1Antiquity assumed special prominence as a tool of statecraft during the Second World War. In Italy, Benito Mussolini’s fascist government revitalized Latin as a national language, excavated archaeological remains, and undertook new construction projects to align its ideology and military ambitions with a prestigious past. Adolf Hitler similarly admired the Roman Empire, but it was the martial prowess, purported eugenics policies, and strict discipline of Sparta that seemed most closely to mirror Nazi Germany’s aspirations (Roche). While these classicizing phenomena are generally acknowledged as an attempt to legitimate fascist ideology and governance, Italy and Germany were not alone in appropriating the distant past for immediate political ends. The United States launched an ambitious public relations campaign to convince Latin Americans and U.S. citizens of a unifying mythic past rooted in Mesoamerican prehistory.
2On July 30, 1941, President Frederick D. Roosevelt created the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) to strengthen cultural and commercial ties among the twenty-one American republics (Roosevelt, 1941 n.p.). The OIAA’s primary objective was to rehabilitate Latin American perceptions of the United States as an imperialist power and to convince Latin Americans, as well as the U.S. public at home, of the critical need for Pan-American solidarity as a bulwark against the Axis threat. The agency installed administrative offices in New York, Washington, D.C., and Hollywood, organized 59 coordination committees throughout Latin America, and sponsored a flurry of cultural programs ranging from fine art exhibitions to Disney animated films to foster inter-American goodwill and cooperation (Cramer and Prutsch 787).
Fig. 1. Arias Bernal, Poster design commissioned by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, ca. 1943
Color slide, 229-PG-7-1, Graphics and Publications Division, Department of Press and Publications, Records of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Record Group 229, National Archives at College Park, Maryland.
3This diplomatic initiative differed from earlier Pan-American initiatives in two notable ways: first, it emerged in the “Good Neighbor” years, a unique period in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations during which Roosevelt pledged the United States to a policy of military non-intervention and mutual understanding and respect; and second, it was pointedly anti-fascist (fig. 1). The notion of U.S. good neighborliness, especially its promise to refrain from military intervention, assumed greater meaning after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and German-Italian involvement in the Spanish Civil War. This bifurcated vision of civilization—democracy vs. fascism, good neighbor vs. bad—held important implications for U.S. foreign policy. Presenting the United States as an “arsenal of democracy” and envisioning a future in which people around the world could enjoy four essential freedoms, President Roosevelt and his advisers cast the European conflict as an existential fight for humanity, a triumph of peaceful, democratic civilization over tyranny and imperial conquest (Roosevelt, 1941 642-644).
- 2 The Grain that Built a Hemisphere is available in its entirety through Internet Archive at archive. (...)
4The language in OIAA-sponsored programs often went beyond simple bonds of friendship to suggest a shared cultural lineage as well. Focusing on Walt Disney Studios’ 1943 animated short The Grain that Built a Hemisphere, this essay illustrates how prehistory, propaganda, and popular culture were strategically combined to construct a shared regional identity and support for the Allied cause.2 The film framed corn as a shared hemispheric symbol rooted in Mesoamerican prehistory, presenting a unifying narrative that connects Indigenous agricultural innovation to modern democratic values. Furthermore, by contrasting the peaceful, intellectual Maya with the militaristic Aztecs, the film echoed wartime binaries of Allies versus Axis powers, encouraging Latin American solidarity with the United States. I argue that this portrayal not only advanced U.S. diplomatic aims by softening anti-American sentiment in Latin America but also reflected U.S. anxieties about fascism and the future of the hemisphere. Widely distributed and warmly received throughout the Americas, the film underscores the effectiveness of animation as propaganda and demonstrates how prehistory and popular culture were strategically employed to promote Pan-Americanism and Allied victory during World War II.
