Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,900

This is the grave of Walt Disney.

Born in 1901 in Chicago, Disney grew up in a middle class family. He spend the first part of his childhood in Chicago and then the family moved to Kansas City in 1911, before moving back to Chicago in 1917. The moving had to do with his father’s business opportunities. Disney was interested in drawing from the time he was a boy and was very good at it, as we all know. He really wanted to fight in World War I, but was rejected for being too young. So he forged a birth certificate and got himself into the Red Cross. He was sent to Europe as an ambulance driver but by the time he got there, the war was over.

Disney came back to the U.S. and started working as an animator. Soon he wanted to go out of his own and did so in 1921. He opened Laugh-o-Gram Studios in Kansas City that year and hired a bunch of talented young animators to work for him. The studio didn’t work, going bankrupt in 1923, but it fueled a lot of animators such as Friz Freleng who would go on to have long careers. Disney moved to Hollywood in 1923 and eventually sold his Alice’s Wonderland cartoons. Eventually, in 1928, he came to draw a mouse that became Mickey. That this happened at the point of sound entering film only helped his success. Steamboat Willie was of course a pioneering animated film and he improved on it soon after. He hired Carl Stalling to do the music for his films, also an inspired choice. He introduced Pluto in 1930, Goofy in 1932, and Donald Duck in 1934, giving himself a range of characters. He pioneered the use of Technicolor in cartoons and started winning Academy Awards, such as for Three Little Pigs, in 1935. Then of course came Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which blew everyone’s mind upon its release at the end of 1937. Pinocchio came in 1938 and then came Fantasia, in the same year. This was just above and beyond what anyone had seen before.

Disney was an artistic genius but he was a very flawed man. He ran his studio like a dictator and in ways that made no sense to most of the people working there. He set low wages, demanded long hours and refused to pay overtime, and he demanded total submission to his executive authority. He also paid people different wages on a whim, causing a lot of resentment when you knew the person next to you was getting more for no good reason. Cartoonists also did not receive professional screen credit for their work. Disney preferred to take personal credit for everything that came out of his studio. Finally, all of their work was the intellectual property of Disney. Everything they drew belonged to him. This infuriated the cartoonists.

In the fall of 1940, the Screen Cartoonist Guild, which had already organized some of the other studio animators, began organizing Disney. It appealed to the National Labor Relations Board, at this time an openly pro-union outfit in the federal government, to recognize the union. But it demurred and as Disney refused to recognize it and then fired 24 union activists in an open purge, the union members voted to walk out on May 29. This was risky as it only had about half the cartoonists committed. This led to a lot of tension on the lines, with a lot of scabbing going on and the bitterness that creates among those striking. Within a week, the United States Labor Conciliation Service stepped in to mediate. But it did not go well because Disney was so recalcitrant. He personally threatened many strikes and vowed revenge against them by name. He claimed they were communists or communist dupes. He had his own company union, even those they were outlawed by the National Labor Relations Act, and he was determined to keep it. The NLRB issued an unfair labor practice against Disney for this during the strike; Disney’s response was to change its name and nothing else.

Generally, the divided workforce fell along generational lines, with older workers opposing the strike, along with poorly paid women painters. Younger male workers tended to support the strike. But this was not universal. Art Babbit was Disney’s chief cartoonist, the inventor of Goofy, the wicked stepmother in Snow White, and Gepetto in Pinocchio. He was also one of the 24 agitators Disney fired.

The strikers became known for their witty signs, often using the same Disney characters they created, as the image at the top of this post suggests. They published comic strip accounts of the strike in local publications. They received a lot of support from other unions. The Society of Motion Picture Film Editors supported the strike and the processing of Disney films at the Technicolor, Williams, and Pathe labs stopped. Disney workers also went out in support of other unions, including the United Auto Workers strike at North American Aviation. Disney workers picketed in front of the showings of Disney films, which made bigger connections between them and the various Popular Front organizations in Los Angeles, such as Film Audiences for Democracy and the League of Women Shoppers, who sent Disney a notice that they supported the strikers and would spread that endorsement through the nation.

