The Ugly Truth About Walt Disney

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The year is 1928 and the 27-year old  Walter Elias Disney is sitting on a train   after a pretty crumby business meeting. He takes  out his faithful pencil and starts sketching,   drawing something that he has no idea  for decades to come will change people’s   perception of a certain kind of vermin. Above  the sketch, he writes, “Mortimer Mouse.”  He then takes it home and shows his wife Lily.  She chuckles and tells him, “Come on Walt,   you need a cuter name than Mortimer…What about  Mickey?” Walt smiles and agrees, Mickey will work.  This is such a cute scene from  the annals of American history,   but did we add that Mr. Disney drew that sketch at  a time when he may have had some very bad thoughts   in his head? Did you know about the time he turned  up at a Nazi meeting and later gave a tour of his   studios to one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite people? Today we’ll talk about the good, the bad, and   the ugly, but before we change into our devil’s  advocate uniform, let’s first paint a picture of   Walt that makes him look as wonderful as some  of the beloved cartoon characters he created.  He came into this world on December 5,  1901, to his Irish-American pop, Elias,   and his German-American mom, Flora. He was  then the youngest brother to Herbert, Raymond,   and Roy, and he also had an older sister, Ruth. It was when he was living on a farm in Marceline,   Missouri, and still only four years old,  that his parents saw that little Walt had a   talent for drawing. First, he drew a horse that  belonged to a neighbor, and later his parents   watched on fondly as Walt started copying the  cartoons of newspaper cartoonist Ryan Walker. Walt had some skills, there was no doubt about it.  But life wasn’t easy by any means. By the time he   was in junior high school, he was getting up at  4.30 am in the mornings to deliver newspapers,   something that didn’t exactly  meld with success at school.  With bad grades, he nevertheless didn’t  lose sight of his sketching career,   later taking a course in cartooning at the  Kansas City Art Institute. His other love   at the time was the Motion Pictures, those  black and white films where dreams came true.  When the war was raging in 1917, Walt was one  patriotic son of a gun, and though much of his   time was spent attending night courses at the  Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, he had ambitions   to go over to the battlefields of Europe  and fight for the US army. He was too young,   but after forging a birth certificate he got a  job as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross.  Still, by the time he got to France, the  war was over. His war effort, in the end,   amounted to drawing sketches on the sides of  an ambulance, not knowing right then that when   that appeared in Stars and Stripes magazines, he  was already on his way to going up in the world.  So, his future as a cartoonist was already  almost in the bag. What’s interesting,   given his close relationships with  some American pro-Nazis years later,   was his gung-ho attitude to fighting those  bad guys of Europe. His relationship, though,   was what we might call ‘complicated.’ But let’s concentrate on the budding   cartoonist for now. At age just 18, he  was laid off from a job at Pesman-Rubin   Commercial Art Studio with another aspiring  cartoonist. That was Ubbe Ert Iwerks. This was a partnership made in heaven.  If Disney was the visionary of the pair,   Iwerks, himself the son of German immigrants,   was a brilliant and fastidious artist. It was he  who really brought Disney’s imagination into the   world. He would barely sleep for days on end,  sketching and sketching, so that minutes-long   cartons were ready in a matter of a few weeks.  This was laborious work for one man back then.  Walt Disney was now getting into animation rather  than static drawn cartoons, which led to him being   contracted to make what were called “Newman's  Laugh-O-grams.” He then incorporated this studio   using cash he still had from a month-long project  called Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists business,   and he got to work on cartoons  such as Jack the Giant Killer. These early cartoons were about as  simple as you could get, for us anyway,   but back then they were pretty decent  fare. Disney kept going, and at 21,   he and his brother Roy, who’d just gotten over  a bout of tuberculosis, went into business by   creating the Disney Brothers Studio‍. This became  the Walt Disney Company in time, a company that   now brings in around 67 billion dollars a  year and has a net value of $203.61 billion.  With his new company, Disney got Iwerks  back on board and together they worked   in Hollywood. It was there at age 24 that  he married Lilly, an inker, and soon they   had a daughter and adopted another daughter. In 1927, he created a character that would   become the blueprint for many others.  