In a disastrous 1941 speech meant to quell the Screen Cartoonist Guild strike, Walt Disney lectured his employees with social-Darwinist rhetoric that backfired badly, swelling union membership rather than resolving the conflict. ✦ AI generated
Walt Disney · Acquired · 2026-06-23 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 127:41
My first recommendation to the lot of you is this. Put your own house in order. You can't accomplish a damn thing by sitting around and waiting to be told everything. It's the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way. And I don't give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up. Nothing can change that.
verbatim transcript · starts at 127:41
127:41is this. Put your own house in order. You can't accomplish a damn thing by sitting around and waiting to be told everything. If you're not progressing as you should, instead of grumbling and growling, do something about it." And then don't forget this. It's the law of the universe that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way. And I don't give a damn what
128:01idealistic plan is cooked up. Nothing can change that. Probably not what you want to tell your employee base after you just slash their salaries. Yeah. Yeah. A labor magazine would write afterwards, "Walt Disney's speech recruited more members for the Screen Cartoonist Guild than a year of campaigning. >> [sighs and gasps] >> Yeah, about the worst reaction that you could possibly have. And Walt, I don't know if you found this in your research,
128:32but it seems like he's kind of deluded here into thinking, well, it's not actually my employees that are doing this. It's these communist, very few communist agitators who have undercover become my employees and they're riing up the rest of them. and Walt's like kind of removed himself and he's in denial that this is actually what his workforce wants. The the the family atmosphere that we had at Hyperion is now a like
129:05real corporate, you know, have and have knots here on Burbank campus. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's a mess. And then it gets worse. So in the middle of the strike, which again lasts for three and a half months, that hundreds of employees are gone from their jobs that are not working and marching and protesting outside the company >> while they're trying to make Bambi, which is equally ambitious,
129:28>> right? Walt is just so depressed and in denial and upset about the whole thing that in August of 1941, he agrees to go on a goodwill trip to Latin America with Nelson Rockefeller's office of the coordinator of interamerican affairs. This is the trip that ultimately results in the Disney films Saludos amigos and the three cabayeros. If you've seen those or been to the three cabarios ride