5Axis occupation of Europe imbued the OIAA’s mission with a sense of urgency from its founding. U.S. observers recognized the immense soft power European nations exerted in Latin America through immigration and trade, and they warned of the persuasive impact more targeted anti-American messaging campaigns would yield. Fascist corporatism appealed to numerous Latin American intellectuals and leaders, most notably in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, during the interwar period. “Totalitarian propaganda, while stressing the achievements of the ‘New Order’ and defending the foreign policy of the aggressors, has been equally anxious to arouse—or revive—the suspicion of Latin Americans against the United States and its commercial and political plans for the hemisphere,” noted inter-American affairs specialist Richard F. Behrendt in 1943 (23).
6To be sure, more than a century of U.S. military intervention and economic dominance had bred widespread resentment among Latin American citizens toward the United States, the so-called “Colossus of the North” (Martí 109). Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros captured the stringent anti-Americanism that he and many of his compatriots harbored against the United States in his fresco América Tropical (fig. 2). Painted on the exterior wall of a Los Angeles restaurant in 1932, América Tropical depicts a crucified Native Mexican, whose bound body and awkwardly angled neck evokes both lynching photography and traditional Christian iconography. The Indigenous figure represents the nation of Mexico, where the federal government and cultural leaders embraced indigenismo, or the celebration of Native history and culture, as a mechanism for consolidating national identity after the Mexican Revolution. An elaborately carved ruinous temple and broken statuary evinces an esteemed pre-Hispanic past, while two armed peasants garbed in the traditional costumes of Zapatista rebels crouch on a nearby rooftop, poised for battle. Their feathered enemy appears at the center of the composition, its wings outstretched and perched atop the double-cross. This menacing eagle symbolized the United States, whose persistent military intervention and economic exploitation had “double crossed” the Mexican people and resulted in U.S. industrial and territorial expansion, most notably in the American Southwest (Poole and Ball 75).
Fig. 2. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Tropical America, detail, 1932
Fresco applied with Arium on cement, 18 x 82 ft, Italian Hall, El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument.
© 2019 Banco de México-Rivera-Kahlo/ARS, photo: Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles.
© 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City.
7Los Angeles city boosters disapproved of Siqueiros’ political critique and soon whitewashed the mural, which contrasted sharply with the romanticized and tourist-friendly version of Southern California history used in promotional imagery and literature. Olvera Street, the Mexican marketplace within view of Siqueiros’ acerbic mural, epitomized this carefully constructed image of Spanish-Mexican history and culture. Following the transformation of the impoverished, multiethnic neighborhood into a popular shopping and tourist destination in 1930, Los Angeles witnessed the rise of a new civic emblem: an attractive Mexican senorita (fig. 3). The urban metropolis possessed a Mexican population of more than 250,000, and civic leaders boasted of the city’s status as “second largest Mexican city in the world” (Lewthwaite 184). Olvera Street simultaneously celebrated the city’s Mexican identity while confining it to a nostalgic, idealized past. The narrow alley offered a romanticized cultural landscape of tiled sidewalks, canopied curio booths, tamale stands, wandering guitarists, and pretty senoritas in traditional garb (Kropp 207-208).
Fig. 3. Olvera Street, 1930
Photograph, Automobile Club of Southern California negatives, 1892-1963. University of Southern California Digital Library, doi.org/10.25549/acsc-m874.
Courtesy of the Automobile Club of Southern California.
8Hollywood, in cooperation with the U.S. government, adopted and reinforced this sanitized portrayal of U.S.-Latin American relations, past and present, in its efforts to generate inter-American goodwill. OIAA officials believed the combined sensory impact of motion pictures endowed the medium with greater potential for winning the hearts and minds of skeptical audiences than radio or newspaper alone. As John Hay Whitney, director of the OIAA’s Motion Picture Division, explained, “The menace of Nazism […] must be understood from the Hudson Bay to Punta Arenas. Wherever the motion picture can do a basic job of spreading the gospel of the Americas’ common stake in this struggle, there that job must and shall be done” (Woll 280). Major studios including MGM, Pathé, and Paramount responded enthusiastically to the call, producing so many films on Latin American themes that President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy became known unofficially as Hollywood’s Good Neighbor Policy (O’Neil 258).
