Disney's Most Notorious Film (4 page)

Hattie McDaniel, playing the same “mammy” stereotype she made famous a decade earlier in
Gone with the Wind
.

Song of the South
, for example, features not one, but three noted racist cinematic stereotypes that were often prevalent in this genre. In addition to Uncle Remus as the always smiling, magical “Uncle Tom” who exists only to serve the needs of white people, Hattie McDaniel repeated the same “mammy” stereotype she had played to great acclaim in
Gone with the Wind
. Bogle has even argued that Uncle Remus really evokes the “coon” stereotype (for which “Stepin Fetchit” is most well-known), since his role is more comic than tragic.
²⁵
Finally, in
Song of the South
there is also the character of “Toby” (Glenn Leedy), the embodiment of the “pickaninny,” a term that Walt himself used to describe the character.
²⁶
A younger variation on the “coon,” this character was often an impossibly dim-witted black child whose main narrative function never extended beyond being the constant butt of visual gags for the amusement of white audiences. The fact that these three characters maintain largely “positive” relationships with Johnny and the other white characters does not offset the deeper problems within the film’s racial hierarchies. All three ultimately reinforce the vision of an illusory utopia where African Americans are perpetually helpful, passive, and nonthreatening to the privileged whites, who are the only ones to benefit from this way of life.

Glenn Leedy as young Toby.

One typical defense against the film’s plantation context is that American history cannot be changed. Yet evoking the legacy of slavery in the South as an unfortunate reality is disingenuous in this context. For one, it is inherently silly to hide behind notions of historical realism regarding a film that depends heavily on lively musical numbers, colorful hybrid animation, and talking animals. Setting that aside,
Song of the South
is further undermined by the willful inattention to the physical and emotional violence used to maintain this way of life, before and after the war. Instead, audiences are treated to images of content African Americans who, of their own choosing, seem perfectly happy with their lower lot in life. In this regard, the use of the musical form is particularly degrading. This pop-culture stereotype of the pre–Civil War South often migrated into generally hazy depictions of postwar life, and reinforced a hierarchy of racial superiority that white audiences decades later could
fi
nd simplistically reassuring during the complicated racial upheavals of the twentieth century. Moreover, these films are notable for the fact that they were really the only representations of African Americans in Hollywood during this time. African Americans may have largely worked on plantations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but as a diverse group they had achieved many other accomplishments since then. Thus the continual perpetuation of plantation movies and racist stereotypes ultimately said more about the cultural and economic dispositions of the predominantly white moviegoers than about the harsh truths of U.S. history.

At the same time, it would be inaccurate for at least two reasons to say that the historical context in which the film was produced somehow makes it more acceptable. For one, as I develop below,
Song of the South
’s stereotypes were already outdated by the time Disney made the film. As scholars such as Taylor have noted before, the 1930s may have seen a huge surge in the popularity of “the ‘Southern films’ . . . [which] presented to Depression audiences nostalgic and idealized images of a feudal ‘paradise lost’ of large plantations, white-columned mansions, beautiful Southern belles and their chivalrous beaux, against a backdrop of loyal and humorous slaves.”
²⁷
These most prominently included musicals such as Bing Crosby’s
Mississippi
(1935) and the 1936 version of
Show Boat
, as well as dramas such as
Gone with the Wind
. But those representations that may have been more prevalent before World War II were decidedly different from those that were accepted just a decade later. Also, a deeper issue transcends the film’s initial release and follows it to this day. Namely,
Song of the South
does not become any
less
offensive now just because it was produced several decades earlier. Audiences’ varying interest in a film reflects the period in which they are viewing it more than the (often forgotten) period in which it was created. This is especially true when a film such as
Song of the South
becomes more popular
later
. Temporal distance does not make the present affection for, or empathy with, racist relationships from the past any more acceptable today.

CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE WHITE BACKLASH

Even more than identifying racist Hollywood stereotypes, a brief history of the civil rights movement is crucial to understanding both audiences’ and Disney’s respective relationships to
Song
of
the South
over the course of the twentieth century. The theatrical reappearances of Disney’s film coincided with, and reflected, several key moments in white America’s negotiation with the emergence of increased rights and visibility for African Americans in mainstream media culture. Invariably,
Song of the South
was positioned, by Disney as well as by critical and supportive audiences, as a reaction against particular moments of cultural upheaval. For decades, the reappearances of the company’s most infamous film corresponded with significant shifts in white America’s attitudes toward African Americans’ collective struggle for equal rights and opportunities. What was occurring in the United States during the 1940s, the 1960s, the 1980s, and so forth greatly shaped how people received and interpreted the film. Just as important, these periods within the civil rights movement also deeply affected if and when Disney chose to rerelease the film, and in what format, to general U.S. audiences. There are in particular three distinct periods characterizing white attitudes toward the progress of the civil rights movement: liberal activism during and after World War II, the “white backlash” in the 1960s and 1970s, and the era of “post-racial” Reaganism that began to settle in during the 1980s and that largely continues to this day. Collectively, they offer a clearer picture of the socially constructed discourse of “whiteness” that has historically shaped the recirculation, reception, and perseverance of a racist artifact like
Song of the South
.

