Four Days Apart

Providence was in an ironical mood. That’s how an unsigned article under the headline “Two Birthdays” began. It appeared in the British political and cultural news magazine The Spectator on April 21, 1939.

What inspired the essay was the fact that Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler were born within four days of each other. Chaplin biographer David Robinson acknowledged there was “something uncanny in the resemblance” between the Little Tramp and Hitler, right down to the trademark toothbrush mustaches each of the men wore.

Their similarities ran only skin deep. Robinson wrote that the two men represented “opposite poles of humanity.” In his own writings, Robinson cited that 1939 article.

“Each in his own way has expressed the ideas, sentiments, aspirations of the millions of struggling citizens ground between the upper and the lower millstone of society.”

Whoever wrote that for The Spectator went on to say something that reverberates nearly a century later.

“Each has mirrored the same realit…