After World War II, a "Red Scare" consumed many Americans, who feared a "Red under every bed". Some Hollywood executives and actors testified before Congress about the perceived Communist threat. Walt was among them.

After World War II, America became deeply concerned about protecting itself from the Russian “Red Menace”. The Cold War created an era of paranoia that the Soviet Communists would attack with atomic weapons at any minute and bury us all before we had a chance to get to a fallout shelter or “duck and cover”.

Senator Joe McCarthy tried to enhance his political profile with his witch-hunting methods of accusing people of being Communists. There were also the publicized Congressional hearings trying to find Communist sympathizers in the film industry who were supposedly influencing the messages that American films were presenting.

Few people know that besides regular live-action motion pictures, the animation industry itself was also a target and many animators lost their livelihoods because of their supposed Communist sympathies. Simply labeling a person a Communist was enough to get that person fired and blacklisted by the entertainment industry for years.

Walt Disney was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) as a “friendly witness” in 1947. This meant not only that he was vehemently against communism, but that he was willing to publicly “name names” of people whom he believed might have Communist sympathies.

The 1947 committee called twenty-four “friendly” and eleven “unfriendly” witnesses to offer testimony. Eight other scheduled unfriendly witnesses were never called to testify. The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an anti-Communist, pro-free enterprise political group to which Walt belonged for a time, furnished most of the friendly witnesses who identified instances of alleged Communist activity in Hollywood.

In addition to commenting on perceived Communist influences in the film content, these witnesses also identified alleged Communists and Communist sympathizers at the hearings.

The friendly witnesses included Jack Warner of the Warner Brothers studio, Louis B. Mayer of MGM, film actors Gary Cooper, George Murphy, Adolphe Menjou, Robert Taylor, and Robert Montgomery, screenwriter and novelist Ayn Rand, screenwriter Robert Hughes, animator and studio owner Walt Disney, film director Leo McCarey, Ronald Reagan (president of SAG, the Screen Actors Guild), and union leader Roy Brewer.

In addition to identifying individuals they believed to be Communists, friendly witnesses were often asked if they believed Hollywood should make anti-Communist films to reveal “the dangers and intrigue of the Communist Party here in the United States” and if they believed that the US should outlaw the Communist Party. Many witnesses falsely identified people as Communists simply because they did not like them or disagreed with them.

Hundreds of careers were destroyed. However, the fear of a Communist influence in the entertainment industry was not totally irrational, and it is important to realize that the Red Menace was a deeply emotional fear that pervaded everything at the time and that Walt was testifying because he felt the communist philosophy was completely un-American.

Additional hearings by the committee were held in 1951–52, 1953–55, and 1957–58.

To call Walt Disney politically naive would be an understatement. As early as 1931, a Nazi newspaper condemned Mickey Mouse as:

[T]the most miserable ideal ever revealed … the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal…. Down with Mickey Mouse!

Adolf Hitler repeatedly denounced Mickey Mouse and in 1937 tried to ban Mickey from German cinemas. Walt’s response at the time, in Overland Monthy magazine, was to state that:

Mr. A. Hitler, the Nazi old thing, says that Mickey’s silly. Imagine that! Well, Mickey’s going to save Mr. A. Hitler from drowning or something some day … then won’t Mr. A. Hitler be ashamed….

At best, Walt might have been slightly concerned about Hitler’s effect on foreign market distribution of his animated product, but certainly wasn’t politically astute enough to realize how deeply Hitler’s political agenda would impact the American way of life. Once he did become aware, he devoted the entire resources of his studio to winning World War II and defeating the Nazis.

As a young man, Walt really had no political convictions, despite his early support of Franklin Roosevelt that he disavowed in later years. At best, he might have been politically considered a “populist” rather than an actual Democrat or a Republican.

As he grew older, Walt became a staunchly conservative Republican, often bullying his animation staff to make campaign contributions to Republican politicians running for office, like George Murphy and Richard Nixon.

One animator told me that in the 1960s, Walt’s golf cart pargo that he used to get around the backlot of the Disney Studio had a big bumper sticker that read: “Vote for Goldwater!” When he received the Medal of Freedom from President Johnson in 1964, Walt wore a Goldwater button under his lapel that he mischievously flashed to Johnson, who was Goldwater’s Democratic opponent in the upcoming election.

