This was a time that American culture was trying to develop and place itself as on par with European culture, which is one of the reasons Cohan's shows are very funny. But to people like Metcalf, Cohan's style of theater was just seen as the lowest common denominator, as pandering to the masses, rather than serving an edifying or educational or uplifting mission.

[36:21] David Armstrong: One thing I've noticed in these comments is that class and race were not far under the surface in the critiques. Interestingly, Metcalf at one point thought Cohan was Jewish and made a really antisemitic critical remark. The magazine later issued a correction that Cohan was Irish, not Jewish, but didn't say anything about the ugly prejudice behind his concern that Jewish Americans were so prevalent in the theater.

[37:02] Elizabeth Craft: Yeah, I love that reference you had later where Cohan writes a sketch, I think, for the Friars Club or something where people confuse him as being Jewish, and he sort of turns that critique on its head. Yes, he worked closely with a Jewish American. Cohan sounded like Cohen, a common Jewish name. It actually came from an Irish name. Many people thought Cohan was Jewish. A common joke was that Cohan benefited from the confusion when Otto Harbach asked George, why do you give so many Irish titles to your shows? Little Nellie Kelly, the O'Brien girl, Cohan responded, it brings the Irish into the theater. The Jews come anyway. So he would joke that it was fine with him if people mistook him for Jewish. He would be able to just capture both audiences.

[37:58] David Armstrong: This highbrow, lowbrow war that absorbs people so much in the 20th century is, again, another thing that's really hard for us to understand today. It seems to have almost completely, I guess, because highbrow has disappeared, basically. We don't have highbrow art. We're too postmodern for all of this.

[38:21] Elizabeth Craft: Yes, exactly. But that's what Metcalf is partly talking about, is that what he dislikes about it, which is what people continue to dislike about the Broadway musical to today, I think, is that it's for the people. It is a populist art form. And Cohan is sort of inventing that.

[38:37] David Armstrong: Yes, he is. He embraced this idea of being lowbrow. His main characters were often lower class. Later on, often Irish. They talked in slang. They waved the flag unabashedly. They sang these simple tunes that often borrowed from other simple tunes. The humor in Cohan's shows came from vaudeville, a lowerbrow form, and came from melodrama. It wasn't considered great drama. In fact, on a humorous chart that circulated in various newspapers at the time where Cohan was placed as low, lowbrow, the lowest of lowbrow. In fact, there was a list of various items of different brow categories that circulated in various newspapers in 1911. George was on the low, lowbrow list, along with beer, toothpicks, and melodrama, colloquialism evoking melodrama and its lowerbrow reputation.

[39:30] Elizabeth Craft: Yeah, in the you must pay the rent kind of version.

[39:33] David Armstrong: Exactly. Cohan ran with it. He would tell audiences, he would make these speeches and say, if I entertain you, that's all I am here to do. I'm not trying for anything beyond that. He kind of wrote columns joking about being lowbrow. He took the label, the critical label, and ran with it and made that part of his reputation.

[39:58] Elizabeth Craft: But as you point out, the craft of these shows and the craft of his songs is really quite high, is quite expert.

[40:06] David Armstrong: This is one of those tensions in Cohan, one of these contradictions that I find so fascinating about him. He is saying how lowbrow he is, and that's not untrue, but he is a craftsman. He really knew theater inside and out. He'd come up doing it. He knew what worked. He wrote a lot of columns about how to evoke emotion from an audience. He knew his theatrical tools. He could turn out plays very quickly. He really was very professional and committed to a theater that was highly professional. So it might be lowbrow. It might be about entertainment, but it better be high quality. It better be well done. It better be from people who know what they're talking about and not from book learning, not from taking a class. He didn't have that kind of formal education, but from putting in the hours and really learning their trade. So in a way, he had very little patience for either academic approaches to it or amateur approaches to it.

[40:59] Elizabeth Craft: Yes, absolutely. Academic approaches he would have kind of puzzled at is that I don't have time to read about drama and theater. I'm too busy writing my own plays. If I ever have more time, I'd like to read some Shakespeare. You have to take whatever Cohan says with several grains of salt because he was always feeding the media, always creating a certain public persona of himself. He certainly knew more than he would sometimes let on. But this was the person that he sold himself as and joked about being. Which leads us right into your second section, which is called The Entertainer. And I think in this chapter, you get to what is the very essence of Cohan that today we would call his brand. He's like the first brand ambassador, and he's an ambassador for himself.

He is the brand. That brand is completely realized and epitomized in everything he does in his style of performance, in the content of his plays, in the beat, in the rhythm of his songs. It's all a perfectly integrated piece. I jotted down here, he looks and sounds and moves and writes in perfect unison. So, how did he invent himself? And that's where we'll pick up the conversation on the next episode of Broadway Nation, when Elizabeth Craft returns with more about her new book, Yankee Doodle Dandy, George M. Cohan, and the Broadway Stage.

[41:25] ♪ Musical number: "You're a Grand Old Flag" — performed by George M. Cohan ♪

[42:16] David Armstrong: If you love this podcast and want to delve even deeper into the world of Broadway musicals, I invite you to become a patron of Broadway Nation. For as little as $7 a month, you can receive exclusive access to never-before-heard, unedited versions of many of the interviews featured on this podcast. I often record twice as much conversation as ends up in the edited, public episodes. And you also have the exclusive opportunity to hear additional, in-depth conversations with my frequent co-host, Albert Evans. And all patrons will receive special on-air shout-outs and acknowledgments of your vital support. To join, simply go to broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech. That's all one word, broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech. Or simply click the link in the show notes to this episode. Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. Special thanks to Powell's Mox for his help with editing this episode, and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.

[43:49] ♪ Musical number ♪