Disney’s Involvement in HUAC 1947

Disney’s Involvement in HUAC

By the time the House Un-American Activities Committee called its first witnesses, it had already compiled a list of potential Communist subversives with the help of files from the F.B.I. Walt Disney came to be personally involved in the investigations when HUAC called him to testify (on a voluntary basis) on October 24th.

Disney, along with others like Ronald Reagan, Ayn Rand and Gary Cooper, were collectively known as “the friendly witnesses,” so called because of their willingness to cooperate rather enthusiastically with the committee and whose loyalty and “Americanism is not questioned.” Most were also members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, the Conservative red-baiting organization that some have suggested actually helped compile the original list of Communist Party members in Hollywood that HUAC used for its investigations.

Disney's testimony before HUAC quickly revealed his bitterness to the 1941 cartoonists strike at his studios as well as his attitudes towards Communism. After an introductory spate of biographical questions, the lead investigator H. A. Smith asks Disney about his wartime propaganda shorts: “From those pictures that you made, have you any opinion as to whether or not the films can be used effectively to disseminate propaganda?” Disney replied that he thought they did. Of course, this question was not a random or insignificant one but rather had a clear purpose: it tried to establish for the public record Disney's credibility and knowledge on such matters as propaganda, which would serve to bolster and legitimate Disney's subsequent testimony regarding Communist influence in Hollywood. Disney continued, explaining how he felt his films were successful: “Well, on the one for the Treasury on taxes, it was to let the people know that taxes were important in the war effort. As they explained to me, they had 13,000,000 new taxpayers...” Disney did go on to assure the committee though that his studio no longer employs propaganda.
Afterwards, the questioning from Smith and Disney's testimony dealt with the heart of the matter.

• Smith: Do you have any people in your studio at the present time that
• you believe are Communist or Fascist, employed there?
•
• Disney: No; at the present time I feel that everybody in my studio is
• one-hundred-percent American.
•
• Smith: Have you had at any time, in your opinion, in the past, have you
• at any time in the past had any Communists employed at your studio?
•
• Disney: Yes; in the past I had some people that I definitely feel were
• Communists.
•
• Smith: As a matter of fact, Mr. Disney, you experienced a strike at your
• studio, did you not?
•
• Disney: Yes.
•
• Smith: And is it your opinion that that strike was instituted by members
• of the Communist Party to serve their purposes?
•
• Disney: Well, it proved itself so with time, and I definitely feel it was
• a Communist group trying to take over my artists and they did take
• them over.
•
• CHAIRMAN (Parnell Thomas): Do you say they did take them over?

Beyond the simplified and whitewashed accounts of the 1941 strike, Disney's testimony is quiet revelatory on another account: Disney equated Communism (and Fascism) with the antithesis of everything that was American. In other words, being a Communist or a “fellow traveler” was inherently seditious and anti-American. The testimony also reveals the extent to which much of the anti-communism of Disney (and of many others) was based on faulty assumptions and varied according to personal whims.

Disney identified Herb Sorrell as the individual that was the at the heart of the strike and described an encounter he had with Sorrell in his office. According to Disney's version of events, Sorrell was threatening in the encounter: "I have all of the tools of the trade sharpened," and apparently Sorrell continued to say “that [Disney] couldn't stand the ridicule or the smear of a strike...I will smear you and I will make a dust bowl out of your plant.” And to this, again according to his own testimony, Disney responded: “I told him that it was a matter of principle with me...that I couldn't go on working with my boys feeling that I had sold them down the river.” This account of the encounter, whether historically accurate or not, demonstrates Disney's fundamentally paternalistic attitude towards his employees. But more importantly, it shows Uncle Walt's perception of his idealized self and therefore the idealized person: a man that is bound by duty to protect those under his care; a man whose ideals never wavered under external pressure, no matter how strong.

The fundamentally trivial nature upon which much of the American anti-communism in the post-war era was based is also demonstrated vividly by Disney's response to a question by chairman Thomas: “The first people to smear me...were all of the Commie front organizations. I can't remember them all, they change so often, but one that is clear in my mind is the League of Women Shoppers, The People's World, The Daily Worker, and the PM magazine in New York.” The next day, Disney sent a telegram besieging the Committee chairman to strike from the official record the reference (he had made the day earlier) to the League of Women Shoppers. In fact, it was not a Communist front organization as he claimed. Disney went on to further identify supposed Communists that had worked at his studios. David Hilberman was a Communist “because he had no religion” and had spent time at the “Moscow Art Theater.” Maurice Howard was a Communist and so was William Pomerance too; but then again, “no one has any way of proving those things.”