9The “Credo for the Individual Citizen of Latin America” outlined the government’s desired public relations outcomes during World War II. In addition to disavowing fascist regimes in Europe as working against one’s best interests and regarding the United States government as being favorable in the same regard, OIAA staff hoped to put Latin American citizens on a wartime footing: “I am supporting the U.S. and stand ready to cooperate with the Americas and to make additional personal sacrifices along with the American people so that I can help the U.S. win the war and establish a better world” (Sadlier 17, emphasis added). For the U.S. public on the home front, it underscored the threat of fascist infiltration and domination in Latin America as well as the Axis powers’ ability to use the region as a staging ground for attacks against the United States (Candida Smith 112). Accordingly, messages of military strength and hemispheric unity predominated in OIAA-sponsored motion pictures. Nearly 40 percent of OIAA shorts, for instance, emphasized common technological, economic, and cultural traits in the hemisphere with the United States at the region’s helm (Rankin 169). This persuasive strategy aimed to distinguish films produced in the United States and intended for Latin American viewers from Nazi Germany’s more heavy-handed approach. OIAA film producer Kenneth Macgowan derided Nazi-produced propaganda as “‘terror’ films, designed to intimidate” and called for a softer diplomatic touch (Smoodin 139).
10The cartoon medium proved especially effective in this regard, since its perception as entertainment helped to disarm audiences, both domestically and throughout Latin America. U.S. officials learned that Mexican audience preferred films with comedic or romantic subjects over those with a military or wartime focus, which they considered to be overly propagandistic. Animated films were also more likely to be dubbed into Spanish instead of using subtitles, making them easier for less literate audiences to follow (Rankin 172-173).
11Arguably the most successful projects to result from this government-industry partnership were the animated films of Walt Disney Studios, whose global popularity helped to win over skeptical hearts and minds. Widely regarded as one of the great innovators of U.S. culture, executive and founder Walt Disney had catapulted to cinematic success through his pioneering use of Technicolor, multiplane camera work, and seamless integration of animation and sound (Denning 403). In Germany, the immense popularity of his signature character Mickey Mouse bred consternation among Nazi Party members, who considered the “dirty and filth-covered vermin” an inadequate animal for admiration. Hitler even tried to ban Mickey Mouse from German theaters, but popular outcry compelled him to rescind the order (Shale 12). Equally beloved in Latin America, Disney proved a welcome ally to the Roosevelt administration’s diplomatic efforts. As a goodwill ambassador, he attended banquets and barbecues, danced with Latin American folk performers, and created on-the-spot caricature sketches for his hosts, many of whom were major dignitaries (Sadlier 23). The studio produced more than two dozen pictures, ranging from feature-length entertainment to educational shorts, supporting the OIAA’s information campaign (Kaufman 13).
12Scholars have focused primarily on the company’s two feature-length theatrical releases, Saludos Amigos (1943) and The Three Caballeros (1945), in combination with South of the Border with Disney (1943), a travelogue documenting studio executive Walt Disney’s 1941 goodwill tour through Latin America. Entertainment shorts and educational films have received far less critical attention, generally appearing in surveys of Disney’s wartime propaganda or as byproducts of the studio’s brief engagement with inter-American affairs. This selective treatment overlooks the company’s more collaborative government projects, including The Grain that Built a Hemisphere, whose short format and fully animated medium shed light on the filmic transcription and far-reaching impact of government-assigned propagandistic themes.
