Walt Disney, the man of a thousand stories.
I’m sure you’ve heard your share of things about this cartoon mogul from him being a
closeted Nazi, to a currently frozen head in a tank of liquid nitrogen right now.
For just one person, he certainly made a mark in the world.
Let’s talk about…
Disney.
Hi, I’m Tristan Johnson, and this is Step Back History.
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Remember a few videos back when I said this?
*clip from Swastika video* Well, I wanted to follow up on my thrown shade,
and for good or ill Walt Disney’s a key figure in cultural history.
He was actually born in Chicago in 1901, but his family moved around a lot throughout his
youth as his father made stabs at farming, delivering newspapers, and working in a jelly
and fruit juice factory.
Walt himself was more of an artist than a student dropped out of high school at age
16, and with a forged birth certificate managed to join the Red Cross Ambulance Corps to aid
the US army in the first World War.
Hey, that rhymes!
Disney magic!
He arrived in France to help out… in late 1918, shortly after the signing of the armistice
that ended the First World War.
He helped out with some random tasks before eventually getting a discharge the next year.
He moved to Kansas City after that, hoping to become a newspaper cartoonist.
He quickly became an illustrator for magazine ads, as they didn’t use photos all that
much in magazines back then, and did some drawings for movie theatres.
He reportedly enjoyed it but was more interested in animation.
Enter into his life making cartoons.
The most famous mouse in history was born early in the Disney timeline.
After a few successful cartoons based on Alice in Wonderland, he developed an original character
he called Mortimer Mouse.
He eventually decided Mickey would be a better name.
His debut was in the 1928 short film Steamboat Willie and was one of the first cartoons ever
made to have synchronised sound effects.
He was the late 20s version of a viral sensation.
There were Mickey mouse clubs for children, and in the truly American fashion the success
quickly followed up with merchandising and comic strips.
The first voice over for Mickey premiered in 1929 The Karnival Kid.
Mickey’s first words were hot dog.
Eventually, Disney decided to voice Mickey himself, which he did until 1947.
His animation company became a massive empire.
He got into feature films with Snow White, and during his life collecting something like
22 Oscars and another 59 nominations.
But Old Walt wanted more.
Disney wanted to start a little theme park near his studio in Burbank, but these plans
became more and more ambitious.
It got to the point where in 1953, he had to hire a team of researchers to find the
perfect place to build a theme park, factoring population growth, weather patterns, and transportation
routes.
They eventually found the home of Disneyland, a 160-acre grove of Orange trees in Anaheim
California.
They broke ground in 1954, and on July 17 a year later Disneyland opened and it was
a… disaster.
There was a surge of counterfeit tickets, leading to too many guests.
Rides broke, the park was unfinished, oh and there was a gas leak that forced part of the
park to close.
The TV broadcast celebrating the park opening even had technical difficulties.
Early jitters aside, Walt Disney loved his park.
He even kept an apartment there.
One of his projects was a utopian city concept.
There was a terrifying angle to what he considered Utopia, but we will talk about that later.
Now, we should discuss how Disney was not some magical creature divorced from his dark
side, nor from historical context.
As many of you have likely heard, the Disney company was involved in creating propaganda
for the United States during the Second World War.
It began with some short educational films, such as a 1942 film “The New Spirit” which
taught people how to file their taxes to support the war effort.
Many of the propaganda films starred Donald Duck and were in thousands of movie theatres.
One even got an academy award nomination.
The education videos turned into military training videos, and Disney also designed
a lot of military insignias.
Disney was initially hesitant to get involved in such a way.
He had built a reputation for himself in such politically divisive times as a non-political
maker of cartoons.
However, he began to come around, producing blatant works of propaganda for the US army
like the probably famous film “Der Fuhrer's Face”, a film making fun of Nazis starring
Donald Duck.
He started to take this seriously, producing some pretty terrifying films such as Education
for Death: The Making of a Nazi.
He also became obsessed with a book called Victory Through Air Power and adapted it to
drum up support of the use of long-range strategic bombing.
It apparently worked, getting the attention of both President Roosevelt and British Prime-Minister
Winston Churchill.
I can’t show these in this video due to copyright, something else we can blame Disney
for.
If you can go find these wartime Disney films they’re quite a surreal watch, and with
no more than a little blatant racism when depicting the Japanese.
