One of the few things about Walt Disney that almost everyone agrees on—his family and his close friends, the animators who stuck by him to the end, his contemporaneous critics, his biographers across the political spectrum, and even the man himself, according to his own self-reflections—is that the 1941 animators’ strike made him incredibly bitter. His role as lead storyteller, producer, and driving force behind the animating side of the studio more or less ended with the strike.
The proximate cause of the strike was the firing of one of the studio’s best animators, Art Babbitt. Babbitt was beloved by the rest of the staff: He had organized the drawing lessons that had become the studio art school, which made a Disney job such a prize. He was also a committed employee: In 1937 a Hollywood branch of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), widely known to be mobbed-up and corrupt, started signing up animators at other studios. Babbitt, concerned about the threat this posed to his fellow employees and the company, brought this to the attention of Roy Disney and Lessing and even helped management set up the Federation of Screen Cartoonists, a company union.
But the federation was designed by Lessing to be toothless, and conditions got worse and worse. Walt paid for the expensive new studios and a massive hiring boom for all the new projects by squeezing his workers. Animators were stiffed on long-promised bonuses for Snow White, which had been not just a grueling crunch to make but also the most financially successful film of all time—the bonuses were delayed almost a year and often smaller than what animators received for a short. Lessing and Roy instituted a system of surveillance called the “Control System” that involved secretarial employees—“Control Girls”—who stood outside offices with stopwatches to find out exactly how long everyone “actually worked” at their desks (as opposed to goofing off, using the bathroom, etc). And for eighteen months they stonewalled the federation in endless contract negotiations. Babbitt eventually jumped ship to the Screen Cartoonists Guild, an independent or “outside” union, after trying over and over to negotiate with Roy, Walt, and Lessing in good faith. As with so many good and honest employees, Babbitt’s openness in his actions was rewarded with a firing. It was the spark that finally started the strike.
