Jim Denney's Blog - Posts Tagged "walt"
The Honest Truth about Walt Disney
In the wake of the release of the motion picture Saving Mr. Banks, a few ignorami have resurrected the vicious canard about Walt Disney being a “racist” and an “antisemite.” This slur on Walt Disney’s reputation is provably untrue—and my writing partner Pat Williams and I did, in fact, demolish this claim in our 2004 book
How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life
(that book, by the way, would not have been possible, without the insight, assistance, and resources of my good friend, Peggy Matthews Rose).
Walt was not a perfect man, and Pat Williams and I honestly present his imperfections in our book. But as we proved in the book, Walt Disney was not a racist. Anyone who says otherwise is a shallow thinker at best, and at worst … well, I’ll leave that unsaid. Read the evidence for yourself, below, as it appears on pages 377-378 of How to Be Like Walt.
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Walt’s utopian vision of the future was more real to him than the “real world” of international tensions, racial tensions, and the Cold War. ... He envisioned a better world—a world beyond hate, beyond divisions of race, ethnicity, religion, and class.
Some revisionist critics have accused Walt of racism or anti-Semitism—and a lot of intellectually lazy people have repeated the accusation without bothering to check the facts. It’s hard to know where these charges originated, but some Disney scholars believe they may have originated in the union smear campaign against Walt during the 1941 strike. In any case, there should be no doubt about this: Walt Disney was not a racist.
"Walt was sensitive to people’s feelings," composer Robert Sherman told me. "He hated to see people mistreated or discriminated against. One time, Richard and I overheard a discussion between Walt and one of his lawyers. This attorney was a real bad guy, didn’t like minorities. He said something about Richard and me, and he called us ‘these Jew boys writing these songs.’ Well, Walt defended us, and he fired the lawyer. Walt was unbelievably great to us."
Artist Joe Grant, who is also Jewish, agrees. “Walt was not anti-Semitic,” Grant told an interviewer. “Some of the most influential people at the studio were Jewish. It’s much ado about nothing. I never once had a problem with him in that way. That myth should be laid to rest.”
Floyd Norman, an African-American story artist, also rejects the racism accusation. He recalls that, during the 1960s, several civil rights leaders tried to force the Disney studio to hire more minorities. “The funny part,” he said, “was that minorities weren’t knocking at the gates to get in. The jobs were there if they wanted them and if they were qualified. It’s like the old ruse that Walt didn’t hire Jews, which was also ridiculous. There were plenty of Jews at Disney. Personally, I never felt any prejudice from Walt.”
Katherine and Richard Greene, authors of Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney, discussed this question in an article on The Disney Family Museum website. Like me, they interviewed hundreds of people who knew Walt well—and they, too, found that in all of those interviews, “not one recalled a single incident in which this alleged anti-Semitism reared its head.” They observed:
"Jewish employees like Joe Grant and the Sherman Brothers all violently defend Walt’s memory. Meyer Minda, a Jewish neighbor of Walt’s in Kansas City, didn’t remember any evidence whatsoever of anti-Jewish feelings in Walt or the Disney family. Even when Sharon dated a young Jewish man, her parents didn’t voice any objections… . In fact, the authors of this essay are Jewish, and from the outset of a decade of research into Walt Disney have looked carefully through the record—letters, memos, conversations with reliable sources—for any evidence that Walt may have harbored a dislike of Jews. None was found. Furthermore, in 1955 the B’Nai B’rith chapter in Beverly Hills cited him as their man of the year. Hardly an award likely to be presented to an anti-Semite."
Those who truly knew the man will tell you—emphatically and unanimously—that Walt had a heart so big it embraced all of humanity, regardless of meaningless distinctions such as language or skin color. The only race he recognized was the human race, and nothing did his heart more good than to see people coming together from all over the world to share their hopes, goals, and dreams.
Ralph Kent of the Disney Design Group told me, “Walt Disney was a humanitarian and a utopian. That’s what his dream of EPCOT was all about. That’s one reason he was so excited about producing attractions for the 1964 World’s Fair. He was always thinking about tomorrow and how to make life better for the people of the world. He was promoting ecology in the 1950s, way before it was the thing to do. He was promoting peace, human understanding, and human progress. We’d tell him, ‘No one will be interested in that stuff.’ Walt said, ‘I’ll teach by entertaining people.’ And he did.”
