by Neal Gabler
The biggest assault on the Hollywood left wing, however, was yet to come. In early October 1943 the University of California at Los Angeles, under the auspices of the League of American Writers, hosted a conference of writers from South America. Walt was among the attendees at the opening session, along with Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Mann. Either during or shortly after the conference James Kevin McGuinness, a reactionary screenwriter who had led attempts to undermine the Screen Writers Guild in the mid-1930s, hosted a dinner with like-minded friends where he and his guests stewed over the conference, which they evidently regarded as another sign of Communist perfidy, and decided to form an “investigating group” to combat what they saw as Communist influence in the film industry. Sometime in late October or early November thirty members of the industry met at Chasen’s restaurant, a Hollywood hangout, to formalize the group, and again at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on November 29 and December 9 to draw up an organization plan. Among the names floated for possible membership at the December meeting was Walt Disney.
Though Walt had never been a joiner, after the strike it probably didn’t take much convincing to get him to participate. He called on Rupert Hughes, another notoriously reactionary screenwriter, on the way home from the studio on January 31, apparently to discuss the political situation, and on February 4 he attended a dinner at Hughes’s home for an organization that was listed in his desk diary as the “Pro-American Committee of Hollywood” but that had actually been named the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals—the group that had been born at James McGuinness’s dinner party. Later that night at a meeting at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel attended by some two hundred members of the film community, director Sam Wood was elected president of the new organization and set designer Cedric Gibbons, writer/director Norman Taurog, and Disney were elected vice presidents. In a declaration of principles, the MPA proclaimed: “We find ourselves in sharp revolt against a rising tide of Communism, Fascism and kindred beliefs” and vowed to do battle against anyone who tried to “divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that gave it birth,” though it was really Communism, not any of the other beliefs, that exercised them, including Walt Disney.
The next month the MPA escalated the battle. It wrote a letter to Senator Robert Reynolds of North Carolina accusing the film industry of harboring Communists and using as proof the fact that people like Walt Disney had felt the need to form an organization to combat the threat. Reynolds placed the letter in the Congressional Record, though the real purpose of the MPA was not to get Congress’s attention so much as to spur Congress to investigate. There had even been rumors that Representative Martin Dies, the chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, was retiring so that he could become the head of the MPA. Up to this point there had been a good deal of intramural squabbling between the Right and the Left in Hollywood. But with the Reynolds letter the MPA—and Walt Disney—had crossed a line. They weren’t simply attacking Communists; they were attacking their own industry.
The Left, which had so often ridiculed Hollywood in the past even as it was taking its money, ironically leaped to the industry’s defense. The Screen Writers Guild called a meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel on May 2 at which thirty-eight unions passed a resolution “reaffirming confidence in the achievements of the motion picture industry” and promising to protect it against “irresponsible and unwarranted attacks.” (The FBI, which was monitoring the entire situation at the invitation of the MPA, called the movement Communist-inspired.) Others accused the MPA of proto-fascism. “[T]he public pronouncements of the more active members of the M.P.A. are modeled strictly along orthodox Red-baiting and witch-hunting lines,” wrote screenwriter and playwright Elmer Rice, “…and one need not look far below the surface to discover that the organization and its leading spirits are deeply tinged with isolationism and anti-unionism and off-the-record, of course—with strong overtones of anti-Semitism and Jim Crowism.” Meanwhile an informant had told the FBI that the executive secretary of the Los Angeles Communist Party had been discussing ways of sullying the MPA, but the secretary had exempted Walt Disney from the criticism because Disney had done such fine work for South America.
