America Vs. Charlie Chaplin

America vs. Chaplin

"I'm not a politician; I believe

in freedom. This is my only policy."

It was "The Great Dictator" (1940), that got Chaplin into the political hot water that ultimately led to his being barred from the United States. While he was on a visit to England in 1952, his reentry permit would be revoked as retribution for his so-called communist sympathies and dubious moral character. It was an ironic twist that Chaplin himself had forecast in a famous gag sequence in "Modern Times."

Wandering down the street, minding his own business, a naive but helpful Charlie sees a red danger flag fall from the end of a passing truck and picks it up. While running along and waving that red flag in an innocent attempt to catch the driver's eye, the Little Tramp is entirely unaware, as he rounds a street corner, that he has just been joined from the rear by an angry mob of striking demonstrators. Rallying behind his unfurled banner, they begin chanting the Communist "Internationale" until they are dispersed by the cops, who bop Charlie the Red over the head and throw him in jail.

Just four years later it would be in a remarkably similar situation involving rapidly changing political contexts that Chaplin the film maker earned the enmity of isolationist America's political establishment for "The Great Dictator." Abandoning traditional pantomime technique and his classic tramp character in order to play two talking parts -- Adolph Hitler and a little Jewish barber -- Chaplin spoke for the first time on film.

His closing speech, an artistically flawed but emotionally eloquent plea for concerted international intervention against Hitler's persecution of the Jews, instantly earned Chaplin a subpoena to appear before a hastily formed, isolationist, anti-war Senate subcommittee on war propaganda in September of 1941.

And Chaplin's popular, financially successful film -- which helped shape American public opinion in favor of the war -- also helped earn him (in the files of the FBI), the quaint political epithet of "premature anti-fascist." (In the terminology of the day, it was a political euphemism for someone with strong left-wing leanings who was not officially a member of the Communist Party.)

Chaplin's passionately anti-Nazi views, about which he was outspoken from the late 1930s to war's end, would never change. But America's relationship to Russia and Germany would. During the years of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, America's official position was isolationist, and Chaplin's speech in "The Great Dictator" was seen as inciting to war. By the time the United States was involved in World War II, new alliances were forming. Politics during this period made strange bedfellows. The American Communist Party and the right-wing America First Committee were unified in their adamant opposition to this country entering the war against Germany. And it was precisely during this period that Chaplin filmed and premiered "The Great Dictator," which openly urged Americans to wage war against the Nazis regardless of whether that war harmed or benefited the Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union and America later became allies in a life-and-death struggle against the Axis powers, Chaplin continued voicing his vehement anti-Nazi attitudes. But now, he also championed Soviet interests. Throughout 1942, he campaigned vigorously on behalf of Russian War Relief and a Second Front.

Because of Chaplin's worldwide stature as an artist and the ability of a Chaplin satire to tickle funny bones on such a mass scale, those who disagreed with his politics viewed him as a formidable adversary. But if his ability to influence were to be effectively neutralized, Chaplin's popular image had to be taken down several notches.

The backlash against Chaplin began gathering momentum in late 1942. Westbrook Pegler, a conservative journalist whose syndicated column ran in hundreds of newspapers (including The Times), kicked off the campaign with two scathing diatribes. Equating Chaplin's activities in support of our military alliance with the Soviets as pro-Communist and therefore anti-American, he recommended his deportation. And with even more vehemence, Pegler also made the suggestion that the actor's three previous divorces were clear proof of his unpatriotic contempt "for the standard American relationship of marriage, family and home."

The last charge proved to be the one that stuck most easily. The average American newspaper reader was in no mood for any political polemics which could weaken the war effort. But as a younger man, Chaplin had a reputation as a ladies' man. And a juicy sex scandal involving a famous movie star made good reading.

In June of 1943, an unmarried woman with whom Chaplin had been intimate filed a paternity suit, claiming he was the father of her unborn child. Independently administered blood tests would conclusively prove that he was not the child's father. But before those results could ever be made known, Chaplin was well on his way to becoming publicly branded a "moral leper."

Daily front-page coverage of a sensational trial on sensational charges of white slavery, unflattering photos of him being fingerprinted like a common criminal and a running series of hostile articles by politically conservative Hollywood columnists (led by Hedda Hopper) all contributed to the precipitous decline in Chaplin's public image, as did behind-the-scenes activities of the FBI. Careful analysis of that agency's security files on Chaplin suggests he was frivolously charged with the antiquated Mann Act in spite of abundant evidence of his innocence (which he eventually proved); it also suggests that the FBI supplied gossip columnists with information from those files and that the bureau even suppressed (and physically hid) indications of judicial impropriety that, if known, would have forced the federal judge hearing the case to disqualify himself on ethical grounds.

Because of newspaper coverage of a protracted series of paternity hearings and trials that did not end until a month after Germany's surrender, Chaplin's political influence was effectively curtailed. But he fervently remained committed to an idealistic, postwar crusade against all forms of domestic political repression. Like many American liberals in those days, he was quicker to identify