….Chaplin continued to depict the horrors of poverty and the brutality of class distinctions in an America whose democratic principles had been under assault by the Palmer Raids of 1918-1921, precursors of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s move to power through accusations that citizens were Communists, and be definition disloyal to their country.
Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, conducted illegal searches and raids on the headquarters of unions and socialist organizations. In the wake of several bombings, Palmer declared that the Communists were about to overthrow the United States government, the excuse he gave for arresting without warrants and holding without trial workers whose only crime was that they belonged to the International Workers of the World [IWW or “Wobblies”]. In his defense of the right of business to ignore the demands of organized workers, by any means at hand, Palmer was aided y a special assistant, twenty-five-year-old John Edgar Hoover, who was soon to become the lifelong nemesis of Charles Chaplin. Palmer’s agents seized resident aliens and succeeded in deporting several hundred supposed enemies of the state, among them anarchists like Emma Goldman.
No dissenter was safe as the press inflamed public opinion, promoting fear of terrorism. In 1919, Congress refused to seat a socialist representative from Wisconsin, Victor L. Berger, because he had evinced pacifist views during World War I. Berger was sentenced to twenty years in prison for sedition before his conviction was thrown out by the United States Supreme Court.
Ignoring that he was working in the midst of a ‘Red Scare,’ financially independent Chaplin did not censor himself. He portrayed his Little Fellow as a victim of capitalist exploitation and as the frequent target of a terrorist police force….
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