Recently, Florida’s legislature passed a bill to revoke Walt Disney World Resort’s self-governing Reedy Creek Improvement district. Florida Republicans were retaliating for Disney’s late but vocal opposition to a law limiting the discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. Some accused Disney of betraying “family values,” saying the company had been “perverted by a woke mob of liberal extremists.”
But this charge misunderstands Disney’s history. The company’s values have consistently changed over the past 100 years. Disney’s brand is stories — and American stories keep evolving. From New Deal populism in the 1930s to multiculturalism at the closing of the 20th century, Disney has always been enmeshed with the politics of “the real world.” The company’s next century will be no different.
Mickey Mouse did not succeed because he was a moral exemplar. He captivated audiences because he was a mischievous everyman in the body of a rodent. In 1933, Edwin C. Hill wrote that Mickey’s celebrity made sense during the Great Depression, when the American people were in crisis and “needed him most.” Most pivotally, the cartoon character gave suffering Americans hope. In Hill’s mind, that made Mickey Mouse as deserving of praise as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, renowned for this same trait.
In his studio’s early years, Walt Disney, like Mickey, was a friend to the little guy — and a supporter of Roosevelt. He was, at heart, a populist. When it came to his business, the little guy was valued most as a potential customer, and Disney’s goal was to serve him by providing entertainment. “It is not our job to teach, implant morals, or improve anything except our pictures,” he said in one 1933 interview. Humor and ticket sales mattered most.
Of course, popular characters were not always kind. In that same year, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” from Disney’s short film “The Three Little Pigs” swept the nation. Even the president loved it. The film contained a stereotype of a Jewish peddler so noxious that it was altered in 1948. Though Disney would later receive commendations from chapters of Jewish organizations Hadassah and B’nai B’rith, stereotypes like this one displayed the alarmingly common American antisemitism of the interwar years.
Disney’s mid-century record on racial stereotypes was similarly troubling.
By the 1950s, both Disney and his company had become Cold War warriors. On Disneyland’s opening day, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish chaplains stood at attention, echoing the chaplains who famously perished together on the troop ship Dorchester during World War II and became a symbol of interfaith unity. A Protestant minister, Walt Disney’s nephew, Rev. Glenn D. Puder, then spoke. He told the crowd: “Beyond the creeds that would divide us, let us unite in a silent prayer, that this and every worthy endeavor may prosper at God’s hand.”
Despite Americans’ great religious diversity — which extended well beyond members of the Jewish and Christian traditions represented on opening day — most Disney stories of the postwar years helped to advance the Eisenhower era’s dominant “tri-faith America” mythos and to promote the nuclear family. Disney also campaigned for Eisenhower, one of many examples of the company diving straight into political waters.
Disney’s 1950s films and television shows reinforced faith and patriotism. “Cinderella” told Americans “if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true.” Davy Crockett’s adventures included his sojourn in Congress and a song that lauded him for “fighting for liberty.” Walt Disney’s own trust in “the efficacy of religion” and in “the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America” shaped how millions of Americans saw their country.
In the 1960s, the “It’s a Small World” Disneyland ride, with its utopic message married to the modern era’s invention of folk dress, distilled Cold War internationalism into a 14-minute cruise set to the sounds of what became an infamous earworm. When the ride transferred from the 1964 New York World’s Fair to Disneyland, its opening day looked like a miniature United Nations. Children from a host of countries ceremonially poured water from the world’s oceans into the moat surrounding this new temple.
As Americans became more active consumers — and as their faith in elected leaders faltered in the wake of Watergate — they looked increasingly to corporations for a kind of salvation. And Disney executives recognized this need. From the 1964 World’s Fair to the 1982 opening of Epcot Center, now Epcot Theme Park, they designed “a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.” In gleaming pavilions, Epcot visitors glided through corporate-sponsored visions of a future with hologram phones and world peace — with catchy lyrics promising “answers to guide us and dreams to unite us.” Epcot heralded a future in which all would be redeemed — through consumerism.
By the 1990s, the Walt Disney Co. was celebrating multiculturalism (albeit with some complications — see: “Pocahontas”) and stronger heroines in its films. The Disney renaissance arose thanks to the creativity of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, the lyricist and composer for “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Aladdin.” Ashman — a Jewish gay man — died of AIDS in 1991.
Ariel might have needed some help with contract law, but she was the first Disney princess to be truly active, rather than reactive. This change reflected Disney’s understanding that the feminist movement had changed American sensibilities. And Ariel was just the start. Over the past 30 years, Disney films have become less about “wishing upon a star” and more about “how far I’ll go.” In the 1990s, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas and Mulan all took initiative in ways that Snow White never could.
More recent heroines’ adventures are about internal struggles rather than external evils. In “Frozen,” Elsa’s “conceal, don’t feel” is a mantra for women raised to pursue effortless perfection. “Moana” premiered in 2016, the same year Americans nearly elected a woman for president. The title heroine discovers that the film’s fiery villain is actually a life-giving goddess, driven to defend her realm by any means necessary after a man steals her heart, a fitting metaphor for resource extraction and the climate crisis, but also for the impact of toxic masculinity on women’s progress.
More films like these, reflecting diversity, show us what America is becoming and demonstrate that Disney isn’t pining for the past. It’s this that is at the heart of the “woke Disney” accusations from the right. Disney’s opponents are longing for a return to the past, to the days of demure princesses who look the way they did in 1950.
This year, when Disney CEO Bob Chapek initially refused to condemn the Florida bill, he wrote, in an email to employees: “I believe the best way for our company to bring about lasting change is through the inspiring content we produce.” Many within the company believed the statement was a cop-out, and it led to anger, but Chapek’s assertion about “changing hearts and minds” is deeply reflective of Disney’s longtime ethos. Over close to a century, its stories have changed as more diverse creators took a seat at the table and helped make the Disney brand more inclusive.
In 1928, a plucky mouse rode to power during a financial crisis. In 1989, Ariel’s longing to be who she felt she was inside became a source of identification for some LGBTQ teens looking for a voice. In 2021, the Madrigal family showed us how families survive trauma as we all continued to reckon with a global pandemic. Disney isn’t perfect. Yet the company’s stories have provided us ways to navigate an ever-changing world.