That was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. This guy was super popular, and unlike those  older cartoons, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit actually   moved around like a human. This was a new age  of animation. But after quite a bit of success,   the character was taken over by others and so  Disney had to come up with another character.   He still liked the idea of Oswald, so he drew  something not too different. As you know,   that was Mortimer, who changed a fair bit  over time from his original appearance. Many years later, Disney would write: “I only hope that we never lose sight of   one thing – that it was all started by a mouse.” By the way, that high-pitched voice that makes   Mickey sound like he had just been kicked in the  balls was actually Walt Disney’s voice, although   he apparently had to give it up over time because  all those cigarettes he voraciously chugged on had   a negative effect on his vocal cords. Anyway, Mickey really turned to life   in 1928 with the cartoon Steamboat  Willie. He was an immediate sensation. With Iwerks as the head animator and a good team  of other animators, that mouse was making children   and adults jump for joy. And they were more  impressed when Disney started putting sound to   Mickey Mouse cartoons. Sound films or so-called  “talkies” back then were state of the art.  Mickey needed a love interest, and over the period  of the 1930s, his new darling Minnie came to life. In 1931, Mickey’s pet, the  bloodhound Pluto, also came to life. But the triad wasn’t enough, and in  1934 an eternally happy duck came   on the scene in the cartoon “The Wise Little Hen.” Disney, still in his early 30s, was a star. Now his studio employed over 200 people.  The Golden Age of Animation was beginning,   and Disney, always the visionary, started  thinking about feature-length animations.   He did that in 1937 with his “Snow White  and the Seven Dwarfs.” This would become   just one of his films that later got  him into trouble with some folks. For instance, this film would make  the actor Peter Dinklage irate,   or at least another iteration  of it. We’ll come back to this. Grossing 6.5 million (about 127 million  in today’s money) Snow White became the   highest-grossing movie at the time. Disney  almost immediately then started working on   Pinocchio and Fantasia, and the rest is history. His fame was cemented. Life was good. But on the   other side of the world a man named Adolf Hitler  was talking about the “Jewish Problem”, and a lot   of poor, angry Germans were listening to him. War was on its way, and Mr. Disney somehow   found himself partly wrapped up in it. Let’s  now change into our devil’s advocate clothes.  So, the war broke out and Disney did his bit  for the Allied war effort. That was making   an anti-Nazi propaganda cartoon called “Der  Fuehrer's Face”, originally titled “A Nightmare   in Nutziland.” In it, Donald Duck is a Nazi,  but, spoiler alert, it was all just a bad dream. As the war came to an end. Mr. Disney was becoming  a lot more conservative. There’s nothing wrong   with that, of course, lots of things in life need  conserving, but he was also, how shall we say,   a rampant anti-communist. In view of the  extreme violence that Joseph Stalin had wreaked   on mankind, that wasn’t a bad thing either,  but did Disney’s views have a selfish bent?  The so-called “Red Scare” got ugly in  America, and many people who were just   progressives who wanted a fairer society were  hunted down. One of the men doing the hunting,   and one who seemed to lack ethics at times, was  the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover. He promoted this Red   Scare propaganda and the attendant restrictions  of free speech, which is never a good thing. The   Red Scare also promoted moving against those  associated with the American labor movement,   which suited the big employer Mr. Disney. Hoover was called by some a “racist, a bigot,   and a homophobe”, inside a country that had an  awful track record for racism. Hoover tried his   best to bring down the Civil Rights movement  and with it the great Martin Luther King Jr.  He was also pretty close to Disney, who himself  once testified against some former labor unionists   at the House Un-American Activities Committee.  He’d branded these three guys, one of whom   worked as an animator for Disney, as communists.  Suffice to say that during those paranoid times   that could be sufficient to destroy a person’s  life. For his help, in 1954, Hoover made Disney   a "full Special Agent in Charge Contact.” While this doesn’t make Disney some kind   of celebrity despot, it gives you a good  idea of what was going on in his mind.   Some of those isolationists in the US weren’t  just against war and communism, some of them   talked about what they called “The Jewish  Problem”, that thing Hitler had talked about.  One of them was the business magnate Henry Ford,  who was better known for making cars than he   was for his “virulent racism and antisemitism.”  