Over the past year, I have tried, at various times, to watch Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) because I kept seeing Chaplin’s famous speech from the end of the film. Every time I started the film, I couldn’t get past the first half hour, where Chaplin’s Jewish barber survives World War I and rescues Commander Schultz. I didn’t finish the movie until I reread Annette Clapsaddle’s Even As We Breathe a few weeks back for my “Lost Voices in American Literature” course. At the end of the novel, Lee, who is Cowney’s supervisor at the Grove Park Inn, takes Cowney to town to see a reshowing of The Great Dictator. Before discussing the novel in class, I wanted to watch the entire film, and, over a couple of days, I did.

I could spend an entire post on The Great Dictator; however, I don’t want to do that right now. Instead, I want to look at the film in relation to Even As We Breathe, specifically Chaplin’s famous speech at the end of the film since that is the scene that Cowney discusses as he sits in the movie theater. Cowney mentions that Chaplin’s concluding speech, where he looks like a mirror image of Adolf Hitler and “pleads with the world to unite in the name of democracy,” stood out to him because he had “never heard a finer speech in his lifetime.”

In The Great Dictator, Chaplin plays two roles: the oppressed Jewish barber and the Hitler stand in Adenoide Hynkel, the dictator of Tomainia. The film culminates in Tomainia annexing Osterlich (Austria) and Chaplin’s speech which is meant to mirror a Nazi rally. Before the speech, the unnamed jewish barber and Schultz espace a concentration camp, and Hynkel, whom the Tomanians mistake for the escpaed barber, gets arrested by his own men. The barber and Schultz disguise themselves to escape through enemy lines, but they get caught up in the rally, and the barber, mistaken for Hynkel, ends up giving the speech in front of the crowd of zealous acolytes.

Many people have seen Chaplin’s speech, but I wonder how many have paid attention to Herr Garbitsch’s introduction of the barber at the end of the film. Garbitsch, who serves as the Secretary of the Interior and Minister of Propaganda and as a stand in for Joseph Goebbels, steps up to the microphone first to introduce “Hynkel” to the crowd. Standing about the word “Liberty,” he tells them, “Today, democracy, liberty, and equality are words to fool the people. No nation can progress with such ideas. They stand in the way of action; therefore, we frankly abolish them.” He continues by espousing antisemitism, stating that the state will removes the “rights of citizenship from all Jews and non-aryans. They are inferior, and therefore enemies of the state.” At this comment, the camera cuts to Chaplin, who raises his head in astonishment.

When Garbitsch calls the barber to the stand, he looks quizzically at Schultz as the commander tells him he must speak, because if he doesn’t speak then the Tomanians will know they are imposters. Schultz tells him, “You must, it’s our only hope.” At the word hope, Chaplin looks at the camera and echoes, “hope.” One single word, full of promise birthed from pain and suffering. One word that must be maintained in order to defeat fascism and move forward towards a more equitable society. One word that stands in the way of authoritarianism because it maintains a spark within the soul. At this, Chaplin steps to the microphone and delivers his speech.

Chaplin’s speech, the year following Germany’s invasion of Poland, confronts fascism and authoritarianism head on, calling upon individuals to no succumb to “unnatural men,” but to join together to “fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.” He also conveys the fact that we must look into ourselves and unite in order to fight back against fascism. He quotes Jesus in Luke 17 when He told the disciples. “the Kingdom of God is within man.” Of this, Chaplin says that this gives people “the power — the power to create machines. The power to create happiness!” It also gives people “the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.”

Watching the film in a segregated theater, Cowney zeroes in this part of Chaplin’s speech. When he hears Chaplin reference Jesus in Luke 17, Cowney looks at Lee and the other patrons sitting with him in the dark as Chaplin looms on the screen. He looks at the others and sees “those effortlessly stuffing popcorn into their mouths and those wiping tears from their eyes, so moved by the actor’s words.” As he looked at each of these individuals, he thought about “how different everyone seemed,” that some could sit there, taking in Chaplin’s speech, and not be moved, and those who completely understood Chaplin’s warning and weeped for what they saw happening and for the “hope” of resistance and a better world.

Everyone in the theater had a different reaction, and each was “was motivated by so many different things” as they sat in the dark listening, for the first time, to Chaplin’s voice as he reminded everyone of their human connections, their “communality.” Cowney sits amazed that a comedian, “a man whose voice we’d only just now heard for the first time, even though he had been a staple in our lives for years,” could bring about these emotions and connect everyone. Yet, he also contemplated whether or not someone might try to silence him and “take away his voice after they heard what he had to say” because that happened more than one would like to admit.

Cowney’s thoughts about Chaplin’s speech highlight one of the important themes of Even As We Breathe, the fact that everyone deserves a voice because when everyone has a voice, we strive towards our common humanity. Cowney tells his story so that it will remain, even after his body returns to the earth and fertilizes the soil. He tells his story because if he doesn’t tell it, no one else will tell it. He tells his story to counter the stereotypes of the Vanishing American and the uncivilized savage.

At the end of the novel, Cowney tells us, “This land is ours because of what is buried in the ground, not what words appear on a paper — even this paper. However, it can also be said that bones shift and decay. Blood dries and flecks. Flesh withers. And the only thing separating us is the stories we choose to tell about them.” Cowney knows that the printed page will not relate his story and the story of those he loved. He knows that the earth carries within it that story, and he can write it down; however, someone must choose to tell the story, to relate it to the world. If one does not do that, no matter in what medium, then the story perishes, the individuals perish, the ideas perish.

Fascism seeks to craft its own mythological stories of the present and the past to silence the voices of individuals like Cowney who, by merely speaking their truth and experience, run counter to the authoritarian rule. To counter that, we must tell our stories. When we do that, we champion humanity and democracy. We, as Chaplin states at the end of his speech, “do away with greed, with hate and intolerence.” We learn that we have threads connecting us to one another, that our experiences are not singular and unique, others have experienced the same things. When we realize that, we stop letting fascists divide us into “us” and “them” and we unite to fight back for humanity, for the present world and for the future.

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.