In 1941, the State Department, wary of growing Nazi sympathies in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, funded Walt Disney and a team of artists on a Goodwill tour of South America. The films subsequently produced, Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Cabelleros (1944), are animated travelogues, complete with cartoon planes tracing the artists’ itineraries. The films proved a financial success for Disney and a diplomatic win for Inter-American Affairs, but more importantly, they awakened Disney to the possibilities of what political theorist Joseph Nye calls “soft power,” that is, asserting political influence via cultural exchange and developmental aid, rather than coercion or military force. [empty line] Decades later, Disney became heavily involved in the 1964 New York World’s Fair, an even meant to foster international relations while demonstrating America’s technological dominance. Disney produced several attractions including a boat ride around the world, with proceeds of ticket sales going to the United Nations Children’s Fund. Reeling from the panic of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Disney’s songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman, best known for the Mary Poppins soundtrack, penned lyrics for the attraction’s theme warning against the threat of mutual annihilation: “It’s a world of fears./ There’s so much that we share, / That it’s time we’re aware, / It’s a small world after all.” With the ride’s success, Disney began planning his own World’s Fair, Epcot Center, of which creative director Marty Sklar once said, “Someday an international crisis will be averted because two diplomats worked together at Epcot during college.” [empty line] This paper examines Walt Disney’s cultural exchange projects through international relations theory, arguing that Disney was an unlikely, yet powerful player in U.S. foreign policy throughout the Cold War.
About the presenterLori N. Brister
Lori Brister is a doctoral candidate at The George Washington University, where she is completing her dissertation, “Looking through the Text: Tourism, Travel Literature, and Visual Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Her most recent publication, “The Precise and the Subjective: The Guidebook Industry and Women’s Travel Writing in Nineteenth-Century Italy,” appears in the edited collection Women, Travel Writing, and Truth (Routledge, 2014).