13The Grain that Built a Hemisphere was the first educational film Walt Disney Studios produced for the OIAA, and as such it served as a trial product for a series of health and agricultural shorts. The government envisioned one-reel subjects on the culture and locations of individual Latin American countries, produced in conjunction with Walt Disney’s goodwill tour, for distribution throughout Latin America and the United States. As OIAA Motion Picture Division Director John Hay Whitney explained in a memorandum to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, the dissemination of these films carried a dual purpose: it not only served to introduce American audiences to their neighbors to the south but also provided Latin Americans with “tangible and flattering evidence of our interest and respect” (Smoodin 142).
14Mindful of the need for government approval, studio executives invited OIAA officials to provide technical assistance and policy advice for the contracted agricultural films and other potential film topics, including “Pan American Highway” and “U.S. Airlines in Latin America” (Mosby n.p.). Grain represents the synthesis of two of these projects: “Corn and Corn Products” and a historical short titled “Our Hemisphere.” In April 1942, Dr. Earl Bressman, chief administrator of the OIAA’s Agricultural Division, spent two weeks reviewing storyboards at the Burbank animation studio. Disney biographer Michael Barrier observed that the tone of these sessions differed sharply from typical production meetings as Walt Disney “occasionally expanded on an idea” but Bressman’s wishes remained paramount (186). He maintained firm control over the film project, directing the theme, visual imagery, and persuasive message of Grain according to agency propaganda guidelines as well as his personal interests and expertise.
15Bressman, as it happened, was not simply the client; he was an expert in corn cultivation who, together with Roosevelt’s vice president Henry Wallace, co-authored the 1922 textbook Corn and Corn-Growing. The book, a practical guide “written in the language of the farm,” covered a range of topics including botany, breeding, and marketing. It also traced the ancestry and geographic origins of corn to Southern Mexico where, the authors explained, Indigenous peoples aided the evolution of modern corn from its ancestral wild grasses through centuries of agricultural cultivation (261-271).
16Additionally, Bressman appeared on NBC’s “National Farm and Home Hour” radio program in September 1941 to discuss a topic “very close to [his] heart”—agricultural cooperation between the United States and Latin American countries. When co-host Josephine Salisbury asked Bressman whether he perceived a “deep underlying feeling of unity” among Latin American countries and the United States, the government official invoked a foundational tenet of Pan-Americanism under the Good Neighbor Policy, reminding listeners that “we’ve all won our independence from the Old Countries” and that “people in each of the other American Republics believe in the democratic way of life.” “With this common bond,” he concluded, “what more do we need?” (“Agriculture in the Americas”). This diplomatic rhetoric, coupled with the factual basis of Corn and Corn-Growing, provided Walt Disney Studios with the central narrative for its inaugural animated short, which traces a seamless agricultural tradition from prehistoric Mesoamerica to the modern United States.
17Taking its cue from Bressman’s and Wallace’s book, Grain opens with a map of the Western Hemisphere; as the title fades, superimposed animation of a Native man grinding corn spans the continents. The narrator explains, “Corn is the symbol of a spirit that links the Americas in a common bond of union and solidarity.” The audience is then transported roughly nine thousand years ago to the high cordilleras of southern Mexico, where scientists believe the crop originated. Crisp botanical illustrations, modeled after images in Bressman’s and Wallace’s book, introduce teosinte and gamagrass as possible genetic forebears to modern corn, which, viewers learn, “could not have existed in the wild” as we know it today. Rather, early Mesoamericans developed maize through selective breeding. By favoring seeds from plants with larger ears and softer kernels, Indigenous farmers produced a domesticated corn plant with cobs many times their original size. “And so,” the narrator announces, “through his discovery of corn the civilizations of the Americas began” (fig. 4).
Fig. 4. Bill Tytla, Native Man Grinding Corn. Frame from Bill Roberts, The Grain that Built a Hemisphere, 1943
16mm color film.
© Walt Disney Productions, 1943.
