As the "New York Times" reported, "While making plain their aversion to the communist movement, they stressed the necessity for applying democratic procedures in combating it. In contrast to some of their Hollywood colleagues, they indicated an unwillingness to label Hollywood personalities as communists on pure hearsay without conclusive evidence." The next morning, Walt joined their ranks, as one of the so-called "friendly" testifiers. His comments centered around the 1941 strike at the Disney Studio. Writes historian Richard Tretheway, "As he had done many times before, Walt claimed that the Screen Animators Guild was dominated by communists (and) that animator and union leader David Hilberman was probably a communist himself."

Several years later, when Senator Joseph McCarthy joined these hearings, they frequently deteriorated into a witch hunt. Writers, directors and performers found themselves named as communists — and some were unable to find work anyplace in Hollywood for years thereafter. Thus, the HUAC hearings became associated with the worst of political overzealousness.

But in 1947, Walt just wanted to communicate his belief that the union that had inflicted a devastating strike on his Studio a half dozen years earlier was heavily influenced by the Communist party. "I believe it is an un-American thing," Walt said. "The thing that I resent the most is that they are able to get into these unions, take them over and represent to the world that a group of people that are in my plant, that I know are good 100-percent Americans are trapped by this group and they are represented to the world as supporting all these ideologies and it is not so, and I feel that they really ought to be smoked out and shown up for what they are, so that all the free, good causes in the country, all the liberalisms that really are American can go out without the taint of communism. That is my sincere feeling on it."

Was Walt right? Was the Studio strike dominated by communists? Hard truths are elusive. The events of those dark days in the early 1940s have been obscured by the mists of time. But it's clear that Walt had good reasons to believe that the men and women who were devastating him personally and financially were outsiders with motivations that went far beyond getting better pay for animators. For one thing, he barely remembered seeing any number of picketers before — an unlikely event had they actually worked for him.

Speaking of Herbert Sorrell, one of the strike leaders, Walt told the committee that, "He said he would make a dust bowl out of my plant if he chose to. I told him I would have to go that way, sorry, that he might be able to do all that, but I would have to stand on that. The result was that he struck.

"I believed at the time that Mr. Sorrell was a communist because of all the things that I had heard and having seen his name appearing on a number of Commie front things. When he pulled the strike the first people to smear me and put me on the unfair list were all the Commie front organizations. . . They smeared me. Nobody came near to find out what the true facts of the thing were. . . And I even went through the same smear in South America, through some Commie periodicals in South America and generally throughout the world all of the Commie groups began smear campaigns against me and my pictures . . . .

"They formed picket lines in front of the theaters, and well, they called my plant a sweatshop and that is not true, and anybody in Hollywood would prove it otherwise. They claimed things that were not true at all and there was no way you could fight it back."

Walt's words speak volumes about the pain he felt during the strike. As he wrote to newspaperman Westbrook Pegler during some of the bleakest days, "I was called rat, a yellow-dog employer and an exploiter of labor. They took the salaries of my messenger boys and claimed them to be the salaries of my artists. My plant and methods were compared to a sweatshop, and above all, I was accused of rolling in wealth. That hurt me most, when the fact is that every thing I have is tied up in this business. The thing that worries me is that people only read headlines and never take enough time to follow through and find out the truth. . . I am thoroughly disgusted and would gladly quit and try to establish myself in another business if it were not for the loyal guys who believe in me - so I guess I'm stuck with it."

Historian and author Charles Solomon makes a valiant attempt to put the episode into some broader context. As he speculates, "The strike had been something that had wounded him so personally, so deeply. He was extremely bitter and wanted to find someone or something that was responsible. He didn't want to believe that his boys — his artists — would have turned against him. So, again, it's not something you look at as admirable today. But he believed the strike had to come from something else, because it couldn't have come from the organization in which he had such pride.

"It's important to put his testimony into historical context. Many people believed that Communism was an immediate threat to the nation and communist agents were infiltrating various parts of the country. And possibly there were."

To see some film of Walt testifying before HUAC, click here.