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This past week British intelligence released its file on the great Charlie Chaplin, the British-born film-maker and comedian whose film character the Little Tramp has captivated cinema audiences for decades. Among his films are The Great Dictator (satirising Hitler), Modern Times (about the grip of industry on the small man), The Kid (a little boy and the Tramp), The Gold Rush (trying to get rich in the gold fields) and City Lights (a romance). 

Chaplin was investigated in 1952 by Britain’s internal intelligence agency, MI5, after a request was made for a background check by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), then headed by J. Edgar Hoover, an ardent anti-Communist. He suspected that Chaplin, a progressive, was a Communist party member or, at least, a sympathiser who contributed to party funds. Hoover wanted information in order to determine whether or not to permit Chaplin, who had lived in the US for 43 years, to re-enter the country after a trip to Britain with his family.

Hoover’s suspicions were raised by laudatory articles written about Chaplin in the Daily Worker, the paper of the British Communist Party, and Pravda, the official mouthpiece of the Soviet Union. In response to the allegations Chaplin snapped, “I am not a Communist, I am a peacemonger.”

The file, 112 pages long, downloadable free of charge from the British National Archives, did not provide the proofs Hoover sought.

Nevertheless, the effort offers an insight into US thinking at the time. There seems to have been a great deal of speculation over Chaplin’s birthplace. His birth date, April 16, 1889, was known but he had no birth certificate, not unusual at the time. A showman to the core, he apparently boasted he had been born in France while his mother, an actress, was on tour. However, commentators point out that she was not successful enough to have been on tour in France.

Britain’s Metropolitan Police eventually found that he was born in the London district of Kennington to Charles, a music hall singer, and Hannah Chaplin, a singer and dancer. Charles Chaplin Jr. first came to the notice of MI5 in 1948 when he requested the lifting of restrictions on funds frozen in the UK.

Hoover’s suspicions were compounded when Chaplin spoke of going “back to Russia.” This phrase suggested to Hoover that Chaplin may have been loyal to Russia, perhaps even the land of his birth. Hoover seems to have thought he had been born in Russia at the height of anti-Jewish pogroms and been taken to Britain by his family. The British, however, took the view that Chaplin was simply referring to a “return” after a previous visit.

The US request prompted the staunchly anti-Communist South African apartheid regime to ask the British for information on Chaplin ahead of a proposed visit to South Africa. The British declined to cooperate on the grounds that they did not have reliable information.

After six years of searching for information, MI5 concluded its investigation by saying, “We have no substantial information of our own against CHAPLIN, and we are not satisfied that there are reliable grounds for regarding him as a security risk. His name has, of course, been exploited in the interests of Communism as one of the victims of ‘Mccarthyism’.”

This, the British put down to a not very successful film entitled, A King in New York, which satirised McCarthyism, a virulent campaign of allegation and innuendo launched by US Senator Joe McCarthy against known Communists and those suspected of Communist sympathies. Many lives of innocent leftists and progressives were ruined by McCarthy. Some accused fled the US.

Among those accused by McCarthy were many in the Hollywood film industry. “McCarthyism” has since become a term for political persecution by the authorities of dissidents and independents who dare speak their minds. Charlie Chaplin was a man who not only spoke his mind but put his thoughts onto films the powers-that-be often found inconvenient or embarrassing.

As a result of the fuss over his background and politics, Charlie Chaplin surrendered his US residency (although his wife was a US citizen) and settled down in Switzerland. Chaplin died in his home in Vevy, Switzerland, on December 25, 1977.

Among other documents also declassified and released last Friday were investigations into Nobel prize-winning chemists Irene Curie, daughter of Marie Curie, discoverer of radium and polonium, and her husband. They were Communist sympathisers who supported the republican side during the pre-World War II Spanish civil war.

While Charlie Chaplin’s files made amusing headlines for a day or two, the paranoia over his politics exhibited by the FBI 60 years ago continues to be a serious factor in US political life. This is currently apparent in the campaign for the Republican Party’s nomination of a candidate to stand for the presidency. Instead of discussing the very real problems citizens of the country face, rivals smear each other with accusations and slurs suggesting that they are not “American” enough to hold the highest office in the land.

During the 2008 campaign, it was alleged that Democratic candidate Barack Obama was not a US citizen but a Kenyan, because his father hailed from that country, and that he was not born in the US state of Hawaii (which he was) but abroad.

McCarthyite paranoia is also emerging in the debate about President Obama’s policy toward Iran. Experts seeking to avoid war are being castigated by hawks in much the same way as leftists and progressives were demonised by Senator Joe McCarthy.

In 1964, academic Richard Hofstadter wrote a seminal essay entitled the Paranoid Style in American Politics that was published in Harper’s magazine. “I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind... The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.”

Hofstadter then quoted McCarthy himself about the situation in the US in 1951 and compared his remarks with a manifesto signed in 1895 by leaders of the long defunct Populist Party. Both focused on dark conspiracies, particularly in high places. Hollywood was a favourite target for McCarthy, hence the pursuit of Charlie Chaplin.

Hofstadter expanded his essay into a highly acclaimed book published in 1965 but it is clear that paranoid and conspiratorial minds have not paid any attention to what he wrote. People with such minds are eager to exploit ignorant and uneducated citizens to create a climate of fear and loathing of persons, countries, and events they do not understand.