Was Walt Disney the first American victim of FDR’s illegal spy network?
Last night I watched an old Disney cartoon called “The Golden Touch,” which is a retelling of the famous Greek myth about King Midas. This cartoon has a message: if you hoard gold, you’re not only stupid, but also immoral.
“The Golden Touch” makes a special effort to ridicule the idea that ‘Gold is Money’ by conspicuously showing ‘In Gold I Trust’ signs plastered all over the foolish King Midas’s palace. The phrase ‘In God We Trust’ has been used on American coins and dollar bills since 1864.
I’m telling you this, because Walt Disney released “The Golden Touch” at an interesting time: the cartoon came out in March 1935, about a year after Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed his 1934 Gold Reserve Act, which was proving wildly unpopular amongst the public. The act was the last in a series of unpopular gold laws:
1) In 1933, Executive Order 6102 prohibited the “hoarding” of gold by any individual, partnership, association or corporation. Everyone, with small exceptions for tradesmen like jewelers and dentists, had to sell their gold to the Treasury before May 1st, 1933 when the price of gold was something like $23/ounce. This order was tweeked a few times in subsequent months.
2) One year later, in 1934, The Gold Reserve Act outlawed the private possession of gold. The Act also ordered the Treasury to buy gold for $35/ounce– $12 higher than the market price before the Act became law!
Understandably, American gold owners felt cheated. The Treasury’s artificially high gold price also caused gold from all over the world to flow into the USA, where the Treasury was legally required to buy it. Some historians view FDR’s gold policy as economic warfare and part of the lead up to WWII.
So many people were outraged by FDR’s gold policy that by 1934 FDR had an epic PR battle on his hands. Franklin would need to use everything at his disposal to bend public will.
The point of this post, readers, is to suggest that Walt Disney began his collaboration with FDR well before the official date of 1941: Disney started his collaboration in 1934 when “The Golden Touch” began production and FDR desperately needed help. I argue Disney’s ‘help’ backfired on him and the Studios.
The production process for “The Golden Touch” had many unusual characteristics. Disney himself hadn’t directed a cartoon in some time, but decided to ‘get back in the game’ and oversea “The Golden Touch” personally.
According to Dave Hand, who ran one of Disney Studio’s production units:
“Well, it seems Walt got itchy fingers and decided HE would direct a picture. The fact that he had never directed any picture never occurred to him. So Walt took what I supposed to be a very good story, ‘King Midas and the Golden Touch’ from the story department. It was all pretty much ‘hush-hush’. He worked on it in his business office set-up. The thing that galled me was that he assigned every one of the ten animators to his ‘Midas’ picture. And I had to do with the beginner guys. The other two directors had to get along with second raters, also. We directors were not invited to see any preliminary animation—nothing was shown until preview time. The cost of the picture was way over budget it was rumored. So what—they were Walt’s costs. I mean to be fair minded, but to be honest, I’ve just got to say—it was a dismal flop. That was the first and last of Walt’s directorial attempts.”
Disney historian Jim Korkis disputes Hand’s version of events:
Of course, you have to be careful trusting even first-person accounts of events. Obviously, Walt had directed shorts before, just not while Hand was there at the studio. While the budget was high, the other Silly Symphonies for the year ranged from the $20,000-$35,000 so it wasn’t wildly over the cost of some of the other Silly Symphonies that year.
The Golden Touch was made at a cost of $35,458.19. Music Land that same year came in at $35,054.55 and The Tortoise and the Hare at $32,671.76. Of course, it could be argued that The Golden Touch with basically only two characters and no major special effects should have come in at a lower cost.
Walt did not steal away ten top animators. He only took two animators: the two top animators at the studio at the time.
Those two special animators were Norm Ferguson and Fred Moore, while storyboarding was done by Albert Hurter. Jack Kinney (who directed Disney propaganda cartoon “Der Fuehrer’s Face”) wrote this about “The Golden Touch” in his 1989 book Walt Disney and Other Assorted Characters :
“Burt [Gillett)]s exodus really griped Walt who said, ‘Who needs him? I’ll direct in his place.’ And so he did, using his top animators from The Three Little Pigs—Norm Ferguson and Freddie Moore. Walt moved into his own music room and started making The Golden Touch, the King Midas story.