Ford and Disney were actually very good friends,   and you might ask if they shared some similar  beliefs. Listen on, before you make your mind up. Was Disney as anti-Semitic as Ford?  That’s the million-dollar question.   Disney actually donated money to some Jewish  charities and his friends have stated that   he didn’t come across as anti-Semitic,  but like we just have, some people have   questioned the folks he liked to hang around with. The first person ever to get access to the Disney   archives concluded after lengthy research that  Disney “was not anti-Semitic, nevertheless,   he willingly allied himself with people who were  anti-Semitic.” He also said Disney “willingly,   even enthusiastically, embraced anti-Semites and  cast his fate with them.” Nonetheless, a Jewish   composer who worked with Disney later said calling  him antisemitic was “absolutely preposterous.”  We told you it’s complicated. For instance, in the original   “Three Little Pigs” cartoon, the big bad wolf  tries to disguise himself as a Jewish character.   The wolf in disguise speaks Yiddish, and his  appearance by one writer was described as   having a “grotesquely phallic nose, a long  black beard and an ankle-length caftan.” It was this kind of appalling  behavior that the Nazis embraced,   and Walt Disney was the one who produced the  cartoon. Sure, when it was re-released in 1948,   Disney had that character taken out, but some  critics now say he only did that because he was   told there’d be criticism from Jewish communities,  as well as shock, given that six million Jews had   just been murdered by Hitler. We can’t forget,  though, that the original character looked like   he was straight out of Nazi propaganda. We also have to look at other matters of   perhaps greater importance, which do in fact make  Disney look like a bit of a Nazi-sympathizer. He   actually attended pro-Nazi meetings at the German  American Bund, aka, the American Nazi Party. Art Babbitt, who worked with  Disney as an animator said this:  “I observed Walt Disney and Gunther Lessing,  Disney’s lawyer, there, along with a lot of   prominent Nazi-afflicted Hollywood personalities.  Disney was going to these meetings all the time.”  Not a one-off then. He didn’t just get lost  and end up in a room full of guys and say,   “Oh, the Nazi meeting, wrong place.” This was  an American Nazi organization and its racist,   anti-semitic Nazi ideology was clear to everyone.  There was always a lot of this sentiment going   around at these meetings, so Disney must  have heard it. But did he agree with it?  Then there was that time he gave a German woman  named Leni Riefenstahl a tour around his studios. The year was 1938, and this woman,  a film director, was already a close   acquaintance of Adolf Hitler. Hitler adored  her because she made propaganda movies for him,   three in total. This is how she described first  watching Hitler at one of his many speeches:  “It seemed as if the Earth's surface  were spreading out in front of me,   like a hemisphere that suddenly  splits apart in the middle,   spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful  that it touched the sky and shook the earth.”  To her credit, her films didn’t expressly  show anti-Semitism, they just embraced what   she thought was the greatness of Nazism. She  was an excellent artist, but after the war,   she wasn’t exactly popular, even though she  admitted that she hadn’t been aware of Hitler’s   genocidal intentions. She later said that meeting  him, “was the biggest catastrophe of my life.”  But that doesn’t mean she didn’t agree  with Nazi racist and anti-semitic ideology   when Disney was giving her the royal treatment at  his studios. She too believed the Jews were the   cause of all the world’s problems, remarking  after that visit that it was “gratifying to   learn how thoroughly proper Americans distance  themselves from the smear campaigns of the Jews.”  That also doesn’t mean Disney thought the same,  but again, he sure liked to flirt with Nazism.   His kind treatment of this woman may have just  been in relation to the art of filmmaking,   or as people have since pointed out, it might  have been in some part an effort to get his films   back into Germany after Hitler banned Hollywood  because he said it was “controlled by the Jews.”  Moving on from Nazism, was Disney racist when  it came to African Americans? Were his movies   just ”harmless fun” or inherently offensive  when it came to people with darker skin color?  Back in Disney’s day, many black  activists said yes, his films are racist.   They said he perpetuated those ugly and  racist black stereotypes in his cartoons.   It was the film “Song of the South” that got him  in the most trouble and still does today. The   present Disney company is a bit ashamed about this  movie, and there is good reason to feel that way. Here is how one person summed up the  synopsis of the film, “A plantation full   of happy-go-lucky slaves who are more than  willing to do the bidding of their masters.”  