Much has been said about Walt Disney‘s political views. As he grew older, Walt is thought to have become considerably more conservative, even while at the same time, Hollywood was growing increasingly liberal, per ThoughtCo. Walt was known to be staunchly anti-communist, according to The Guardian, but it doesn’t appear that his point of view was a product of McCarthyism or the red scare of the 1940s and ’50s. (Disney did however testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.) The seed for his disdain for such left-wing ideologies came decades earlier.
When Walt and his older brother, Roy, were growing up, their father was a proud socialist. Elias Disney had tried and failed at several business ventures, something it appears Walt later blamed partially on his politics. According to Collider, Walt noted that while Elias was an honest man, he naively thought everyone else was, too. “He got taken in many times because of that,” Walt said. Ironically, according to PJ Media, Walt taught himself to draw — the very skill that made him millions — by copying cartoons from his father’s issues of the socialist newspaper titled Appeal To Reason.
The Disney brothers went in the other direction and, while Walt voted to re-elect Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, he and his brother remained fairly consistently conservative in their beliefs despite Walt’s attempt to promote an apolitical public image. Writer Maurice Rapf, who worked on several of Disney’s films, noted that Walt “was very conservative except in one particular — he was a very strong environmentalist.”
