Life Among the Ants

Friday A/V Club: A vintage anti-communist cartoon

In the late 1940s and early '50s, GM chief Alfred P. Sloan funded a series of anti-communist cartoons. (The story behind the films is convoluted, but the compressed version is that Sloan's foundation gave grants to Harding College, an Arkansas-based Christian school, which then paid former Disney animator John Sutherland's studio to make them.) One of the shorts is Albert in Blunderland, a 1950 attack on the planned economy. It presents communism as an anthill society—literally, with actual ants.

While just about everyone involved in funding this film hailed from the political right, the cartoon was clearly aimed at a union-friendly working-class audience; it defends independent trade unions and warns that state factories will be able to impose harsh speed-ups with impunity. In a precursor of sorts to the Hard Hat Riot, it ends with a blue-collar worker beating up a socialist:

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here. I haven't featured any of the Sloan/Harding/Sutherland films in the A/V Club before, but their 1948 effort "Make Mine Freedom" has turned up elsewhere on this website.)