Jon Wiener | The Nation

From “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” to “A dream is a wish your heart makes”: Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney are together at last in an unprecedented Disney exhibit at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is the nation’s official repository for the memory of the man who, his supporters say, ended the cold war and defeated global communism. And for the next ten months the Reagan Library also is featuring the largest exhibition ever assembled of Walt Disney treasures, organized by the Official Disney Fan Club D23. It’s also the largest temporary exhibit in the history of the Reagan Library: 12,000 square feet, with 500 objects including drawings, costumes, models and other stuff, over half of which have never been seen by the public.

I had one question: why?

The National Archives operates the Reagan Library and Museum. The mission of the Archives is to “serve American democracy by safeguarding and preserving the records of our Government.” So why is it displaying drawings of Bambi and Cinderella and the actual car from The Absent-Minded Professor?

And what does any of this have to do with Ronald Reagan? The answer: not much.

Reagan and Disney did do some things together. On one memorable day, October 20, 1947, both testified before HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, on the first day of its “investigation” into communist infiltration of the film industry. Both were friendly witnesses. The next day, ten other witnesses refused to testify and were sent to prison. The Hollywood blacklist had begun.

But the Hollywood blacklist is not mentioned in the Reagan Library Walt Disney exhibit.

The exhibit opens with the statement that “Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan were two eternal optimists who shared a belief in the essential goodness of the American way of life.” That’s a start, I guess.

Next, when Disneyland opened in 1955, “Mr. Reagan, who was then working in the new medium of television, was chosen as emcee for the historic event”—along with Art Linkletter and Robert Cummings. In the first gallery a continuous loop shows black-and white video of a very young Reagan in a bowtie reading from script in hand about how “our very historic past” is represented at Disneyland.

After that Reagan disappears, and instead we get some great stuff—for those who care: the original script for Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon; hand-drawn artwork for Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty; and then lots of objects from Disney live-action films, including dozens of costumes, along with a submarine model from the 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (where Kirk Douglas sang “Whale of a Tale”). Also, “a faithful recreation” of Walt’s office at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, including the baby grand piano played by Leopold Stokowski.

Although the exhibit is supposed to be about Walt Disney himself, it includes lots of stuff promoting Disney Studios’ current films, released more than forty years after Walt’s death, including The Avengers and the latest version of Pirates of the Caribbean. Note: promoting Disney Studios’ current films is not part of the mission of the National Archives.

Reagan doesn’t reappear until the last room, which focuses on the “Hall of the Presidents” exhibit at Disney World. It displays, among other things, ten Reagan documents dealing with Disney. But the point of the room is that all the presidents starting with FDR “reached out” to Disney, that Reagan was one among many. On display is a 1940 thank-you letter from Roosevelt acknowledging an original drawing of Mickey Mouse that Walt had sent him. There’s an even more unlikely letter from Eleanor Roosevelt, thanking Walt for the “many delightful evenings” his films had provided. She also described her husband as “one of the devotees of Mickey Mouse.” The room displays pictures of every president starting with Truman visiting Disneyland or Disney World—including Obama (with one exception: LBJ).

Reagan did have “a special relationship” with Disney, the wall text says, but the evidence here is weak. Reagan as governor endorsed a Walt Disney postage stamp, but that was after Walt died in 1966. Reagan as president issued a proclamation declaring a National Walt Disney Day (December 5, 1986), but he also issued proclamations declaring National Leif Erikson day, National Skiing Day and National Dairy Goat Awareness Week.

The exhibit closes by quoting a speech Reagan gave in 1990, on his last visit to Disneyland, on the park’s thirty-fifth anniversary. “They say that one man of vision can change the world,” Reagan said. “Well, maybe Walt Disney didn’t alter the globe, but he did make one small section of it a happier, friendlier, and more civilized place.” True enough—but that was twenty-five years after Walt died. It’s not evidence of a “unique friendship.”

So I return to the question, Why is the Reagan Library sponsoring a Walt Disney exhibit?

One clue: on the opening weekend for the Disney exhibit, the Museum’s attendance almost doubled. Melissa Giller of the Reagan Foundation reports that the typical weekend attendance is 1,200 on Saturday and 1,000 on Sunday. But for this weekend, “We had over 1,800 on each day!”