18The film advances a transhistorical and transcultural perspective of American identity that not only evolves alongside but also develops as a product of corn cultivation. The domestication of corn, which takes place over millennia, appears in Grain amid a pastel-hued mountain landscape. Prehistoric societies evolve alongside corn, such that the nomadic hunter-gatherers introduced at the beginning of the sequence develop permanent settlements, religion, and art. The film highlights the creative and intellectual achievements of the Maya, Aztec, and Inca civilizations before cutting to the present day. The second half of Grain centers on agricultural advancements with the breeding of hybrid corn, as well as the dietary and commercial products made possible through its increased yield. An urgent desire to foster inter-American goodwill pervades every aspect of Grain, but it can most clearly be seen in the final sequence. The marshaling of corn as a weapon of war explicitly advocates hemispheric unity as a desirable position for Latin American governments and individuals to adopt. Corn was a prevalent motif in U.S. propaganda; yet while many posters carried slogans such as “Corn Goes to War” and “War Plants Need Corn!” exhorting farmers to adapt to wartime demands by increasing their harvests and moving their corn yields to market, Grain teaches about the botanical origins of corn and its cultural importance to civilization in the Americas, past and future.
19Indeed, contemporary scholarship viewed the impact of agriculture upon prehistoric societies as being nothing short of radical. In The Dawn of European Civilization (1925), Australian prehistorian V. Gordon Childe referred to this momentous break with earlier hunting and foraging foodways as a “Neolithic Revolution,” in which higher food yields, more permanent villages, and population growth propelled social and economic stratification through specialist craftsmen, priests, merchants, and a ruling elite. Childe’s influence is evident in corresponding scientific literature on the prehistoric Americas. “That agriculture is the steppingstone to civilization,” wrote Charles Amsden in 1930, “is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than here in America […] [C]enturies of patient labor have borne fruit in lands unknown to [the Native farmer], and immeasurably quickened the stride of civilization across the globe” (79-80).
20Grain taps into this scientific discourse to establish a sense of regional identity and cultural belonging across the hemisphere. In the United States, corn has long been associated with American identity and values, both for its New-World origins and for its prevalence in U.S. history and culture. As textile designer Candace Wheeler observed in 1893: “No other plant is so typical of our greatness and prosperity as a nation; no other has such artistic meanings and possibilities; no other is so wholly and nobly and historically American” (iii-iv). Scientific studies provided a basis for expanding this conception of agricultural heritage to include Latin American countries as well. While archaeologists and botanists had long theorized human intervention assisted the evolution of teosinte, a wild grass, into corn, renowned botanist Luther Burbank announced proof for this theory in 1921 after successfully cultivating corn from teosinte on his California farm over the course of 18 years (Current Opinion, vol. 71, 395). Publications including A. Hyatt Verrill’s Foods America Gave the World (1937) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Corn in the Development of the Civilization of the Americas (1940) codified popular and scientific understanding that the earliest strains of maize originated south of the U.S. border. Bressman and Wallace’s Corn and Corn-Growing likewise traced corn’s origins to two wild grasses in prehistoric Mexico, concluding that corn is “one of the few standard crops that originated in America” (261).
- 3 Traditionally, this task would have been performed by women.
21The centrality of prehistoric peoples in the evolution of corn complemented existing national mythologies, such as the First Thanksgiving, and emerged as a common refrain in Grain’s enunciation of a “Greater” America, whose borders reached beyond the contiguous United States to encompass the entire hemisphere. Numerous scholars noted the generosity of early Native peoples to White settlers. In 1933, archaeologist Glen A. Black wrote: “Of all agricultural items of the prehistoric American, corn ranks foremost in importance. Cultural development among the Indians was dependent upon it and even the colonization of the United States by the whites owes its success largely to the Indian and his corn” (97-99). Similar expressions of gratitude prevail in Grain. The recurrence of the Native man grinding corn—both in full view and as a line drawing of his forearms—acknowledges the Indigenous peoples who first cultivated and carried forth this agricultural tradition.3 The voiceover praises the Native Americans for discovering and developing corn, while later a montage of modern corn-based foods illustrates its evolutionary apex in the present day. “The skill and patience of this early ancestor created a new civilization,” the narrator intones. “To him we owe much.” Moreover, Grain asserts actual agricultural continuity with the Maya practice of planting four kernels at a time—a habit, we learn, that many farmers still observe in the present day. Further argument for Pan-Americanism resides in the deliberate echoing of past and present, thereby suggesting Pre-Columbian precedents for modern U.S. culture. Toward the end of the film, for example, the viewer encounters soaring skyscrapers whose vertical massing and gleaming surface conjures the Maya temple shown in an earlier sequence. Notably, the narrator refers to the futuristic building as a “monument to corn,” a phrase that could apply equally to Mesoamerican religious centers erected centuries before.
