by Neal Gabler
Writing Walt shortly after the strike began, a former employee, commiserating with his old boss, wistfully recalled the “good old days when we had a big happy family all packed into a small building…In those days every man in the organization had the good old ‘do or die for Disney’ spirit.” Then, when the company grew, he said, a “feeling of working for personal gain started creeping in. The present condition seemed inevitable.” Success necessarily destroyed comity. But Walt, for whom the shattered peace now meant shattered dreams, did not think it had been inevitable. As he analyzed it, his utopia had been despoiled not by the ineluctable forces of corporatism but by a few rotten apples manipulated by a few determined ideologues. He may not have believed, as did Leon Schlesinger at Warner Bros., that his employees loved him, but he did believe that they were dedicated to the greater good of animation and to the artistic community he had created. “It hurt him,” Ward Kimball said of the strike, “because guys he had trusted were letting him down.” Walt saw himself as benevolent, and he thought that after he had kept nearly everyone on the payroll, even during the Depression, the angry workers were ingrates for calling a strike just because he demanded a secret ballot. It made no sense to him that they were chafing over a few relatively minor grievances. The only explanation that made sense was that they—Hilberman, Sorrell, Babbitt, and others—were Communists or Communist sympathizers bent on destroying Walt Disney. “Commie sons-of-bitches” was how Walt put it.
This would always be the Disney version of the strike. The studio had had no labor troubles until, as Walt later put it, the “Commies moved in.” Roy concurred. “[M]oney was never the basic problem in this thing,” he said, “as much as Communism.” In this view Walt, who was politically naïve, was no doubt fed by Gunther Lessing. But he was also influenced by right-wing government agencies that had a political stake in blaming Communists for labor unrest. Walt said he showed his photographs of the strikers to the FBI and to representatives of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which investigated Communism, and was told that the strikers were professional instigators. Anthony O’Rourke drafted a letter for Walt’s signature inviting California state senator Jack Tenney, who chaired a fact-finding committee on un-American activities in that state, to investigate the affiliations of the strike leaders, and the FBI had a dossier on Herbert Sorrell listing him as a registered member of the Communist Party despite his claims to the contrary. “I had a lot of people just hoping that it was the end, you know?” Walt would say, meaning Communists wanting to take Walt Disney down.
Though it was a typical antilabor tactic at the time to brand unions as Communist to delegitimize them, Walt’s belief that the SCG was Communist-inspired was undoubtedly sincere. It also may not have been entirely wrong. Arthur Babbitt certainly wasn’t a Communist, nor were any of the other animators, but Dave Hilberman, the assistant who had begun organizing the studio, had by his own admission been a member of the Communist Party and had even traveled to Russia when he was a young man. Moreover an FBI report called William Pomerance, soon to be the union’s business manager, “one of the leading Communists in the movie industry” and claimed that at least since July 1941, a month after the strike began, the union had followed the Communist Party line. Citing an internal source close to the labor situation, the report concluded that the Disney strike proved “conclusively” that the SCG was Communist-dominated and said that the Communists “threw the entire strength of the Communist machine in Hollywood” into the dispute. True or not, all of this provided Walt with a convenient excuse for holding the line against the SCG. It also excused him from having to deal with the very real dissatisfactions that had been building at the studio.
Now, despite Lessing and Walt’s optimism, both sides hunkered down for a long siege. Sorrell had set up strike headquarters across the street from the studio on a little swell in a grove of eucalyptus trees, where a kitchen with camp stoves was erected by Warner Bros. carpenters and manned by striking Disney cafeteria workers. One striker compared the line of cars crawling up the hill to “something out of The Grapes of Wrath.” It made for a picturesque scene, but then this seemed to be a picturesque strike. Pickets held signs reading “Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Da Vinci and Rembrandt all belonged to guilds!” or “No wise quacks [with a picture of Donald Duck] We want our guilds!” or “Snow White and the 700 Dwarfs” or “1 Genius Against 1,200 Guinea Pigs.” Another sign, featuring Pinocchio, said, “No strings on me.” And one with Mickey Mouse declared: “Are we men or mice?” The left-wing newspaper PM called it the “most unique picket line in labor’s history.” Film stars walked the line to show support. Leon Schlesinger let his animators out early to picket and harass Disney, and one day Schlesinger himself drove up to the line, prompting a union spokesman at the loudspeaker to announce, “Herb Sorrell is now speaking to Leon Schlesinger, who has signed a very nice agreement with the Cartoonists Guild.”
