Charlie Chaplin and the Communist Party

Charlie Chapman was a popular movie-writer and actor who first became famous in 1915. His specialty was comedies and social commentaries. He was really popular in the United States until 1940, when he made a film called "The Great Dictator" that ended with a call for Americans to rally against Hitler and the Nazis. America, at the time, was strongly anti-war, so Chapman already had points counting against him there.

The thing that really condemned him was his later full-fledged supported the Soviet Union; 1942 articles written by columnist Westbrook Pegler accused Chapman of being a Communist sympathizer and, what was worse for his reputation, an immoral womanizer. The second count actually did the most damage to his reputation in the eyes of most Americans. He was eventually accused of all sorts of crimes of both illegal and immoral nature--fathering a child of an unmarried woman; owning white slaves; and, of course, being a Communist. He was innocent of all of these despite his pro-Soviet leanings (he was not a member of the Communist Party but was never allowed to testify on his own behalf when he was taken to court about it), and he eventually ended up leaving the country to live in Switzerland by 1953 to escape the intense political persecution.

To be honest, the things that most strike me about this article are the similarities between the political journalists (Pegler, as mentioned above, but also a "Hollywood columnis[t]" named Hedda Hopper) and the fictional journalist Rita Skeeter from the Harry Potter series. In the books, Skeeter was a clear villain--a journalist whose main goal it was to go after any and all scandals, regardless of their truth, as long as they sold newspapers. She was (as her name suggests) like a mosquito or a leech--sucking the juicy rumors out of the truth and publishing them for her own means. Pegler and Hopper may not have been villains, but journalists who are in business for the money and drama of stories, instead of for the truth, are like villains to their victims. Reading this article made me think more about the bias of the media and whether they should publish personal things about celebrities, as they make a habit of doing. I've heard that "the people have a right to know," but do they really? So what if Chapman really was a Communist sympathizer? He did have influence over American media, but by persecuting him as the legal authorities did, the American right of free speech was violated. That moral compromise probably did more harm for the nation than Chapman would ever have done.

Source: "What Made Charlie Run?" Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1989. By Stephen M. Weissman, MD. http://www1.american.edu/academic.depts/soc/run.html