"Mickey Mouse" History: How Disney Parks Portray the Past

Pretty much everyone I knew growing up had been to a Disney Park. It was either Disney World or Disneyland (or, if you were one of the lucky ones, both of them) or EPCOT, which, for kids my age, was not nearly as cool as the princesses and princes at the Magic Kingdom. Growing up, though, we never recognized that Disney was attempting to show us history. 

My parents, on the other hand, remember Disney in a much different fashion. They remember Disney films on everything from history to biology being shown in classrooms in their middle schools and high schools. Disney's attempts to educate were much more obvious then.

Now, however, it is much different. My generation did not grow up watching educational films on America created by Walt Disney and his corp of Imagineers; instead, we grew up on Disney's animated princes and princesses and his marvelous theme parks. These theme parks were Walt Disney's way to reinterpret history as he wanted to see it. 

There is an important distinction that should be made before I continue this post. There are two Walt Disneys, according to Mike Wallace's Mickey Mouse History: Original Walt, who is Walt Disney himself, and Corporate Walt, who is the WED Enterprises, Inc. Corporate Walt took over for Original Walt after Disney's death in 1966, and has operated ever since. 

It was Original Walt who conceived the idea for the Disney Parks in California and, later, Florida. He  created a place which was "clean, wholesome, and altogether different from the seedy carnivals he remembered from his youth" (Wallace 135). Here, Disney built his own version of history, starting with Main Street, the first place visitors come to when entering a Disney Park. 

Main Street, USA at Walt Disney World, Orlando, Florida

"It is a happy street," writes Wallace, "clean and tidy, filled with prancing Disney characters. It has a toylike quality...It is like playing in a walk-in doll's house that is simultaneously a shopper's paradise, equipped with dozens of little old-time shops with corporate logos tastefully affixed" (135-6). Supposedly, Main Street is based on the main street of Disney's childhood hometown of Marceline, Missouri; looking at Disney's actual life history (a childhood of displacement and perambulation across America) shows this to be false. Instead, Wallace points out, Main Street, USA, is Disney's idea of what Main Street should be like. "Original Walt's approach to the past," Wallace writes, "was thus not to reproduce it, but to improve it [author's italics]" (136). Imagineers call this "Disney Realism," "where we carefully program out all the negative, unwanted elements and program in the positive elements" (Wallace 137). 

Disney also embraced this perfected view of history in the Hall of Presidents. A brief video elaborating on the Constitution and the threats it had faced in the past is followed by a display of animatronic presidents, moving and talking about their presidencies. 

The Hall of Presidents

Wallace points out that each president is portrayed with a degree of detail "characteristic of Hollywood costume dramas" (139). The audience is held in rapt attention by the presidents, occasionally whispering as famous names are mentioned. When Nixon is spotlighted, however, "chortles and guffaws break out" because, as Wallace notes, "The contrast between the official history and living memories is too great...and the spell snaps under the strain." Wallace, after leaving the show, asked a worker if it had just been a bad day for Nixon, and was told in reply "that no, the crowd always rumbles when RN takes a bow" (139). 

This problem of connection between past and present led to Corporate Walt's creation in 1982 of EPCOT and its American Adventure. 

The American Adventure, EPCOT

The American Adventure departs from the history portrayed at the Magic Kingdom in that it includes African-Americans, women, and Native Americans. It follows American history, as narrated by (animatronic) Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin, covering everything from the American Revolution to the lunar landing. Despite including groups that had been excluded or portrayed in an unflattering light in the Magic Kingdom, it still glosses over the parts of history that Corporate Disney found distasteful, including the complete elimination of the Vietnam War and the fights for union rights. While it is a step in the right direction, it still holds back.

What Disney history (or, as Wallace terms it, "Mickey Mouse" history) reveals is the desire to teach while entertaining, and improve while appearing to teach the truth. This is similar to what happened in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, as America struggled to find a true national heritage. By creating his own version of America, Disney commodified American history, turning it into something that could be bought and sold. It becomes an idea to be passed on to future generations - an idealization, instead of the actuality. 

What Disney promotes is a perfected idea of the past - a glossy magazine cover, with no problems, no ills, no issues of race or gender. It's a beautiful dream, but it remains just that - a perfected dream. 

