Why Walt Disney Is One of the Most Iconic American Dreamers
It was my first trip to Disney World with my son. I had been there before, but the significance of the place had never dawned on me beyond it just being the iconic travel destination in America that it is. As I walked through the park that year, many exhibits were closed for maintenance. On the placards on walls covering some of these temporarily closed attractions, I kept seeing inspirational quotes. (I’ve always been a sucker for a good inspirational quote.) I can’t remember exactly which Walt Disney quotes I saw that day, but I imagine they were some of his best: “If you can dream it, you can do it,” “It all started with a mouse,” or “All your dreams can come true, if you have the courage to pursue them.”
Later that day, I was raising my son over my shoulders and watching the u
sual show in the Magic Kingdom where all the main Disney characters were present. The characters were telling the kids about being princes and princesses, about being heroes. But that day I realized, it wasn’t about being a “prince” or “princess” at all. I should have realized it sooner. It became plainly obvious that what Disney was trying to do in the spirit of its founder was to inspire kids—and adults—that we should be chasing our dreams and pursuing meaningful, adventurous, and courageous lives.
After that trip, I bought what has become one of my favorite books of all time, Bob Thomas’s Walt Disney: An American Original. The book recounted an amazing life story, but it also became of immense sentimental value as it inspired me and put me on the path I travel today in pursuing my own American Dream. At the time I purchased the book I was thinking about starting a nonprofit focused on addressing poverty and improving upward economic mobility. I was also thinking about my kids achieving their own dreams or being able to pursue their own paths to happiness and flourishing.
Shortly before that trip to Disney World, I had received my green card, which in a way allowed me to dream. In Latin America, where I am from, there are few opportunities or paths to flourishing and dreaming. It’s a very narrow corridor. But in the United States, I am in the home of the American Dream. The main understanding I had of the “American Dream” back then was simple: if you worked hard and were persistent, regardless of who you were and where you started, you could achieve your dreams.
That is still what it means to some people today, but I’ve become more of a student of the American Dream, and there is so much more to the national ethos than just hard work and perseverance. To achieve the American Dream you also need to be able to project yourself into the future, to have aim and meaning, and to design and pursue goals. The dream is about more than wealth; it’s about aspiration, achieving success, and in many cases is more about the journey than the destination.
Walt Disney is for me and many others the epitome of the American Dream. The quotes I saw that day and the stories and performances of those characters and their ideas about becoming “princes/princesses/heroes” were about Disney himself and what he wanted to bring to the world. His own life was the perfect example of pursuing and achieving the American Dream—that of a better, richer, and fuller life.
Walt was one of five kids born to an impoverished father, who, despite his poverty, didn’t give up on trying to become an entrepreneur. He encouraged his son in his drawing classes, but young Walt paid for the classes himself by working for his father, delivering newspapers. He also did other odd jobs and even worked as a drawing artist for a dentist’s office.
As a young man, Walt opened his first animation studio, Laugh-O-Gram, with his friend, Ub Iwerks, and started working on different projects (including an early version of Alice in Wonderland), which at the time were mostly shorts. This didn’t last long as they were forced to declare bankruptcy shortly after starting. After that failure, Walt moved to Hollywood and looked for jobs in different studios, hoping to become a director at some point, but he was rejected over and over. He then decided to go back to animation and started his second company, the Disney Brothers Company, with his brother Roy, who stayed with him throughout his life.
They started again with the Alice videos and managed to carry on for a little while, but success finally came with Oswald the Rabbit, in twenty-seven video shorts. Unfortunately, the film company they were partnering with for distribution didn’t renew their contract, hired away most of Disney’s staff, and basically stole the character away from him. In desperation, on the train ride back home from the failed negotiations, Walt developed the character of Mickey, which was named by his wife—a wise choice, as his first idea was to call the creature Mortimer. Disney’s biggest success became Mickey Mouse, which is why even though he had already started working to create other companies before, he was fond of saying that it all started with a mouse.
Many believe Mickey was built on his own image, both as Disney himself dubbed one of the first voices of Mickey for the early movies but also because everyone on the staff felt that as the character developed throughout the years, it had Disney’s personality on screen.
Some of the main highlights that I appreciate the most about Disney’s story have to do with the essence of living the American Dream: overcoming barriers, pursuing your own hero’s journey, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, and seeking to be the best at your craft. Disney fit many of those categories. He was in debt for the first twenty years of his company, in part because he constantly reinvested earnings and tried to build new innovative products in the form of films but mostly in the form of cultural narratives that could shape and inspire lives. He constantly pushed into new frontiers with his profession. He innovated in many areas of film production, animation, and in running a company.
