So What Sort Of Person Was Walt Disney?
One of his former employees told me, "Walt was a genius, Walt was a friend, Walt was generous and Walt was a tough son-of-a-bitch. He was all that at once." He has also been described as an arrogant businessman, a self-made tycoon and a person with a large ego. He was raised in the early years of the 20th Century on small town, Mid-West values (he has been called a WASP). Roy and Walt were good businessmen, but they made several costly mistakes including going bankrupt in the 1920s and signing away the rights to Oswald, their silent screen star in 1928. Their early mistakes helped shape the way they did business once the company was on the road to success with Mickey Mouse as their star. Walt was said to be justifiably proud of his rise from shoestring productions to being the head of a major Hollywood studio.

Walt (left) and Ub Iwerks, circa 1932. © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Walt Disney misled the public into believing he was the artist responsible for all those wonderful short films. His legend is so erroneous at times that an art gallery in Florida once sent out a flyer claiming they were selling valuable Disney limited edition cels by the man who invented animation. He didn't invent the medium nor did he design or animate the first Mickey Mouse (I assume you know about Ub Iwerks' importance -- if not see Leslie Iwerk's terrific book and video, The Hand Behind the Mouse, about her grandfather). Disney scholars say he was a good animator, but by the mid-20s he was more valuable to the company as a producer. Ub Iwerks was a business partner and head animator until he left Disney in 1930.

Walt was a brilliant producer who understood the value of making the best possible product. Major studios in Hollywood are said to be happy if 1 out of 8 or 10 films turns an impressive profit. Disney's track record was much better than that (at or close to a 100% success rate). He understood the value of having a carefully crafted script. He knew how to motivate his production team to create the best possible characters, sets, costumes, props, etc. He was also the visionary who put together the team that created Disneyland and Walt Disney World in Florida. He was a genius who produced exceptional family entertainment for most of his life.

I suspect that Walt was naive politically. It appears he didn't understand how others felt about being underpaid and not getting the expected bonuses after the initial success of Snow White at the box office. He certainly didn't agree with these ideas and other labor issues that were raised before the strike.

Disney's handling of the strike at his studio in 1941 suggest he lacked the complex skills needed to successfully negotiate a timely resolution of a major labor conflict. It appears his anger and hatred of those who opposed him probably prevented him from reaching an acceptable compromise. Resolution came after others stepped in and he left the country.

The company's conservative attitude about women employees in the 1930s was to mainly hire them for low paid jobs in the ink and paint departments. Disney did on rare occasions hire women as artists or designers. The list of women who were better paid artists included Mary Blair, Sylvia Moberly-Holland, LaVerne Harding, Retta Scott and several others. Although one would call the attitude sexist today, it was the norm in industry at that time and I wouldn't call Walt or the company racist or sexist for their employment practices before WWII unless you clarify the statement and say the vast majority of American companies had similar attitudes about hiring women. Also, the animation industry grew out of the male-dominated newspaper business so many people probably assumed animators were guys like the cigar smoking newspaper men in The Front Page (1931).

Maurice Rapf tells an awful story that he says Walt told him about why he became a Democrat. In his youth a few sons of local Republicans beat him up and poured hot tar on him because his father didn't vote Republican.

As for Walt's feelings about Fascist Germany, Eliot says he regularly attended meetings and social events of the American Nazi party. The statement is probably a gross exaggeration of the truth, but he did in fact meet with Fascists including Germany's most celebrated filmmaker, Leni Reifenstahl, when she visited Hollywood in 1938. Her L.A. visit was protested by people with strong anti-Nazi feelings and several studio heads decided not to meet with her. Walt's main motivation to meet her may have been to find a way to recover money owed his firm by his German film distributor. A book recently published in Germany says Roy and Walt went to Germany in 1937 to try and retrieve over 135,000 Reichmarks owed them (they were on a tour of Europe promoting Snow White). They may also have lobbied to get Germany to lift its ban on importing films from the U.S. Their visit to Germany was unsuccessful. Since the brothers were capitalists, I suspect any positive feelings they might have had about Hitler were replaced by hatred for the SOB that was robbing them of their share of their films' income in Germany. Their anti-German sentiment is quite obvious in their WWII propaganda films.