Apparently people are getting tired of hearing “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

That’s been evident for years, starting in 2005 when the museum opened the Air Force One pavilion in an earlier effort to boost attendance. That exhibit is completely apolitical. Conservative ideology is nowhere to be found in the 90,000 square feet, $30 million display. Reagan’s “Flying White House,” visitors learn, is the same plane used by all presidents from Nixon to George W. Bush, including Carter and Clinton—and thus is hardly a monument to Reagan’s unique role in winning the cold war. Indeed on the opening weekend of the Disney displays, lots of visitors also had their pictures taken waving from the front door of Air Force One.

Thus the Disney exhibit, like the Air Force one pavilion, suggests that the story of how Reagan personally ended the cold war is being greeted with increasing apathy. Or perhaps it’s skepticism.

There’s good reason for skepticism. Most historians now believe the Soviet Union collapsed not because of Reagan but because of its own internal dynamics, along with the efforts of Gorbachev to bring pluralist democracy. George H.W. Bush said pretty much the same thing on the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead of praising Reagan, he gave credit to the Soviet leader. “We can never repay the debt we owe Mikhail Gorbachev,” Bush declared at a ceremony in Berlin in 1999. “History still hasn’t given him the credit he deserves, but it will.”

So maybe it’s not surprising that people would rather hear about the early days of Disneyland than about the last days of the Soviet Union. And if Reagan didn’t have much to do with either, that too is part of “our very historic past.”

Jon Wiener’s new book, How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America, will be published in October.

Organizers called it “the largest Walmart protest in the history of the US”: thousands of marchers in Los Angeles’s Chinatown on Saturday morning, hoping to stop the low-wage, anti-union employer from opening a new store there. The rally featured music by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Ben Harper, both of whom played in front of a banner that read “Walmart = Poverty,” underneath iconic Chinese dragons. Featured speakers included Dolores Huerta and US Representative Judy Chu (D-El Monte), who said, “We must stop Walmart.”

Steve Earle, who didn’t attend, posted a YouTube video of support, including a song from his next album, “I’m thinkin’ ’bout burnin’ the Walmart down.” “I’ve never known of Walmart to be a good neighbor in any town it’s ever moved into,” he added. “Y’all stick together out there.”

The store represents a new strategy for the company, which has been blocked from building new superstores in Los Angeles for years by activist pressure on the City Council. The Chinatown store, Walmart says, will be a “Neighborhood Market”—a grocery operation about a fifth the size of a supercenter, in an existing retail space. That makes it possible for the firm to avoid the permit process for new construction of a big box store, along with the public review now required by the LA City Council. The firm plans to open a dozen more “Neighborhood Markets” in California, according to the Los Angeles Times.

"Such stores are wedges to get even bigger stores into the city," said UCSB historian Nelson Lichtenstein, author of The Retail Revolution, a history of Walmart. That’s because, "by themselves, they’re probably not going to be too profitable."

On Tuesday, at a Walmart event celebrating the beginning of construction in Chinatown, Kim Sentovich, senior vice president of Walmart’s Pacific store division, said “Everything we do is connected with our mission of helping people to save money so they can live better.”

Walmart says its full-time hourly employees in California are paid an average wage of $12.79—higher than the state’s minimum wage of $8 an hour. But Walmart does not allow most employees to work full time, and part-time workers get lower pay and worse benefits. Girshriella Greene, a supervisor at a Walmart in the Crenshaw district, told an earlier news conference, “I don’t make enough money to get off county healthcare or welfare. I make $9.80.”

LA’s Chinatown, north of downtown, has become the center of a youthful arts scene as Chinese immigrants have moved to eastern suburbs like Monterey Park over the last few decades. Gallery owners and artists have helped organize the protests, including a fundraiser Friday night at Human Resources gallery, where the popular indie-rock band No Age played and labor leaders spoke.

“With the crowd already sweaty and ear-worn” from loud opening acts, Paul T. Bradley of the LA Weekly reported, “No Age began its unrelenting onslaught just after 11pm.… Shirtless dudes tossed around other shirtless dudes as aging organizers and pro-labor folks kept their distance.”