Driving through the crowd each morning, Walt seemed, in Babbitt’s words, “very jaunty.” One day, according to Ollie Johnston, he even stood near the entrance, with his coat over his arm and his hat tilted back on his head, smiling at the strikers and making quips. But if the strike began with a certain gaiety, it soon turned ugly and violent as both sides realized that, O’Rourke’s prediction notwithstanding, no settlement was imminent. Strikers would yell at the workers entering the gate—“mighty uncomplimentary things,” Dick Huemer remembered, “like how one guy was an alcoholic or something.” Jack Kinney recalled strikers letting air out of tires or scratching cars with screwdrivers as nonstrikers drove onto the lot. Occasionally there were fistfights, and Kinney said that some shots were fired. Walt asked the Burbank Police Department for fifty officers, but the chief declined, saying that he couldn’t post that many men without the union’s cooperation for fear of a confrontation. Instead Walt hired fifty former Los Angeles policemen to try to push away the pickets, until the Burbank chief ordered them inside the studio gates. At a mass rally and parade in front of the studio early that June, Gunther Lessing was hung in effigy, while the American Federation of Labor (AFL) formed a “flying squadron” to picket theaters showing Disney films.
With the negotiations continuing fitfully, the union increased the pressure. The AFL put all Disney films and products on its “unfair” list, soundmen refused to cross the picket line, and perhaps worst of all, the lab technicians at Technicolor refused to process Disney film until the studio recognized the guild. A scheduled preview of The Reluctant Dragon, Walt’s testament to studio harmony, had to be canceled because the American Newspaper Guild, which represented reporters, asked them not to attend, and when Walt did release the film late that June, picket lines were thrown up at the RKO and Pantages Theaters in Los Angeles while a parade of guild sympathizers in New York marched down Broadway to the Palace Theater where the film was playing and set up another picket line.
Still, Walt remained intransigent. He continued to insist that he would recognize the SCG only if it were elected by secret ballot, a call that the union again rejected, this time not only because a majority of the workers were on strike—prima facie evidence that the SCG already represented the workers—but because there was no impartial agency to conduct the election and count the votes and because it clearly distrusted Walt to do so fairly. At the same time, during daily negotiations late that June, Walt agreed to reinstate the workers he had dismissed in May—except Art Babbitt—while warning that there were more layoffs to come. This was also rejected unanimously by the union board. Despite the impasse Walt still seemed oddly jovial, writing a journalist that “we feel very much like the young couple having their first baby!” and ridiculously telling another reporter that the studio had actually increased its output during the strike because it had gotten rid of “deadwood,” “doubtful talent,” and “green hands.”
But Walt never despaired of finding a way around the union. At one point Dave Hand, Ben Sharpsteen, Wilfred Jackson, and others met—one of them
would say with Walt’s knowledge—to discuss disbanding the studio altogether and forming another one headed by Roy and Walt but without any union involvement. At another point Bill Tytla, who had gone out on strike but nevertheless felt a deep allegiance to Walt, happened to see Walt at a local diner and approached him, saying he thought the whole thing was “foolish and unnecessary.” Brightening, Walt suggested that Tytla come back to the office, where they might hammer out a solution the way Walt might solve a problem on a film. Tytla agreed but wanted first to go home, shower, and change. By the time Tytla arrived at his house, Walt had phoned Tytla’s wife and told her the meeting was off. Tytla believed someone had gotten to Walt, presumably Lessing.
