by Bob Thomas
Some of the Disney war work was never paid for. Walt’s artists designed more than 1,400 insignia for military units at an average cost of $25. “I had to do it,” Walt said afterward. “Those kids grew up on Mickey Mouse. I owed it to ‘em.”
In December 1942, John L. Sullivan, a Treasury Department official, telephoned Walt. Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury, had an urgent special project he wanted to discuss. “Can you fly to Washington tonight?” Sullivan asked. Walt mentioned his daughter Diane’s birthday; he had twice been away on her birthday, he didn’t want to miss another one. “This is very important,” Sullivan insisted, and Walt agreed to make the flight.
Walt presumed the project would be a campaign to sell war bonds. But when he arrived at Morgenthau’s office, he learned of a different mission. “We want you to help us sell people on paying income tax,” Morgenthau announced.
The suggestion puzzled Walt. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re the Treasury speaking. You’re the United States government. Sell people on paying taxes? If they don’t pay ‘em, you put ‘em in jail.”
Guy T. Helvering, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, spoke up. “That’s my trouble. Under the new tax bill, we’ve got fifteen million new taxpayers next year. I can’t prosecute fifteen million people. We’ve got to make them understand what taxes are and the part the taxes play in winning the war.”
“I came back here all prepared to help you sell bonds,” Walt remarked.
“That’s the point,” Helvering said. “People think when they buy a bond, that’s going to pay for the war. But how are we going to pay off the bonds? By taxes. We don’t want to prosecute those people. We want them to pay their taxes and be excited about paying their taxes as a patriotic thing.”
Morgenthau said to Walt: “Now you’ve got the idea. See what you can do for us.”
That evening Walt met over drinks with Sullivan and Helvering at Sullivan’s house in Virginia. The two Treasury men outlined the points they sought to put across to the public, and Walt began devising an idea for the film. He called the studio and ordered a story crew to start work. Then he telephoned his daughter Diane to wish her a happy birthday.
Walt hurried back to California. It was late December, and Morgenthau wanted the film in the nation’s theaters by February. The cartoon had to be completed and processed through Technicolor in less than six weeks. Walt dropped everything else to work on the film. He and his crew labored eighteen hours a day, sleeping on cots in the Animation Building. When the storyboards were completed, Walt flew to Washington to show them to Morgenthau.
Neither Sullivan nor Helvering was permitted in Morgenthau’s office during the presentation. Only Morgenthau’s secretary and an aide were present. Walt was warned beforehand: “Keep an eye on the secretary. She wields a lot of influence.”
Walt set up the storyboards and went into one of his eloquent performances. He described how Donald Duck was patriotic in the extreme—except when it came to taxes. But when Donald was shown that paying taxes meant helping to win the war, his attitude changed. He refused calculators and headache pills, filled out the simplified tax form and hurried to the mailbox to file his return early. Red-white-and-blue flags in his eyes lighted up, and he raced from California to Washington to submit his tax in person.
Walt’s audience of three sat expressionless through the entire recital, and they remained silent when Walt finished. Then the aide said tentatively, “Well, I, uh—I always visualized that you would create a little character who would be called Mr. Taxpayer.” The secretary was more blunt: “I don’t like Donald Duck.”
Morgenthau said nothing, and Walt’s Irish temper began to mount. “Well, you want to get this message over,” he said. “I’ve given you Donald Duck. At our studio, that’s the equivalent of giving you Clark Gable out of the MGM stable. Donald Duck is known by the American public. He’ll open doors to the theaters. They won’t be running a cartoon of Mr. Taxpayer; they’ll be running a Donald Duck cartoon. By giving you this, I’ll be losing money. Every theater that plays this short will knock off a Donald Duck cartoon that would have been booked. I did it because I want this thing to be successful. I felt it was the only way to tell the story: by using a character they know and putting him into a situation that they themselves will be in. If you don’t like this, I’ll have to throw away half the picture, because it’s already in work.”