America is about pushing the boundaries, exploring new frontiers—not only geographic frontiers but frontiers of innovation, of entrepreneurship, of pushing the limits of what humans can do and accomplish for their own betterment and that of others. And that is what Walt Disney did, consistently throughout his career, producing films and amusement parks, and inviting us all to be the architects of our own dreams. He was not so much inventing only brand-new things but improving on things that were already built, pushing the frontiers of his crafts.
Another one of my favorite stories from his life was his lengthy, and eventually successful, efforts to convince the author of Mary Poppins, Pamela Travers, to let him bring her character and book to life. It took many attempts to sell her on his vision—a story which was beautifully (and from what I could tell very accurately) depicted in the 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks starring Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson.
Walt still tried to be a dedicated father and lead by example. He defended his country in the First World War and ended up supporting the Second World War effort by producing films for the military exhibiting a sense of patriotism, which is more about belonging and being proud of being American than it is about a nationalistic nativist feeling.
What does Disney’s life tell us? That the American Dream is not a linear trajectory or a pain-free pursuit. One of the main things about it is that it includes overcoming barriers, it includes suffering, it includes hard times. And it includes success in life, despite all of that. It might be material success; it might be improvement in life success; and it might be success in inspiring others to pursue their own dreams and refueling the spirit of a nation that uses the American Dream as its gasoline—a national ethos, unlike that of any other country in the world.
One of my favorite quotes about Disney and his impact came from a eulogy by Eric Sevareid in the evening news the night Disney passed away (mentioned in the Bob Thomas Disney biography):
He was an original. Not just an American original, but an original. Period. He was a happy accident, one of the happiest this century has experienced. And judging by the way it’s behaving, in spite of all Disney tried to tell it about laughter, love, children, puppies, and sunrises, the century hardly deserved him. He probably did more to heal—or at least soothe—troubled human spirits than all the psychiatrists in the world. There can’t be many adults in the allegedly civilized parts of the globe who did not inhabit Disney’s mind and imagination at least for a few hours and feel better for the visitation.
And in that sense, in his own pursuit of human flourishing, entirely apart from the economic success he had, Walt Disney enabled many others to fulfill their own human flourishing and potential by being inspired by his stories and dreaming along with him. That fulfillment transcends any material reward, and it’s at the essence of the pursuit of a fuller life highlighted by the American Dream.
Another part of that eulogy that stands out was this: “But what Disney seemed to know was that while there is very little grown-up in every child, there is a lot of child in every grown-up. To a child, this weary world is brand-new, gift wrapped. Disney tried to keep it that way for adults.”
In a similar fashion Disney liked to say, “That’s the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up.” What does it mean to grow up? To stop thinking about big dreams and endless possibilities. It’s not not maturing, but it is about losing our visionary selves, our imaginations, giving up striving to do big things. We revert back to security. And yes, reality has a way of slapping you in the face. But you also have the agency to slap it back, to overcome barriers and keep moving forward. That is the essence of the American Dream as well, to have a vision for your future and not stop imagining a better, richer, and fuller life.
Being more about the journey than the destination, Disney was a pioneer in many fields of film and entertainment. And even though he was able to create and enjoy Disneyland in California, he wasn’t able to see his dream of Disney World in Orlando come to fruition as he unfortunately passed away at the relatively young age of sixty-five. I’m sure that he did enjoy that journey, however, even if he didn’t make it to the destination of seeing the joy that Disney World brings to myriad people and how many come from all across the globe to enjoy the fruits of his imagination and his own American Dream.
Despite the many challenges his company had after he passed away, I believe his legacy still lives on and we can use his story, and continue to retell it, so that more people can be inspired by one of the most important American Originals.
There are many books and podcasts about Walt Disney, but I’m biased in the sense that my favorite one is a biography summarizing Disney’s life in our American Originals series, written by the great business historian Gary Hoover. As Gary closes his article: “When considering this man in full, our assessment is that Walt Disney was, like all of us, an imperfect human being. Above all else, he was among the most normal of Americans, sharing their histories, their biases, their dreams, and their ambitions.”
And in that sense, there are millions of other “ordinary” Americans out there who have been inspired and continue to be inspired by Walt Disney and his work to dream their own American Dreams.