At roughly the same time, after the union had rejected Walt’s proposals, quite possibly the most notorious figure in Hollywood arrived on the scene. IATSE head Willie Bioff was a moon-faced, jowly little man with hexagonal wire-rim glasses and an ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips. It was Bioff whom Babbitt had so feared two years earlier that he had met with Lessing about forming the federation. Since that time Bioff had been indicted on federal racketeering charges, but that seemed to have had little effect on his power. Bioff’s IATSE was the rival of Sorrell’s CSU. Whether Walt contacted Bioff to help broker a settlement (Bioff was famously tight with the studios) or whether Bioff volunteered as a way to undercut Sorrell is unclear.* However it happened, on June 30 Bioff reached a quick settlement with Disney, then had one of his lieutenants approach the strike leaders at the union’s hall on the corner of Sunset and Highland and request a meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel. All of them piled into a car and set off for the conclave, only realizing once they were on the road that they were being taken not to the Roosevelt Hotel but rather to Bioff’s ranch in the San Fernando Valley. (Hilberman, fearing what Bioff might do in the privacy of his home, demanded that the driver stop the car and then jumped out.) When the rest arrived, Roy, Lessing, and Bill Garity were waiting for them along with Bioff, who announced that if they signed with the IATSE they could go back to work in the morning. Babbitt said he was even offered a fifty-dollar raise and time off whenever he wanted it.
But like Walt’s March speech, the meeting had exactly the opposite effect to resolving the strike. The strikers were incensed that Walt had involved the racketeer Bioff and rejected the offer, after which the studio announced that it was breaking off all negotiations with SCG. “[H]e honestly tried to settle it,” Walt would say of Bioff. But when Sorrell rebuffed him, it “proved to me that Sorrell is dirty, sneaky and as foul as they come and there is no doubt but he is a tool of the Communist group.” A week after the Bioff fiasco the federal government offered to step in, and Stanley White, an officer from the Conciliation Service of the Department of Labor, flew into Los Angeles to confer with the parties and see if he could mediate an agreement. He recommended binding arbitration by a three-man panel, during which the strikers would return to work. The SCG at a mass meeting unanimously accepted the offer. Lessing, however, rejected it, saying that yet another reformed company union, the Animated Cartoon Associates, really represented the workers and fuming that the NLRB had meddled in the company’s affairs, even contacting its bankers to press for a settlement, and that the NLRB’s actions warranted a congressional investigation, and he once again accused the union of being Communist.
Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, on July 23 Lessing reversed himself and wired the Conciliation Service accepting its mediation offer. The Disneys clearly had not softened; they still vehemently believed that the SCG was a Trojan horse to take over the studio. But they now had another force to reckon with, a force even more resolute than Sorrell. As Sorrell later told it, Stanley White, the federal conciliator, had called him, hoping to break the stalemate, and recommended they contact the Bank of America, which was what Lessing had accused the NLRB of doing. Sorrell, who happened to know A. P. Giannini from the time Sorrell had lived in Oakland, phoned him and was referred to Doc Giannini, A.P.’s brother. White then arranged to meet with Doc Giannini. “Sorrell wouldn’t strike for anything that he couldn’t win at arbitration,” Giannini said, and suggested that it would soon be resolved. When White asked if Disney, after weeks of obstinacy, would agree, Giannini answered, “I guarantee he’ll arbitrate or he won’t have any studio.” The strikers returned to work as the arbitration began, and a tentative settlement was reached on July 30. The strike was over.
Or so it seemed. The sides had agreed to wage increases—10 percent for artists earning less than $50 a week—one hundred hours of back pay for the strikers, reinstatement of the fired workers, including Babbitt, and of course, recognition of the SCG as the bargaining agent for most of the studio’s employees. Future layoffs were to be decided by a joint committee to be agreed upon, but Babbitt was expressly excluded from termination. Some workers were stunned. “I went from $32.50 a week to $65 a week for the same job,” recalled camera operator Bob Broughton. “My pay just doubled overnight.” Walt, however, was not happy. Writing columnist Westbrook Pegler, who had asked for Walt’s version of events, he called the strike a “catastrophe” that had destroyed the spirit of the studio. Without mentioning the Bank of America, he groused that he had had to settle, but insisted, “I’m not licked…. I’m incensed.” His eyes were now open to “what is happening to our government today,” presumably Communist infiltration. And with so many workers now and so little work, he said he might have to close the studio for a time to survive.
