Very few public artists, and Chaplin was an artist as well an an entertainer, of the period were felt to be of the working class. Chaplin was not one, he was THE one. Because of that, the impact of Chaplin on culture generally, and on the left in particular, was profound. Here, the power of his 1921 film, ‘The Kid.’

‘Charlie Chaplin As a Proletarian Pilgrim’ from Good Morning. Vol. 3 No. 6. April 1, 1921.

Charlie Chaplin’s film, “The Kid,” was just beginning when a lone middle-aged woman came in and sat down immediately in front of GOOD MORNING’s head motion picture critic. She was one of those women who, from behind, look so round and mellow, but who, from in front, look like a flinty section of the Hudson River Palisades. She wore spectacles and she glared around as if her habitual attitude was one of non-approval.

When Charlie and his platypus feet came galumphing out for the first time, the audience responded with one of those yells of anticipatory ecstasy that is Charlie’s immortal privilege to evoke, but the old lady did not emit even a slight rumble. Even when Charlie became definitely stuck with the abandoned baby, her face relaxed about as much as that of a competent Egyptian mummy.

But when Chas. patted the little kid from below as the infant swung in its sling and immediately afterward sought a towel, the old lady broke loose with a whoop that rattled the seats and probably strained her interior supports. She was doubtless Somebody’s Mother and that gesture woke Memories.

Chaplin can do these things. In the face of his epic antics, grouches dissolve and are washed away and one’s sins are borne off on the flood of his mighty humor.

“The Kid” indicates that Charlie had quit making fillums and has begun the creation of motion picture classics. The sources of his power are numerous but one can detect a few of them. Charlie is great because he is the Immortal Hobo, the Pilgrim Proletarian wandering through a world wilderness thick with misfortune and beset by avalanches of hard luck. His fairest dreams wind up in a garbage can and his fondest ambitions are dispersed by the policeman’s boot.

Charlie remains human no matter what the settings are. But he is more than human. He is human nature itself, as we know it, under the slave system which by editorial writers is called “civilization.” He is Man Under Capitalism–tricky, blustering, cowardly, boastful, fawning, generous, pathetic, ready to exploit his fellows, eternally grotesque, and ever hopeful. The Phagocyte.

Good Morning was a (wonderful) left-wing illustrated humor magazine published bi-weekly from May 1919 until October 1921 by Ellis O. Jones and legendary radical cartoonist Art Young. Both had worked together earlier on The Masses. Good Morning was funded by donations and was forced to decrease in frequency from weekly to semi-monthly to monthly with a press run between 4 and 10 thousand, finally folding in late 1921.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/goodmorning/1921/v3n06-apr-01-1921-good-morning.pdf