The strike only ended because the government convinced Disney to go on a goodwill tour in South America as part of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy. Doing so allowed more reasonable heads at Disney to prevail and the strike to be settled. Even here though, Disney’s position was a problem. South American unions were aware of the Disney strike and were protesting him. Blackie Myers, head of the National Maritime Union, told the government he planned to notify the South American unions in the ports where his members disembarked. The government now mediated the strike more intensely. On August 6, a settlement was reached. However, on August 15, Disney threatened to layoff 207 of the returned strikers, leading to a second two-week strike. Finally, near the end of August, all issues were settled and the strikers returned to work. Everyone on the payroll on May 15 was reinstated, including the 24 fired union supporters. Pay rates were equalized by job, taking away Disney’s personal power to set pay rates capriciously. A system of salaries and classifications was set, severance pay created, draftees into the upcoming war would receive 6 weeks salary, and a grievance procedure was created. The SCG also became the bargaining agent for Disney workers.

Disney was furious at the negative publicity. And he never got over it. Testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, he said the only way his workers had received that much publicity was because of communist coordination. He claimed, in the kind of whining that one is used to hearing today from Donald Trump, a man whom Disney shared no small number of traits, “I even went through the same smear in South America and generally throughout the world all of the Commie groups began smear campaigns against me and my pictures.” Sad!

After the strike, Disney was just not the same, not personally and not artistically. He became a very bitter man and even more conservative. His days of transforming the art of animation were largely over. There are important post-strike cartoons, but they are often important more for geopolitical reasons than for artistic reasons. Technically, Dumbo and Bambi were both post-strike, but they were developed before the strike, so should be counted as such. It doesn’t mean what came after was bad work, but it just wasn’t so pioneering as before. Disney had voted for Democrats until 1940, but after the strike, he became a Republican and was a huge HUAC and Joe McCarthy supporter after the war, rooting for the government to get rid of all the commies who dared unionize his shop. Supposedly in private, he was a fairly normal guy who enjoyed a drink and of course his beloved cigarettes, but he was so concerned about his reputation that he would never project this stuff publicly. Just as weird and increasingly bitter man.

Where Disney did continue to transform American life was through the creation of Disneyland in California, and then Disneyworld in Florida. It’s effectively impossible to overstate the importance of Disneyland on the nation’s history. It became a cornerstone of postwar suburbanism. Built in Anaheim instead of downtown somewhere, it required a car to get to it and it became the fantasyland for the white suburban postwar family. That it became the vacation of choice for kids, helped by the television shows that Disney also created, only extended this reach as an icon of a time and place. And of course Disney also embraced television and created TV shows, the most important of which was The Mickey Mouse Club. Disneyland opened in 1955. The Magic Kingdom was geared to provide the perfect vacation spot for white families, with everything super safe and sanitized and of course plenty of rides based on Disney intellectual properties. I have never been to Disneyland, but I did get dragged to Disneyworld in 2019. The Florida version of Disney’s dream opened in 1971, after Disney’s death. It certainly fit his vision, picking another completely suburban landscape to plop down an idealized vision of American fun and then have a huge city develop around it. I will say this for Disneyworld–the food was better than I thought it’d be and I have never seen anywhere in the nation be so welcoming and easy for families with disabled people.

What Disney was really into at the end of his life was the development of EPCOT. This was somewhat different from the EPCOT Center that emerged after his death and which people visited today. I managed to escape the day at EPCOT because I was invited to give a talk in Grand Rapids, Michigan. that day so I had to leave early and let me tell you what, no human has ever been happier to visit Grand Rapids than I was that day. Anyway, Disney’s version of EPCOT was an autocratic community utopia led by someone like himself and populated by people who wanted to live the Disney dream without any of those messy black people or protests or any of that stuff. Basically, it’s what Sunshine, Florida became but more autocratic.

In short, Disney was a genius but he was a very scary dude.

Disney also was a very heavy smoker and that killed him, as it does most heavy smokers. He died in 1966, while in the middle of planning EPCOT. He was 65 when lung cancer did him in.

Walt Disney is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.

If you would like this series to visit other animators, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Tex Avery is in Hollywood and William Hanna is in Lake Forest, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.