SOURCE: "For the Family and Its Tired Businessman," in Broadway, revised edition, Macmillan Publishing Co., 1970, pp. 97-121.

In the following essay, Atkinson traces Cohan's rise in the American theater and subsequent decline after the Actors' Equity strike in 1919.

In 1901, Broadway had no idea of what was going to happen to it when it ignored a comedy called The Governor's Son. But George M. Cohan did. Twenty-two years old at the time, he knew what was going to happen to Broadway. He was going to overwhelm it.

The next season, Broadway rejected his second play, Running for Office, and it did not have much enthusiasm for his third, Little Johnny Jones, when it opened in 1904. But Cohan refused to accept a third failure as final. Taking Little Johnny Jones on tour with his mother, father, and sister in the cast, he rewrote it extensively, and brought it back to...