Today, we often think of labor strikes as fairly mundane affairs—at least in the United States. But there was a time when labor actions were much more intense. Like in 1941, when animators supporting the strike at Disney’s studio in Burbank, California brought a guillotine to show just how upset they were with Disney management over low wages at the studio.
By early 1941, many of the major animation studios, like Warner Bros. and Fleisher Studios, had unionized. But when the Screen Cartoonists Guild (SCG) tried to do the same at Disney, the studio’s management pushed back hard. Walt Disney threatened workers who were trying to organize with the SCG and by May of 1941, Disney fired two dozen people who had joined the union. One of the artists who was fired included Art Babbitt, an animator who worked on characters like the Wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Babbitt, one of Disney’s highest-paid animators at the time, was the lead organizer pushing for a union to help his fellow workers. Walt Disney had initially tried to stop his workers from organizing by creating an “internal union” at the company, led by Babbitt, but the animator called bullshit and wanted the artists to be allowed to organize under the Screen Cartoonists Guild (SCG).
In the wake of the mass firing, artists at Disney had had enough and staged a strike the next day. The signs at the strike were well-illustrated, as you can imagine. But if you’ve ever seen a documentary that mentions the Disney strike in 1941, it probably doesn’t include the most radical aspects.
Animation studios that were already unionized came to show support for the Disney strike. And the merry pranksters at Warner Bros. even came to parade around a dummy made up to look like Disney’s attorney, Gunther Lessing, sitting inside a guillotine. The Warner Bros. revolutionaries, led by legendary animator Chuck Jones wearing a black mask, also had a sign that read, “Happy Birthday to Gunther and Walt.”
By mid-summer, Walt Disney was feeling some public pressure from people who favored the striking workers, but the studio head took out magazine ads blaming the strike on “Communistic agitation.”
Things got so heated that Walt Disney took a run at some of the animators, apparently upset that he had to drive through the picket lines every day. Disney even took off his jacket to fight Babbitt, who was mocking him through a megaphone, before people could pull them apart.