“This was a very hush-hush operation, with just two animators, who were sworn to secrecy. The entire studio awaited this epic, and finally it was finished and previewed at the Alex Theater in Glendale. All personnel turned out to see what Walt had wrought. He had wrought a bomb! The Golden Touch laid a great big golden egg. That picture was the last Walt ever directed. We knew better than to discuss it, ever. It was forgotten and the studio went on to other things.
“Years later, Walt roared into Jaxon’s [Wilfred Jackson] office and started chewing him out about something or other. Jaxon was usually a very calm guy, but he was a redhead and this time he blew his cool. ‘Walt,’ he said, “I recollect that you once directed a picture called The Golden Touch.’ There was instant silence. Walt stared at Jaxon, then stomped out, slamming the door.
“As Jaxon described it, after a few beats, the door opened and Walt’s head popped back in. Wearing a heavy frown and very slowly punctuating his words with his finger, he said, ‘Never, ever mention that picture again.’ Then he slammed the door and clumped down the hall.
“Needless to say, it was never mentioned again.”
What I think we can take home is that “The Golden Touch” was a very secretive project that Disney was sensitive about and wanted to oversee himself. The cartoon was also a flop and I ask readers to remember that “The Golden Touch” was unprofitable for Disney.
“The Golden Touch” itself was part of a larger propaganda campaign supporting FDR’s gold policy, which involved Good Housekeeping magazine, as well as other prominent media outlets. According to Jim Korkis:
The story [The Golden Touch] appeared in a full- page color adaptation in the November 1934 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine to publicize the upcoming release of the short. Six illustrated panels told the tale in rhyme: “A wiser, better, happier king. He’s learned that gold’s not everything.”
Nearly a decade later, in the comic book Walt Disney’s and Comics and Stories No. 20 (May 1942) there was a three-page illustrated text story of the short, using the illustrations from the Good Housekeeping magazine.
More intriguingly was that, in 1937, publisher David McKay’s Whitman Publishing Company released an entire hardcover book devoted to the story from the film. In close to a 150 pages (with a black and white illustration on each page and many full-page illustrations facing text pages, as well as six full-color pictures), an uncredited writer effectively expands on the story with some interesting additions including Midas sharing his hamburger with his cat at the end of the story: “His dining hall was no use to him now, for he could not eat gold. His bathroom was equally useless, as the water would become a liquid golden mass at his touch. His bedroom would be even more useless since who could sleep between golden sheets and wighed down by a golden eiderdown?”
“The Golden Touch” was clearly useful to FDR and his friends, but Walt Disney was not amused at being left to pay for the commercial flop. It could be that Disney was reluctant to dabble in propaganda again after getting his fingers burned on Midas…
Fast forward five years to 1940. Disney had just released to the public his personal masterpiece, Fantasia, which I wrote about here. Most critics loved it, except one in particular, Dorothy Thompson, who had switched her political allegiance to FDR one month before her review of Fantasia. (TIME called her the most influential women in the USA after Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR’s wife.) Dorothy Thompson tried to destroy Fantasia in her Herald Tribune review by claiming the film was ‘Nazi’! She painted Disney in colors which signaled to FDR’s well-monied supporters that Disney Studios should be shunned and shamed.
In 1940 Thompson’s readership was huge– in the millions– and she was one of the most widely-talked about female journalists. Just how bad was Thompson’s review of Fantasia? From Steven Watts’ The Magic Kingdom:
On November 25th 1940, Dorothy Thompson published a long review of Fantasia entitled “Minority Report”” in the New York Herald Tribune, and it set off a major imbroglio. Given the essay’s extreme sentiments, it was little wonder. “I left the theater in a condition bordering on nervous breakdown. I felt as though I had been subjected to an assault,” Thompson wrote. Disney’s film, she asserted, was “a performance of Satanic defilement,” “a remarkable nightmare, ” “brutal and brutalizing.” As she went on , she ratcheted her anger several notches higher: “All I could think to say of the ‘experience’ as I staggered out was that it was ‘Nazi.’ The word did not arise out of an obsession. Nazism is the abuse of power, the perverted betrayal of the best instincts, the genius of a race turned into black magical destruction and so is ‘Fantasia.'” Disney and his concert film, Thompson accused, had launched an attack on “the civilized world” by providing a sick caricature of the “Decline of the West.” Warming to her theme, she made two specific complaints. First the film reflected a “sadistic, gloomy, fatalistic, pantheistic,” anti-humanist philosophy where “Nature is titanic; man is a moving lichen on the stone of time.” Second, she insisted, Disney and Stokowski had concocted an assault on civilized culture that made a mockery of great classical composers. The degradation of the Beethoven segment alone should have been “sufficient to raise and army, if there is enough blood left in culture to defend itself,” Thompson wrote angrily, before noting that she stormed out of the theater unwilling to witness the film’s concluding degradation of Mussorgsky and Schubert.