The protest was organized by a coalition of labor, community and faith organizations, including LAANE, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, the LA County Federation of Labor, and a number of grassroots community groups, along with Making Change at Walmart.

On Tuesday Californians will vote on an initiative to raise taxes on cigarettes. It’s called Proposition 29, the “California Cancer Research Act,” and it would increase the state tax on cigarettes by $1 a pack, raising $700 million a year, which would be spent on cancer research.

I’m voting against it.

The “No on 29” campaign is funded mostly by the tobacco industry, which is the main reason many people are voting “Yes.” Phillip Morris has spent $27 million, R.J. Reynolds $11 million.

The “No” campaign includes some of the worst forces in American politics: Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers’ political arm that played a key role in the Republican victories in 2010; Americans for Tax Reform, the Grover Norquist organization that gets Republicans to sign a “no new taxes” pledge: the Chamber of Commerce, which has been funding Republicans everywhere; the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, responsible for Prop. 13, the 1978 initiative that crippled the state’s ability to raise taxes.

The “Yes on 29” campaign includes the American Cancer Society, an $8 million donor; the Lance Armstrong Foundation, $1,5 million; plus the American Lung Association in California, American Heart Association, American Stroke Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

The “Yes” side argues that the higher tax will result in a 14 percent decrease in youth smoking, which means 230,000 fewer California kids will become adult smokers. The higher tax, they say, will get 118,000 adult smokers in California to quit; it will save 104,000 Californians from premature smoking-caused death; and it will save $5 billion in healthcare costs. Even if those figures are exaggerated, they are impressive.

But there is an argument against the initiative: the tobacco companies and their friends say “California can’t afford to start a new billion-dollar spending program when we have a $10+ billion budget deficit and can’t pay for critically-needed existing programs like education and health care.”

They are right about that.

If the money from higher tobacco taxes went to support healthcare in general, to prevent the closure of emergency rooms and help provide home health aides and medical care for the poor, it would be great. Instead the initiative creates a new state agency with its own tax base.

As the Los Angeles Times pointed out in an editorial opposing the initiative, “California can’t afford to retain its K-12 teachers, keep all its parks open, or give public college students the courses they need to earn a degree.… If the state is going to raise a new $735 million, it should put the money in the general fund rather than dedicating it to an already well-funded research effort.”

A new Survey Research poll shows Prop. 29 leading 42–38, which is officially “too close to call.”

(Note: All facts from http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition_29,_Tobacco_Tax_for_Cancer_Research_Act_%28June_2012%29)

The United Farm Workers was once a mighty force on the California landscape, with 50,000 members at the end of the 1970s; today the membership is around 6,000. What happened? And to what extent was the UFW responsible for its own demise? Frank Bardacke has been thinking about that for a long time—he was active in the student and anti-war movements in Berkeley in the 1960s. He moved to California's Central Coast in 1970, worked for six seasons in the Salinas Valley fields and then taught English as a Second Language at the Watsonville Adult School for twenty-five years. Verso has just published his book Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers—it's a masterpiece of sorts, on the order of Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch. I spoke with Frank Bardacke recently on KPFK 90.7FM in Los Angeles.

You worked in the fields in Salinas, picking celery. What was that like?

It’s done by collective piecework, with a crew of thirty to thirty-five people, paid for each box of celery. They share that pay equally. The crews are all men. They have a high degree of solidarity. They try to make the jobs equal. The men typically come from the same small towns in Mexico, often they are brothers and cousins and fathers and sons. You can’t get on a crew unless the members want you and are willing to carry you while you learn the work. The core of the crew will stay together over many seasons. The result is that they have a tremendous amount of power and leverage at harvest time, because they can’t be replaced except by other crews with similar skills. They never split up if it comes to a strike—they either strike together, or they don’t strike. These people, along with the lettuce workers, were the heart of UFW strength in the fields.

How much did piece-rate vegetable workers earn in the mid-1970s, at the height of UFW power?

When I worked on a celery harvest crew in the mid-seventies, we made about $14 an hour. The guys who cut the lettuce made about $20 an hour. That’s the equivalent of about $50 an hour today. They were among the highest paid people in the US working class. This resulted from their own power in the fields, coupled with the UFW’s institutional power and ability to mobilize support in the rest of society. That was in the 1970s.

