‘Uncle Walt’ Disney provoked 1941 strike

Bill Knight column for Thurs., Fri., or Sat., Dec. 28, 29 or 30

After Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” opened 80 years ago this month, the box-office hit encouraged Disney to build a $2 million studio in Burbank, Calif., but before moving into the new facility in 1940, many of the 800-some animators who’d drawn more than 130,000 individual celluloid frames for “Snow White” became angry at their wages, hours and working conditions.

The “Magic Kingdom” was Disney’s kingdom; any feeling of magic escaped animators, some of whom worked for $12 a week, lousy pay even then.

“The fantasy lands animators create bear little resemblance to the conditions under which these artists worked,” wrote Tom Sito, author of “Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson.”

“Anonymous animators routinely toiled in dark, cramped working environments for long hours and low pay,” said Sito, the former president of the Hollywood Animation Guild whose 2006 book is considered the best account of the 1941 Disney strike.

Technological advances in the 1930s moved animation from the obscure to the ordinary, but labor relations hadn’t progressed at Disney. In that decade, the American Art Union struck Fleischer (makers of Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons), which led to the formation of the Screen Cartoonists Guild. It then negotiated contracts with MGM, Screen Gems, Walter Lantz, Terrytoons and George Pal. Warner Brothers’ Leon Schlesinger Productions (makers of Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons) tried to break the union in a lockout, but that company also settled after workers didn’t cross picket lines and work stopped.

Disney set up his own company-controlled “union” and named chief animator Art Babbitt its president.

“It didn’t take long for Babbitt to realize that the Disney Federation of Screen Cartoonists was designed to keep workers from getting involved with industry-wide unionism,” said Kenneth and Mark Bergfeld in Jacobin magazine. “After one of the inkers fainted because she couldn’t afford to buy lunch, Babbitt joined [the] Screen Cartoonist’s Guild, a local of the Painters union.”

The biggest complaint was how Disney set pay.

“He played favorites, stole credit from workers, and paid different wages for the same job,” the Bergfelds said. “Wages ranged from $12 to $300 a week.”

In February of 1941, Disney addressed his work force, pleading for understanding, given personal sacrifices he said he’d made, adding, “If you're not progressing as you should, instead of grumbling and growling, do something about it.”

Workers resented that, and soon 400 out of 560 eligible animators signed union cards and voted to strike that May. In retaliation, Disney laid off dozens of workers and fired Babbitt for union activities. Hundreds walked off the job, interrupting work on the next scheduled feature, “Dumbo.” Disney refused to negotiate.

Outside Disney’s studios, animators set up “Camp Cartoonist” as strike headquarters, where picket lines were based along with a soup kitchen for strikers.

“The Disney Company's activities in disregard of National Labor Relations Board decisions, together with the other facts, make it clear that you had no other recourse than to strike your rights to bargain,” Screen Actor Magazine commented that June.

Strikers blocked trucks going to Disney and leafletted theaters. The Los Angeles Central Labor Council initiated a nationwide boycott, and animators launched a campaign that got Technicolor and British Pathe to refuse to process film and RKO to stop distributing Disney movies.

By July, the NLRB sent in a mediator.

Disney went on a “good-will mission” to Latin America, his absence let some tensions fade, and the work stoppage ended July 29 after the mediator agreed with strikers. Animators won substantial raises, back pay for strikers, reinstatement of discharged workers, recognition of the union, and a management-labor committee to decide future layoffs.

But for years a divide remained between strikers and the company.

“Disney was not a benevolent leader but a domineering control freak who demanded to have things his way or the workers would pay the price,” wrote Rhode Island College scholar Lisa Johnson. “This is truly how animators viewed Walt.”

Of angels, wise men and shepherds

Bill Knight column for Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, Dec. 25, 26 or 27

This whole month has marked a season of gifts and love, anxiety and melancholy. But amid the holiday hubbub of commercial chaos, one occasionally can hear hope as well as hype.

Frantic competition and eager expectation, even an odd sense of foreboding or fear, can be quieted by a spirit of encouragement or reassurance.

Modern Washington and its effects on us aren’t exactly ancient Rome, but there are some similarities that offer lessons in perseverance and passion.

There’s the sinister centrality – the cacophony – of the marketplace, with its onslaughts of appeals to buy and of the growing power of big banks replacing moneychangers tainting temples.

There’s the feeling of frivolous pursuits, with fast food and smartphones instead of Romans’ “bread and circuses.”

And there’s an ominous régime that exhibits the callousness and ruthlessness of Rome and its occupying forces, its seizing of resources for elites, and the abuse of the census.

Millennia ago, a working-class couple without shelter – one an unwed, teen-age mother-to-be – had to register with the Empire’s census, and they went on a long journey made worse by their poverty.

