I saw a documentary about Disney a while ago and heard about the accusations there. (don’t remeber exactly what they said though)
I find this a bit hard to believe, but he may have had som sympathy for the nazis back in the 1930’s and 40’s.
Does anyone know anything about this ?
I don’t have an answer, other than I’ve never heard of any anti-Semitism. I don’t remember reading anything about it in Mouse Tails, but it’s been a long time. Still, I think I would have remembered.
Anti-Semetism was very common in the 1930s. Charles Lindberg was an ant-Semite, as was Henry Ford. That doesn’t make it right, but that’s how the country was back then.
Disney’s artists designed the Flying Tiger logo for Gen. Claire Chenault’s volunteer squadron of the same name. Disney characters were not unknown on U.S. aircraft either. Interestingly, a German ace (I think it was Adolf Galland) had a Mickey Mouse on his Messerschmidt Bf-109. I understand Disney did not endorse that one.
I suspect you’re thinking of Henry Ford.
Or, perhaps, the rumor that Hitler loved Disney’s Three Little Pigs cartoon, & would go around Berchesgarden (sp?) singing “Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf”?
I’m not kidding about the existence of either rumor.
That, in 1938, Disney released a film that was little short of Nazi propaganda.
There was an oblique reference to it in the Simpson’s (Itchy and Scratchy Land was a Disneyland-type place where the guard wore SS uniforms).
I would butcher the quote, so I’ll let someone else provide it.
I first heard of Walt’s fondness for Adolph 30+ years ago.
Would love to see Disnay Inc. finally nailed on it.
Yes, I emailed them - the response was ‘we made only anti-Nazi cartoons’. I didn’t mention ‘cartoon’ - I believe the film in question was live-action, so their statement was not, technically, a lie.
Disney (as a good capitalist) was vehemently anti-communist (as that was defined in the 1930s - 1960s) and is reported to have turned over the names of various Hollywood “communist sympathizers” to the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. (For which he is generally condemned by advocates of free speech.) Among the names were a couple of prominent Jewish members of the Hollywood community. From that action he has garnered the label (in some circles) of being anti-semitic.
He may or may not have been anti-semitic, but I have never seen any evidence that he was pro-Nazi.
That should include “by Walt Disney”.
And of course, there’s an H in Lindbergh.
:o
Ford had a pamphlet called The International Jew for which he received praise (and a medal?) from Hitler. He later repudiated it.
Got a title?
Disneyland has always been concerned with security. In the 1960s some people were turned away for wearing “inappropriate” T-shirts or having too-long hair. Their goal is to allow people to forget the outside world. They are very vigorous about avoiding bad publicity. There have been charges that they “hushed up” incidents at the park.
Because of this “authoritarian” stance, whether real or just perceived, some people have called them “Nazis”. I thought the Simpsons reference was to Disneyland’s very strong security and propaganda measures.
“Oblique” must mean “sledgehammer”. The Simpsons reference was to a Walt Disney-ish man named Roger Myers, sr. In the film of his biography, the narrator includes:
Walt was probably an isolationist, but that hardly makes him unique among 1930s Americans. And once the U.S. was involved in WW2, Disney Studios cranked out plenty of anti-Nazi propoganda, so I say leave the man alone. When they thaw him out, then you can attack his politics.
I have nothing to add factually, but I just wanted to add one more Simpsons reference. In the episode when they visit Itchy and Scratchy Land, Bart and Lisa listen to a documentary on the creator (George Meyers Jr., maybe?) . It spoke of briefly one time when the creator received bad press for creating the cartoon, We Should Hail Nazi Supermen as our Superiors. I probably botched the title, but it is pretty close.
FWIW, I found this:
try “Education for Death” - kind of a portrait of the SS, IIRC.
yes, after 12/7/41, the Fords, Edison’s, Disney’s, et. al. became good litttle Nazi-fighters.
The period between 1927 and 1941 is interesting.
Of course, Edison died in 1931.
Ford clearly was anti-semitic (financing, at one point, a printing of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and publishing the Dearborn Independent with such articles as “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.”). After he lost a lawsuit brought by a person libeled by his newspaper, Ford published an apology to Jews–although a low-grade controversy remains over whether he believed his own apology or issued it for practical/marketing reasons.