When you went to work in the fields, were you doing research for a Berkeley PhD thesis? Or was it political organizing, because you believed the working class could overthrow capitalism?

Neither! I left Berkeley during the Vietnam War and went to work in an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Ord, not far from Salinas. That didn’t pay much money, so I was also a PE teacher at a local high school. But I was fired because my police record from Berkeley arrived. So I needed a job.

One day I picked up a hitchhiker who told me he had just finished working for a couple of weeks in the fields with the UFW. He told us how to do it, so a friend and I got jobs, working hourly, with short-handled hoes. The work was extremely difficult. I worked in the fields for six years, and by the end I was just barely an average worker. But eventually I made my way onto a piecework crew, and made a decent living. I only had to work for six months of the year, and then I qualified for unemployment for the next six months.

The politics were extremely interesting. The farmworkers the year before had won a really big strike. In 1971 the crews we were on often refused to get off the bus, for instance if they smelled pesticide in the air, or if they didn’t like the foreman. There was a level of daily struggle that was much greater than all the politics I’d done in the anti-war movement as a student. It was thrilling.

At the end of the 1970s, the UFW had 50,000 members; today it’s 6,000. That makes us ask how the UFW got beat. If you ask UFW leaders today, what do they say?

The standard UFW line is that the Republicans came into power in California and throughout the country, and the fields were swamped by immigrants. It’s not entirely wrong. But the story is a lot more complicated than that. It took me 700 pages to explain it. Actually there were 1,400 pages to this book when I handed it in.  It took my wonderful editor JoAnn Wypijewski two years to turn it into a regular book.

Your book is subtitled The Two Souls of the United Farm Workers. What were the two souls?

The UFW was a union of Mexican farmworkers, but it was also a cadre boycott advocacy organization that was not connected directly to the union. When those two souls were in unison, in the grape strike and grape boycott of the late 1960s, the UFW was extremely powerful and won a lot. When those two souls came into conflict, then the UFW was debilitated and was set up for its eventual defeat.

What was the conflict?

There were lots of conflicts. The first key is that the union did not have locals. There was no way for local farmworkers to be elected to the UFW staff. The UFW had field offices staffed by people appointed by the people above them, so they were responsible not to the workers but to the people above them. The staff went in one direction and the farmworkers went in another direction.

There was a big ethnic difference between the staff and the farmworkers. The staff was Chicano and white. The farmworkers were Mexican. This is a huge difference. The staff kind of looked down on farm work. But for a Mexican immigrant, the fields, especially in the mid-1970s, made for a great success story—they were making fabulous wages compared to Mexico. The fields were not something to get out of. The fields where a place where people built successful lives.

There was also a whole different attitude toward where the UFW’s true power lay. The staff came to believe the UFW’s true power lay in the supporters of the boycott, whereas the more militant farmworkers thought the union’s true power was in the fields.

Another difference was also crucial: The UFW’s income did not come primarily from farmworkers dues. It made money off contributions, donations and government subsidies. So the staff had an independent source of income.

Because farmworkers couldn’t be elected onto the staff, because there was an ethnic difference from the staff, and because the staff had a different attitude toward where the union’s power was, the conflict erupted in an internal fight in the late 1970s that thoroughly debilitated the union.

You say Cesar Chavez built an organization that did not tolerate dissent. Please explain.

That’s not a very controversial statement. Because the structure of the union was entirely top-down, you got a culture of command and obedience. In the UFW there was no way for worker opinion to be expressed. Everybody served at the pleasure of Cesar Chavez and the executive board. If you didn’t like what the union was doing, you didn’t put up a fight. You quit.

The dispute came to a head around the 1979 strike. The farmworkers won it, which gave them a sense of their own power. They wanted commensurate power inside the union. Cesar didn’t want to give it to them.

What is the significance of this story for what’s left of the labor movement today?

There’s no substitute for democracy. That’s the major lesson of the UFW experience. Democracy inside unions might be difficult and seem like a waste of time, but it’s only through democratic debate that people build the kind of commitment that is necessary to stand together. The UFW had no locals. That was a tremendous mistake. There’s no substitute for face to face debate, people having direct control over their local union affairs. That’s the way you build strength.