A Holiday Message From The Great Dictator

In September 1939, six days after the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, Charlie Chaplin began filming one of his most epic films ever… and the first “talkie” for the silent film star.

It was a courageous project - the ‘Great Dictator’ directly poked fun at Adolf Hitler.

At the end of the movie, Chaplin looked into the camera and gave a stirring speech about timeless principles– peace, mutual respect, freedom from evil men who aspire to lead nations.

This did not win Chaplin any friends in Washington who were keen to maintain official neutrality.

And he paid dearly for it; the Great Dictator was the beginning of an entire decade of turbulent trouble between Chaplin and the US government.

FBI director J Edgar Hoover opened a file on Chaplin and launched a smear campaign to tarnish his public image. The mainstream media quickly jumped on board, accusing Chaplin of being a communist sympathizer.

Eventually they found an obscure law on the books as an excuse to haul him into court and put him in prison.

Chaplin won the trial… barely… but was then roped into the anti-communist witch hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

In his autobiography, Chaplin sums up his troubles with the US government as follows:

“My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a nonconformist. Although I am not a Communist, I refused to fall in line by hating them. . . Secondly I was opposed to the Committee on Un-American Activities– a dishonest phrase to begin with, elastic enough to wrap around the throat and strangle the voice of any American citizen whose honest opinion is a minority one.”

Chaplin reached his breaking point when, as a British citizen, he realized that he would be effectively kicked out of the Land of the Free. As he wrote,

“Whether I re-entered that unhappy country or not was of little consequence to me. I would like to have told them that the sooner I was rid of that hate-beleaguered atmosphere the better, that I was fed up with America’s insults and moral poposity, and that the whole subject was damned boring.”

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