Chapter 2
Disneyland’s Maine Street USA was entirely modeled after the Marceline of Disney’s childhood. Scholars such as Brian Burnes, Robert W Butler, and Dan Viets have noted Disney’s “affection” for “small-town, turn-of-the-century life to the boyhood experiences that were echoed and in expanded in his animated cartoons” in their work Walt Disney's Missouri: The Roots of a Creative Genius.[1] They write: “Disney’s concept of what it means to be an American was directly inspired by those five seminal years of his childhood.”[2] Marceline, and therefore Maine Street USA, become important primary resources in the investigation of Disney and his idea of patriotism as it related to jingoism. In general, Disney’s communication of pro-American patriotic themes through its films, parks, and merchandizing, further cemented jingoist ideals. Numerous primary source materials quoting Walt Disney support Giroux’s assertion of the corporation’s desire to make American identity synonymous with Disney’s corporate identity: “Disneyland will be a place dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America,” Disney said on the creation of his first amusement park.[3]