It did not help that the studio was much larger and seemed far more impersonal to many employees than it had a few years earlier. “When they did start laying off some guys,” the animator Jack Bradbury said, “it seemed like the fellows up in the clerical type work, upstairs, never seemed to diminish at all. You’d see these guys running around with papers you’d have to fill out, duplicates for every bit of work you did, and they never seemed to cut down. There were always plenty of them.”6
After Disney’s speeches to his employees, sentiment swung sharply in the Screen Cartoonists Guild’s direction. Art Babbitt epitomized the shift: not only did he leave the federation and join the guild on February 18, 1941—just a week after the second of Disney’s two antiunion speeches—but in March he was elected chairman of the guild’s Disney unit.7
The guild had presented Disney with membership cards signed by a majority of the employees in its proposed bargaining unit, but Disney insisted on a secret ballot. This was probably not a negotiating ploy. Disney quite likely believed that his employees would choose him over the union if they could make their choice in secret. “My boys have been there, have grown up in the business with me,” he said in 1947, in a characteristic expression of his paternalism, “and I didn’t feel like I could sign them over to anybody. They were vulnerable at that time. They were not organized.”8 But of course many of them were organized, only not in a way that Disney approved; and a high percentage of the people who worked for him had not “grown up in the business” with Disney but had instead been hired during his studio’s furious expansion after the success of Snow White.
On May 20, 1941, Disney sent this memorandum to about twenty employees: “Will you please be in 3-C-12 [a projection room] at 5:15 this afternoon?” There, Disney fired them personally, reading aloud a statement in which he assured them, “This release is not based on unsatisfactory performance on your part.” Steve Bosustow, one of those dismissed, remembered that another employee asked Disney, “What do we do now?” Disney replied: “I don’t know. Start a hot-dog stand.”9
It is not clear how many of the laid-off employees were guild members when Disney fired them (or exactly how many people were in the group). Lessing, the Disney attorney, contended later that only a half dozen were members but that many of the others joined the union after they were fired. Dave Hilberman, a leader of the guild as its secretary, said, to the contrary, that “eighteen or so” were members, and “that since the majority were union, we couldn’t let it go.”10 In any case, the guild, no doubt correctly, believed that the layoffs, in combination with Disney’s refusal to bargain, were a challenge it had to meet.
When the guild’s membership voted on the following Monday, May 26, to strike unless Disney met with a union committee, Disney upped the ante. He fired Art Babbitt the next day, through a letter from Lessing that the studio’s police chief hand-delivered as Babbitt left the studio restaurant. Lessing told Babbitt he was being fired because he had disregarded warnings against proselytizing for the union on company time. Babbitt had admitted to Adelquist in a transcribed conversation that he had done so, but that was in March, and the timing of Babbitt’s firing was a thumb in the union’s eye.11 A picket line went up on May 28, 1941.
According to a memorandum by Lessing, 1,079 people were on the Disney payroll at the time of the strike; 294 employees within what he called the guild’s “proper” jurisdiction went out on strike, 352 stayed in. Several employees—“perhaps five”—went out only one day; 37 others returned before the strike ended. Another hundred employees honored the guild’s picket line.12
“When the strike was called,” Hilberman said, “many of the people who had signed up stayed in, and many of the people who hadn’t signed came out.”13 The sense that working in Disney animation was more a calling than a job had by no means been entirely lost. The effects animator Jack Boyd voiced an attitude typical of many nonstriking Disney employees: “I figured I got the job on my own. They didn’t ask me to come there, I would have worked for free—which we practically did.”14
Disney later described the strike as a turning point in his own thinking. His father was “a great friend of the working man,” he said, “and yet he was a contractor and hired people. . . . I grew up believing a lot of that . . . but I was disillusioned. I found that you had to be very careful giving people anything. I feel that people must earn it. They must earn it. You can’t give people anything.” His own experiences as an employer were such, Disney said, that “a lot of my dad’s socialistic ideas began to go out the window. . . . Gradually I became a Republican.”