Excerpted from How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life by Pat Williams with Jim Denney; foreword by Art Linkletter (Deerfield Beach, FL: HCI, 2004), 377-378.
Walt was not a perfect man, and Pat Williams and I honestly present his imperfections in our book. But as we proved in the book, Walt Disney was not a racist. Anyone who says otherwise is a shallow thinker at best, and at worst … well, I’ll leave that unsaid. Read the evidence for yourself, below, as it appears on pages 377-378 of How to Be Like Walt.
---------------------------------------
Walt’s utopian vision of the future was more real to him than the “real world” of international tensions, racial tensions, and the Cold War. ... He envisioned a better world—a world beyond hate, beyond divisions of race, ethnicity, religion, and class.
Some revisionist critics have accused Walt of racism or anti-Semitism—and a lot of intellectually lazy people have repeated the accusation without bothering to check the facts. It’s hard to know where these charges originated, but some Disney scholars believe they may have originated in the union smear campaign against Walt during the 1941 strike. In any case, there should be no doubt about this: Walt Disney was not a racist.
"Walt was sensitive to people’s feelings," composer Robert Sherman told me. "He hated to see people mistreated or discriminated against. One time, Richard and I overheard a discussion between Walt and one of his lawyers. This attorney was a real bad guy, didn’t like minorities. He said something about Richard and me, and he called us ‘these Jew boys writing these songs.’ Well, Walt defended us, and he fired the lawyer. Walt was unbelievably great to us."
Artist Joe Grant, who is also Jewish, agrees. “Walt was not anti-Semitic,” Grant told an interviewer. “Some of the most influential people at the studio were Jewish. It’s much ado about nothing. I never once had a problem with him in that way. That myth should be laid to rest.”
Floyd Norman, an African-American story artist, also rejects the racism accusation. He recalls that, during the 1960s, several civil rights leaders tried to force the Disney studio to hire more minorities. “The funny part,” he said, “was that minorities weren’t knocking at the gates to get in. The jobs were there if they wanted them and if they were qualified. It’s like the old ruse that Walt didn’t hire Jews, which was also ridiculous. There were plenty of Jews at Disney. Personally, I never felt any prejudice from Walt.”
Katherine and Richard Greene, authors of Inside the Dream: The Personal Story of Walt Disney, discussed this question in an article on The Disney Family Museum website. Like me, they interviewed hundreds of people who knew Walt well—and they, too, found that in all of those interviews, “not one recalled a single incident in which this alleged anti-Semitism reared its head.” They observed:
"Jewish employees like Joe Grant and the Sherman Brothers all violently defend Walt’s memory. Meyer Minda, a Jewish neighbor of Walt’s in Kansas City, didn’t remember any evidence whatsoever of anti-Jewish feelings in Walt or the Disney family. Even when Sharon dated a young Jewish man, her parents didn’t voice any objections… . In fact, the authors of this essay are Jewish, and from the outset of a decade of research into Walt Disney have looked carefully through the record—letters, memos, conversations with reliable sources—for any evidence that Walt may have harbored a dislike of Jews. None was found. Furthermore, in 1955 the B’Nai B’rith chapter in Beverly Hills cited him as their man of the year. Hardly an award likely to be presented to an anti-Semite."
Those who truly knew the man will tell you—emphatically and unanimously—that Walt had a heart so big it embraced all of humanity, regardless of meaningless distinctions such as language or skin color. The only race he recognized was the human race, and nothing did his heart more good than to see people coming together from all over the world to share their hopes, goals, and dreams.
Ralph Kent of the Disney Design Group told me, “Walt Disney was a humanitarian and a utopian. That’s what his dream of EPCOT was all about. That’s one reason he was so excited about producing attractions for the 1964 World’s Fair. He was always thinking about tomorrow and how to make life better for the people of the world. He was promoting ecology in the 1950s, way before it was the thing to do. He was promoting peace, human understanding, and human progress. We’d tell him, ‘No one will be interested in that stuff.’ Walt said, ‘I’ll teach by entertaining people.’ And he did.”
Excerpted from How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life by Pat Williams with Jim Denney; foreword by Art Linkletter (Deerfield Beach, FL: HCI, 2004), 377-378.