The Secretary of the Treasury looked up from his desk and said resignedly, “I leave it to you.”
Walt hurried back to California to finish the film, titled The New Spirit, and the Treasury ordered an unprecedented eleven hundred prints to saturate the nation before the March 15 deadline for tax payments. The Treasury Department estimated that the film was seen by sixty million people; a Gallup poll indicated that The New Spirit affected 37 percent of the taxpayers on their willingness to pay.
As Walt had predicted, many theaters that received the Treasury’s film at no expense canceled their orders for Donald Duck cartoons. Only the Radio City Music Hall sent a check for the Disney cartoon it had ordered but didn’t show.
When the bill for The New Spirit was presented to the Treasury, Morgenthau questioned it. The total was $80,000, and the Secretary complained to Walt: “You said you could make a cartoon for forty-three thousand.” Walt explained that his own cost had been $47,000 because of the hurry to complete the project; the rest of the expense was caused by the huge order for Technicolor prints. Morgenthau said he would have to go to Congress for a deficiency appropriation. It was submitted at the same time the President’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, had appointed an exotic dancer to a civil-defense post. Congressmen denounced employment of “a fan dancer and Donald Duck” as examples of boondoggling in civil defense. Walter Winchell defended Disney in his newspaper column and radio broadcast, but Walt received mail accusing him of being a war profiteer.
Donald Duck also starred in the most popular of the wartime Disney shorts, Der Fuehrer’s Face. The storyline showed Donald having a nightmare in which he dreamed he was working in a German munitions factory. Oliver Wallace, the onetime movie-theater organist who became a prolific composer for the Disney studio, was assigned to write a song for Donald and his companions to sing in saluting Adolf Hitler. Wallace said he was riding a bicycle along the studio streets when the inspiration came to him and he nearly fell off. The idea: to punctuate the “Heils!” with over-ripe raspberries.
The contemptuous treatment of Hitler delighted audiences throughout America, and the song became one of the most popular during the war. Der Fuehrer’s Face was translated into all European languages and smuggled into the Continent by the underground, infuriating the Nazi High Command.
Victory Through Air Power was a unique Disney venture. It was an advocacy film not sponsored by the government but produced by Walt Disney because he shared the beliefs of Alexander de Seversky.
Until his trip to South America, Walt’s acquaintance with air travel had been an occasional cross-country flight. Then he flew over Amazon jungles and through Andean passes, saw Brazil, Argentina and Chile more thoroughly and faster than he could have any other way. Along the way he talked to pilots and ground crews, prowled through hangars and control towers, asking endless questions about how things worked. By the time he returned to Los Angeles, he had traveled twenty thousand miles, and he was a confirmed proponent of the airplane.
Walt was overwhelmed by the logic of the 1942 book Victory Through Air Power, written by Major Alexander P. de Seversky, once a commander of Russian air squadrons in the First World War, later an inventor of bombsights and navigation controls, a speed flier and advocate of air power to win World War II. A naturalized citizen, he convinced many of his fellow Americans with the arguments in his book. Historian Charles Beard called Victory Through Air Power “a more important book for Americans than all the other war books put together.” The New York Herald Tribune commented that the Seversky book “if read and heeded, might become a turning point
in the war.”
On May 4, 1942, Walt telegraphed his New York representative:
AM ANXIOUS CONTACT MAJOR ALEXANDER DE SEVERSKY BY TELEPHONE AND MAIL. WILL YOU ENDEAVOR GET THIS INFORMATION TO ME EARLIEST POSSIBLE MOMENT BUT DEFINITELY ELIMINATE MY NAME FROM ALL INQUIRIES MADE.
Walt reached Seversky and said he wanted to make a film of Victory Through Air Power. Within a few weeks the project had started with the crew that had recently completed Bambi after five years of production. Because of the urgency of its theme and the changing world events, the new film had to be finished within months.