Patriotic Correctness: The Purpose of the Public Museum

The United States is filled with museums. Some, like the Spy Museum (who I lauded heavily in my last post), are private museums, run by a board and funded by contributions from private donors. They have a greater control over what is presented in their museums - what artifacts are presented, in what order, and what story they tell.

Public museums are different. 

Public museums, such as the Smithsonian Institute, are also run by a board of directors. But the public museum relies on donations from major public sponsors and the good will of the public in order to remain open. In the case of the Smithsonian, it receives major funding from the United States government, and depends on the goodwill of Congress and the constituents to maintain its nineteen museums, national zoo, and extensive underground storage systems. 

While sites such as the Smithsonian are dependent on public good will for funding, that does not mean that they should cater to public interests and beliefs. 

Case in point:

In 1995, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum planned to display the Enola Gay for the first time, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the ending of World War II (which, coincidentally, would also be the fiftieth anniversary of the droppings of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). A detailed exhibit was planned, covering not just the bombings, but the background to the decision, its pros and cons, and the impact it had on world events. The public, specifically John T. Cornell, editor of AIR FORCE Magazine, threw a fit over the exhibit. Eventually, Congress became involved, as Newt Gingrich and other members of the Republican Party saw a way to control the way in which America was perceived. Declaring that "revisionist" historians had no place in American museums, a campaign was launched against the exhibit, which eventually led to the semi-forced retirement of the director of the Smithsonian Institute and a presentation of a much more subdued exhibit devoted solely to the Enola Gay, ignoring the bomb entirely.

Which brings me to my main point: what is the true purpose of the public museum? And should it have to conform to public desires for "patriotic correctness"?

Public museums (and all museums, to be completely honest) are made available to the public in order to give them a place to connect with the past. "At long last," writes Mike Wallace, "the American past is as crowded, diverse, contentious, and fascinating as the American present" (302). And Americans are drawn to this. In a museum, people are given the chance to see things and form their own opinions, based either on the placards or simply on their own personal knowledge, instead of being taught one person's opinion. There is a chance that they can exit the museum with a greater respect and knowledge of the past than when they entered. Public museums (and private ones, as well) do a great service here to the American people.

However, some people want to see only certain versions of history that go along with how they view events. This is where the Enola Gay exhibit comes into play. The public attempted to determine what kind of history was displayed at the Smithsonian, and, in trying to fix what was deemed too radical, the Smithsonian eventually cut out everything and left only the plane. The members of the public wanted a more "patriotic" look at the events that led up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a look that portrayed Americans as heroes and the dropping of the bombs as vital to the ending of the war. The original copy for the exhibit showed doubts about the necessity of the bomb and the heroism of Americans - in fact, it was heavily criticized (unnecessarily, upon reading in context) for favoring and victimizing the Japanese.

Should public museums become "patriotically correct" - sticking to the mythological America, where Americans are strong and brave and can do no wrong?

No. They should not.

Do they often have the liberty to do so?

No.

By becoming "patriotically correct," history loses some of the things that make it interesting - the darkness must balance out the light. Americans fought in Vietnam as well as in World War II. The Holocaust involved not just Nazi soldiers and the German people, but people in Hungary and Vichy France. The French Revolution overthrew a corrupt monarchy, but it also led to the mass executions of hundreds of thousands of innocents. Americans dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed citizens.

The good has to be balanced by the bad.

By cleansing the viewpoint, we lose the balance. History becomes saccharine - sickly sweet, overly cheerful, like the Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s. The hero always triumphs. In the end, good wins out over evil, the hero can do no wrong, and all is right with the world. But that is not how history works.

Men who seemed to be able to only do good turn out to be maniacally evil. The best laid plans turn out to have catastrophic consequences. Nothing is as it seems on the surface.

However, public museums are often influenced (in the Smithsonian's case, threatened with a Senate hearing) by what the public wants. They do not want to offend the delicate sensitivities of the public imagination. And so they leave out the controversy. They "let the objects speak for themselves" - a tactic which works sometimes, but, on occasion, fails to incite the thought process that is so heavily sought for. In their attempts to please both sides, the message of the events - of the people who fought, the people who prayed, the people who died - is lost.