As the strike unfolded, the wounded feelings on both sides flared in outbursts like something out of divorce court, with Disney as the boorish husband and the union members his enraged spouse. Disney himself was a frequent target of taunts as he entered the studio (“Walt Disney, you ought to be ashamed,” Babbitt called out to him one day).15 Disney was, as the animator Preston Blair noted, “a great Chaplin imitator and student,” and now he evoked Chaplin in confrontations with the strikers. One day, Blair recalled, Disney had driven through the picket line and was walking from his car to his office “when suddenly he cut loose with a wild Chaplin-like gesture of a man ripping off his coat to have a fist fight. Walt was suddenly the Tramp.”16
Disney struggled to keep a feature schedule alive, but money was tight. By June 20, Roy Disney was in New York, trying to persuade not just RKO, the Disneys’ current distributor, but also United Artists, their old distributor, to put more money into the Disney films. Roy told George Schaefer, RKO’s president, that the Disney studio was planning three films—Wind in the Willows, Bongo, and Uncle Remus—to follow Bambi and an unnamed Mickey Mouse feature. Each film would cost $730,000 to $750,000, Roy said. But the Disneys were “without necessary finances to see this schedule through,” Schaefer wrote to another RKO executive, and were seeking financial aid from RKO, to the tune of thirty thousand dollars a week for fifteen months.17 Schaefer was skeptical.
Four days later, Roy had a different offer for Arthur W. Kelly, UA’s vice president. He wanted UA to put up half the cost—which he now set at a million dollars each—of three features (the rest would come from a bank loan). The list of planned features he presented to Kelly included not just the three that Schaefer listed, but also Peter Pan. Kelly was not interested in an investment that large.18
The Disneys were in a bind. Even though they had planned to lay off many of their employees, they could not continue normal production with a reduced workforce during the strike. A critical factor was, ironically, that many strikers were from the studio’s lower ranks—the very people, like the inkers and painters of cels, whose work was essential in the later stages of a film’s production. The day before the strike, Disney had spoken to the inkers and painters to ask for their help in finishing Bambi, which by then was mainly in their department; he promised to support them if they crossed the picket line.19 Every week of the strike pushed Bambi’s release date further into the future and denied the studio desperately needed revenue. By August the studio’s bank debt had risen to $3.5 million—$300,000 above the ceiling the Disneys had accepted just a few months earlier.20
On July 1, Disney outraged the guild by welcoming the intervention of Willie Bioff, a notorious labor racketeer who had been indicted in May on federal extortion charges.21 Bioff and George E. Browne, president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which embraced many of the movie industry’s craft unions, were charged with (and eventually convicted of) extorting more than a half million dollars from producers by threatening strikes if they were not paid off. Bioff’s involvement in the Disney strike was significant because of the control he exercised over other unions; by withholding support from the guild, he could make its position more difficult. On July 8, after the guild refused to let him negotiate a settlement, Bioff ordered about a hundred union members who had been honoring the guild’s picket lines to return to work.22
Roy Disne
y defended what he called “a lot of dealings with Bioff at that time. . . . As long as the guy’s fighting with you, you welcome him on your side. Not to say that I was condoning Bioff. . . . But money was never the basic problem in this thing, as much as communism.”23 As far as the Disneys were concerned, Bioff’s anti-Communist credentials were in order, whereas those of the strike’s leaders definitely were not.
Dave Hilberman was a Communist Party member at the time of the strike,24 and a few other strikers and guild officials were party members or sympathizers. The guild was affiliated with the union that represented the painters of movie sets, and Herbert Sorrell, the painters’ business representative, was repeatedly accused of being a Communist. Sorrell consistently denied the charge, but, in any case, his gravest offense was probably his longstanding hostility to Bioff. There has never been any reason to believe that the strike itself was called to serve Communist Party purposes.
