1776 (film) - Political Changes

Political Changes

The song "Cool, Cool, Considerate Men" depicts Revolutionary War–era conservatives as power-hungry wheedlers focused on maintaining wealth. According to Jack L. Warner, the film's producer and a friend of U.S. President Richard Nixon, Nixon pressured him to cut the song from the 1972 film version of the show, which Warner did. Nixon apparently saw the song as an insult to the conservatives of his time, it suggesting that the conservatives were the ones who were hindering American Independence as they danced a minuet singing the song that included the stanza "Come ye cool, cool considerate set/We'll dance together to the same minuet/To the right, ever to the right/Never to the left, forever to the right”. To further complicate things as mentioned above, the song is anachronistic, because, the terms "right" and "left" in politics were not coined until the French Revolution. Warner also wanted the original negative of the song shredded, but the film's editor secretly kept it intact. It was only decades later that the song was restored to the film.