But while the strikers suffered in the blistering sun, the Disney Company was suffering far more. By the second month of protesting, the studio was being boycotted by half of the Hollywood shops, making it impossible to continue making, let alone make money off, their ongoing projects. But a bitter Walt Disney still refused to start negotiations. Things got so bad that President Franklin D. Roosevelt (who was a little busy with a little thing called World War II) had to intervene, sending two federal judges to Burbank to mediate. When even that failed to pressure Disney into talks, the U.S. government concocted a ruse luring the mogul out of the country on a bogus propaganda tour of South America. This gave his brother Roy Disney enough time to hash out a deal with the Guild.
By the time Walt returned, the Labor Department had already ratified the union agreement, granting all Disney animators increased wages, health insurance, a standard 40-hour workweek, and, finally, a screen credit on the movies they helped create. Legend has it, Walt was so angered by these concessions that in an act of petty revenge, he added a scene to Dumbo depicting Babbitt and other prominent unionists as drunk clowns who go out to literally “hit the big boss for a raise.”
According to Babbitt himself, this slight was pure fiction — the clown scene had been created long before the strike had started. The real slight was far worse. Instead of appearing in the quickie scene, Babbitt was forced to work on it — a job far underneath his talent and position in the company. The same sidelining befell the other picketers as an embittered Walt spent the next years cultivating such an unwelcome environment for Babbit and the so-called traitors that, by 1950, almost all of them had moved on. But while Walt could bully the union fighters into going away, he couldn’t do the same to the union benefits. And with Disney’s animators on board, every animation studio in the country joined the Screen Cartoonists Guild, which later morphed into The Animation Guild — a powerful force for fair labor practices that every American animator owes to the brave men, women, and guillotines of the Disney Strike of 1941.
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Top Image: Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives
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