But if the Communist Party was sparing Walt Disney, his friend, producer Walter Wanger, was not. Wanger and Walt engaged in some frank talks about the MPA, and Wanger sent Walt a scathing letter that he had written to one of the MPA’s officials in which he blasted the group for attracting “irresponsible people” and permitting them to speak for it and for picturing the leaders of the industry as “at best, inept, and as at worst, fools.” And Wanger was worried about Walt, about where he was headed. Walt had sent him an article by the red-baiting columnist George Sokolsky lacerating Vice President Henry Wallace, for whom Walt had once attended a dinner, and urged Wanger to read it. Wanger wrote back regretfully, “The minute you become a producer of the Sokolsky theme in your films, I am afraid you will never make a SNOW WHITE, a DUMBO, a SALUDOS AMIGOS, a BAMBI or a PINOCCHIO. These pictures are full of faith, decency, ideals and charm.” And he closed: “You had better look in the mirror and not be impressed by rabble rousers.”
But he had been impressed by the rabble rousers, and he hadn’t made another Snow White, Pinocchio, or Bambi. Though he publicly professed to be nonpartisan—“As an independent voter I owe allegiance to no political party,” he told a national radio audience before endorsing 1944 Republican presidential nominee New York governor Thomas Dewey—he donated heavily to the Republican Party, allowed a Dewey rally on the studio grounds, delivered a speech for Dewey at the Los Angeles Coliseum, and was selected as one of California’s electors should Dewey win, even if he was stirred less by enthusiasm for Dewey, who was a comparative moderate, than by antipathy to the Roosevelt administration. To a Republican fund-raiser, he wrote, “I’m sorry I can only give money.”
Yet by 1947 he could give more, and he did. The invitation that the MPA had tendered to Congress back in 1944 had finally been accepted. With Congress coming under Republican control after the 1946 midterm elections, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) announced that it was going to investigate Hollywood, and in September 1947 it issued subpoenas to nineteen so-called “unfriendly” witnesses (the term was actually the Hollywood Reporter’s) and twenty-six “friendlies.”* Among those “friendlies” was Walt Disney, the quintessentially American face of Hollywood. Walt wasn’t a passive recipient. He was firmly entrenched now with the professional red-baiters on the Hollywood right—McGuinness, Hughes, Wood and actors like Adolphe Menjou, Ward Bond, and Robert Taylor. Throughout the year he continued to attend MPA meetings and meet with fellow conservatives like George Murphy and with the staff of HUAC. He even had Gunther Lessing submit questions to the committee that he thought he should be asked. Then on October 18 he left for New York for a brief stay to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Mickey Mouse at a dinner before heading to Washington for the hearings. The juxtaposition of the celebration with the testimony showed what a long twenty years it had been. He had gone from iconoclast to guardian of the social order.
He arrived at the less-than-packed House Caucus Room on Capitol Hill on the afternoon of October 24, 1947, in a sober gray flannel suit, albeit with a loud tie, his ordinarily wild hair plastered to his head, the first witness of that session on the second day of the hearings. (Actors Gary Cooper and Ronald Reagan, among others, had testified the first day, when the Caucus Room had been jammed.) After preliminary inquiries about Walt’s background in the film industry and his producing propaganda during the war, committee co-counsel H. A. Smith asked the big question: were there any Communists or fascists at his studio? No, Walt asserted in his soft, flat, nasally midwestern voice, “I feel that everybody in my studio is 100 percent American.” But had there been Communists at the studio in the past? Yes, Walt answered, and proceeded to tell the story of how union chief Herbert Sorrell strong-armed the studio into the strike, even though, he said, his employee
s, whom Sorrell claimed to be representing, actually protested against Sorrell’s union. When Walt said that he wouldn’t recognize the union, Sorrell, who, Walt told the committee, he believed was a Communist, sneered that he would “smear” Walt, and Sorrell had been true to his word. Walt couldn’t remember all the groups that smeared and boycotted him—“one that is clear in my mind is the League of Women Voters”—but he did cite People’s World, the Daily Worker, and PM as three publications that he knew had flayed him. He couldn’t remember the Communist employees who had incited his studio either—only the union agitator David Hilberman. And as for whether the Communist Party deserved to be outlawed, Walt called the party an “un-American thing,” though he said he wasn’t qualified to determine whether it would violate rights to banish it. Chairman J. Parnell Thomas praised his films and his testimony, and Walt Disney’s day was done.