The result of the Disneys’ flirtation with Bioff was, as the federal mediator Stanley White reported to Washington, to leave the strikers and the studio more antagonistic than ever.25 In the wake of the Bioff episode, the federal government began pressing for arbitration to end the strike. The guild embraced the idea but the Disneys rejected arbitration until finally accepting, through a telegram from Gunther Lessing, on July 23. The strike ended on July 28 after the arrival in Burbank of James F. Dewey, described by Daily Variety as the labor department’s “ace conciliator.” He required the studio to reinstate all the strikers while arbitration hearings were under way. When almost three hundred strikers came to the studio the next day, fifty were given work, and the rest were to get work as it became available.26 That layoffs would soon follow was a given; Daily Variety reported on July 31 that a large number of Disney employees would be laid off “under a retrenchment policy planned by the company” once an agreement with the union had been reached. The critical question was how the layoffs would be distributed among strikers and nonstrikers.27
Roy Disney, Gunther Lessing, and Bill Garity represented the Disney studio at the arbitration hearings; Walt Disney was not present. On the second day of the three days of hearings at the studio, the Disney executives agreed to recognize the guild and accept a closed shop—key elements of the award that Dewey and Stanley White, the other federal arbitrator, imposed on studio and union on August 2.
A “final report” bearing that date by the labor department’s Conciliation Service noted that, on August 1, Dewey had gone to the studio to “try to bring about a reconciliation between the inside ‘independent’ union [a new company union called Animated Cartoon Associates] and the returning strikers’ Union. He addressed a large theatre gathering of all the Disney employees, and the process of restoring a measure of harmony was begun. It was a bitter conflict, with a great deal of personal vilification between the parties.”
The strike’s poisonous effects were felt in a more concrete form. When Roy Disney proposed on August 11 to lay off 207 strikers and only 49 non-strikers, the guild protested. On August 15, with studio and union at an impasse, Roy ordered the studio shut down for two weeks. It ultimately stayed closed until September 15, a few days after Dewey imposed a settlement that required the studio to lay off strikers and nonstrikers in line with their percentages in each department.
Art Babbitt returned to the studio with the other union members who had been laid off in May. By October 1941 he was animating on a Donald Duck cartoon called The Flying Jalopy.28 Dave Hilberman, the other strike leader, gave up his job—because, he said, the union “offered my scalp in exchange for so many people to be returned. . . . Disney felt he was making a great deal, but I was a very willing sacrifice. It was a mistake; I should have gone back, simply to cement the victory and make sure that things went well.” But he returned to art school instead.29
The Disney bonus plans, now relics of much happier days, officially ended on September 12.30 The studio installed time clocks around the same time. Walt Disney had scorned such devices only a few years earlier, but he was not at the studio to see his opposition to them overturned. He and Lillian had flown out of Burbank August 11, leaving on an 11 P.M. flight for a trip to South America. He made the trip in the company of fifteen employees, a mixture of writers, artists, and other staff people—none of them strikers. Lillian’s sister Hazel Sewell, who was by then married to Bill Cottrell of the Disney staff, also came along. (She had been the supervisor of Disney’s ink and paint department until her marriage.)
On the day he left, Disney wrote a rambling, defiant three-page letter to the right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler. In words that echoed his February speeches, he declared that “the entire situation is a catastrophe. The spirit that played such an important part in the building of the cartoon medium has been destroyed.”
The strike had been “Communistically inspired and led,” he said, and the strikers themselves were “the malcontents; the unsatisfactory ones who knew that their days were numbered and who had everything to gain by a strike. . . . I am thoroughly disgusted and would gladly quit and try to establish myself in another business if it were not for the loyal guys who believe in me—so, I guess I’m stuck with it.”