22Archaeologist and curator Herbert Spinden’s text for the 1941 Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibition As Revealed by Art: America South of U.S. further elucidates Disney’s central premise of Native Americans’ agricultural gifts. Using similar language to the film, he explains that a “common heritage from pre-Columbian days unites the American nations with bonds at once practical and ideal.” Spinden writes:
Aside from furnishing agricultural sources of great wealth and industrial technologies as well, the civilizations of ancient America exemplify in general the conceit that government […] should be just and honorable not only towards its own citizenry but towards other people as well. Unfortunately, when it seemed that institutions of chivalry might establish far-reaching precedents along this line in Europe, came the discovery of America, which let loose private greed and governmental vice beyond all previous conception […]. In America we have an opportunity to start afresh with a clean philosophy and to build a moral and intellectual solidarity on mutual appreciations. (5)
23Highlighting Indigenous achievements as belonging to a shared hemispheric culture, Grain attempts to teach Latin American individuals about preexisting bonds of hemispheric unity and to persuade them of the vital importance of U.S.-Latin American cooperation in the global fight against fascism. In doing so, the animated short adheres to the tenets of the Cultural Gifts movement, an antiprejudice campaign that promoted tolerance by calling attention to the contributions of immigrant and minority groups to American life. Worried about the possible incursion of Nazism into the United States, liberal crusaders increasingly viewed racial prejudice and anti-Semitism as a threat to the domestic social order. An embrace of ethnic pluralism became a defense of U.S. democracy as an alternative to fascism (Selig 236).
- 4 Formal archaeological mapping projects and advances in glyph decipherment since the late 1950s have (...)
24Maya antiquity proved an especially desirable touchstone in this regard. Notably, the OIAA’s diplomatic initiative arrived on the heels of Mexico’s postrevolutionary revaluation of Aztec culture but before the linguistic decipherment of Maya glyphs. The dearth of historical information about the ancient Maya permitted nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archaeologists working in Latin America to mythologize the Mesoamerican past with the effect that U.S. writers, in particular, claimed cultural inheritance and custodial rights over archaeological remnants (Evans 2). Leading proponent J. Eric S. Thompson, for instance, posited a peaceful, agrarian lifestyle for the Maya people, who practiced subsistence farming and built temples in support of a few priest-scholars (Becker 12).4 This political and demographic theorization allowed for a conceptual mapping of Maya society upon familiar European precedents. Concerned more with philosophy than with empire, the Maya supplied a proximate and geographically rooted alternative to ancient Greece, whose artistic and intellectual accomplishments marked a high-water mark in ancient civilization.
25Providing a distinctly New World heritage of which all Americans could be proud, Maya accomplishments helped the United States to enunciate a hemispheric identity rooted in the pre-colonial past. No longer divided into North/South or Anglo/Latin dichotomies, the United States and Latin American nations appeared as a singular territorial body whose origins and ideologies established a uniquely American culture distinct from European precedents. Yet Grain’s depiction remains ambivalent, shaded by speculative archaeological theories and colonial epistemologies of social progress. If the Maya represented an esteemed “mother culture” of the Americas, the epitome of Pre-Columbian civilization with intellectual and artistic feats commensurate with archaic societies in Europe, other Indigenous peoples—including the Aztec and the Inca—appeared more conventionally “primitive” and culturally deficient due to material evidence of warfare, human sacrifice, and the absence of written language.