Walt had played his part—the part of the aggrieved hero of the common man, the Horatio Alger industrialist, who had been besieged by left-wing ideologues—and H. A. Smith called his testimony “as effective as that of any witness.” Save for one problem. In citing Communist organizations that had attacked him in the wake of the strike, Walt had indicted the nonpartisan civic group the League of Women Voters. The league, astonished, immediately ordered an investigation to determine if any of its members in the California chapter had taken part in the Disney labor dispute, and an officer wrote Walt asking for the names of the women involved. Walt answered the request with a tepid retraction to the committee, saying that in 1941 “several women [supporting the strikers] represented themselves as being from the League of Women Voters,” but averred that he was not criticizing the current league. Meanwhile, Gunther Lessing was frantically conducting his own investigation and discovered four letters in his file, at least one of which Walt had seen, from the Hollywood League of Women Shoppers supporting the strikers, though Lessing also wrote Walt that he thought the local chapter of the League of Women Voters “appear[s] to have followed the party line about the time of the Disney strike,” which was patently false. A few weeks later Lessing conceded and wrote the league to apologize for Walt’s mistake, suggesting that Walt would “recommend your organization whenever the opportunity presents itself.”
But with his appearance and his careless denunciation, Walt Disney had gotten himself ensnared in the politics of red-baiting. Shortly after his testimony he was invited to an American Legion rally at which the legion’s commander, James F. O’Neil who had been spearheading a drive for an industry blacklist of Communists and Communist supporters, would be in attendance. Walt begged off, saying he would be at Smoke Tree at the time for a much-needed rest, but he added, “I would have no hesitancy in joining your group,” and said, “I am sure the Hollywood people who were in Washington will all be glad to attend.” When a number of studio heads met in November at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York to discuss instituting their own blacklist, Walt sent his New York publicity chief, William Levy, who approved the plan for the studio. “Blacklisting me would have been embarrassing for him,” Maurice Rapf observed, blaming Roy and Lessing for stoking Walt’s anti-Communism. “He wouldn’t have liked to fire me, but he would have fired me, of course,” Rapf said, had Rapf not already left the studio. Rapf was right. Walt did enforce a blacklist, and he didn’t do so reluctantly. He was among the first subscribers to Alert, which billed itself as the “weekly report on Communism in California,” and he routinely cooperated with the FBI, even funneling names of prospective employees to the bureau for clearance.
Of course by this time it was no secret that Walt Disney was a fervent anti-Communist. Another question—one that would haunt him for the rest of his life and even haunt his reputation decades after he died—was whether he was also an anti-Semite. As with race, one could certainly point to some casual insensitivity. Shortly after the release of Three Little Pigs in 1933, Rabbi J. X. Cohen, the director of the American Jewish Congress, wrote Walt angrily that a scene in which the wolf was portrayed as a Jewish peddler was so “vile, revolting and unnecessary as to constitute a direct affront to the Jews,” especially in light of what was then happening in Germany, and he asked that the offending scene be removed. Roy, speaking for Walt, responded that he felt the scene was neither vile nor revolting, that the studio had Jewish friends and business associates whom it would not dare to demean, and that the characterization was no different from that of Jewish comedians in vaudeville or on the screen. (Years later, when Pigs was re-released, the scene was reanimated.) Whether it came from this kind of insensitivity or from the fact that the Disney studio was one of the few in Hollywood at the time that was not run by Jews, a perception apparently arose that the company was anti-Semitic. Kay Kamen, the head of the company’s merchandising arm and himself a Jew, seemed to acknowledge this when he sent Roy a clipping of a photo of Walt and Lillian from a Hebrew newspaper with a note, “This proves that we are not prejudiced.”
