Disney's Most Notorious Film Read Online Free PDF

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.
    But 1964 was also important in the history of white America’s racial consciousness for other, less honorable reasons. In retrospect, it was the beginning of the end for largely sympathetic attitudes among whites toward the civil rights movement, leading to what sociologist Doug McAdam has called the “white backlash,” which was in full effect by the end of the decade. 30 Most prominently, Southern and other conservative Democrats abandoned the party, believing that the Great Society betrayed their core beliefs about the lower social and economic status of African Americans, who should be left to take care of themselves. Republicans successfully played on a building sense of white lower- and middle-class resentment. They argued that the government treated blacks better than it treated whites—an astoundingly ignorant, but frighteningly effective, claim that conservatives continue to make to this day. Urban rebellions in the cities and increasing white flight to the suburbs widened the divide further. Even moderate and liberal Democrats who remained deeply sympathetic to the civil rights movement in the mid-to-late 1960s found their collective attention and energies quickly distracted by the more urgent, costly fiasco that was the Vietnam War. Thus, almost as soon as the Great Society was coming into effect, conservative politicians were already mobilizing a combination of active resentment and inattentive indifference among whites to seize power throughout the country. The Republican Ronald Reagan was elected governor of traditionally liberal California in 1966; two years later, Richard Nixon was elected president. By the 1980s, socially conservative Democrats were supporting Reagan for president in droves—the