Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs provides a lesson in the origins of capitalism, writes Quentin Outram.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HI0x0KYChq4%3Fsi%3DeLyuVvL5WdVs7gLv

Heigh-Ho*
Dwarfs Chorus (Larry Morey and Frank Churchill, 1937)

‘Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s home from work we go’ sing the seven dwarfs as they walk over a fallen log on their way home, tired but cheerful. But there is something odd; in fact several things are a bit odd. The dwarfs work ‘In a mine | Where a million diamonds shine’ but the story comes from central Europe and there are no diamonds in central Europe. Looking up the original story in the Brothers Grimm we find that the dwarfs worked in a gold mine; even this is a bit unusual: silver was much more widely mined in Europe than gold. No matter: diamonds sparkle in the film better than gold or silver would. Then we hear the dwarfs sing ‘It ain’t no trick to get rich quick’, but one can tell from their cottage in the woods that they are poor; it’s the wicked Queen who is rich. But oddest of all is that the dwarfs seem to have no employer; they don’t deliver the diamonds to a mine boss; instead Doc and Dopey throw sacks of diamonds into a store house to which they themselves have the key! So this must be some kind of workers’ co-operative or partnership.

Where on earth did this idea come from? The film was made in Los Angeles in the 1930s where workers’ co-ops were barely known; it is hardly reflective of contemporary working relations. So what is going on? Hollywood is notorious for distorting history. But remarkably Walt Disney wrote in a 1935 memo to his art instructor Don W. Graham that ‘we cannot do the fantastic things based on the real, unless we first know the real’. And in medieval Europe, as John U. Nef wrote in the Cambridge Economic History, mining was usually carried on by small-scale local partnerships of fewer than a dozen villagers. But as the costs of mining and smelting increased these partnerships borrowed money, usually from the traders who had bought their output. Inevitably, some partnerships were unable to repay their loans and the traders foreclosed. Some then worked the mine themselves, some employed an agent to work the mine for them. ‘In any case the work people, once independent adventurers in a small way, were turned in to wage-earning employees’. And so capitalism was born. Heigh-ho.

Quentin Outram is Secretary of the Society for the Study of Labour History.

* Performed by The Dwarfs Chorus (Roy Atwell, Pinto Colvig, Billy Gilbert, Otis Harlan & Scotty Mattraw); lyrics by Larry Morey; music composed by Frank Churchill. Recorded in 1937 and released in 1938 by Victor Records of Camden, New Jersey as track five of the album Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the soundtrack to the animated film of the same name by Walt Disney distributed by RKO Radio Pictures.