The honeymoon period for Bob Iger's return sure didn't last long. Months after taking back the CEO's chair at The Walt Disney Company, he managed to alienate huge swaths of Hollywood and his own employees with dismissive comments about the demands of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA that have led to both unions' ongoing strike. If Iger's words weren't the cruelest comments said by an executive about the current tensions in the industry, they are among the most widespread and condemned ones uttered by an executive willing to go on record.
In making sweeping statements about the strikes that seem almost tailored to further inflame a hostile labor dispute, Iger has at least one thing in common with his predecessor. There's not much else to connect him to Walt Disney, who eschewed corporate titles and obscene personal wealth and was far more a filmmaker than a businessman. Walt never had to deal with streaming residuals or the looming threat of AI either. But his failings helped contribute to the Disney animators’ strike of 1941, a momentous enough event that historian Tom Sito has dubbed it the “Civil War of Animation.” The effects of this particular strike went beyond working conditions. Because of it, art, design, and animation would never be the same.
Disney Was a Magnate for Labor During the Depression
Unlike today's conflict, Walt Disney Productions (as it was then known) was out of step with the rest of Hollywood when it came to labor disputes. The Great Depression and the Roosevelt administration helped inspire more union activity during the 1930s than the previous 50 years. SAG, the DGA, and what became the WGA were all founded that decade, and they doggedly fought the major studios to win equitable pay, protection against exploitation, and safe working conditions. These battles passed Disney by. It was too small then to attract any notice from labor efforts; a handful of artists exiled from Kansas working in a medium seen as a novelty wasn’t worth expending energy over. And sitting at a drawing desk carries considerably less physical risk than a live-action shoot.
Those humble circumstances didn’t last long. Animation was no mere novelty to Walt Disney. From his first forays into the medium, he strove to improve it, and his ambitions grew with each effort. The Depression drove many an artist to the studio’s doors, and the reputation of the studio as a place of artistic growth provided an additional lure. Per historian Michael Barrier, “Artists who were working at other cartoon studios routinely accepted large pay cuts and took lesser jobs when they went to work for Disney. They came to learn.” Flocks of students fresh from school became eager disciples of Walt’s vision for animation. The Hyperion Avenue studio grew into a chaotic weave of expansions, stuffed with artists zealously and proudly working to advance the potential of cartoons. As the major studios in Hollywood struggled through the economic downturn, Disney, while hardly immune to financial hardship, rode high as the most prestigious operation in the animation field, and Walt presented his studio as a happy family of artists.
The picture was broadly true for most of the 1930s. A pioneering spirit and the slapdash nature of the Hyperion lot bred a sense of camaraderie among the animators. Their boss’s professed value of quality above all else was genuine; Walt made major investments into extracurricular art classes and expensive technical innovations, to the consternation of big brother Roy Disney on the business end. He directed a share of the cartoon shorts until 1935, provided copious story material, and served as a hands-on producer for every step of production. Walt also socialized with his animators in off-hours, maintained a casual dress code, and insisted everyone work on a first-name basis. But as his biographer Bob Thomas observed, “[he] was the boss. He enjoyed the position, and he enforced it.” Walt’s was the dominant – and mercurial – creative vision for the studio, and while many on his staff idolized their leader, others found his dictates confining. He was notoriously stingy with praise, at most passing compliments on second-hand. And he encouraged competition among animators, who sometimes clashed without help from the boss.
Still, morale was high, and the challenge of making cinema history with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs inspired Walt and his staff to pour all their energies into the film, putting in hours of unpaid overtime. Bonuses were promised if the film succeeded, but as Todd James Pierce observed, “Walt believed that artists could be motivated by money, comfort, and good will, but most of all they were motivated by pride in their work.” Snow White was just cause for pride. With its profits, Roy settled the studio debt, a riotous party was thrown for the entire staff, and Walt invested most of the rest into new films and a new studio. Pinocchio, Bambi, and especially Fantasia represented new heights of ambition and experimentation, and a new studio under construction at Burbank was intended as a worker’s paradise.
Tensions Slowly Boiled at Disney After 'Snow White'
But by the end of the 1930s, organized labor had come to animation. The Screen Cartoonist’s Guild was founded in 1938, after poor wages and dangerous working conditions back East exposed the need for protections. Aggressive campaigning led animation producers MGM, Walter Lanz, and George Pal to recognize the SCG in short order. Looney Tunes producer Leon Schlesinger tried to resist, but a brief strike convinced him otherwise. He is alleged to have said, after signing a contract with the union, “Now, what about Disney?” The importance of the Disney studio to the field of animation made it an essential target for the fledgling union.
And there was growing discontent among the Disney rank and file. While Walt Disney Productions offered the best pay and working conditions in the industry, these benefits were unevenly distributed. Walt’s management style set wages and awarded bonuses and promotions on his (or his executives) opinion of an artist’s worth. Two men working the same job could have massive disparities in salary. The gaps between different jobs were similarly vast; while a lead animator might make $300 a week (over $6200 in today’s money), his assistants often made less than $20 (barely over $400 today), and the ink and paint department made as little as $16 a week (less than $350).