However, barring the existence of the 1938 film you have cited, there is no evidence for a pro-Hitler or pro-Nazi stance by either Ford or Disney.
There is a very definite difference between an isolationist philosophy and a pro-Nazi philosophy and it is not accurate or fair to conflate them.
According to The Big Cartoon Database, the 1943 Education for Death was
I have not been able to find anything on the IMDb that matches Disney, Nazi or Germany, and 1937 - 1939.
When did Hitler award that medal to Ford, and when did Ford repudiate it?
Disney? I imagine any/all concrete evidence of the film in Q was destroyed 12/8/41.
then we could discuss “Song of the South” and the (expurged) scenes in “Fantasia” - even the print delivered to the Smithsonian (1968) had them cut (the meadow scene originally included a black ‘pickaninny’ centaur polishing the hooves of the white centaur)
Given the choice between that and it just being an urban legend, I’d say Occam’s razor indicates that the latter is the likelier scenario. If you can provide anything resembling, even merely passingly, actual evidence, perhaps we might have something. Otherwises, it seems that you just want to believe bad things about Disney, even if there’s no reason to think they’re true.
Nah, Mouse Tales is too squeaky-clean for this sort of stuff. I know it gets a bit deeper than the Disney PR would like, but MT is still a family-friendly book.
To address the OP: I recommend reading Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince, by Marc Eliot. Walt was not (as far as I remember) a pro-Nazi person, but he was definitely on the far right of the political spectrum, and helped finger “suspected communists” for the McCarthyites. I think the book also mentions some anti-Semetic tendencies, but not excessively so.
I don’t know how accurate the book’s findings are, but (a) it seemed very well-researched to me, and (b) is one of the few Walt Disney biographies that do more than regurgitate the usual sanitized Disney Corp. stories.
Yes he was far right, he was a conservative Libertarian who campaigned for Barry Goldwater.
Ford’s anti-semitic literature (his Dearborn Independent was published in foreign language editions in Europe) was an inspiration to Hitler (and Ford may have provided the anti-semitic, pre-Nazi Adolph Hitler with financial support in the early 1920s). On the occasion of Ford’s 75th birthday, in 1938, he was awarded the “Order of the German Eagle” which Hilter had established to honor foreigners that he liked or wished to impress.
I am not aware that Henry Ford, himself, actually repudiated the medal. At the time of the award, he claimed to have accepted it from the German people and distanced himself from Nazi politics.
I realize that this looks more than a bit disingenuous, but several biographies of Ford have pointed out that he was prone to this sort of simple-minded cognitive dissonance. At any rate, Ford is not on record as having provided support for the Nazis once they came to power in 1933.
I’m not sure why you are injecting the racist elements of Disney’s movies into this discussion. While they obviously demonstrate that he was no opponent of racism or champion of civil rights, they do no more than show that he was willing to use commonly accepted stereotypes in his films. And, of course, they do not show any support for the Nazis.
I have never been a fan of either Disney or Ford and I am quite willing to condemn them for actions that they actually took, however, nothing presented here indicates a support for the Nazis regardless how we look askance at their personal prejudices. (And I have still seen no evidence that Disney was anti-semitic. Such evidence would not surprise me, but we have not yet seen any actual evidence for the charge.)
Walt Disney was a man of his time.
His Midwestern thoughts of that era might have been reflected in such films as “Song of the South.”
That such films are no longer made does not mean that the people who made them are stupid or that you or I are in some way superior. It just means we use different standards to measure our world today.
I used to hate “Birth Of A Nation.”
Now I consider it a window on a different time.
Geez, was this a hijak?
Sorry.
Two seperate things. tomndebb covered the medal and also Ford’s publication. What I meant to say was that Ford repudiated his writings; not the medal. Perhaps “repudiate” (“disown”) is too strong a word.
Isn’t there a whole series of Disney cartoons (mainly wartime) that are sort of on ice somewhere, never reshown in Disney marathons or archive shows, because they contain racist-type stuff unacceptable today? Not just anti-semitism, but stuff portraying black people in a negative way that was considered humourous a few decades back but isn’t now.
I am certain I remember either reading a detailed thread about it here, or quite an in-depth web article.