A Biography of One of My Heroes, Part 1

The introductory chapter to a book I considered writing about Walt Disney

I’ve always been a fan of Walt Disney. All of us in my family are Disney people, and adding that to my interest in history meant that I became interested in learning about Walt the man.

Walt Disney also has ties to the South, and if you want to know more, check out Neon Crosses!

There’s a lot to admire about Walt Disney, but over the years he has become the target of vicious smears. Some of them were based on misunderstandings, while others came about as the result of people who disagree with what he stood for and tried to tear him down as a result.

A few years ago, I toyed with the idea of writing a book debunking those smears against Walt Disney, but I concluded it might be too research-intensive than I had time for. I wound up writing several articles over at PJ Media debunking some disinformation.

I did wind up writing most of an introductory chapter, which was a sort of biography of Walt Disney. I’m sharing it with you in three parts, and here’s Part 1, which centers on his early life. Enjoy!

Walter Elias Disney entered this world on December 5, 1901, the fourth child and last son of Elias Disney and the former Flora Call. Elias Disney was a complex man – a hard worker who desperately tried to succeed in business yet espoused socialism, a deeply religious man who nonetheless worked his boys mercilessly on Sunday mornings, an often dour and humorless figure on the surface who loved music and could sparkle with wit – who bore a lasting influence on his son.

The Canadian-born Elias moved all over the country looking for a business opportunity that would stick – searching for California gold, trying his hand at growing oranges in Kansas and Florida, working as a fiddle player in Colorado, managing a jelly canning company in Chicago. During his stint in Florida, he met and married Flora Call in Kismet, only 50 miles from what would become the site of Walt Disney World, and he worked as a mail carrier even closer to that site in nearby Kissimmee.

During one stretch in Kansas City, Elias bought a newspaper delivery route. For nearly six years, sons Roy and Walt delivered the morning and evening papers to hundreds of customers for hours before and after school, even under the most unforgiving of conditions.

Elias was deeply and strictly religious; he abstained from alcohol and rarely smoked. He helped build the St. Paul Congregational Church building, where the family was involved when they lived in Chicago, and he and Flora named their son after the church’s pastor, Walter Parr.

Many of the portraits which biographers have painted of Elias portray him as hot-tempered, even abusive at times – some have suggested that Walt himself made those allegations. But Walt’s brother and business partner Roy sought to set the record straight.

I don’t like him put in the light of being a brutal or mean dad. That he was not. But when you lose your temper and you hit a kid with the back of your hand, that’s impulse, that’s temper… That was Dad. He’d give us impulsive whacks. He never took a club to anybody. He never took a strap to anybody. He wasn’t a mean man at all.

Walt’s daughter Diane recalled of her father, “He loved his dad. He thought he was tough. But he did love him. He loved that old man."

Elias espoused a fascinating and surprising set of political views. Despite his attempts to build a business and make money in the capitalist system, he was a socialist – but not just the typical, run-of-the-mill socialist. Elias Disney followed the writings of writer and newspaper mogul J. A. Wayland, whose version of socialism included a distinct populist twist. Author Daniel Flynn explains the lure of Wayland’s Appeal to Reason, to which Elias and his family subscribed, as such:

More than any other force, it was the Girard, Kansas-based Appeal to Reason that reached Americans with the message that had been heretofore explained in a German, Yiddish, or Russian accent, but never with a Bible-belt twang. The Appeal was folksy, laden with homespun anecdotes, and peppered with cartoons, ALL CAPS for stressed phrases, and screaming headlines that reached the common man’s ears but irritated the intellectual’s. It was the socialism of [Edward] Bellamy and [Eugene V.] Debs more than the socialism of Karl Marx. Yet in it Marxism finally found its American voice. It was big picture socialism, unmolested by obscure phraseology and the minutiae of theoretical disputes. Appeal to Reason was unapologetically American.

...The Appeal appropriated the Bible and the Founding Fathers for Socialist ends. It was not yet another socialist rag about workers and farmers read by professors and professional agitators. It was a socialist weekly for workers and farmers read by farmers and workers.

…In its early years, socialism failed to connect with Americans because it failed to speak to Americans in the language most Americans spoke. J. A. Wayland changed that.

In 1907, Elias managed to convince some of his fellow farmers around Marceline, Missouri to join a sort of collective that resembled a union. The American Society of Equity sought to consolidate the buying power of farmers.

Elias supported Progressive candidates like William Jennings Bryan and Socialist candidates like Debs, and he loved discussing his socialist ideas with random people around town. Walt recalls his father “meeting up with strange characters to talk socialism… He’d bring them home!” Elias’ socialist leanings most likely helped contribute to his failure to maintain a long-lasting business, as they gave him a more fatalistic view than that of a typical entrepreneur’s optimistic temperament.

Stay tuned for Part 2 in few days, where we’ll look at Walt Disney’s career.

Image credit: NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons