Disney's Main Street USA and The Long Pre-History of Trumpism

Today I took my children to Disneyland. It was a lot more fun for me than I had anticipated, but I could not help but to analyze my experience through my knowledge of the park's history. We came in before opening at 7AM, which enabled us to walk into the Main Street area before the "rope drop" allowed us access to the rides in the park itself.

In the soft glow of an early California morning, the eternally scrubbed Main Street looked gorgeous. I knew that it was Walt's idealized rendering of his rural Missouri hometown in the early 20th century, an attempt for him to pretend he did not have an unhappy, disadvantaged childhood. (Disney and his works are always about fantasy as escapism.) The buildings were built smaller than a real main street of that time, which makes everything feel especially cozy.

I could not help thinking of the political meaning of this section of the park. This idealized main street does not have any saloons (as it would have had circa 1910), of course, or any traces of the immigrants who were coming to America in massive numbers at the time. Built amid the cultural reaction of the 1950s in Orange County, the very heart of the growing postwar grassroots conservative movement, Disneyland could not help but reflect its context, nor the political context Disney himself grew up in.

Main Street is supposed to represent a "simpler time," but to me it looks like what reactionaries in the 1910s and 1920s wanted America to be: white, native-born, rural, and teetotal. People of color are certainly present and otherized in the older rides, from the wild "Indians" in Peter Pan to the African "headhunters" in the Jungle Cruise.

The fact that the entrance to the park is a nostalgic tribute to an idea of America as a culturally homogenous place is very striking to me today in the age of Trump. I am not saying that Disney today is a Trumpist enterprise or that Walt Disney himself would have been a Trump supporter were he alive today, but rather that Disney's Main Street reflects an idea of America and the "good old days" that rhymes with Trumpism. In the 1950s Walt looked to the small town America of 1910 as the time to be idealized, while Trump and his supporters pine for the 1950s. The Trumpism of today, as many a historian will tell you, is rooted in a longer history of nativism and nationalism. You can find traces of it everywhere, including at Disneyland.