In order to understand what happened here, you have to know of Walt Disney’s disappointment over Disneyland, not with the park itself but with the built environment right around the park, which boomed, to accommodate the tourist trade, and sprouted seedy hotels, garish advertisements, vistas of the wrong sorts of people. Disney was heartsick over it — he, who was so visually meticulous that he used to lurk in the various animal centers and zoological gardens of Los Angeles shooting footage of little creatures, trying to ensure his animators got the musculature and locomotion right. How was he supposed to fashion a flawless dream environment, with urban blight as the backdrop? How could he open, in the words of Bob Hope, “an escape from our aspirin existence into a land of sparkles and lights and rainbows”? For that, he needed control over the entire context of the park. Not a land, in other words, but a world. Virgin: that was the word he used in a 1967 promotional film, made right before he died. Walt Disney died dreaming about Disney World; it’s said that while lying on his back, in his hospital room, he turned the tiles on the ceiling into a map of his precious “Florida project.”
The way Walt went about getting his way was crafty and made for good listening. He wanted to buy more than 40 square miles of contiguous private property in central Florida. It wasn’t virgin, by a long shot — Central Florida, after all, is where America’s sins begin — but it was depopulated. Yet Disney knew that if word were to leak about Walter Disney buying real estate, local prices would soar, the overall cost become unmanageable. So he created shell companies, with improvised names, and through them acquired the acres in jigsaw parcels. The landowners didn’t realize just one person was buying everyone’s property until a local journalist figured it out, and Disney was forced to hold a press conference. You heard right, folks! It was me.
From one point of view, the state had deliberately deceived its citizens in order to help a corporation seize a massive chunk of its territory; from another, they were safeguarding a deal that would do more for Florida’s economy than anything since oranges. People still argue over how smart a deal it was. Disney World has made a lot of money, but it’s not clear whether Florida has received a fair share. A lot of this has to do with unique and highly irregular tax arrangements Disney was able to arrange (or demand, to use the term Walt’s brother Roy accidentally let slip at that first press conference). These have only increased over the years. Today there’s even a sort of “Disney visa,” negotiated between the corporation and the U.S. government, in order to make it possible for Disney to fill its foreign-accent needs at Epcot.
Where it got interesting was that, in order to gain these extraordinary powers, Disney had to deceive the government of Florida at the same time the two were colluding in all sorts of other ways. It gets very complex and legalistic but comes down to this: Disney pitched Disney World to Florida not as a resort but as a real city. You’ve heard of Epcot (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). If you’re a Disney freak, you may know that it was originally supposed to possess more of a utopian-futuristic vibe, not be just primarily an around-the-world-in-a-day-type tour, as it became. Fewer people are aware, however, that Epcot was supposed to be a working utopia, a “living blueprint,” as Disney vividly calls it in that film, during which he stands before wall-size diagrams of geometric urban plans, pictures that could have come from the 21st century or the French Revolution. Twenty thousand people would live there, in this bubble-domed community, “completely enclosed . . . climate controlled . . . shoppers and theatergoers . . . protected day and night from rain, heat and cold, and humidity . . . the pedestrian will be king . . . only electric-powered vehicles will travel above the streets.” Disney would solicit the major industrial giants to design and test bold new technologies for Epcot, “finding solutions to the problems of our cities.”
The reality, as Foglesong shows, is that Disney never really meant for people to live permanently at Epcot. In the Disney archives, Foglesong turned up a memo, the Helliwell memo, drafted by one of Disney’s lawyers and annotated in the margins by Walt himself, and it makes this point quite plain. Disney crossed out every mention of “permanent residents.” The denizens of Epcot would be passing through, longer-term tourists, staying for a few months at the longest. How could Disney have it otherwise? If your town has residents, then those people are citizens of some local government of the United States — yours. They can vote. They can vote against you. That hardly made sense as part of a corporate development strategy. But without municipality status, Disney wouldn’t be able to secure the legislative fief it ended up getting, with ludicrous tax advantages, unprecedented oversight of land and water usage, of building codes, etc. For that you needed inhabitants. So Disney fibbed and said he wanted them. Foglesong’s point is that these maneuvers leave Disney World in an ambiguous category of legitimacy. It receives the breaks that an autonomous political settlement would have enjoyed (and then some), but it never has had any settlers. Strictly speaking Disney World shouldn’t exist.
When you know all this, the promotional film becomes unsettling to watch. I prefer to keep my Disney-as-enemy-of-democracy thoughts at a comfortable left-theoretical distance. Disney was selling not utopia but a perversion of classic utopian aims. There would be no private property, sure, no ownership (again, if people owned land, they would have to be given the vote), but instead of substituting the commons for individual plots, as social planners had struggled to do for centuries, the Epcotians would be made renters. Tenants (just as the residents of Celebration, Fla., Disney’s planned community, are today). The tall, architecturally innovative office buildings downtown? Those would be “designed especially to suit the local and regional needs of major corporations.” And all on the soil where the very first North American utopias, the forgotten Franciscan missions of Spanish Florida, had been destroyed, when the South Carolina colonists burned them at the start of the 18th century, murdering their priests and enslaving their Native American populations. The Disney developers had to clear orange groves left over from those missions. Such is the virginity of the New World.
John Jeremiah Sullivan, “You Blow My Mind. Hey Mickey!”