How any of this translated into Walt’s and Roy’s personal feelings about Jews is difficult to determine. In 1933 Roy had called one business agent with whom he was dealing a “cheap kike,” and A. V. Cauger’s son said his father told him that Walt had groused about Jews when he returned from New York after his fateful showdown with Charlie Mintz in 1928, though this may very well have been Cauger’s own interpretation of Walt’s postmortem and not Walt’s own remarks. In fact, Walt had been around Jews all his life. There were a number of Jews at the Benton School in Kansas City and an even larger contingent at McKinley High School in Chicago. And though he did make insensitive ethnic remarks and occasional slurs, talking about “coon voices” or referring to an Italian band in Pinocchio as a “bunch of garlic eaters,” he was tolerant where it counted most and where it wasn’t for public display—in his personal life. He had sent Diane to a Catholic school and wrote his sister Ruth that though some people, presumably Lillian, were worried about a conversion, he felt differently. “I think she is intelligent enough to know what she wants to do,” he said, “and I feel that whatever her decision may be is her privilege…. I have explained to her that Catholics are people just like us and, basically, there is no difference.” And he said that by giving her this exposure, he hoped to “create a spirit of tolerance within her.”
There is some dispute whether the same spirit of tolerance prevailed at the studio, but of the Jews who worked there, it was hard to find any who thought Walt was an anti-Semite. Joe Grant, who had been an artist, the head of the model department, and the storyman responsible for Dumbo along with Dick Huemer, declared emphatically that Walt was not an anti-Semite. “Some of the most influential people at the studio were Jewish,” Grant recalled, thinking no doubt of himself, production manager Harry Tytle, and Kay Kamen, who once quipped that Disney’s New York office had more Jews than the Book of Leviticus. Maurice Rapf concurred that Walt was not anti-Semitic; he was just a “very conservative guy.” Still, when Tytle—who had changed the spelling of his name from Teitel, shortened from Teitelbaum, to hide his ethnicity—joined the studio, he felt compelled to tell Walt that he was half-Jewish. To which Walt snapped that if he were all Jewish, he would be better.
Moreover Walt contributed frequently to Jewish charities: the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of the City of New York, Yeshiva College, the Jewish Home for the Aged, even after the war to the American League for a Free Palestine. At the very time that Walt was appearing before HUAC, Ned Depinet of RKO had passed along a folio from some friends trying to get Walt to make a Jewish-themed film, which certainly would have been unlikely had they thought of Walt as anti-Semitic. A decade later, in 1955, he would be named Man of the Year by the Beverly Hills Lodge of the B’nai B’rith, the organization that had branded him an “arch-reactionary” during the Song of the South dustup. The plaque read: “For exemplifying the best tenets of American citizenship and inter-group understanding, and interpreting into action the ideals of B’nai B’rith, Benevolence, Brotherly Love and Harmony, and for bringing laughter and
happiness to all people.”
So why then was Walt so often called anti-Semitic? For one thing, the idea was encouraged by disgruntled employees like Art Babbitt and David Hilberman. Hilberman told one Disney biographer that an animator named Zack Schwartz had been fired shortly after the presentation of the union cards. “He wasn’t a troublemaker, he was a good artist and didn’t give anybody a hard time. What he did have was the last name of Schwartz and a big nose.” (In fact, Walt seldom involved himself in hiring or firing except at the very top tier.) Many years later an animator and director named David Swift, also a Jew, told another biographer that when he informed Walt he was leaving the studio for a job at Columbia, Walt called him into the office, feigned a Yiddish accent, and said, “Okay, Davy Boy, off you go to work with those Jews. It’s where you belong, with those Jews.” When Swift returned to the studio after the war, he claimed that Walt, still resentful, told him that the studio hadn’t “come to any harm while you were away with those Jews.” It is certainly possible that Walt made these remarks out of bitterness shortly after the strike, though it would have been uncharacteristic of him even under those circumstances. No one else, not even Art Babbitt, had ever accused Walt of making anti-Semitic slurs or taunts, and Babbitt hated Walt. In any case, for a man who had been insulted, Swift always treated Walt cordially, often effusively, and said he owed everything to him. Walt, in return, told Swift when Swift left the studio a second time that “there is still a candle burning in the window if you ever want to come back.”