Either way, they are quite a fascinating blip in American cultural history.
Here’s where we start to see an infamous side of Disney, however.
He criticised a lot of parts of the Nazi ideology through these propaganda films, but one thing
he never criticised was the Nazi regime’s antisemitism.
Disney was a very socially conservative man.
He was a staunch capitalist, and despite criticising a lot of Nazi ideology in films like Education
for Death, embodied many of the very things he railed against.
Rumours are still commonplace that Disney was a Nazi, and while it would be unfair without
evidence to call him a Nazi with a capital N, he definitely had aspects of their ideology
in his politics.
The better term would probably be Nazi-sympathizer.
Before the war, there were meetings of people openly supporting and interested in the Nazi
form of government.
These groups were small, but reportedly fiercely loyal and were open to the public.
On a few occasions, Disney and his lawyer Gunther Lessig were spotted in attendance
along with a lot of other of the Nazi-aligned Hollywood elite.
This organisation was the German American Bund, which would eventually become the American
Nazi Party of today.
More on them in my Neo-Nazi video, or my video on hate groups.
I’m getting so sick of Nazis…
why did they have to become relevant again?
He also hosted a visit from the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl when she came to America
to promote her film Olympia in 1938.
You might remember her if you ever took a film class as the director behind the infamous
Triumph of the Will Nazi propaganda film.
This was only about a month after the notorious Kristallnacht, a night of brutal assaults
on German Jewish businesses and homes.
You could write this off as the west’s all too comfortable relationship with the Nazi
regime that we try hard to forget happened, but his peers even criticised Disney for this
act.
Even after the war, this whiff of antisemitism spilt over into his 50s politics.
Amongst the hardcore anti-communists of the red scare, there was a common association
between Jews and communists, which might have fuelled their… enthusiasm for destroying
the lives of anyone a little too far left of centre, but I don’t wanna spoil too much
of next week’s video… oops!
Disney was a full and happy player in Mccarthy’s purges.
He was a member of many of the 50s witch hunting organisations like the Motion Picture Alliance
for the Preservation of American Ideals, which was associated with the infamous House Un-American
Activities Committee.
The former being notorious for it being quietly a very anti semitic organisation.
Some folks like Disney’s own grand-niece Meryl Streep have confirmed the Alliance was
an anti semitic industry lobbying group.
Not too surprisingly then, Disney also had… opinions about organised labour.
That utopic city EPCOT he imagined?
It was a place where unions would be illegal, democracy nonexistent, and of course no social
safety net.
All enforced by his own written laws, and a proto-police security force.
It was like a prototype of the gated community.
And this ethos followed into the corporation he created.
In the 1960s, the Disney corporation lobbied to create the Reedy Creek Improvement District,
and the government gave broad authority over it to the Disney corporation.
They to this day have pretty much complete control over the land and do whatever they
want with it.
It’s political insulation to protect them from labour regulations and competition.
A true model for the corporatist worldview.
Walt Disney was a longtime smoker, and in 1966 he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
Only a month later, on December 15th he died.
Not long after he died, there was a rumour that he had been cryogenically frozen.
This is actually a myth.
He was cremated, and his ashes are in a mausoleum in California.
The rumour probably persists because the first person to be cryogenically frozen was put
on ice in January of 1967, just a month after Disney’s death.
A history of cryogenic freezing that might be a fun video.
If only I had a know your sci-fi series…
Today, Disney is a massive corporation, and frequently lobbies governments to change policy
to their will.
The US’s extremely long-term for copyright being an example, or the fact that Disney
just flat out bought up a ton of Fox’s properties in the not too distant past without the word
antitrust flying anywhere.
In many ways, the corporation Disney made with his values is responsible for a lot of
the corporate dominance in the United States today.
It’s also responsible for a lot, and I mean like a METRIC FUCKTON of our cultural masonry.
It’s as ingrained a part of America as apple pie, burgers, and for-profit medicine.
Welcome to the end!
I wanna thank Cody from the Alternate History Hub for making the Disney voices for this
video!
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I’d especially like to thank Don and Kerry Johnson as well as Kolbeinn Mani for their
generosity.
The theme song is by 12Tone, and come back next time for more Step Back.