During World War II, the United States and its allies were engaged in a long and costly global conflict with Germany, Italy, and Japan. The country found itself in a moment that required the deep commitment of every man and woman to supporting the cause, regardless of color. Whether it was fighting in segregated units in Europe, working the factories in the North, or plowing their fields in the South, African Americans were needed every bit as much as the next person. At the same time, the ugly white supremacist rhetoric emerging in particular from Nazi Germany evoked for many Americans an uncomfortable similarity to the cultural logic underlying decades of Jim Crow laws in the South and institutional racism in the North. As such, the U.S. federal government, through the Office of War Information (OWI), actively worked with the NAACP and Hollywood studios to create more positive, less stereotypical images of African Americans in feature-length fiction narratives and nonfiction government films. Meanwhile, these images were largely well-received by wartime and postwar audiences of every race, who were anxious to both support the common national cause of the
war
effort and to see themselves as more racially enlightened than the enemies they were fighting overseas.

Within this environment, Disney decided to make a film that reduced black characters to the same prewar stereotypes that the OWI, NAACP, and most other Hollywood studios had consciously made a decision to avoid. Disney may have hoped that plantation films would still find a receptive audience a mere seven years after
Gone with the Wind
’s record-breaking success. Yet making the film when they ultimately did revealed a shockingly tin ear regarding the activism and racial climate of the time. Many people were thus deeply critical of the racist assumptions in
Song of the South
, much more than they might have been a decade earlier. This was not a response limited just to African American activists and white liberals. In the pages of mainstream publications like the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, and the
Los Angeles Times
, critics and audiences expressed their disappointment and even anger at seeing old stereotypes return in such a prominent Hollywood film so soon after the war had ended. Although
Song of the South
was not a box office flop, it was a major disappointment for the studio, in considerable part because of the progressive backlash to its racist images. In short,
Song of the South
was not typical of other Hollywood films of the time in terms of its depiction of idyllic life on a peaceful Southern plantation. If anything, one could argue that Disney’s film was the first of many nostalgic films after World War II that went out of its way to
revive
this otherwise dormant, even shunned, subgenre of the Hollywood melodrama.

Of course, despite the best efforts of political activists at the time, this was not the end of the story for
Song of the South
, unlike many now-forgotten films. Disney’s film would reappear and take on new meanings for audiences as circumstances changed. But this original historical context for
Song of the South
’s debut in 1946 should not be forgotten or marginalized.
Song of the South
was
always
considered a racist film. Yet this truth is easily distorted by personal nostalgia and by a muddled, generalizing understanding of Hollywood history, which mistakenly assumes that every film or television show made before the 1960s was either racist, sexist, or both. In turn, this assumption lends itself to hollow historical statements based on a false equivalence—since most films were racist “back then,” the argument goes,
Song of the South
should not be so harshly criticized now. But aside from simplifying the history of Hollywood to the point of blatant inaccuracy, this assertion also misses the more local history of
Song of the South
’s initial reception.

Despite
this racial climate, Disney was not anxious to give up on high-profile theatrical product like
Song of the South
, particularly when so much of their business model is focused on reusing older properties. As early as the 1940s and 1950s, the company’s existing feature-length films provided seemingly endless revenue opportunities in the form of theatrical reissues and ancillary consumer markets. Yet even Disney was not oblivious to the larger cultural attitudes at the time, and the company approached
Song of the South
carefully. The company rereleased the film in 1956; while the film elicited fewer criticisms, it also made relatively little money. After that, the film did not appear again until 1972. Disney’s official line then was that the film just “skipped a reissue cycle,”
²⁸
since it would have been due to reappear around 1963 or 1964. Yet the film’s absence during the 1960s tells us as much about Disney and the United States’ complicated relationship to the civil rights movement as its reappearance a decade later ultimately would. When
Song of the South
finally returned, sixteen years after its last appearance, the racial attitudes of white America had changed as well.

The year 1964 was arguably the apex of the Civil Rights movement, and public polls repeatedly indicated that white support for the cause of African American equality was at an all-time high in the United States.
²⁹
The activism that had begun with World War II, and persevered through the spectacle of racial discrimination and violence in the 1950s, was finally paying off. That year marked a landslide electoral victory in Congress for the Democrats and the reelection of President Lyndon B. Johnson. This achievement would lead to the passage of various pieces of “Great Society” legislation in Congress. In addition to providing health care and aiding community action programs designed to educate and empower the inner-city poor, the Great Society included laws that were intended to put an end to racial discrimination at the voting booths, within housing policies, and in employment practices. The Great Society was arguably the single biggest legislative achievement in the history of the civil rights struggle for African American causes, and it benefited from widespread support among many white voters. It should not be surprising, then, that Disney decided to “skip” releasing
Song of the South
in the mid-1960s.