Public museums are national treasures, and should be treated as such. But they should also be allowed the freedom to interpret events that is given to private museums. Public museums have just as much right as private museums to accurately portray history, and, because they are visited by so many Americans, they have a duty to do so. But by listening to the cries for patriotic correctness, they fall short of their calling, and portray only a partial portrait of history.

The Changing Face of the Museum

Museums are constantly changing and evolving.

Take Colonial Williamsburg, for example. The living history museum was built in the 1930s by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and represented a clean, orderly version of colonial life in Revolutionary America - a perfected portrait of Americana sans dirt, animals, and slavery. Today, it is much different. Certainly, there are no animals wandering the roads willy-nilly, but an effort has been made to incorporate the African-American story into the living history presented. It may still be slightly idealized, but it has a more balanced approach.

Colonial Williamsburg - not as idealized, but still picturesque for colonial America

Or, for a more traditional example, look no further than the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY). Founded in 1923 to counteract the "old man's club" of the New York Historical Society (Wallace 35), the museum initially focused on exactly the same topics, but with more interesting displays: Dining in Old New York and Heirlooms of New Yorkers Past feature among exhibit titles from the 1940s and 1950s (Wallace 37). However, by the 1930s, the realization of its location on the fringes of high society, Harlem, and the Hispanic community forced the museum to change its exhibit focus. The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of a greater number of exhibits on the history of the ethnic groups surrounding the museum, but a slow draining of funds during the 1980s saw the progress gained slowly recede. As the museum dwindled, new curators arrived, with grand plans, and the museum continues to flourish, faring better in the long run than its original rival the New York Historical Society.

The Museum of the City of New York

But why have these museums (and many others across the nation - these are only two examples) changed their focus?

Because their original focus was too narrow and exclusionary.

In the case of Colonial Williamsburg, Rockefeller wished to portray the planter class of Virginia. The museum had, and still has, no visible issues: it is, as Mike Wallace points out in Mickey Mouse History, "a corporate world: Planned [sic], orderly, tidy, with no dirt, no smell, no visible signs of exploitation....The rest of the population - the 90 percent who create the wealth - are nowhere to be seen. The only whiff of conflict appears in recollections of the stirring anti-British speeches in which the founders enunciated the timeless principles since passed down..." (15). Williamsburg, in its original form, was too perfect, too idealized. It did not even attempt to touch on slavery until 1972, but remained uncomfortable discussing the relationships between blacks and whites. Because Williamsburg as a museum was built on the concept of idealizing the ideals of liberty which had motivated the founding fathers, "Admitting that the reality of exploitation contradicted the ideal of liberty was only a first step" (23).v

With the MCNY, the focus was also too narrowly classed. Many of the original donors were members of New York's elite society (the Carnegies, du Ponts, Guggenheims, and Vanderbilts were all on the original roster, to name but a few), and lent and re-borrowed their items from the museum as if it were a bank vault for temporary storage (Wallace 36-7). By the 1940s, the MCNY widened its focus to include the communities around it, beginning a lecture series that was given in Spanish (Wallace 38). It slowly incorporated the histories of the classes and people around it, and the museum became more than just a history of the glory days of Old New York. Despite the slight downturn in the 1980s due to lack of funding, the museum is coming back, returning to its focus on more than one socio-economic group.

These changes have, for the most part, been for the better. Both of these museums now include a wider perspective on the place (and, in the case of Colonial Williamsburg, the time period as well) that they cover, including the voices of men and women of different ethnic backgrounds.

However, they have also failed to change in some respects. Williamsburg still remains an idealized vision of colonial America - a clean-cut structure, where families can wander down Duke of Gloucester Street and stop in the little shops and houses along the way, eating gingerbread and drinking root beer that are made from recipes dating back to the time period. And the MCNY also struggles with retaining its image, most notably during the financial crisis of the 1980s, when it reverted to the Edith Wharton-esque portrayal of New York.

There are more museums in America (and in Mickey Mouse History, Mike Wallace's book of essays which was the basis for this post), than I can possibly blog about here. But, overall, I would like to think that the changing face of the American museum is a good thing, and, hopefully, it continues to improve, allowing for improved discussion and greater interest in historical topics.