The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life.

• Author: Doerksen, Clifford

Four years ago, when the Wald Disney Corp. made a bid to transform the Manassas National Battlefield Park into a theme park, intellectuals reared up in protest and ultimately defeated the project, even though it enjoyed the strong support of local businesses and politicians. Perhaps if the Ramada Hotel chain or Donald Trump had been behind the attempt to annex Manassas the outcome would have been the same, but the fact that it was Disney lent a particular color to the rhetoric of highbrow dissent. Was it not universally understood, after all, that the name "Disney" signified everything sentimental, false, and Philistine in American culture?

The day is now long past, but as Steven Watts reminds us in his valuable if uneven study, Walt Disney and his works once received adoring hosannas from the intelligentsia. Elite Disneyphiles in the 1930s included Gilbert Seldes, Sergei Eisenstein, Mark Van Doren, and Arturo Toscanini; comparisons to Leonardo, Hogarth, Daumier, and Matisse were routinely preferred, except by those critics who saw in Disney something entirely new and unprecedented in art. Disney himself affected an aw-shucks indifference to this kind of attention while it lasted, but the steady decline of his cultural reputation after 1940 was clearly galling to his mammoth ego.

The full reversal of Disney's critical fortunes was marked by the 1968 publication of Richard Schickel's scathing The Disney Version, which took Disney's measure in relation to the values of the counterculture and pronounced him vulgar, sentimental, and dehumanized, an assessment which has since become more or less entrenched as an upper-middlebrow shibboleth. Disney died shortly before the Schickel book appeared, but he had long before adopted a defensive populist posture in relation to his many detractors. "The critics think I'm corny," he told his studio associates. "Well, I am corny. As long as people respond to it, I'm okay."

With The Magic Kingdom, Professor Steven Watts, hitherto a cultural historian of the early American Republic, presents us with a fresh opportunity to evaluate the life and work of this architect of modern American culture. Although a confessed Disneyphile and the beneficiary of unprecedented cooperation from both the Disney Archive and the Disney family, Watts has produced an admirably even-handed work that should hold considerable interest even for those cynical souls who find themselves congenitally out of sympathy with the Disney...