26This characterization was well-established in the American imagination by the 1940s and, like the peaceful and stargazing Maya, owed much to historical and archaeological scholarship of the previous century. Walt Disney Studios created a research division for Latin American subject matter, owned a complete set of National Geographic, and consulted with OIAA officials to ensure accuracy in its portrayal of Mesoamerican and Andean subjects. Grain’s reliance on authoritative guidance and imagery is evident in its careful reproduction of pre-Inca pots, for example. The film’s bifurcated treatment of Maya and Aztec societies likewise stemmed from prevailing archaeological currents. As scholar Lindsay Jones has noted, “there was a pervasive tendency to characterize the pre-Hispanic culture of the lowland Maya not only as profoundly different from its highland Mexican counterpart but as vastly more sophisticated and more appealing in all important respects” (275).
27The animated sequence describing Maya civilization highlights their devotion to the corn god (fig. 5), Yum Kax, as well as their sophisticated understanding of astronomy, which they used to chart the agricultural season from planting to harvest. The Aztecs, by contrast, practiced ritual human sacrifice (fig. 6). Grain’s evocative Aztec sequence conjures nineteenth-century historian William H. Prescott’s dramatic and oft-quoted account of ritual human sacrifice. According to the historian: “Five priests secured [the victim’s] head and limbs; while the sixth, clad in a scarlet mantle, emblematic of his bloody office, dexterously opened the breast of the wretched victim with a sharp razor of itzli,—a volcanic substance, hard as flint,—and, inserting his hand in the wound, tore out the palpitating heart” (Prescott, vol. 1 76). Prescott’s epic tome, The History of the Conquest of Mexico, published in 1843, proved immensely popular and along with other literary works helped to foster the predominant stereotypes Americans held regarding the Aztec Empire and, following the Mexican-American War, the Mexican nation-state. This association reemerged during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and became codified soon after as the post-revolutionary Mexican government embraced Aztec civilization as a unifying national past.
Fig. 5. Josh Maedor, “Corn God Temple.” Frame from Bill Roberts, The Grain that Built a Hemisphere, 1943
16mm color film.
© Walt Disney Productions, 1943.
Fig. 6. Bill Tytla, Aztec Sequence. Frame from Bill Roberts, The Grain that Built a Hemisphere, 1943
16mm color film.
© Walt Disney Productions, 1943.
28For Disney animators as well as the wider U.S. public, archaeological publications proffered an accurate approximation of the pre-Columbian historical events they described. But, as Jones has shown, these characterizations in fact demonstrated “the creative manipulation of stereotypes and images of Indians that have been available for several hundred years” (278). The stories perpetuated in the archaeological record reflected a preoccupation with what might transpire in confrontations “between two kinds of Indians – between noble savages and savage savages, between native scribes and native warriors, between superstitious priests and heathen brutes, and between primitive victims and primitive attackers” (Jones 278). Grain translates this classicizing discourse for lay audiences as Native figures dissolve into close-up objects that, through the magic of animation, seem to come to life. Wet corn kernels glisten, temples and golden vessels sparkle in the sunlight, the bloody knife drips. On the one hand, the silhouettes soften and literally mask “barbaric” actions by suggesting that the events take place off-screen; on the other, they reinforce colonialist ideas about Indigenous extinction at the same time audiences are encouraged to appreciate their contributions to hemispheric society. Notably, modern Latin American populations, cities, and material culture do not enter the film at all. Instead, the United States assumes the mantle of cultural heritage and demonstrates its scientific and military prowess as a leader in the Allied war effort.
