Much has been made of the racial controversy of, and surrounding, the original release of Walt Disney and RKO Studios’ Song of the South in 1946 and subsequent theatrical rereleases –the last of which was 1986, during Ronald Reagan’s second term in office as President of the United States. More still has been made of the Disney Corporation’s decision – due to the film’s ahistorical portrayal of race relations in the American South – to finally cease releasing the film digitally, which grew backlash from the same members of the American polity upset by the removal of Confederate statues from public parks and renaming of military bases formerly named after Confederate Generals.

But Song of the Song is so glaringly racist to the point of being hokey. The racial controversy at the center of the film will be evident to any viewer but the most obdurate. But just as deleterious, but for whatever reason far less apparent to educated scholars and laymen alike, is the insidious way Song of the South perpetuates racial utopianism through the denigration and vilification of poor white folks.

As such, simply pointing out the films’ racist stereotypes in the context of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s “Double V” campaign, Cold War and Civil Rights, as well as “conservative backlash,” et cetera, is important and informative, but lacks a certain substance because the focus on race relations largely ignores the dynamism of race in the context of class in American society.

Though Song of the South is ambiguously set in the Deep South sometime around the Civil War, it was produced and manufactured during World War II in Phoenix, Arizona, and illustrated in Hollywood, California. As such, Song of the South helps illuminate ways in which the rise of the Sunbelt is a redux of the New South, which was always as much about historical memories related to the mythological “Old South” as it was about industrial development.

Little Johnny, Song of the South’s protagonist, represents the new generation – the Sunbelt. Johnny is the grandson of an elderly woman who lives on the Plantation year-round. Her son, Big John, is a fictitious rendering of the New South of which Joel Chandler Harris and Henry Grady helped perpetuate and popularize in the Atlanta Constitution. Big John in Disney’s version of the story is the boy from Harris’s Uncle Remus Tales, all grown up. Big John is strapping and masculine. Little John is effete, frail, and dominated by a mother who is strict, overprotective, obdurate, unkind, and talks like a Yankee.

Song of the South is, in a nutshell, about a little rich white city boy named Johnny who moves from Atlanta to a rustic plantation somewhere in the hinterland. Johnny is devastated emotionally and psychologically when his father leaves the rural plantation to tend to his newspaper back in Atlanta, an urban space, where he “stumps for industrialization, railroads, and god knows what,” which is a source of conflict between Big John, his wife (Sally), and his mother. The father’s abandonment of the family is the primary source of drama and psychological distress for the protagonist.

Uncle Remus, an elderly and unthreatening black man, befriends Johnny and helps to restore the child’s sense of courage and guile while the father is away in Atlanta. Remus is the source of all that is good in the movie, the moral center of the film. He has more intuitive knowledge of human nature and the psychology of the little boy than either of Johnny’s parents. He’s what film scholars have referred to as “the magical negro,” a trope common in American literature and film in the Twentieth Century. The evil antipodal to Remus’s holiness and sagacity in Song of the South are two poor white boys (Brer Fox and Brer Bear in the animated sequences) who bully Little Johnny, going so far as to call him “little girl” for being dressed by his mother in a doily-lace collar. The boy’s mother, a bourgeois white woman who speaks with a northern accent, is the source of ignorance and misunderstanding in the movie.

Song of the South ultimately demonstrates more about the creator, Disney, than the audience – whether black, white, rich, poor, man, woman, child, northerner, or southerner. Disney’s studio survived largely because of government funding during World War II. Disney had also bitterly battled a union during the War. Both these events might have piqued his class consciousness, which might have seeped into his odd revision of Chandler’s tales, which portrayed the evil characters as poor blacks rather than Disney’s portrayal in Song of the South as poor whites.

Disney was the son of farmers from Marceline, Missouri. Song of the South was Disney’s most transparently personal movie. Disney claimed that one of his earliest and fondest memories was reading the Remus Tales. Chandler’s books came out in print when he was a kid, and he read every single one. They impressed him as authentic American folklore. “Ever since I had anything to do with the making of motion pictures,” he said in an interview leading up to the original premiere of the film, “I have wanted to bring them to the screen. They have been in my mind from early childhood.”

Much of the racial controversy surrounding Song of the South was fueled by Disney’s creative license with Harris’s tales, particularly the ambiguity of the movie’s setting. Disney and RKO spokespeople adamantly asserted that, like Harris's books, the film takes place after the Civil War and that all the African American characters in the movie are free.

