“My father was a Socialist,” Walt Disney told an interviewer in 1960. By that time Disney had become one of the world’s most visible self-made men. He’d improbably built a powerhouse multimedia empire with the aid of a carefree cartoon mouse, first seen in 1928 whistling ragtime at the helm of a crudely drawn steamboat. He started off a Democrat, and ended up a Republican. He supported private enterprise and free markets. He loathed state control of anything, and when an industry-wide animators’ union took shape in the late 1930s, he vocally opposed that too.
