Charlie Chaplain "The Great President"

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So I'm new here and I'm going to work on something hopefully new. What if Charlie Chaplain ran for president in 1940 using the popularity of "The Great Dictator."
 
Talented men can find ways around things friends.
The US is incredibly unlikely to amend the constitution for him to run though, and the country in 1940 is not fertile ground for someone with no prior experience in politics. If Chaplin were to run in spite of this he'd likely garner a few votes, but wouldn't be seen as a serious candidate and would likely be forced to drop out vary quickly.
 
You're better off if Douglas Fairbanks never takes up smoking; get rid of his chain smoking habit after a sermon by Billy Sunday or whatever else you can use in the first few years of the century, and while there might be a lot of second hand smoke in Holy wood, he'd still last long enough to run aand win in 1940 and appear to be in decent help. Just have him run for governor, feeling he won't be as good at talking pictures, and maybe he wins in 1934, when the Republican might have only won because Upton Sinclair was a former Socialist. (Or, if Fairbanks was a Republican, perhaps he forges a Progressive candidacy as a more popular go-between than the Progressive candidate they had.)

I mean, the guy played Robin Hood - that's got to be more effective than "The Great Dictator" as a campaign theme anyway. A dictator, even in 1940, was frowned upon at that time, given the success FDR had, even though it was by no means universal and some argue about it to this day how effective he was. But, Robin Hood waas seen as something of a hero, though misguided. Some oponent attacks the idea of a dictator, he's a hero supporting democracy. Some oppoent attacks Robin Hood, he's the evil Sheriff of Nottingham.
 
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An actor perceived to be a draft dodger, a pedarast, immoral, Communist, AND who refused to apply for American citizenship while being critical of the system while at the same time enjoying it's protection...you REALLY think he can work around all that? There was a reason no one protested his refusal of admittance back into the US.

(I'm leaving out the scandals he was tied to including Hearst's attempt to shoot him over Chaplin's involvement with Randolph's mistress, the court case that found Charlie liable and forced him to pay child support for a daughter fathered out of wedlock he abandoned, his ties to Judaism which was as unelectable as Catholicism, the negative image many in the industry had of him due to his tyrannical behavior on set...)
 
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I wouldn't call Chaplin a talented politician.

"I remain just one thing, and one thing only — and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician."

I don't think the man who said that would be interested in stooping so low as the US Presidency.
 
It would run pretty similar to Stephen Colbert's presidential bid, but I'd guess with less publicity, depending on how funny the public thinks it is.
 

claybaskit

Gone Fishin'
Have Chaplin make a picture where he is doing a satire of f.d.r. he can be a wheel chaired president that gives inspiring fireside chats on the radio..
 
I have actually seen it argued by some neoconservative authors (e.g., Joyce Milton in her somewhat unfavorable biography of Chaplin, *Tramp*) that *The Great Dictator* was (though they don't quite put it this way) "objectively pro-Nazi"--or at least in conformity with the Communist line under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact--because the final speech encouraged pacifism and the belief that the military/industrial/political leaders of the capitalist West were no better than Hitler. Milton admits that this sub-text was lost to most viewers of the film, but says that the Communists understood it perfectly well, as shown by David Platt's favorable review in the *Daily Worker.*

This would certainly be news to many non-interventionists in the US at the time, who blasted Chaplin's film as part of a Hollywood (and--it was sometimes said and often implied-- Jewish) conspiracy to get the US into the war. However, not only Communists but some very un-Communist non-interventionists also praised the film, as Benjamin L. Alpers noted in *Dictators, Democracy and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s*:

"Not surprisingly, among the most positive reviews of the film were those of two very different noninterventionist publications, the conservative *Catholic World* and the CP's house organ, the *Daily Worker.* The former preferred to conceive of the struggle against fascism as a spiritual rather than a physical war: 'More devastating than any bomb invented, his caricature of tyrants will outlive their tyranny.' The *Daily Worker* was operating under the suddenly noninterventionist line taken by the CP after the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Since the summer of 1939, the party had been maintaining the difficult position that the war against fascism was best served by urging the United States to stay out of the conflict, which was imperialist and thus could not be truly antifascist. Although this change in stand more or less shattered the Popular Front,a small group of party members and sympathizers put forward this left-noninterventionist approach in the years between the invasion of Poland and the invasion of Russia. The growing tide of liberal anticommunism hardened the pacifism of CP members and these remaining fellow travelers. The *Daily Worker*'s reviewer, David Platt, praised Chaplin's film as a 'tremendous contribution to peace' with nothing for the 'Roosevelts and Churchills and little Hitlers in industry.' Though Chaplin probably did not intend to create a film that adopted the current CP line, the film could easily be read as an argument for internal revolution and an end to war as a solution to the problem of Germany." https://books.google.com/books?id=AaWrbJf3EKcC&pg=PA90
 
^ That's interesting, because one thing I thought when I saw that film was that that speech, eloquent though it was, could just easily be something that a fascist politician could have delivered, depending on the audience. I could easily imagine an American Nazi, for example, telling people "Don't go off and fight for rich men who just want to start wars for profit"(or however the line in the film went).

Though that probably had less to do with any objective correlation to fascist ideology, and more to do with just how generic the speech is; as I recall, it's pretty much just full of truisms that amount to not much more than "Tyranny is bad". Incidentally, in his autobiography, Chaplin states that, at the time of the book's writing, he had become an adherent of Social Credit, the "monetary reform" ideology that quickly degenerated into anti-semtism and seduced, among others, fascist extraordinaire Ezra Pound. So, yeah, he seems to have been ideologically naive, and not someone I would look to for serious political analysis.
 
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