The new Burbank studio, for all its undeniable comforts, was so thoroughly compartmentalized that these disparities were made readily apparent, and access to perks such as parking spaces, theater seats, and the studio’s Penthouse Club were highly selective. Walt’s theory was that “the men who are contributing the most to the organization should, out of respect alone, enjoy some privileges,” but following Snow White, the studio’s staff ballooned to over 1200 employees. A close personal or working relationship with Walt wasn’t possible for most workers, and Walt’s often inscrutable methods for determining compensation were untenable.
Workers were also resentful at the lack of public recognition for their toil. The animated features awarded credit, and in interviews, Walt could acknowledge the contributions of his staff, comparing his own role to “the bee that carries the pollen.” But his was the most prominent name on the features, the only name on the shorts, and in the public’s mind, Walt Disney was the only name associated with his films. Such marketing united all the studio's output under a clear identity. But no honest assessment of Walt Disney can deny the man’s ego, which was perhaps more brazen in his younger days. When one animator floated the idea of animation having its own awards, Walt snapped, “if there’s going to be any awards made, I’m going to get them.”
Walt was as consumed with Pinocchio and Fantasia as he had been with Snow White. He prowled the studio on nights and weekends, expecting the same level of devotion from staff. Many gave it. But the novelty of making the first feature-length cartoon had worn off, and the relentless demands for perfection through long hours, uneven compensation, and little to no recognition took a heavy toll; pride was no longer enough. Among the ranks of assistant and in-between animators especially, resentment grew, and the resentful found a champion in the upper echelon of animators: Art Babbitt. A self-described troublemaker, Babbitt was among the most well-paid artists at Disney, but he felt strongly that the assistants who worked for him and the other animators deserved better. He refused perks that were not open to the company at large, and he accepted a leadership role in the Federation of Screen Cartoonists to advocate for workers. He also hoped to head off an attempted union drive by notorious mob associate Willie Bioff. Gradually, however, Babbitt came to realize that the Federation was a company union, and it was being used by Disney to keep any legitimate union activity out along with the Mafia.
Walt Disney's Efforts Only Made Things Worse
Walt and Roy’s father had been an avowed socialist who routinely failed in his ventures. His misfortunes and rough breaks early in their film careers inspired the Disney brothers to take a hard line on business. Roy became a solid Republican even as Walt voted for FDR during the '30s, but Walt’s stance on unions had less to do with politics, family, or gangsterism than his own independent nature. “You know how I am, boys,” he told Babbitt. “If someone tells me to do something, I will do just the opposite.” And in Walt’s mind, there was no need for a union. He gave his employees the best conditions in the business, designed the Burbank studio to meet their every need, and challenged them with exciting new ventures in animation. Layoffs were a rarity at Disney; when there was no work between pictures, Walt would find projects to keep his staff paid. While every animation studio held an official policy of keeping women in the ink and paint department, Walt happily ignored it, employing talented women in story, art, and promotional roles. And unlike other studio bosses, he’d been a movie maker himself, worked his way up, faced lean times and rotten deals, experimented, innovated, found what worked and what didn’t in animation. Who knew better what “his boys” needed than their old Uncle Walt?
It was paternalism, well-meant, deeply held, and divorced from reality. “[Low-paid workers] were living hand to mouth,” remembered Maurice Noble. “[There were] five guys living all in one little old shack to make ends meet…I didn’t have a spare cent.” Babbitt was deeply moved by an incident where an ink and paint worker, forgoing meals for herself to afford food for her family, fainted from malnutrition; paradoxically, the presence of women in artistic roles inspired rumors that Walt was planning to use them as less costly replacement workers. The sudden reversal of Disney’s fortunes in 1940, caused largely by the loss of the European market to World War II and the financial disappointments of Pinocchio and Fantasia, left the studio in such dire straits that rumors sparked of impending mass layoffs. The SCG began to make real inroads with Disney, and by late 1940, they approached Walt with a claim to represent the majority of his employees. Leadership of the Federation was largely sympathetic to the Guild. Even members of the staff who felt deeply devoted to Walt – and there were many – could sense trouble brewing and urged Walt to speak directly with his workers.
Walt did deliver two addresses to the studio, in February 1941. He acknowledged the setbacks caused by the war and dismissed rumors that women were intended as low-priced help rather than worthy collaborators. But his address was also filled with self-pity and self-aggrandizement, displaying little awareness of his staff’s material hardships. He scolded everyone to “put your own house in order,” claimed that “too many fellows are willing to blame their own stupidity on other people,” and ended on the Darwinian claim that “it’s the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way, and I don’t give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up, nothing can change that.” The speeches “could not have been better drafted if the aim was to alienate as many workers as possible,” wrote Barrier. Among the alienated was Art Babbitt, who joined the SCG and became chairman of its Disney unit. Against a threat by union negotiator Herb Sorrell that he could make a “dust bowl” of Disney, the studio laid off a significant number of union-affiliated workers. When Babbitt continued to agitate, he was fired in a flagrant violation of federal labor laws. A picket line went up the next day.