By July, preliminary storyboards had been prepared, and Seversky came to the studio to assist. He and Walt proved good collaborators, sparking ideas off each other:
WALT: Do you think there is anything in taking the people back forty years and showing the progress we have made? It would be a little reminiscent thing. Show how progress in this speeded up during the first war and then slowed down a bit in peacetime and then shot up again during this war.
SEVERSKY: Sure. And for this war the progress will still be faster. You could point out that when the Germans bombed Coventry they used five hundred airplanes and unloaded two hundred and fifty tons of bombs. And today at Rostov, fifty planes carried two hundred and fifty tons of bombs. In two years, a ratio of ten to one….
WALT: We leave here to go back forty years ago to the historic Wright Brothers taking off and show this telegram and then that little item in the newspaper about their being home for Christmas. Then suppose we move along to the start of the last war and how everything advances in wartimes. Show how when the last war started they didn’t even have enough guns in their planes, then go on up a few years when they have these dogfights and fancy maneuvers.
SEVERSKY: Yes, they had the Sikorsky bombers within three years.
WALT: And at the beginning of the war, range was practically nothing. But right after the war, they had this Navy plane nonstop flight to the Azores.
SEVERSKY: And then you could show how commercial aviation had developed wonderfully since then. Of course, we paid no attention to the military end, and the military planes did not develop as fast as the commercial. But since the beginning of the war we have advanced terrifically….
WALT: What did you use in the war—a gun?
SEVERSKY: Well, back in 1915, all I had was a pistol. Then later we used automatic rifles and then we started using machine guns.
WALT: At first, you know, they used to wave to each other when they passed each other on their way to their destination. Then one Frenchman put some bricks in his plane; he didn’t want to wave at the Germans, and the next time he passed, he threw a brick at a German. And from there it progressed to dogfighting.
SEVERSKY: Karsikoff was flying with a big heavy ball with a hook on it, and when he met another plane, he threw the ball out and the hook would catch on the enemy plane. This ball would have another ball attached to it, and the other ball would tear up the plane. He downed a couple of planes that way….
Seversky was designated as technical adviser on Victory Through Air Power, but he became more than that. A draftsman and engineer, he created sketches which were used as guides by the Disney artists. He remained at the studio throughout the eight-month production period, changing elements of the script as events of the war substantiated his predictions. One sequence theorized on the use of air power to eliminate hydropower dams of the enemy. Before the film could be completed, the Royal Air Force bombed the Rhineland dams in almost the exact method proposed by Seversky.
When Walt was in Washington, he was invited to a meeting of high naval officers. They queried him about Victory Through Air Power, and one of the admirals complained, “Do you know what that’s going to do to our battleship program?” Walt replied, “Gee, you don’t really believe in battleships, do you?” They did indeed, and they offered arguments. “I believe in air power,” Walt insisted. “I just want to tell the story of air power.” The Navy men persisted, and Walt later omitted portions of the film illustrating Seversky’s bias against heavy ships.
Victory Through Air Power was released in July of 1943, only fourteen months after Walt had first talked to Seversky. The Disney selling force steadfastly avoided the term “propaganda,” but that’s what the film was. As such, it succeeded, exerting a vast influence on the thinking of both the public and policy-makers.
In his biography of advertising man Albert Lasker, Taken at the Flood, John Gunther wrote that Lasker had long tried to arrange a meeting between Seversky and President Roosevelt or to screen Victory Through Air Power at the White House. But Lasker had failed because of the watchfulness of Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, “who thought that Seversky was a crackpot.” Gunther added:
Meantime, the film received wide attention in theaters in England. Lasker, through a British friend, got a print to Winston Churchill, and the Prime Minister was much impressed by it.