What is interesting to note about Disney's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in general is the language he uses and the imagery that is evoked as a result; the themes of his testimony could have very easily been borrowed from one of Disney's many movie scripts. The workers at the studios were “good, solid Americans.” They were “my boys” just defending “their American rights.” While the accused Communists were often described very differently: “they” were un-American and we are told that we must “fight them,” otherwise, “it” will interfere with the rights of the people. In other words, a language of anonymity was used to great emotional effect, evoking imagery of a David and Goliath struggle, where Disney was the David and the amorphous but omnipresent Communist enemy was the Goliath. “I know that I have been handicapped out there in fighting it,” Disney testified. But in the end, how could he lose?

This imagery of Good against Evil was present and took center stage in Disney's movies throughout his career in animation. The first animated cartoon with a synchronized soundtrack to be released begins to deal with similar themes. Steamboat Willie, released in 1929, opens with the lovable and jovial Mickey Mouse steering his ship when to the viewer's surprise, the large and threatening Captain Pete makes his entry (signaled by an abrupt change in the tone of music) and forcefully removes Mickey from the steer. As the animated short progresses, Mickey must also deal with a loud-mouthed but enviably-positioned parrot who mocks the Mouse's misfortunes endlessly.

In the end, Mickey “teaches” the parrot a lesson but never is able to deal with the Captain. Presumably, this is an attempt by Disney at portraying the “David” but also reminding the audience that a level of authority must always exist and be respected. In his latter career, Disney's movies would be more uncompromising in their representations of the “Davidian” battle that must be waged. In the 1961 release of One Hundred and One dalmatians, the antagonist Creulla De Vil kidnaps a group of lovable Dalmatians in order to be used as fur only to have her plans ruined by the dogs.

The Roots of the HUAC Committee

The Roots of the HUAC Committee

The roots of the House Un-American Activities Committee go back to the 1930's when it was initially known as the Special Committee on Un-American Activity.

Created by the Liberal Democratic Senator from New York Samuel Dickenstein, the main focus of its investigations were domestic American Fascism and Nazism. In 1938, with its status as a committee of the House of Representatives extended and now under the leadership of conservative House member Martin Dies, its new task was to investigate subversive organizations and unamerican propaganda; this quickly took an anti-communist tone under the aggressive leadership of its conservative chairman. The Dies committee, as it was known, also became a convenient conservative tool for reducing many hated New Deal programs by linking them with the taint of Communism.

The Federal Theater Project, a New Deal initiative that kept actors employed, was investigated by Dies for its alleged Communist themes. In 1941, a colleague of Dies', Jack Tenney, started his own commission in California investigating subversive activity, a decision partly inspired by Disney himself. The first person that Tenney called to testify was Herbert Sorell, the man that was responsible for unionizing Disney studio employees.

By the time 1947 came around, HUAC was a permanent standing committee and refocused its efforts once more towards subversiveness in Hollywood. As the authors of The Inquisition in Hollywood have put it:

“Like a beacon in the darkening political night of postwar America, Hollywood attracted the moths of reaction again and again.”

But in 1947, there was also an unprecedented amount of new measures taken to clamp down on Communist influence, with HUAC being but one of them. The Taft-Hartley Act, which sought to reduce the power of Unions and Communist influence within them and the Federal governments loyalty-security programs for federal employees, were both instituted in the same year setting the stage for HUAC.

This is not to say of course that political anti-communism had not existed prior to HUAC. As Ellen Schreker has noted, anticommunist forces would first come to influence national politics during World War I, when “national security became central to the repression of left-wing dissent.” She goes on to document the many political uses of the wartime espionage and sedition laws to stifle union activity and fight the “reds.”28 But it is important to recognize as well that the climate of McCarthyism was reflective of the high level of anxiety in American post-war society and the highly corrosive influence of a minority of powerful Conservative figures who had the ability to push their anti-liberal agenda. These Conservatives included the likes of Eric Johnston, the President of the Motion Pictures Producers' Association, who cooperated with the Hollywood investigations and engaged in self-censorship.

Another more notable Conservative who was only too willing to cooperate with the Hollywood investigations was Walt Disney himself.

