“Patriotism is the greatest insanity the world has ever suffered.” – Charles Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin brought his iconic character, The Tramp, into some of our lives and hearts as children, endearing the performer into many of our lives. Later, we learned much more about the entertainer beyond his funny shoes and tiny mustache. As we are currently dealing with a fascist President and fascist movement, there are important lessons to be learned from Chaplin’s life and times.
Charles Chaplin’s start in life was anything but smooth. He and his older brother Sydney, with whom he had a close relationship throughout his life, spent more years in London’s dreaded workhouses than in grade school. His holiday gift at the workhouses was an orange. Henceforth, it gave him a repugnance to the holidays.
While Chaplin’s parents had quite an influence on him via the theater, his father died at thirty-seven, with alcohol being the main culprit. His mother carried the family by sewing at home until a pawn shop reclaimed her machine. She suffered from mental illness for much of her early life until it was discovered that she really was starving, giving most of her meager family meals to her boys.
A traveling vaudeville show took Chaplin to the United States. The experience brought him back to take a chance in the burgeoning film industry’s silent movies. His early Little Tramp days were successful, and he formed United Artists Co. with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Hollywood transformed from a “cow town” to the most prominent place to seek out a film career.
While much is made of him as a “womanizer,” Chaplin clearly states that the loneliness he experienced at various times, sometimes isolation during the Cold War years, made him genuinely search for companionship. He wanted what every human being craves: to love and be loved. Following early relationship foibles, his marriage to Oona, Eugene O’Neill’s daughter, lasted 34 years to his death in 1977.
At one point in his book My Autobiography, Chaplin uses the term dialectical materialism. While he became an owner of an important means of communication and culture, he knew where to go to become a more conscious adherent of his working-class roots.
In a new book, Charlie Chaplin vs. America – When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided by Scott Eyman, the author wrongly uses the approach of blaming the victim. This is readily visible in the title. Americans, north and south, loved Chaplin. The ruling classes did not. The author even blames Charlie for being “a nonconforming outsider from another country.” So, he is vilified for being an immigrant and never obtaining American citizenship. In other words, he was undocumented. This sounds familiar to what many undocumented working people face today in the United States.
Eyman’s book does have a very good chapter on events surrounding Chaplin’s searing, anti-fascist comedy, The Great Dictator. The film earned him the enmity of a wide swath of conservatives and the extreme right. The latter would spread out in audiences where Chaplin was speaking to disrupt him by coughing loudly. A priest from San Francisco would later tip him off that fascists were organizing these disruptions.
Quite often, the biography leaves out important context. Eyman uses a quote from an employee of Charlie’s to indicate the filmmaker wanted to meet noted communists like Harry Bridges, head of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. The autobiography explains in detail that Charlie wanted to meet Bridges to hire union workers for security from organized, fascist disruptors.
The biography has a quote from the great Paul Robeson, who was blacklisted during the Cold War and was refused a passport to travel.
“I want to thank you and tell you how deeply I was moved by your recent message supporting the struggle now being waged to restore my right to a passport,” Robeson states. “I recall that in his epic poem, ‘Let the Railsplitter Awake,’ Pablo Neruda noted with sorrow that in the United States, ‘Charles Chaplin, last father of tenderness in the world, is defamed.’ But I also remember that fascists everywhere hated you for your anti-fascist film, The Great Dictator. Well, Hitler and his gang are gone, but Chaplin and his art lives on! And your name will be honored – yes here in America too – long after McCarthy and his kind are buried in oblivion.”
Chaplin was treated differently by the U.S. government. In 1952, his return entry visa was revoked while on a ship for a European vacation. He would not return to the U.S. for another twenty years.
Charlie was not a communist. Did he know what side he was on? He decisively knew it was the working class. He understood that fascists ignored the complexities of international relationships and generated wars.
In the concluding page of his autobiography, a much older Chaplin writes, “I vacillate with inconsistencies; at times, small things annoy me, and catastrophes will leave me indifferent.”
Sorry, Charlie, that’s one behavior pattern we can’t afford to follow. The 2024 election was a catastrophe. We cannot just shrug our shoulders. Fascism is at the door. Resist!
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