Came the Quebec Conference between Roosevelt and Churchill in the summer of 1943. Critical military decisions, preparatory to the invasion of Europe the next year, had to be made, but the conference was deadlocked. F.D.R. and General Marshall wanted to set a definite date for the operation, but Churchill, the RAF, and General Arnold felt that this should not be done until certain conditions were met, such as the undisputed command of the air over the English Channel. In an effort to break through this impasse Churchill asked Roosevelt if he had ever seen Victory Through Air Power. F.D.R. said no, and a print was flown by fighter plane from New York to Quebec; the President and the Prime Minister saw it together that night privately, and Roosevelt was much excited by the way Disney’s aircraft masterfully wiped ships off the seas. It was run again the next day, and then F.D.R. invited the Joint Chiefs to have a look at it. This played an important role in the decision, which was then taken, to give the D-Day invasion sufficient air power.
The film lost $436,000 for Walt Disney Productions and Walt admitted later, “It was a stupid thing to do as a business venture. It was just something that I believed in, and for no other reason than that, I did it.”
Victory Through Air Power contributed to the downward trend of the Disney finances during the war. Bambi, released in August 1942, had earned a disappointing $1,200,000 in the United States, with foreign receipts at $2,190,000. Saludos Amigos, issued in February of 1943, drew $500,000 in the United States and $700,000 abroad, much of it from South America. Since the film cost slightly under $300,000, it provided a profit.
As in the Depression, the Disney studio failed to share in the prosperity of the motion picture business. The other companies were grinding out war movies and musicals for an entertainment-hungry nation, and theaters were earning huge profits. But not with Disney pictures.
There was no Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to rescue the Disney brothers from debt. The studio issued a dozen short cartoons annually during the war; returns on them were limited by the economics of the movie business. The training and propaganda films contracted by the government barely paid for maintaining the staff and studio. The indebtedness to the Bank of America climbed to more than $4,000,000, and some of the bank’s board members expressed concern over the revolving line of credit extended to Disney.
One day Joe Rosenberg, the bank’s Los Angeles liaison with the studio, telephoned Roy to request that he and Walt answer questions about their loan at the board of directors meeting in San Francisco. In later years Roy enjoyed recounting the story of how he and Walt traveled north in a state of gloom. They had never before been summoned to a command appearance before the board. With the war continuing to occupy the studio’s major effort, they could offer little hope for an immediate upturn in the company’s finances. Their gloom deepened when they were escorted into the Bank of America’s dark-paneled board room and saw the twelve solemn-faced directors seated around the large table. Nothing could proceed until the arrival of A. P. Giannini, the founder and board chairman of Bank of America. After fifteen minutes he entered, leonine-
faced and commanding in presence. He declined to take a chair, listening to the discussions as he walked around the table. As he passed the Disneys, he nudged them in the backs and muttered, “Don’t look so downhearted; it isn’t going to be that bad.” Walt and Roy found reason for hope. A.P. had long been their champion; when traveling in Europe, he sometimes sent them postcards with the message, “I saw one of your pictures and it was pretty good.”
The matter of the Disney loan came before the board, and Walt and Roy explained how war conditions had interrupted the studio’s profitability. Giannini began interrogating the directors: “You’ve been lending the Disneys a lot of money—how many of their pictures have you seen? Which ones?” He demanded answers from each board member, and he discovered that several of them had seen none of the Disney movies.
“Well, I’ve seen them,” Giannini remarked. “I’ve been watching the Disneys’ pictures quite closely, because I knew we were lending them money far above the financial risk. But I realized that there’s nothing about those pictures that will be changed by the war. They’re good this year, they’re good next year, and they’re good the year after. Now there’s a war on and the Disneys’ markets are in trouble. Their money’s frozen, or else they can’t get in countries. You have to relax and give them time to market their product. This war isn’t going to last forever.”
He strode out of the room. Walt and Roy returned to Los Angeles with the assurance that they would be able to stay in business.
WALT DISNEY’S dealings with his employees followed patterns. Newcomers to the studio, and even some longtime employees, were perplexed by his manner and misread silence for disinterest, gruffness for disfavor. Others learned to understand the enigmatic nature of his creative gifts. None professed to understand the man himself, and he was not given to intimacy and self-revelation. But the patterns of his working life, firmly ingrained now that Disney had reached his forties, could be discerned by those who studied his day-to-day dealings with his staff.