Ms. Thompson’s wild accusations of Nazism and ‘misuse’ of classical music, as well as her preoccupation with culture wars, remind me of Herbert Marcuse’s work and the ‘Frankfurt School’ political theorists. In two years’ time FDR would employ Marcuse as part of his personal propaganda and intelligence apparatus, the OSS:
Marcuse worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) formed in 1942 to conduct psychological warfare against the Axis Powers. After the end of World War II, the pivotal section of the OSS, the Research and Analysis Branch, was assigned to the Department of State.
Were Walt Disney and his masterwork Fantasia the first victims of FDR’s WWII propaganda machine? Did Walt Disney, who was possibly reluctant to cooperate with FDR after “The Golden Touch”, find himself on the receiving end of Franklin’s media bitch-bulldog?
William Boyd of The Guardian says that William Stephenson, the British spy and FDR’s co-conspirator in forming the OSS, used his position as head of the British Security Coordination (BSC) in New York to influence reporting at Thompson’s employer, the Herald Tribune— influence that was well entrenched by late 1940 when Thompson wrote her take-down of Fantasia.
Dorothy Thompson, whose employer The Herald Tribune, was manipulated by British spy and FDR crony William Stephenson.
But Dorothy Thompson’s attacks were not the only FDR-aligned catastrophe to hit Disney before he agreed to become Franklin’s ambassador to South America.
Fantasia was not a financial success and after 1940 Disney Studios was in need of money. On top of that, they were hit by a strike on May 29th 1941, which was lead by secret Communist Party member and Soviet spy Herbert Sorrell. (Bear in mind that FDR and Stalin were allies at this time, and secret FDR collaboration with the Soviet NKGB had started at around the time of the Disney strikes. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan would ‘legitimize’ this informal relationship between the NKGB and the OSS in 1944.) Perhaps all FDR had to do in 1941 was make a phone call?
Disney’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, says that this strike hit Disney completely out of the blue: he couldn’t understand where it came from and why it had such “virulence”. The strike was one of two events that Disney couldn’t recover from, she says in Walt and El Grupo.
One week after the start of the strike on June 5th, FDR ‘asked’ Walt to take part in a US propaganda mission to South America, which is the subject of the Disney Corporation’s 2008 documentary Walt and El Grupo. (In the documentary Walt Disney described the 1941 period in his life as “the toughest for me” and filled with ” a lot of disappointments”. At 08:31 you can see a brief glimpse of a memo marked “WALT” and “Bob Carr” which outlines the propaganda plans for Disney’s South American trip. Bob Carr was a mayor of Orlando, Florida who oversaw the opening of the Disney theme park there. Carr’s politics seem to align with FDR’s.)
The Disney Studios strike wasn’t resolved until the end of Walt Disney’s South American tour of duty. Disney’s father had died in the meantime. But what does that matter? FDR got what he wanted.
Walt Disney Studios would limp through WWII making propaganda cartoons for FDR and his Brit-spy buddies. Remember BSC asset Roald Dahl and his gremlins?
Hey, Air Force! Merchandise!
Walt may have been forced to participate in 1941 propaganda drives, but whether he was or not, he made sure that Disney Studios wouldn’t loose money on disastrous government propaganda films. Consider this clip from Walt and El Grupo, where J B Kaufmann describes how Walt painstakingly negotiated with the US government to make sure Disney Studios wouldn’t be stuck with the bill for a propaganda flop… like what happened with “The Golden Touch”?
Once Disney worked out the kinks in his government contracts, he cooperated fully with US Armed Forces and the Executive Branch to make many different forms of propaganda, as described here by Lisa Briner of the Army Heritage and Education Center:
An important factor ensuring America’s ultimate victory over the Axis Powers in World War II was the overwhelming and unwavering support of the Home Front. Contributing much to creating and maintaining that Home Front support were Walt Disney films. Meanwhile, morale-boosting Disney-designed insignia that soon appeared on planes, trucks, flight jackets, and other military equipment accomplished the same for American and Allied forces.