Disney told Pegler that the South American trip was “a godsend. I am not so hot for it but it gives me a chance to get away from this God-awful nightmare and to bring back some extra work into the plant. I have a case of the D.D.’s—disillusionment and discouragement.”31
As early as October 1940, before any Disney trip to Latin America was contemplated, the federal government, through John Hay Whitney, was encouraging Disney to add “some South American atmosphere in some of the short subjects to help the general cause along,” as Roy Disney put it.32 By June 1941, during the strike, Disney had agreed not only to make a trip but also to produce twelve shorts on South American themes.33 The federal government would underwrite 25 percent of the cartoons’ negative cost, as well as paying seventy thousand dollars of the expenses of the trip itself.34
Disney recalled years later that he had resisted making a mere goodwill tour of Latin America: “I said, ‘I’d feel better about going down there and really doing something instead of going down there and shaking a hand.’ ” The 1941 trip was thus officially a “field survey” during which the Disney group would “make a study of local music, folklore, legends, scenes, characters and themes.” The trip took the Disney group from Miami to Puerto Rico, and then on extended visits to Rio de Janeiro (from August 16 to September 8, with a side trip to São Paulo) and Buenos Aires (September 8 to September 25, with a side trip to Montevideo).
Leaving Buenos Aires, the group—“El Grupo,” as its members called themselves—split up. Disney himself flew to Mendoza, in the foothills of the Andes, while others in the party scattered to points in Argentina, Chile, and Peru. After a few days in Chile, Disney, Lillian, the Cottrells, and seven other members of the group boarded the Grace liner Santa Clara in Valparaiso on October 4. The trip to the United States took more than two weeks, with stops along the way in Peru, Ecuador, and Panama.35
On September 13, while Disney was in Buenos Aires, his father died. Elias was buried next to Flora at Forest Lawn.
Whatever Disney’s intentions when he set out, the trip’s “survey” nature was mostly eclipsed by an unending round of cocktail parties, special screenings of Disney cartoons, interviews, public appearances, and meetings with politicians and other local luminaries. The artists in the group did make some sketches, and the Disney people even set up an impromptu studio on the roof of a Buenos Aires hotel, but the trip was in substance the goodwill tour Disney later said he had not wanted to make—even though, as it turned out, he was very good at it.
“Walt Disney is far more successful as an enterprise and as a person than we could have dreamed,” Whitney reported to Nelson Rockefeller from Rio de Janeiro on August 29. “His public demeanor is flawless. He is unruffled by adulation and pressure—just signs every autograph and keeps smiling.”36 (Rockefeller was in overall
charge of such activities as the government’s coordinator of inter-American affairs; Whitney, another heir to a famous fortune, was director of the motion picture division of the coordinator’s office.)
As noted in a detailed itinerary written after the trip, apparently by John Rose of the Disney staff, Disney entertained two thousand children at Mendoza not only by showing them cartoons, but also by literally standing on his head.37
Disney reached New York from his South American trip on October 20, 1941, and was interviewed soon thereafter by a writer for the New Yorker. Although he had previously explained his role at his studio by describing himself as a sort of an orchestra conductor, his experience with Fantasia may have made him uncomfortable with such an analogy. In any case, he now used a new one, one he invoked repeatedly in the years ahead. “In the studio,” he said, “I’m the bee that carries the pollen.” The New Yorker described Disney as he demonstrated: “Rising in illustration, he held out his two cupped hands, filled with invisible pollen, and walked across the room and stood in front of a chair. ‘I’ve got to know whether an idea goes here,’ he said, dumping some pollen into the chair, ‘or here,’ he went on, hurrying to our side of the room and dumping the rest of the pollen on our knees.”
In that interview, Disney repeatedly disdained the “arty,” using language strikingly different from the ambitious sentiments he had often voiced during work on Fantasia: “A man with a dramatic sense but no sense of humor is almost sure to go arty on you. But if he has a really good dramatic sense, he’ll have a sense of humor along with. He’ll give you a little gag when you need it. Sometimes, right in the middle of a dramatic scene, you’ve got to have a little gag. . . . I don’t want any more headaches like the ‘Nutcracker Suite’ [in Fantasia]. In a thing like that, you got to animate all those flowers, boy, does that run into dough! All that shading. That damn thing cost two hundred thousand dollars—just the one ‘Nutcracker Suite.’ ”38
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