Walt Disney - A brief Biography

A Brief Biography of Cartoonist Walt Disney

“It's a Matter of Principle with Me.” Disney testifying before Congress.

Walt Disney, born in 1901 to a Canadian father and German mother, learned the importance of hard work at a very young age. During the Great War, driven by a strong sense of duty, the result of his father's traditional Victorian values as well as an intense jealousy of his older brother's service in the navy, Disney devised a plot to enlist in the war effort by crossing into Canada and signing up there, a necessity in order to circumvent American age restrictions.9 Disney's first experiences in animation and business would go a long way in explaining his anti-communist zeal and willingness to testify before HUAC in later years.

In 1929, Disney was dealt a formative experience when a majority of his employees deserted him and took up employment with a competitor. Again, in 1931, Disney's close friend and lead animator, Ub Iwerks, abandoned him to start his own company. Indeed, Disney very early on concluded that the animation production industry was an “out-and-out cutthroat business” where one would be “putting a knife in your back and he'll be laughing and having a drink with you.”

Disney's later role as a willing anti-communist soldier can also be explained by his keen awareness of and subsequent adaptation to the changing American culture of any given time. As his biographer Steven Watts puts it, Disney “had a visceral instinct for the rhythms and emotions of mass culture.” For example, the animated cartoon The Whoopee Party (1932), as cited by Watts, was representative of the new emerging mass culture in America by its conscious mix of a fast-paced, upbeat musical score along with the portrayal of Mickey Mouse as a hyper-prominent figure, which worked well in the new cultural landscape that saw the rise of the celebrity culture.

Disney's work also included patriotic themes as he enlisted for the war effort during World War II. In 1941, the Lockheed Aircraft Company began a four year collaboration with Disney making instructional films for the war. The Canadian National Film Board enlisted Disney for a series of four animated shorts dealing with, among other things, troop training. The American army was also involved, subsequently taking over Walt Disney studios in California in order to support the war effort; at a certain point, a Navy commander would occupy Disney's personal office for two months, but Disney never did find the courage to say much.

One of the animated shorts that was produced by Disney for the American war effort was Education for Death: the making of a Nazi, based on a previous book by Gregor Ziemer of the same name. The short opens with the narrator asking “What makes a Nazi? How does he get that way?” Later, we see a mock scene from the Sleeping Beauty story with Hitler portrayed as the hero reawakening a slumbering Mother Germany. The short goes on to detail how the Nazis educate their young from an early age to become ruthless killers. According to Disney's view, as represented in the short, Nazis are ruthless enemies much akin to animals who are bred to hate and that such qualities were of a permanent, unchanging nature. This extreme and dehumanizing view of the Nazis demonstrates Disney's tendency to moral absolutism, a behavior that he would exhibit in the future as well.

Disney had also inherited from his father, who was a firm liberal, a politics of egalitarianism and populism. In 1948, Disney signed a letter urging Congress to pass a $300 million education bill which had the support of labor unions and was being stalled by a conservative congress. But he also was a believer in the traditional values of hierarchy and stability in the home, what could today be referred to as “family values.” This resulted in a pervading sense of moralism throughout his cartoons and movies, a point missed by some critics who tend to focus almost entirely on the technical aspects of Disney's cartoons and movies. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Disney's first full-length animated feature, we are presented with a version of the idealized woman. In the opening scenes of the movie, we see Snow White happily tending to her garden, cleaning and singing, wishing for her prince to come save her. A little further in the movie, we see the seven dwarfs arriving at the cottage only to notice that it has been cleaned. When they finally meet Snow White in the upstairs room, she quickly besieges them to wash up before dinner, as the inside of the cottage sparkles from the workings of an over-enthusiastic but duty bound woman.

Disney's moralizing has indeed left a lasting legacy on the publics imagination until modern times. When the issue of building a Disney historical theme park in Virginia arose in 1995, one critic drew an editorial cartoon of Goofy running along side a Vietnamese girl that had just been struck with napalm, with the caption “I loved hearing Mickey read the emancipation proclamation in his funny little voice.”
In sum, Disney's early business experiences, including the strike of 1941, in addition to his traditional sense of personal duty and morality along with his keen ability to discern the cultural trends of his time, would position him to play a leading role in the institutionalized anti-communism of post-war America. It would also lay the groundwork for Disney's relationship with the F.B.I. as well as his testimony before the HUAC investigations.