Then the President’s. 
Always he soared in ambition
And, becoming a lord of the theatre,
He ventured on serious drama,
And out of his wisdom and watching
Wrote masterful plays,
Envisaging the types of our natives. 
Truly a genius,
Genius in friendship, genius in stagecraft,
Genius in life! 
Even in choosing a partner
He fattened his average,
Batting four hundred
By taking a kindred irreverent soul,
Graduated out of the whirlpool
That wrecks all but the strongest,
Born on the eastern edge
Of Manhattan,
Sam H. Harris, man of business,
Who to the skill of the trader
Adds the joy in life
And the sense of humor,
Coupled with pleasure in giving
And helping
That Cohan demands of his pals. 
Together they plan wonderful projects,
And the artist soul
And the soul of commerce
Are an unbeatable union. 
Best of all about Cohan
Is his congenital manliness. 
He sees Americans
As our soil and our air and our water
Have made them;
Types as distinct as the Indian. 
He follows no school,
Knows little of movements artistic. 
A lonely creator,
His friends are not writing men,
Reformers, uplifters or zealots. 
He writes the life he has lived
So fully and zestfully,
And over it all plays like sheet lightning
A beneficent humor. 
Growth is his hall-mark,
Hard work his chief recreation;
Not Balzac could toil with labor titanic
More terribly. 
George M. Cohan,
Excelling in everything—­
Beloved son, brother, father, partner, friend,
Our best-beloved man of the theatre.

DAVID BELASCO

King David of old slew the Philistines;
Our David has made them admirers and patrons;
He has numbered the people
Night after night in his theatres. 
Will he ever, I wonder, send forth for the Shunammite? 
Many there be who would answer his calling,
For he has shown ambitious fair women
To acting’s high places. 
As Rodin in marble saw wondrous creations
To be freed by the chisel,
So Belasco in immature genius and beauty
Sees the resplendent star to be kindled
At his own steady beacon. 
Too varied a mind for our comprehension,
Too big and too broad and too subtle
To be understood of the bourgeois American
Whom he has led decade after decade
By a nose ring artistic. 
Capable of everything, he has worked
With the ease of a master, giving the public
Marvelous detail, unfailing sensation and poses pictorial;
Preferring the certain success to arduous striving
For the more excellent things of the future. 
Like David his forebear, a king but no prophet,
Amazingly wise in his own generation. 
A wizard in art of the everyday,
Lord of the spotlight and dimmer,
But nursing the unconquerable hope, the inviolable shade
Of what in his dreams Oriental