Here's a treat. Alan Wellikoff,

Here's a treat. Alan Wellikoff, author of The Civil War Supply Catalogue, gives TAM a historian's view of Disney edutainment. It isn't pretty, folks. Thanks Alan, for allowing me to publish this. You may have earned the title TAM History Consultant.

Goofy-American History
by Alan Wellikoff

"Today we came under attack by the combined forces of the Imperial (crackle, crackle, oooweeeooo, crackle)"
- F.D.R.'s radio announcement of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Epcot Center's "American Adventure."

Walt Disney believed that history was best taught as entertainment, which is partly why Pocahontas enjoys more fame than the 1909 Payne-Aldrich Tariff. Of course, Mr. Disney advanced this theory way back in the 1950s, just as the country itself was beginning to take on characteristics of a fun park, with its wild frontier getting carved into a site map of Mickey Mouse suburbs and burger-themed miracle miles. However, as it's been just a few years since the Disney Corporation proposed to build an American Historyland not far from the site of the Battle of Bull Run, it might do well to consider just how that subject fares at the company's existing wonder worlds. One place to go is Disney World's Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida.

On my last visit, Disney's "American Adventure" stood like a neocolonial insurance company headquarters in the midst of nearly a dozen other national pavilions. In its lobby, tourists ignored revolutionary-era artifacts until permitted to enter a theater with seats that (unlike those at most other Epcot attractions) didn't move along tracks. The house was an admirably patriotic iteration of a Loew's movie palace, its stationary chairs redeemed by the "magical mix of motion pictures and Audio-Animatronics imagineering" that unfolded before their occupants.

Signaling the start of the American Adventure, house lights dimmed and music swelled as -- trembling slightly on their lifts -- robots rose. These weren't sinister cyborgs, but effigies of Mark Twain and Ben Franklin that -- appropriate to the mixture of past and present they represented -- were to be our cohosts for the performance. Although artificial as a couple of diet Yoo-Hoos, robots Franklin and Twain were astonishingly lifelike and performed their tasks with no less skill that might be found, say, in a junior high production of Our Town.

After introductions, Franklin and Twain yielded to a succession of fellow replicants from beneath the stage and a US history unfolded: Jefferson bantered amicably as he prepared a draft of the Declaration; silhouetted atop his horse Nelson, Washington contemplated nation-building at Valley Forge. Then, and in a gesture reminiscent of Jiminy Cricket snuffing out a candle in Pinocchio, George Washington Carver doused a lantern for the night on a Mississippi river raft. What's this, you say? G. W. Carver floating down the Mississip' on an old river raft? Well, I suppose it could've happened, perhaps on some well-earned break from peanut experimentation. But in iconographic terms, Carver riding a Mississippi raft is a bit like Huckleberry Finn working in a Tuskegee research lab. Sure, Carver's a genuine historic figure, but in American-Adventure terms, the ante-bellum river-rafting franchise belongs to the two greatest figures in American literature -- Huck and his runaway slave companion, Jim. Needless to say, these two have always been controversial figures, and only recently the scourge of a language police too horrified by 19th-century "N-word" usage to understand either the historical or the subversive political context in which they appeared. You'd think that Twain's cyborg might've lifted a servomotor in the defense of his characters. I've got a green-backed Franklin that says the old man himself would have done as much.

This little episode was a harbinger of the schizophrenic political correctness that informs the American Adventure. Partly, it's one that reinforces the postwar California progress-ideal for which the original Disneyland stands as a monument. On the other hand, it's a variation on Disney's customary telling of American history that's a bit like Cubby and Annette being replaced in the Mouskateer lineup with Charles and Mary Beard.

In the first instance, Andrew Carnegie, and other, less philanthropical robber barons emerge from beneath the American Adventure's orchestra pit to remind us that the progress ideal still so evident at all Epcot attractions had its beginnings in 19th-century Social Darwinism. Here, the indelibility of the Tomorrowland trust in technological progress trounces standard-issue political correctness. Thus, Disney's pro-tech article of faith is enough to save the memory of even Gilded-Age capitalists from the plundering cast of their popular image.

However, although he's cordial toward fellow android Twain, Ben Franklin's favorite author appears to be John Steinbeck, to whom he referred twice. Was this the Wonderful World of Historical Revisionism with Disney returning Franklin to us as a Pinkerton-fighting Wobbly in a cocked hat? Was a coy parallel being drawn between the embattled farmers who first fired the "shot heard 'round the world" and the migrant farm workers of Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle? Maybe so, but the American Adventure cannot be dismissed as simply an endorsement of Depression-era polemics -- for Disney doesn't just leave the stage to reconstituted colonial grape-boycotters like Franklin.

As part of history that diligently pays tribute to those political movements that have come into vogue since you, Fess Parker and I were young -- and as a likely sop to Epcot's many German and Japanese visitors -- the American Adventure covers both World Wars without any mention of just whom it was we fought, much less why we did so. Also, in a Magical Kingdom take on the revisionism for which American history texts have become so notorious, such denizens of the historical fringe as Chief Joseph, Susan B. Anthony, and even John Muir got full robot-and-set status, while even Honest Abe enjoys no more screen time than Say-Hey Willie. Why? Maybe it's because Lincoln's one dead white male whose animatron is doing nicely over at Disneyland, or -- as JFK also gets short shrift in this program -- perhaps it's because the American Adventure considers martyrdom more in the province of the Moroccan pavilion just down the street at Epcot.

In all, these weird couplings, additions and omissions attain a greater strangeness when limned in the cartoon style of early Disney histo-dramas - only this time the politics have changed. A clockwork Sally Ride flying the Discovery space shuttle through the heavens like Herbie the Lovebug wouldn't have been out of place here. Nor would a funicular Mike Fink polling down the Big Muddy in concert with Emiliano Zapata, Haym Salomon, Rosa Parks and Squanto. Their finale might proclaim Disney's dictum that in order to entertain, history must also be inoffensively p.c. -- for in its own way, Disney history is anything-can-happen day.

Email Alan at cwcatalog@aol.com

Copyright 2002, Alan Wellikoff

August 11, 2002