The Disney Strike Was Ugly, Personal, and Changed Animation Forever
Just how many workers went on strike varies depending on who did the counting, but sizable numbers held the picket line, and sizable numbers crossed it. Who made which choice could be surprising. Liberal animator Ward Kimball, after agonizing over the decision, decided to keep working out of loyalty to Walt and a belief that the studio’s possible failure would be the greater disaster. Bill Tytla, an animator equally devoted to Walt, couldn’t turn his back on his friend Babbitt and joined the line. Striker Bill Melendez was bemused when many of the ink and paint workers chose to go in, and Walt grew increasingly distressed by the artists who chose to stay out.
The strike lasted for nine weeks, and it effectively drummed up support for the picketers. The SAG voiced solidarity, Technicolor stopped processing Disney film, and distributor RKO threatened to stall Disney releases. Work in the studio ground to a halt. Sorrell’s tactics were sometimes unsavory; tires were slashed and propaganda passed off the wages of studio messengers as those of artists. But Walt hardly helped matters. Thomas, largely a sympathetic biographer, conceded that Walt often hurt himself in his stubbornness and volatile public statements.
At one point, he and Babbitt nearly came to blows. But many saw the real blame in lawyer Gunther Lessing. “Walt was a nice guy,” Kimball insisted. “He was wrapped up in his cartoons and animation, so he relied on what Gunther Lessing told him [about the union], and Gunther Lessing was a pack of lies.” Story woman Sylvia Holland agreed, calling Lessing a “heel of the first water.” The fiercely anti-union Lessing had been instrumental in forming the Federation some years prior, in part to keep out Willie Bioff; now, he and the Disney brothers flirted with Bioff for their side of the union battle. Roy justified this years later by saying, “As long as the guy’s fighting with you, you welcome him on your side.” Bioff was also a vocal anti-communist, and Lessing fed the Disneys a steady diet of red-baiting aimed against the strikers.
By that point, however, pressure on the studio grew so immense that Walt conceded to a federal arbitrator. He also accepted a trip as a goodwill ambassador to South America on behalf of the US government that would remove him from the studio during the final settlement. The result, according to Sito: “salaries doubled overnight for a 40-hour workweek and screen credits were established. The SCG now represented 90% of Hollywood animated workers.” Animators could now earn pensions and had guaranteed insurance. Layoffs had become inevitable, but an agreed-upon ratio of strikers to non-strikers protected union members from discrimination. It was virtually everything the strikers had wanted.
The Strike Made Workers Resent Walt Disney
The price of victory was the loss of the camaraderie that once filled the studio. This was a far more personal labor conflict than the typical Hollywood dispute. Friends became bitter enemies over the strike, and resentments lingered for years. The loss of staff and revenues meant that Disney couldn’t produce a cartoon on the level of Snow White until 1950; it barely survived the '40s on a series of unambitious package features. Walt Disney, feeling personally betrayed, traded paternalism for a more distant and often gruff administrative style. Partly due to the strike, his interests shifted away from animation. And his reputation suffered; Barrier traces the myth that Walt was anti-Semitic to his conflicts with Babbitt and Dave Hilberman, another strike leader. Barrier stresses that “there is simply no persuasive evidence that Walt Disney was ever in thrall to such prejudices,” but not he nor other credible biographers nor even fierce defenses from peers and employees have dispelled the smear from pop culture.
Walt’s hostility to Babbitt and Hilberman was genuine, and vindictive. The strike, and the influence of Roy and Lessing, pushed him firmly into conservativism and anti-communism. He went before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a friendly witness and named Hilberman a Communist, marking him for a blacklist. As for Babbitt, his contributions to the studio's history were scrubbed as much as possible. Other strikers were eventually welcomed back and given positions of prominence at the studio in later years, but in his treatment of the ringleaders, Walt lived up to an anonymous animator’s assessment: “If you were [Walt’s] friend, he was a warm friend. If you crossed him, he was a mean S.O.B.”
There was one more effect of the strike, one far more visible to the viewing public. In the immediate aftermath, the harsh feelings of Walt and his loyalists moved many strikers to seek work elsewhere. The Disney diaspora moved through animation studios across the nation, sometimes setting up shop for themselves. A group of artists including Hilberman founded United Productions of America (UPA). Babbitt contributed to UPA’s success and later worked with Canadian animator Richard Williams. Talented workers like Maurice Noble decamped to Warner Bros., where Noble became the artistic right hand to director Chuck Jones on some of the best Looney Tunes. Walt Kelly, a close friend of Kimball’s, went into comic strips with the phenomenally successful Pogo. Many of these artists worked counter to the Disney model of simulating life, instead experimenting with limited animation and bold, stylized graphics. These became hugely influential trends in art and design from the 1950s on, even coming back around to influence Disney productions. The SCG had targeted Disney for its outsized influence over the industry; besides winning benefits for workers, the diversity brought to animation by these Disney exiles from the strike diluted that influence ever after.