When Walt gave a speech and mentioned that he had some minor traffic tickets for illegal left turns and the officer warned him to only make right turns in the future, Walt smiled and said that would be an easy request because “I lean that way anyway.”

Many believe it was the infamous Disney strike of 1941 that turned Walt away from some of his earlier, more liberal beliefs and toward a harder conservative viewpoint.

The strike occurred because the animators were actively talking about creating a union to protest what they felt was the Disney Studio’s inequitable, arbitrary pay scale, based largely on Walt’s whims. One person in the room like Art Babbit could be making $300 or more a week, while his assistant made $25 a week and ink and painters might make as little as $16 a week, which was not enough to pay normal bills.

During the strike, Walt took out an ad in Variety, the industry trade paper, on July 2, 1941 to proclaim:

I am positively convinced that communistic agitation, leadership and activities have brought about this strike.

Animator Ward Kimball (who didn’t go out on the strike, but stayed inside the studio as part of management) told me that Walt calling the strikers “Communists” was typical “Walt overkill”. It was an easy way of discrediting somebody. Kimball said:

Look, you have to realize that in those days if you said anything against the status quo, if you were even slightly liberal, you were called a communist. It’s still the magic buzz word. If they want to destroy somebody, they say he’s a communist. In those days you were automatically called a communist if you believed in unions.

Walt was really getting all this from [Disney lawyer Gunther] Lessing who was sure that all labor leaders and union members were Commies, that he was dealing with pure communists straight from the Soviet Union. They weren’t! They were fellow artists who wanted an equitable wage.

Walt’s reasoning was that anybody who was against what he wanted to do HAD to be a Communist because Walt was such a staunch American.

Walt felt betrayed by his “boys” who went out on strike and decided that the only reason for that betrayal must have been outside influences like Communist instigators.

To read the rest of the story, pick up your copy of The Vault of Walt: Volume 5.

Upon his election, Barack Obama joined a powerful and popular society: the great (and sometimes not-so-great) statesmen on stage at Disney World's Hall of Presidents.

The Hall of Presidents at Magic Kingdom was based on an attraction that Walt Disney himself had conceived for a never-built area of Disneyland called Liberty Street, where guests could see moving representations of all the presidents and hear them speak.

When the Hall of Presidents opened in 1971, President Richard Nixon was in office and supposedly visited the park to take a look at his audio-animatronics doppelganger. Since that time, seven additional presidents have been added to the attraction, with President Obama the latest in 2009.

Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States, but there are only 43 men standing on the stage because Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, so he is both the 22nd and 24th president.

Obama stands on stage next to Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, the only other two presidents programmed to speak. Washington’s speech explaining the importance of the presidental oath of office uses portions of a speech he actually gave during his second inauguration ceremony.

Actor David Morse, best known for his work on the television series St. Elsewhere, provides the voice of Washington. He played Washington in the 2008 Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning HBO mini-series John Adams, for which he received an Emmy nomination.

Royal Dano provides the voice of Abraham Lincoln. Walt Disney had seen Dano perform as Lincoln in the acclaimed 1952 five-part Omnibus television program of the same name written by James Agee. Dano was the original voice for the character at Walt Disney World from 1971, as he was for Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln at Disneyland from 1964 and the New York World’s Fair. At Walt Disney World, he was replaced from 1993–2008 by Pete Renoudet.

In 2009, during the rehab of the attraction, Imagineering located out-takes and other clips of Dano’s original recordings to use in the current show. The figure in the new version delivers the Gettysburg Address in its entirety.

While there has been some discussion over the decades among historians that Dano did not accurately capture Lincoln’s real voice, almost everyone agrees that his interpretation was “emotionally right”.

Even before the debut at the 1964–65 New York’s World Fair, Walt Disney had to go to Illinois to defend his audio-animatronics re-creation of Lincoln that some in the state felt was going to be “ghoulish” and “grotesque”. Walt told them:

He is going to speak to you. His voice is as close as we could get from actual descriptions of this great man. He will appear in a very dignified setting. While seated in a chair before speaking, he will drop his head in thought, a characteristic Lincoln action.

When he is introduced he will stand—putting his hands behind his back—as though deep in thought. He will appear as life-like as I am standing before you—perhaps more so. I have more at stake in this than the state of Illinois. I am staking my reputation on this—my integrity; I am not a carnival operator.