Today’s corruption and repression ranges from using population numbers to carve out districts to make voting less meaningful, to a Congress approving a tax overhaul as insidious as some Roman Senate edict, and rulers such as President Trump attacking organizations or workers, immigrants, women, the disabled and so on, to bureaucrats like National Labor Relations Board member William Emanuel (Emanuel!) admitting that he previously represented more than 100 clients in union-busting efforts.

Again, the contemporary Capitol isn’t ancient Rome’s Curia, but regular people in the Empire then sang psalms and read texts to bolster their sometimes-shaky confidence.

Did armed Centurions lead troops using excessive force against those singing forbidden melodies?

Did Consuls or Tribunes punish commoners who read scripture such as the Old Testament’s Isaiah, who said, “Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey!”

Some 2,000 years past, there were various resisters, insurgents and sects that cared for everyday people, who showed compassion for the poor and the ill, the jailed and the hungry, the exploited and the oppressed.

And there were sympathetic outsiders, few as famous as the Magi, traditionally known as Melchior of Persia, Gaspar of India, and Balthasar of Arabia. Traveling to Bethlehem from afar, they brought gifts, which we celebrate on Epiphany, January 6.

Melchior – in tales described as having long white hair and a beard and a golden cloak – brought gold, the precious metal linked to royalty. Gaspar – with brown hair and a beard and adorned in a green cloak and a bejeweled gold crown – delivered frankincense, a fragrant substance burned in reverent ceremonies. And Balthazar – recalled as a bearded black man wearing a purple cloak – presented myrrh, a perfume often used on the dead.

There are modern challenges that threaten us: “permanent war,” a deteriorating global climate, the risk of losing health care, an economy that increasingly serves those who need less help than most Americans, and other dangers.

However, we need not wait for affluent, benevolent strangers to arrive with treasures, nor other-worldly angels to magically transform the world. Rather – as the humble shepherds showed – ordinary folks can work together and help each other.

Hope and love are what’s at hand at Christmastime if we stop opening gifts and just listen to whispers in the air.

O, come all ye faithful.

Solidarity forever.

Heywood Broun’s ‘Bethlehem, Dec. 25’

Bill Knight column for Thurs., Fri., or Sat., Dec. 21, 22 or 23

            At a time when journalism suffers government attacks such as factual reports being dismissed as “fake news” and accusations that the press is somehow part of a “war on Christmas,” it’s comforting to return to the following piece by newspaperman Heywood Broun. One of the country’s top columnists in the 1920s and ’30s – when Broun also founded The Newspaper Guild labor union, risking his career to help reporters paid much less that he earned – Broun wrote about sports and books as well as current events and social-justice issues. However, for years one of his most popular themes was Christmas, the subject of this sentimental essay from some 90 years ago, blending nostalgia for traditional journalism and appreciation for the holiday:

            “When we first came into the newsroom it looked like a dreary Christmas afternoon. To us there is something mournful in the sight of a scantily staffed city room. Just two men were at work typing away at stories of small moment. The telegraphic instruments appeared to be meditating. One continued to chatter along, but there was nobody to set down what it said.

            “Its shrill, staccato insistence seemed momentous. But telegraph instruments are always like that. Their tone is just as excited whether the message tells of mighty tremors in the Earth or baby parades at Asbury Park. Probably a job in a newspaper office is rather unhealthy for a telegraph instrument. The contrivance is too emotional and excitable to live calmly under the strain. Even an old instrument seldom learns enough about news values to pick and choose suitable moments in which to grow panicky. As soon as a story begins to move along a wire, the little key screams and dances. It is devoid of reticence. Every whisper which comes to it must be rattled out at top voice and at once. Words are its very blood stream and for all the telegraph instrument knows, one word is just as good and just as important as another.

            “And so the one restless key in the telegraph room shrieked, and whined, and implored listeners. We tried to help by coming close and paying strict attention, but we could not get even the gist of the message. It seemed to us as if the key were trying to say, with clicking tumult, that some great one, a King perhaps, was dead or dying. Or, maybe, it was a war and each dash and dot stood for some contending soldier moving forward under heavy fire. And again, it might be that a volcano has stirred and spit. Or great waves had swept a coast. And we thought of sinking steamers and trains up-ended.

            “Certainly, it was an affair of great moment. Even though we discounted the passion and vehemence of the machine, there was something almost awe-inspiring in its sincerity and insistence. After a time, it seemed to us as if this was in fact no long-running narrative, but one announcement repeated over and over again. And suddenly we wondered why we had assumed from the beginning that only catastrophes were important and epoch-making. By now we realized that though the tongue was alien, we did recognize the color of its clamor. These dots and dashes were seeking to convey something of triumph. That was not to be doubted.

            “And in a flash we knew what the machine said. It was nothing more than, ‘A child is born.’

            “And, of course, nobody paid any attention to that.

            “It is an old story.”