This morning, both Facebook and Google photos reminded me that two years ago today, I was in Marceline, Missouri (population 2,123). It was May 2021, I was fully vaccinated, and it was my first research trip since the advent of COVID-19.
Marceline is known as Walt Disney’s boyhood “hometown.” Walt was born in Chicago and lived his teen years in Kansas City. But it’s Marceline that is known, in Disney lore, as his place of origin. It’s where the Disneys lived from 1906 to 1911, during his elementary school years, and where he seems to have had his happiest memories.
Right now, I feature Marceline in the first chapter of my book manuscript. But, friends, to be honest—I am still struggling to tell this story the right way— briefly, evocatively, sharply, in a way that will keep you from putting down the book (and in a way that will keep agents and editors from rejecting it). I’ve rewritten this short chapter on and off for two years now, ripping it to shreds.
Right now it’s in tatters, like Cinderella’s pink dress, ravaged by her stepsisters.
In Marceline, Disney’s loves— sketching, farming, performing, talking to older citizens, and most of all, the railroad— linked him to a romantic nostalgia for the nineteenth century just as the twentieth century was taking off. When Walt Disney spoke about his childhood years in Marceline and returned there for visits after achieving his Hollywood success, he endowed its agrarian past with purity. “Everything connected with Marceline was a thrill to us, coming, as we did, from a city the size of Chicago,” he wrote in 1938. “I’m glad I’m a small-town boy and I’m glad Marceline was my town.”*
The site of the Disney family farm.
The story of my own visit to Marceline revolves around the symbol of Walt’s “dreaming tree”— an old cottonwood where he loved to sketch, now the symbol of the Walt Disney Hometown Museum—and a barn erected on the old Disney farm in 2001, on the one hundredth anniversary of Walt’s birth. It’s a story best saved for the book, once I find the right way to tell it. It’s about relics, and pilgrimage. It’s about who gets to dream the dreams called “America.”
This week’s bright spring weather in Pennsylvania evokes the day I visited Marceline—blue skies, crisp air, abundant sun. The leaves are new enough that I am still startled to see green everywhere instead of bare branches. It’s like the world is fuller. Like the transition to color in The Wizard of Oz
(Fun fact: when Disney’s Hollywood Studios was “Disney MGM Studios,” The Wizard of Oz featured in The Great Movie Ride (RIP, Great Movie Ride).
But spring is only fecund if we are lucky. I am thinking about the migrants on the US border today. People traveling through heat and dangerous byways for just the hope of coming here. Like my ancestors. Like Walt Disney’s ancestors.
But current US immigration policies are far from welcoming. We have billionaires like Jeff Bezos. (Robert Iger, Disney’s CEO, is not technically a billionaire, but he is certainly a millionaire many times over). So much wealth is locked away. And we have so much suffering.
Don’t worry, today’s newsletter is not about to descend into a long discourse on immigration or financial policy. I’m just struck— as always— by the contrasts between the American stories Disney paints and the American stories happening every day, all around us.
Marceline is a promise. It offers tales of an Edenic incubator: a refuge where any young man could lie under a tree and dream new dreams. (Any young straight cis white Christian man? Does he have to be that? In some Disney stories, he must be). Here the youth shall see visions.**
A mural just off of Marceline’s Main Street (the inspiration for Main Street, USA in Disneyland) included a quote from its famous sun son.
“To tell the truth, more things of importance happened to me in Marceline than have happened to me since-or are likely to in the future.”—Walt Disney
The rest of the Disney universe is built on this promise. Destiny is in the everyday—on Main Street, not just on the moon. In recent years, Disney films and television shows have included more people in this dream—people of varied races, ethnicities, gender identities, religions.
But if stories matter, how do we transpose them from pixelated promises into power and prosperity for all?
And are Disney stories— and so much other art— enough to inspire action
*Marceline News June 2, 1938.
** A reference to a phrase in the book of Joel and several other prophetic texts, which are much more melodramatic and dark in context than anything I’ve written here. As a child in a Reform synagogue I learned the phrase from Debbie Friedman’s interpretation of it, which is linked out—a children’s chorus version. It’s possible you could write a whole essay about how well this song would work in a Disney film. But this is not that essay.