Another critic called it “One of Hollywood's  most resiliently offensive racist texts.” And yet   another called it “a dangerously  glorified picture of slavery.”  One thing for sure is Disney was not doing  realism here. As one person later said, it   certainly was an “insult to American minorities”,  but did it mean Walt Disney was a racist? Was he   just ignorant when he should have been sensitive  to moral standards and people’s feelings?  That same person who had access to the Disney  archives didn’t think he was racist. He once said,   “Walt Disney was no racist. He never, either  publicly or privately, made disparaging remarks   about blacks or asserted white superiority.  Like most white Americans of his generation,   however, he was racially insensitive.” That much is true, but you also have to   remember that Disney fought for a black  actor to win an Honorary Academy Award.   He might have been insensitive, but  according to a man named Floyd Norman,   who back then was the first black animator for  Disney, his boss was no racist. Norman said, “Not   once did I observe a hint of the racist behavior  Walt Disney was often accused of after his death.   His treatment of people‍—‌and by this, I mean  all people‍—‌can only be called exemplary.”  With that movie, was Disney just trying to ignore  some of the terrible things that had happened on   those plantations? Sticking your head in the  ground is never a good thing when it comes   to atrocities, but that doesn’t always mean he  agreed with the atrocities. As you’ll soon see,   Disney was a bit of a utopian, but he still  shouldn’t have idealized the horrors of slavery.  Disney still has a lot of detractors today.  Meryl Streep for instance said recently that   Disney “had some racist proclivities”  and “supported an anti-Semitic industry   lobbying group and was a gender bigot.” Hmm, gender bigot, ok, can we add that   to the list of Disney’s apparent attributes? His friend and animator once said about Disney,   “He didn’t trust women or cats” and Disney himself  said in a 1938 letter to a female job applicant,   “Women do not do creative work”. He  added that the work was for men and   girls should bear in mind that only jobs  such as Inker or Painter are open to them. So yes, he certainly had a sexist side,  just as many people did back then.  Just prior to his death in 1966, he was  working on a project called the “Experimental   Prototype Community of Tomorrow”, a  plan for a real, functioning town. This was Disney’s idea of utopia, a  community where no one lived in poverty,   where there were no slums or joblessness. It  was the ideal place, kinda something like Hitler   dreamed of in his utopia. And Disney’s  little world also had to be autocratic,   meaning one strong leader had total power. But it didn’t sound too bad when Disney described   it, once saying, “It will be a community  of tomorrow that will never be completed,   but will always be introducing and testing  and demonstrating new materials and systems.   And EPCOT will always be a showcase  to the world for the ingenuity and   imagination of American free enterprise.” So again, you have to connect a lot of dots   to make Disney the bad man some people say  he was. It’s only too easy these days to call   someone far-right or far-left when something  they have said has been taken out of context   and exploited on social media. You have to  dig deep and keep an open mind when you read   articles calling people far-something. It’s  generally never that simple, and when it is,   it’s obvious. Nothing about Disney’s faults was  that obvious except for his hate of labor unions.  These days the Disney company does actually  give warnings about some of its old movies   such as Dumbo and Peter Pan and The  Jungle Book, writing that they have   “negative depictions... of people or cultures.” And let’s not forget about what Peter Dinklage   said about the remake of Snow White. He called  it a “backward story” about short people living   in caves, which might be as offensive to  him as a movie about black people living   in trees would be to someone of African descent. We don’t think Dinklage wants the Snow White story   to be brushed under the carpet of human history  or for Walt Disney to be canceled into perpetuity,   but he probably wants people to learn from the  relics of past ignorance and insensitivity.  So to conclude things, with Walt Disney,  the evidence isn’t strong enough to say   without any doubt that he was a racist  or antisemitic, but there’s enough to   not completely let him off the hook. One thing  for sure is he had some pretty dodgy friends.  Now you need to watch “The Ugly Truth  About Mother Teresa.” Or, have a look at…
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Channel: The Infographics Show
Views: 1,050,901
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Keywords: walt disney, mickey mouse
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Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)
Published: Mon Jun 20 2022
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