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Page 16 of
28 |
Creative
Explosion: |
Walt's Political Outlook |
Was Walt anti-Semitic? No evidence
has ever been brought forward.
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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 was the great
formative event in Walt's political outlook.
He believed it was Communist-inspired.
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On October 24, 1947, Walt testified before
the House Un-American Activities
Committee
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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 always cherished the
American ideals of freedom and free enterprise,
and considered communism 'an un-American
thing'.
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