Cover image for The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World by Vicky Osterweil (2026) | Haymarket Books
In the wake of the animator’s strike, Walt’s reflexive conservatism turned into a frothing anti-communism. But while his politics grew more unhinged and hateful, his creative output turned definitively toward the production of nostalgia. Song of the South’s reenvisioning of plantation childhood was one particularly egregious example, as was Peter Pan’s shocking image of Indigenous life in “What Made the Red Man Red?” But this aesthetic was perhaps most clearly embodied in his televised Disneyland show on ABC, where he cemented his image as avuncular friend of America’s children, and in Main Street, USA, the entry point of his new theme park, Disneyland.
Main Street, USA was a reproduction of Walt’s memory of turn-of-the-century Marceline, Missouri, a town where he had spent some of his formative childhood years, even if his actual family life had been marked by economic precarity, paternal abuse, and emotional alienation. Evoking such an image as part of a “magic kingdom” became an aesthetic argument for a kind of small-town American Protestant morality that would predominate in the park in the form of aggressive friendliness, total cleanliness, and the elimination of “vice.” But pointing to this moral conservatism is often where critiques of Disney’s politics end.
In most biographical glosses and histories, Walt is described as basically nonpolitical. He is acknowledged as a Republican, but he is often portrayed as someone mostly interested in his company, his creations, and his cartoons. This is an accurate enough description of Walt Disney in the 1920s and early ’30s. In the wake of various sex and morality scandals that rocked Hollywood in the late ’20s, and the anti-Semitism that ran through those moral panics, Walt was held up to the world as the image of a cleaner, more wholesome Hollywood, the nice middle American goy who gave birth to Mickey Mouse and reminded us of childhood innocence. Walt and his company were extremely careful in managing this image—Walt appeared everywhere, but actual journalistic access to the studio was intensely controlled.
This has continued long after his death: the Walt Disney Company maintains a “public” archive of all of Walt’s papers, along with the studio’s internal workings and early art. It is one of the largest collections of entertainment and early Hollywood material any-where on earth—but it is only open to the right kind of public. You have to apply to receive access, and even if you are approved it can be conditional on giving the company final say over whatever work you produce with the archival IP contained therein. As a result, the research scope of the books and academic papers that talk critically about the company or Walt is actively diminished by the existence of the archive. This is another way that IP can subtly, quietly restrict and reduce public culture, knowledge, and thought: Corporate control over archives and histories leaves unseen and unknown gaps in our knowledge of the world, gaps that could be easily filled were it not for the legal power of the owner. Through such gaps paranoia, conspiracy theory, propaganda, and marketing flow like water through a drain.
When talking about politics in the latter period of Walt’s career, historians typically point to Disney’s anti-Axis propaganda films for the US war effort, including—most infamously—Der Fuehrer’s Face, in which Donald Duck dresses up in Hitlerian parody. They may also point to his key role in the federal government’s Hollywood trust-busting campaign, where he testified before Congress about collusion practices carried out by other studio heads. Though he probably participated in the latter as a matter of good competitive business sense and to assuage his own long-nursed resentments against the other major studios, he was certainly on the right side of history. But in all these examples, Walt was driven by anti-communism and self-interest, not economic justice or anti-fascism.
In November of 1938, Third Reich director Leni Riefenstahl, who had wowed the cinematic world with her Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935) and her body-fascist account of the Berlin Olympic Games, Olympia (1938), was scheduled to visit Hollywood and meet with studio heads and stars. But a week before her arrival, the Nazis unleashed Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass—in Germany. The state-coordinated mass rioting and violence against Jewish businesses, people, and other social “deviants” is widely recognized as a foreshadowing, or even the beginning, of the Holocaust.
Hollywood studios widely condemned the event, and Holly-wood’s biggest stars and the Jewish heads of studios (despite most of the latter being otherwise conservative union-busting businessmen) canceled their meetings with Riefenstahl. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, made up of a wide array of Hollywood workers, owners, producers, and stars, called on everyone to do the same in an open letter in The Hollywood Reporter. Walt, however, kept his appointment with Riefenstahl, giving her a tour of the studio and spending all day with her, showing her stills and concept images from Fantasia. When she offered to send Walt a print of Olympia, Walt demurred, since the projectionists who would be required to screen it were unionized and might spread word of the event. Three months later, however, when the incident was uncovered in the press, Walt begged innocence, claiming he didn’t know who she was at the time of her visit.
