Jennifer Begakis
“The Best Laid Plans of a Mouse and its Men: Disney’s American Capitalism”
FORTHCOMING, 2026
My writing argues that Walt Disney’s career represents an exacting expression of American capitalism’s central paradox: the pursuit of independence reproduces concentrated power. The man who entered the motion-picture industry fighting patent monopolies would, over four decades, transform into a force more expansive than the movie moguls he once opposed.
From the silent era through the golden age of animation and television’s debut, I highlight how Disney’s creative ambitions became inseparable from control over contracts, intellectual property, labor, and access to markets. In the postwar period, media, land, and infrastructure converged into a single corporate strategy that would define Disney’s Parks and Resorts enterprise, linking cultural production to real estate development and state partnership.
The history of mouse to monopoly culminates not with Disneyland, Walt’s project in Anaheim that was acquired ten years after opening day by the Walt Disney Productions company, but with a ski resort in the lower Sierra Nevada Range of California. Walt laid plans for a second Disney resort in the Mineral King Valley, extending his and the firm’s postwar ambitions from media into land. Yet the momentum of the Disney name faltered in the mid-1960s when the Sierra Club’s lawsuit halted the project Walt had envisioned and his namesake company pursued. Disney’s unfettered California dream met a slow, public demise. In Florida, the story reversed: through the Reedy Creek Improvement District, Disney acquired delegated governmental powers, including authority over planning, utilities, taxation, and municipal services. The man who came of age seeking entrepreneurial freedom in California had become a form of government in Florida.
Following a decade of research on the Walt Disney Company, I showcase in this work how one entrepreneur’s firm learned to operate as an American institution. Constrained by political imperatives, I illustrate how creative autonomy, resolves itself into retreat or total control.
Jennifer Begakis 