In "The Ghost of Yankee Doodle" Sidney Howard grapples with the problem of war and peace, demonstrates the impotence of sober liberalism as pitted against drunken jingoism, but ends with a faint note of hope for the forces of temperance and sanity, a note which is scarcely justified by what has gone before. A great newspaper owner, a frank caterer to mob passions, is the chief antagonist; while two brothers, a manufacturer and a one-paper journalist, do battle for liberalism and pacifism, but draw their strength from a woman, their sister-in-law. There is something in the play of the old conflict of destruction versus creation with their usual symbols, a man and a woman.

The action opens on Christmas Day and carries us through New Year's Eve at a time eighteen months after the beginning of the next world war. True to popular expectations, Germany, Italy and Japan are fighting England, France, and Russia. America is observing a costly neutrality, which is dragging her into demoralization and depression. According to the Christmas sermon of a sententious ex-senator, the nation is to be seen in minature in the family, particularly in the Garrison family, consisting of the aforesaid two brothers and sister-in-law, and several lesser figures. John Garrison runs the family business, a factory producing various tools and machinery. On the income from this Robert Garrison runs his unprofitable liberal newspaper; and Sara Garrison, onetime actress and widow of Paul Garrison, World War victim, runs the old family mansion.

The business is being ruined by cancelled orders, and the question comes up of whether the family should accept ruin or sell indirectly to the Italian government. They take the noble stand, when out of the sky drops James Madison Clevenger, the news magnate and former passionate admirer of Sara in her acting days. In spite of his cynicism and his occasional tossing over of an economics teacher to the Red-seeing rage of the populace, he reveals that he has built up a dike by means of most of the influential newspapers of the country against war propaganda from either side. In a great swirl of mixed emotions, including revived love for Sara and conviction that the people are sick of neutrality, he lets down the dike, first playing up the story of the French sinking of an American ship carrying contraband. When war begins to loom, the credit of the Garrison business is restored, and factory, paper, and home are saved. Sara scorns her benefactor, but with this ironic picture of pacifists surviving at the mercy of bellicose demagogy, and an anti-war paper's being run on war profits, the play irresolutely runs out.

Ethel Barrymore is superb in the role of Sara. Although the role is that of a dominant person, Miss Barrymore has happily realized that all Sara's command is feminine, and has attached no masculinity to the character. Dudley Digges as Magnate Clevenger carries the impersonation to perfection without falling into the ever-present danger of exaggeration. The rest of the cast is so numerous and so uniformly good that no further special mention is possible.