The Hays Office (The Motion Picture Production Code) asked Disney to be certain that the frontispiece of the book during opening credits “established the date as being set in the 1870s,” but the final film was void of any such statement and was instead conspicuously ambiguous. The film opens instead with text reading: “Out of the humble cabin, out of the singing heart of the Old South, have come the tales of Uncle Remus, rich in simple truths forever Fresh and New.” The “humble cabin” resembles slave quarters, and so “happy and content” could allude to slaves being better off in the antebellum than postbellum period; and “Old South” is obviously an indication that the movie, unlike Chandler’s books, is set before the Civil War.

When the film was first released to the public in 1947, Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, telegraphed major newspapers throughout the U.S., stating that Song of the South “helps to perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery. Making use of the beautiful Uncle Remus folklore, Song of the South unfortunately gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship, which is a distortion of the facts.”

Because the film’s setting is so historically and thematically vague, Song of the South does evoke a master-slave relationship between Remus and Big John’s family, even if the story is not set in the antebellum period. While no explicit reference to slavery is made in the movie, the narrative offers no hint to suggest anything but an imaginary space of the idyllic Southern Plantation popularized in minstrels.

But there is also a great deal to suggest that the film is set in the postbellum period. One could, for example, assume that Big John and his family are carpetbaggers from the North and that the former slaves seem so jubilant because of emancipation. Big John is hardly in the movie at all, and when he is, he dons a blue jacket eerily like the ones worn by Union officers, only without emblems or insignia. Neither John’s mother (who lives at the plantation year-round), his wife, nor his son has even the faintest hint of having a southern accent. In fact, they are the only people in the movie who do not speak with a southern dialect.

What is certain is that the ambiguity was by design, allowing the viewer to fill in the gaps based on their own worldview.

The film originally debuted in 1946, a moment in history when the NAACP and other civil rights groups were trying to dispel any notion that there was any kind of ambiguity between Nazi and American white supremacy. In addition to being a product of the transition from New South to Sunbelt, Song of the South premiered during an evolving Cold War in which the Soviet Union was trying to correlate American and Nazi white supremacism into Cold War discourse designed to win adherents to communist ideology in the emerging anti-colonial “Third World” by underscoring American racial hypocrisy. One of the primary weapons used in the Cold War/Civil Rights was public opinion, which made popular culture as pervasive and politically potent as ever.

The NAACP very consciously used mass media to fight for Civil Rights. It was an uphill battle because white supremacy was increasingly celebrated and popularized the more the nation, particularly the South, transitioned from an economy rooted in agricultural production, and then industrial production, and finally to the production of culture in the South’s “moonlight and magnolias” commodified form. Movies such as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind (1939), The Littlest Rebel (1935), as well as radio programs such Amos and Andy, which Disney’s Uncle Remus, James Baskett, often appeared in, helped perpetuate the notion that America was greater back in those olden antebellum days.

Politics in the form of popular culture was increasingly the hottest medium in which the global Cold War, Civil Rights in the U.S., and anti-colonialism around the globe were both manifested and fueled. The same government propaganda effort that kept Disney studios in business during the war also advocated less stereotypical representations of African Americans during the Cold War as a means of combating Americans as having similar racial proclivities to the Nazis. But Disney ignored the government and made the film he wanted to make, which was, as many scholars and cultural critics have elaborated, ribaldly racist in its ahistorical depiction of southern race relations – whether before or after the Civil War. But what is ignored is that Disney conspicuously made the foils of the film version as poor white kids.

By the time Disney was able to begin making Song of the South in earnest at the end of WWII, the film was by no means merely an expression of his childhood dreams, never mind Harris’s vision, let alone the original oral slave tradition that Chandler ripped off. By 1946, Disney had just battled a labor union to keep his company afloat and had had to depend on government contracts and the War Department’s stringent demands, which often chided the mogul. Song of the South was by the time it premiered to audiences across the country in 1947, was loaded with political ideas and imagery as potentially deleterious to viewers’ conceptions and understanding of class and gender as it was to postwar American race relations. But at base, Song of the South provides some insight into Walt Disney’s own perceptions and proclivities in terms of the role race, class, and gender were meant to function in Postwar American society.