Walt and HUAC

It’s really easy to chalk up all kinds of things to Daddy Issues. Because it’s so easy, it’s something of a cheat. If you don’t have anything else to say, blame Daddy Issues. That being said, if you want to understand pretty much anything about Walt Disney, you have to start by looking at Elias. You might not think this would include his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but it does. At least, it makes sense to say that it does; impossible at this late date to plumb the inner workings of Walt’s mind.

The Committee itself became permanent in 1945, determined to root out mostly just Communism in the US. There had been dabbling in rooting out fascism, but only dabbling, and as the war was winding down, it became all-Communism all the time. In 1947, fourteen friendly witnesses were called in to testify about Communists in Hollywood. Among them were Ronald Reagan, Adolphe Menjou—and Walt Disney. He didn’t speak for very long, and nothing he said was supported, but he did testify and he was at least vaguely opposed to Communism.

So how does Elias enter into it? Well, for one thing, the elder Disney had been a member of a union when the younger Disney was a boy, and he might have held a grudge about anything his father was involved in. This is pure speculation, and it may be getting a bit Freudian, but it’s not fully unreasonable speculation. Elias Disney was a failure and a bad father, who according to Bill Peet made Walt pay him rent when Walt was a literal child, and resistance against his father’s ideals would make sense for adult Walt.

More, though, it seems clear that Walt Disney wanted his company to be like the family he wanted to have had as a child, only with Walt as father. His resistance to the idea that his employees were unhappy stemmed from the idea that they should be happy to be part of the whole thing and look up to him and believe that he had their best interests at heart. They shouldn’t unionize because they should just trust him and let him tell them what they needed and pay them what he wanted. In an early “pizza party” move, he even put in a canteen instead of giving them a pay raise.

Given the mood of the era, it’s not surprising that a man with Walt’s particular set of beliefs could be persuaded that in fact it was all Communism. He also made the claim in his testimony that the strikers were a minority in his studio, which is almost certainly not true. Still, Walt did take the strike personally, because didn’t these animators know they were supposed to treat him like a father? And not his father, but, like, a good one? And now it was clear that those darn Communists were trying to convince people that he was a father like his own and how dare they?

Oh, let us not absolve Walt of responsibility, here. Just because he was warped by his father and politically naïve doesn’t mean he wasn’t part of a system that would destroy lives and careers. Perhaps he was not as wildly enthusiastic on the subject as Menjou, but he still testified, and he still blamed Communism for strikes trying to address systemic issues in the studio. He named names, albeit very few of them, and he agreed with questions naming other ones. If Walt didn’t go as far as various other people in the industry, he still caused harm and allowed harm to be caused.

Walt is seen as being further to the right and more bigoted than he actually was. He did become a Republican in 1940, and he did associate with the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Which was a right-wing organization that almost certainly had a strong tendency toward antisemitism because hello, most anti-Communist organizations! By all accounts he was too apolitical to have been aware of that connection. Walt may not have even realized that an organization didn’t have to be a political party to be worthy of protection under freedom of association.

The people in charge of the studio now should take a lesson from what Walt did nearly eighty years ago. He went along with a notorious system. He didn’t cave to political pressure; he went there willingly. He blamed others for what he himself authored. Maybe you can blame Elias for the situation, taking a long view, but that long view doesn’t matter in the lives of the people blacklisted, some of whom Walt himself specifically named. Walt went along with it, and people were harmed. Going along with people who want to control others’ beliefs will do that.