Disney's Most Notorious Film Read Online Free PDF Page A

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