During the war Disney made films for every branch of the U.S. government. Typical of the films was the 1943 “The Spirit of ’43” produced at the request of the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. The film depicted Donald Duck dealing with federal income taxes and pointing out the benefit of paying his taxes in support of the American war effort.
At the Navy’s request, the Disney Studios also produced, in just three months, some 90,000 feet of training film to educate sailors on navigation tactics. Disney animators also worked closely with Hollywood producer Frank Capra and created what many consider to be the most brilliant animated maps to appear in a series of seven highly successful “Why We Fight” films.
During the war, over 90 percent of Disney employees were devoted to the production of training and propaganda films. In all, the Disney Studios produced some 400,000 feet of film representing some 68 hours of continuous film. Included among the films produced was “Der Fuehrer’s Face” again featuring Donald Duck. It won the Oscar as the best animated film for 1943.
Perhaps the importance of the Disney Studios to the war effort is best demonstrated by the fact that the U.S. Army deployed troops to protect the facilities, the only Hollywood studio accorded such treatment.
(Emphasis is my own- a.nolen)
I think it’s more than likely that FDR called on Disney for political support in 1934; I think it’s also very likely that Disney ended up feeling cheated by FDR. When FDR’s war effort got rolling, the president had to use his British illegal spy friends and their ‘dirty tricks’ to coerce his fellow American into jumping on board.
FDR’s propaganda machine cost Disney more than just his integrity. In 1941– the year Disney became an ‘official spokesperson’ for the US government in South America– Disney Studios lost its brilliant special effects guru, Herman Schultheis, who was responsible for many of the revolutionary artistic effects in Fantasia. Herman Schultheis was German-born and probably didn’t pass the US government’s ‘security clearance’ requirements. Schultheis left Disney to work in the research library at Librascope: a huge loss for Disney Studios and American cultural heritage.
How did Walt Disney feel about his wartime propaganda efforts? He was probably too scared to ever talk about it, but I suspect the 1961 creation of kind, loveable Prof. Ludwig Von Drake with Ward Kimball (who animated Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi) was a type of personal penance.
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P.S. Writing this post on Disney turned up so many interesting tidbits on Dorothy Thompson that I just have to list some here.
First of all, Dorothy made her name as a suffragette in the New York political milieu that was so heavily financed by Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, who also financed the British agent provocateur and war-monger Emmeline Pankhurst, and whose family money made Winston Churchill’s career possible. Working for Alva as a suffragette also launched the career of Roald Dahl’s political bedfellow Clare Boothe Luce.
Curiously, both Dorothy Thompson and Clare Boothe Luce were given journalistic roles after their ‘suffragette’ ones: Dorothy covered Hitler for Cosmopolitan magazine (you know– it’s now a sex rag like the type George Orwell hated); while Clare Boothe Luce became an editor at both Vogue and Vanity Fair, and then covered WWII for TIME. You could say these fabulous women paved the way for journalistic mega-millionaires like Gawker.com’s Nick Denton.
Dorothy Thompson and Clare Boothe Luce both did a lot of ‘agenda flip-flopping’ throughout their careers– Dorothy was so bad that TIME magazine called her “iron-whimmed“, though you could argue Luce wasn’t much better. For most of her career Dorothy Thompson could be counted on to be a venomous ‘shrieker’ in support of whatever cause gained her strokes from the powerful. Dorothy paved the way for modern agenda prostitutes like Little Green Football’s Charles Johnson.
Finally, Dorothy and Clare had a famous falling out over Dorothy’s mid-campaign switch from supporting Wendell Wilkie’s presidential bid to supporting FDR’s. Since these two women are credited with shaping many American women’s political opinions at the time, you could say that Dorothy’s switch had more than a touch of the Hegelian Dialectic about it. Dorothy Thompson and Clare Boothe Luce paved the way for modern democracy managers like the staff at BuzzFeed and their ex-editor Benny Johnson.
Mrs. Luce got into a scrap with Democrat Dorothy Thompson during the Roosevelt-Wilkie campaign, and witnessed the “almost physical pleasure” men got out of watching that fight. From this she learned that “men will turn what two women say into a hair-pulling battle, and the issue the women are fighting over will be forgotten.” (From The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 9th 1980).