But Walt wouldn’t be there for the pain of layoffs. Instead, he left.
III
While the thorniest issues of the settlement were being hammered out—the inevitable layoffs—Walt headed for South America. He called the trip a “godsend,” even though he admitted, “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.” He said he had a “case of the D.D.’s—disillusionment and discouragement.” The studio desperately needed films now both to bring in revenue and to keep the staff working. One potential source that had suddenly availed itself that summer was the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, established in August 1940 to promote relations between the United States and Latin America. The office had been the brainchild of multimillionaire oil heir Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller had long been interested in South America, first through his art collecting, then through investments in the Standard Oil subsidiary in Venezuela, and later through a hotel-building campaign in Caracas that he had launched at the behest of the Venezuelan president, Eleazar López Contreras. On his frequent trips Rockefeller had been moved by the poverty there, and in the spring of 1940 he managed to deliver a memo to President Roosevelt on ways to improve inter-American relations. The memo led to his appointment as coordinator in a new government bureau.
One of Rockefeller’s methods of bringing the two Americas together was sharing culture. He sent to South America scores of celebrities, including Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and actress Dorothy Lamour, even the Yale Glee Club. He also recruited his friend and fellow millionaire John Hay Whitney, known as “Jock,” to head up a motion picture division to provide films for South American theaters that might otherwise be showing movies from the Axis powers. Somehow, possibly through Walt’s intervention, Gunther Lessing was appointed the chairman of the short subjects committee of Whitney’s Motion Picture Section. In autumn 1940 Walt was meeting with Whitney about the possibility of making films for the Coordinator’s Office. The following May, Walt met with Whitney and with Whitney’s assistant, Frances Alstock, at the studio, and by June, Roy and Lessing were meeting with Whitney to discuss a $150,000 contract for several films on South American themes. “Lets [sic] try to bring the show down [sic] with Jock Whitney, this question of S.A. films,” Roy wrote Walt from New York. “The way he talked to me they are waiting on us to give them some definite plan.”
Within a month Rockefeller and Whitney upped the ante. They asked Walt to take a goodwill trip to Sout
h America, where he was obviously well known and well liked. It is unclear whether the trip was originally intended as anything other than a kind of ambassadorial mission, but by the time Walt agreed, it had become a filmmaking venture as well. The Coordinator’s Office would underwrite the entire cost of the trip for Walt and a group of his artists and pay for the films that Walt would ultimately make. Walt called it a “combined ‘business and pleasure’ trip” and, despite the work, said he hoped to “get in a good rest at odd times.” Of course, the films and the rest were a bonus. Mainly Walt just wanted to forget the studio. “We don’t know whether we’ll have jobs there when we get back there!” he joked sourly.
The group (Walt, Lillian, and seventeen associates including Norm Ferguson, Bill Cottrell, Ted Sears, and Webb Smith) left Los Angeles on a DC-3 on August 11 and hopscotched across the country, stopping in Fort Worth, Nashville, and Jacksonville before arriving in Miami, where they took a Sikorsky flying boat across the Caribbean to San Juan, Puerto Rico. The next morning they left aboard a Boeing Strato Clipper for Belém, Brazil, a remote outpost at the mouth of the Amazon River. “We landed for refueling in some little place cut out of the jungle in Brazil,” Cottrell remembered. “And there were hundreds and hundreds of school children there to greet Walt. They knew who Walt Disney was. They might not have known who the president of their own country was, but they all knew Walt Disney.” From Belém they flew to Rio de Janeiro, where they stayed ten days. The stated idea was to soak up atmosphere for the films the studio intended to produce on South American customs and folklore. But the real business seemed to be displaying Walt Disney to adoring fans and South American aristocrats, including heads of state. As Frank Thomas said, “Mainly we were wined and dined all over the place, where it was real hard to do any work.”