Walt Disney’s works often celebrate American values: optimism and innocence (Pollyanna, Summer Magic), hard work leading to amazing achievements (Ten Who Dared, The Absent-Minded Professor), and even the individual’s fight against the tax collector (Dr. Syn Alias The Scarecrow).
He championed the wonders of progress under free enterprise; e.g., his original concept of EPCOT as an “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow,” and the 1964 World’s Fair attraction Carousel of Progress, now at Walt Disney World, where he showed a family’s life getting easier every decade thanks to new innovations.
Disney often presented the stories of actual heroes from American history, such as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Abraham Lincoln.
In 1966, Disney told an interviewer that as a child he read “American history and biographies…I especially admired Lincoln, because of his background, and where he went, and how he did it all himself. I’ve always thought well, too, of Henry Ford. He was an advanced thinker, put this country on wheels with the tin-lizzie and set up social patterns that have lasted. He had in mind the welfare of his workers…”
Walt said about his childhood, “the home environment was important. We had discipline…Self-discipline is learned by example, and my dad believed in it strongly. We always were self-sufficient, but we had no luxuries—had to earn everything we got, which is good for a boy growing up.”
In 1913, at age eleven, Walt already started making money creatively: he would enter Charlie Chaplin-impersonation contests and “ad lib and play with my cane and gloves. Sometimes I’d win $5, sometimes $2.50, sometimes just get carfare. “
At age 16 Walt impersonated an 18 year old to join the Red Cross so he could go to war. He worked at an evacuation hospital in Paris driving an ambulance in the aftermath of World War I.
Throughout his life, Walt benefited from his understanding of capitalism, mutual trade for mutual benefit. He got his first office rent-free by selling a restaurant owner on trading artwork for desk space. He persuaded Kansas City businessmen to invest in his animation studio for their own potential profit. He later embraced television as an advertising tool for his movies and for Disneyland, when other film studios saw TV as the competition.
Walt would probably not see eye-to-eye with those liberals of today who want to provide a cradle-to-grave nanny state, who give trophies to the losing team as well as the winning team to prevent hurt feelings, or who seek to protect everyone from struggles or hardships that if experienced may enlighten or may lead to great productivity.
Walt said, “You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.” Walt told his employees in 1941, during a time of union tensions in his studio, “Don’t forget this –it’s the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way, and …nothing can change that.”
Those union tensions led to a strike, which was a pivotal experience in Walt’s turning from apolitical to right-wing Republican.
Art Babbit, the president of Walt’s in-house cartoonists’ union, wanted Disney’s artists to join Big Labor. Babbit left the in-house union and joined Communist Herb Sorrell’s Screen Cartoonists’ Guild, recruiting other Disney artists.
Walt saw this as a betrayal after sacrificing to build a new Burbank studio for his artists’ comfort, with a gym, baseball field, and a restaurant with prices below wholesale.
Babbit called for a boycott of Disney films if Walt refused to recognize the SCG. Walt dismissed 20 SCG members saying he would only bargain with a union chosen by majority vote by secret ballot. SCG refused the vote and about half of Walt’s artists (around 300) walked out. The strike wore on through the summer but Walt refused to settle.
However, while Walt was in Latin America on a goodwill tour, FDR sent a representative of the Dept. of Labor to meet with his brother Roy, who agreed to binding arbitration, ending the strike.
Walt and Roy thought the strike was not based on grievances but simply ideological. Roy said, “Money was never the basic problem in this thing as much as Communism.”
As the 1940s continued, Walt was convinced that Communist infiltration of Hollywood was destroying the film industry and Disney’s own financial situation, and was promoting values destructive to America. In 1944, he became vice president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which informed the U.S. Congress about Communists in the film industry.
In 1947 the newly Republican Congress finally responded, and the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hollywood. HUAC’s friendly witnesses included Walt Disney, Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor and Adolphe Menjou.
Walt named names. He said that by taking over unions they misrepresent the industry as supporting their ideology: “I believe they ought to be smoked out and shown up for what they are.”
A year earlier, in 1946, Ayn Rand, another friendly witness to the HUAC, who had escaped from Communist Russia in her youth, had sent Disney an advance copy of her novella Anthem set in a bleak collectivist future. She wrote, “I think its theme would appeal to you… I don’t have to point out to you how important a picture with such a theme would be at the present moment.”
Walt Disney always remained optimistic, however. In 1966 he proclaimed, “To the youngsters of today, I say believe in the future, the world is getting better; there still is plenty of opportunity.”
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