Disney appeared beside Charles Lindbergh at several rallies for the “America First” movement that demanded the US stay out of the war. Biographer Marc Eliot even claimed that that Walt, Roy, and lawyer Gunther Lessing attended American Nazi Party meetings, which the Disney family strenuously denies. Walt’s anti-Semitism was well known and well established in the studio and across Tinseltown, but to call him a full-throated Nazi is going too far. He was just Nazi-curious. As the US entered the war, his patriotism—or his bottom line, at least—overcame his flirtation with European fascism. But after the animators’ strike, he became one of Hollywood’s most vicious and visible Cold Warriors and anti-communists.
The McCarthyite Red Scare, in which Hollywood actors and directors were brought before Congress to testify on whether they were or had ever been members of the Communist Party, owe part of its genesis to Walt. As early as 1941, Walt was writing letters to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), asking it to undertake an investigation of Hollywood because it was, in his words, a “hotbed of communism.” He suggested they start with Art Babbitt, Herb Sorrell, and the Disney artists who had organized the anima-tors’ strike. When, during the war, Walt was made vice president of the MPA, as one of his first official actions he again wrote to HUAC about Hollywood communism, and this time, in 1944, HUAC sent an officer who would begin the process of setting up those trials and hearings.
In 1947, Walt was called to testify before HUAC as it built its cases, which Walt proudly did. He started his testimony by slandering Herb Sorrell as a bona fide communist. Sorrell, a union man who had been central in organizing Hollywood workers, including in Disney’s shop, was no revolutionary, never mind a card-carrying Bolshevik, but the accusation fatally weakened Sorrell’s Conference of Studio Unions. CSU was already in decline, but its demise was a huge win for the bosses, as it was a progressive shop opposed to the mobbed-up, patriotic, and anti-strike IATSE that dominated the Hollywood trades. Sorrell had been sacked before the hearings had even ended, and the organization collapsed shortly thereafter. But not be-fore its supposed communist ties and the extremely contentious set decorators’ strike it led (which culminated in the infamously violent Black Friday riots at the gates of Warner Bros. studios on October 5, 1945) were used as key evidence in support of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which effectively made most types of strikes illegal and has severely restricted militant labor power in the US ever since. In his folksy and avuncular way, Walt Disney contributed to Taft-Hartley and the end of the classical workers’ movement in America.
Returning to his HUAC testimony, Walt next pointed the finger at David Hilberman, an extremely talented animator who had been a core organizer in the strike but was actually a member of the communist Party. Hilberman’s fate was more typical, though no less tragic: He would be blacklisted, put under FBI surveillance for fifteen years, and forced out of Hollywood. When he finally managed to get hired as a partner in a New York commercial animation house, Tempo Productions, it was identified as a communist front in the pamphlet Red Channels, published by the blacklist periodical Counterattack, and pushed out of business. In the same hearing, more comically, Walt accused the staid suffragist League of Women Voters of being a communist front. (He had in fact confused them with the completely apolitical League of Women Shoppers, whom he had meant to finger because Gunther Lessing had told him they offered a statement of support to the Screen Cartoonists Guild during the Disney strike.)
Walt also worked as a special agent for the FBI in its war against civil rights and union and communist organizing. He filed reports on an event held by the Latin American civil rights organization the Council for Pan American Democracy in 1943 (which was soon thereafter designated a subversive organization by the attorney general) and on a tribute to cartoonist Art Young that was held by leftist magazine New Masses in January of ’44. Walt, a guest of honor at the former and a host at the latter, wasn’t just emceeing or eating rubbery chicken breasts, but spying on Carmen Miranda, Pablo Neruda, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, and Orson Welles, among others.
Walt campaigned openly against communism through the MPA, but he also supported and donated to right-wing Republican candidates. He was part of a loose social club of Hollywood ultra-conservatives, became close personal friends with ur-racist John Wayne, and was a major donor and supporter of proudly racist presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, donating over $16,000 to his campaign and offering Goldwater the use of the company’s jets.
At the same time that his politics were solidifying within the far right, he cemented his image as the benevolent upholder of Ameri-can values and protective father figure to America’s youth. He also displayed his keen entrepreneurial insight and technological acumen, and transformed Disney from a film studio into the multisector entertainment conglomerate it remains to the present day.
Excerpted from The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World by Vicky Osterweil (2026) | Haymarket Books. Reprinted with permission.
