When Charlie Chaplin returned from his visit to
depression-ravaged Europe in June 1932,
he was a changed man. His social consciousness
had gained a new energy during his seventeen-month
sojourn and his creative activity was greatly
affected by this change. Chaplin began to
do the first serious writing of his life,
beginning with his economic policy, released
to the media on June 27th immediately following
his return. He would soon employ whatever
means at his disposal in order to use this
consciousness positively. As he states at
the end of “A Comedian Sees the World,”
“Looking back on my holidays leaves me with
an outstanding impression. Europe and the
different countries I visited, embroiled
in unrest, seem brewing a new epoch--theistic,
sociological and economical--unprecedented
in the history of civilization. It animates
me with a desire for accomplishment--not
in the old way but in something new; perhaps
in another field of endeavor.”
In so doing, Chaplin
found another motivation for performing
on the radio—a political one that seems
to first have been suggested to him
by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Whitehouse.
FDR spoke to Congress on May 17, 1933
about his new National Industrial Recovery
Act. After the final approval of the
act, which called for industrial self-regulation
and set forth codes of fair competition,
allowing workers to organize and bargain
collectively if they wished, 
the National
Recovery Administration (NRA) was established
to regulate, mediate and/or enforce
the new industrial codes. As he states
in the introduction to his radio speech
just a few months later (23 October)
on station KHJ of the CBS network in Hollywood, Washington
asked Charlie Chaplin to speak on behalf of
the NRA “seriously.” This could indicate
the nature of his acquaintanceship with
FDR (the two met during the Liberty
Bond Rallies in 1918), his continued
fame and celebrity, and/or the new level
of respect he was receiving for his
economic expertise.
Chaplin’s 800-word speech must have
taken only five minutes or so of air
time, but it gave him an opportunity
to try to make an immediate verbal impact—one
he would later utilize in both The
Great Dictator’s ending speech
and in Verdoux’s courtroom speech. In
the paragraph below, taken from the
original typescript, we can easily see
Chaplin using some of this rhetorical
oratory quite well: |
