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Page 16 of 28 Creative Explosion: Walt's Political Outlook

Was Walt anti-Semitic?

Was Walt anti-Semitic? No evidence
has ever been brought forward.

How do myths like Walt's supposed anti-Semitism begin? Did Walt make offhand comments about the Jewish union members during the painful strike of 1940? Likely. Might some of his executives have harbored anti-Semitic feelings that were wrongly ascribed to Walt himself? Very possibly. Did some of his early cartoons -- notably "Three Little Pigs" -- contain the kind of unpleasant Jewish caricatures that were common to many cartoon studios at the time? Certainly. Did a few Jewish men who had difficult relationships with Walt speculate that the reason was because they were Jewish? Also yes. Does all this add up to an anti-Semite? Not by any means. In fact, the authors of this essay are Jewish, and from the outset of a decade of research into Walt Disney have looked carefully through the record -- letters, memos, conversations with reliable sources -- for any evidence that Walt may have harbored a dislike of Jews. None was found. Furthermore, in 1955 the B'Nai B'rith chapter in Beverly Hills cited him as their man of the year. Hardly an award likely to be presented to an anti-Semite.
Yet another area of Walt's life subject to much misguided analysis was his political orientation. The truth is that Walt's politics don't require much analysis at all. They were very simple. He believed in America. He believed in Abraham Lincoln. He believed that if people were given the right information, and the freedom to utilize it, they would behave well. Up until the 1940 election, he voted for Democratic candidates. From that time on, he tended to vote Republican.
Walt's father, of course, had socialist leanings himself, and Walt grew up believing a lot of that, but he said that  "I found you had to be very careful giving people anything. I feel people must earn it. They must earn it." He was vigorously anti-communist. In the 1990s, that statement can be made to sound as though Walt carried a vision of a Red menace. But in the years following the Second World War, as Russia acquired satellites throughout Eastern Europe ? and on to the years when Khrushchev was threatening to 'bury the West'  -- it was a perfectly acceptable point of view, held by many Americans.
The Studio strike of 1941

The Studio strike of 1941 was the great formative event in Walt's political outlook.  He believed it was Communist-inspired.

Walt testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee

On October 24, 1947, Walt testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee

Of course, the great formative experience in Walt's political life was the strike against the studio in 1941. Walt became firmly convinced that many of the strike's leaders were communist-sympathizing men and women whose interest was more in advancing a political ideology than genuinely helping the workers. Is that true? The passage of time has made it difficult to know. However, it is clear that this belief stiffened his resolve, to make sure that communists did not gain a foothold in Hollywood or elsewhere in the United States. With that in mind, he took some actions that in retrospect leave him vulnerable to criticism. In 1944, for example, Walt helped to found a conservative organization called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideas. One of the goals of the organization was to fight "Communists, radicals, and crackpots."
      When Walt was called upon to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he did so willingly. The  majority of his testimony dealt with his feelings that the strike had been manipulated by Communists. He testified that the Communists "smeared me... They distorted everything, they lied; ... they formed picket lines in front of the theaters and, well, they called my plant a sweatshop, and that is not true, and anybody in Hollywood would prove it otherwise." 
.When he was asked about his personal opinion of the Communist Party, Walt replied, "Well, I don't believe it is a political party. I believe it is an un-American thing. The thing that I resent the most is that they are able to get into these unions, take them over, and represent to the world that a group of people that are in my plant, that I know are good, 100-percent Americans, are trapped by this group and they are represented to the world as support[ing] all of those ideologies, and it is not so, and I feel that they really ought to be smoked out and shown up for what they are, so that all of the good, free causes in this country, all the liberalisms that really are American, can go out without the taint of communism."
Walt with his daughters, Sharon and Diane, as teenagers

Walt with his daughters, Sharon and Diane, as teenagers. Walt always cherished the American ideals of freedom and free  enterprise, and considered communism 'an un-American thing'.
 

 
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