The first contemporary president to speak in the Hall of Presidents attraction was Bill Clinton, followed eight years later by George W. Bush.

The entire show in the 700-seat theater may not be as entertaining as some people might want, but the technological achievement as well as attention to detail is astounding. For instance, President Franklin Roosevelt wears polio braces under his pant legs as he did in real life, even though they are never seen by the audience.

The newest version of the show that premiered in 2009 is called The Hall of Presidents: A Celebration of Liberty’s Leaders, and it focuses on the bond between the president and the people. Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin consulted on the project and said those who see the show should feel a greater sense of closeness to the presidents.

More than a hundred craftsmen contributed to the Obama figure, which they playfully nicknamed Robobama. It was kept under tight secrecy in a Los Angeles warehouse. Disney’s replica of Obama is more realistic than its predecessors thanks to new technology such as a more flexible silicone skin. It was officially unveiled to the public on July 4, 2009. However, there was a lot of work to get to that debut.

Disney animator Blaine Gibson sculpted every president except Obama. When he was sculpting the bust of George W. Bush following his election in 2000, Gibson hinted that for the next president, the job might be passed along to his protégé, Valerie Edwards, a director of sculpting for Walt Disney Imagineering.

Valerie is the daughter of Disney animator George Edwards, who worked on projects like the Disney animated feature film Sleeping Beauty (1959). In his leisure, he painted desert landscapes that were exhibited in art galleries. Edwards died in 1987.

Valerie was the sculptor responsible for the figures of Captain Jack Sparrow and Barbossa for the rehab of the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction in 2006. She was mentored by Imagineer John Hench for seventeen years, and has a background in science as well as art. She was laid off from Disney in 2010 after twenty-one years of working for Imagineering.

In 2009, Valerie commented on the challenges of sculpting Obama:

It was a great challenge and certainly, for me, it was time to put my best foot forward. After all, Blaine is a tough act to follow.

There are techniques and tools that I learned to embrace from him and add to my repertoire. For this kind of work, it’s not only sculpture as fine art, but sculpture as a mechanical art as well—because of all the internal mechanisms built into the figures. Blaine was the guy who developed this type of sculpture, and he had—and still has—so much to share.

To gather much of the physical information she needed to begin her Obama sculpture, Valerie looked at countless campaign photographs on the internet that showed Obama from a variety of different angles and from all sides. She studied hundreds of photos and hours of video in order to capture every physical attribute and nuance of the president’s look and personality. She stated:

On the internet, you can see so much and select what’s actually useful for detail, because what we’re creating has to be as realistic as possible.

Naturally, there is anatomy involved, but also math. Because so many parts of his face are moving mechanically, you have to be vigilant about diameters and circumferences. The calibration all had to be done through photos and scientific references for musculature.

It’s about finding a pleasant overall look in the facial composition and paying attention to his speech patterns, the muscles that work his face and his expressions both at rest and during speaking. Once it’s done, there are a lot of progressive meetings to meet criteria of other groups that handle the figure and create the movement.

Living up to audience expectations was daunting, to say the least. Certainly this is a figure of a person everybody is acquainted with. They see him on the television and in media constantly. We had an expert anatomist look at it to make sure it was structurally sound and to guide us mechanically.

We’re always working to find new materials and techniques that will deliver a more realistic figure. It’s a constant search for new materials and technology.

It goes from my hands to the audio-animatronics programmers where myriad functions are keyed into the figure’s mechanical substructures for the mouth, eyes and every perfectly synced facial movement.

Then artists work on the finishing facial touches and hairpiece. During the manufacturing phase, I checked on the figure to make sure the external package was not compromised.

Well, it’s a great pressure of course to completely do an accurate job of somebody that’s in the media so often. I can watch the different speeches and I can watch his cadence as he speaks, I can watch his muscles as they move, I can see how his face changes as he speaks to see if there’s any dominance in muscle.

President Obama recorded a recitation of the oath of office and a short speech on March 4, 2009, in the White House Map Room—the same room where he retook the actual oath after a minor flub on Inauguration Day—to accommodate the Hall of President’s updated sound system.

To read the rest of the story, pick up your copy of The Vault of Walt: Volume 5.