29The resulting portrayal of Maya and Aztec cultures contrasts two examples of human civilization—peaceful vs. bellicose, agrarian vs. militaristic. For viewers immersed in wartime rhetoric about the global fight against fascism, these earlier models would have conjured the Allied and Axis powers, respectively, and called upon Latin American governments and their people to decide which path to take. A hemispheric alliance would safeguard democracy for the world. Divided loyalty, by contrast, would hasten humanity’s fall to barbarism. The competing portrayals in Grain shine light on US policymakers’ anxieties about the future of the hemisphere. Fortunately, an even older, prehistoric cultural base is never far from view. Corn – whose cultivation served as a catalyst for Indigenous and, later, colonial cultural advancement in the Americas—imbues the film with the language and visualization of scientific instruction, undergirding its propagandistic message with a sense of authority and objectivity.
30One of the reasons pre-Hispanic civilization was an effective vehicle for OIAA diplomatic thought in this context was the overriding impression that anything predating European settlement belonged to the distant past. As late as 1960, Pre-Columbian scholar George Kubler noted a tendency among Western academics to imagine American antiquity as dating “far greater, far deeper” in time than its Greek and Roman counterparts. The reason for this cognitive dissonance, he proposed, was the Spanish Conquest which ruptured Pre-Columbian history into two distinct phases: pre- and post-contact. Whereas the period following European intervention merged Pre-Columbian history with the familiar timeline of Western civilization, scholars struggled to conceive of Indigenous history beyond a European framework. Consequently, the immense span stretching from the paleolithic era to the militaristic societies of the Inca and Aztecs appeared distorted, presented in archaeological and historical literature as occurring very close in time (Kubler 49). This compressed chronology, coupled with early twentieth-century scholars’ limited ability to decipher Maya texts, relegated Mesoamerican antiquity to a distant past more closely aligned with the vagaries of prehistory than the periodization of Western civilization.
31As scholar Stefanos Geroulanos has perceptively written, “prehistory is, at its core, a device for creating meaning—for celebrating those who practice a particular idea of humanity and for demonizing those who don’t” (7). During the Second World War, the visual pairing of Indigenous subjects and corn in books, murals, and animated films represented a concerted effort on behalf of the U.S. government to engender a sense of collective identity and strengthen hemispheric defense. Entwined with dry expositions of botanical features and cultivation techniques, Grain repeatedly foregrounds Indigenous agricultural practice alongside visualizations of a conjoined American continent to convince viewers of preexisting bonds of shared regional identity. Accelerating the development of hemispheric culture across time and space, over the course of millennia, the documentary also offers a possible reason that inter-American similarities have previously been overlooked. Finally, the concluding sequence of the film assures audience of Allied victory over fascism through the cooperation and strength of a united hemisphere.
32Grain was not the only time Disney animators attempted such an epic historical narrative. The film benefited greatly from animation techniques and the narrative collapse of time perfected a few years earlier in Fantasia (Walt Disney Productions, 1940). In the segment for Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” Walt Disney Studios visualized eons of geological history from the birth of the universe approximately 13.7 billion years ago to the extinction of the dinosaurs around 66 million years ago. As with Grain, the film’s narration stressed its conceptual grounding in scientific thought. Conductor Leopold Stokowski introduces the segment, noting that the story “isn’t the product of anybody’s imagination.” “It’s a coldly accurate reproduction of what science thinks went on during the first few billion years of this planet’s existence,” he avows. “Science, not art, wrote the scenario of this picture.” Yet while Fantasia illustrates such theories as the “big bang,” the evolution of life from ocean microbes, and the extinction of the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous-Paleogene era due to intense drought, Disney animators also took artistic liberties for dramatic effect. The struggle between the Stegosaurus and the Tyrannosaurus Rex, for instance, is impossible as the two dinosaurs lived 150 million years apart.
33The lessons that the studio took from Fantasia shaped its approach to Grain. In both movies, Disney animators called upon methods of scientific modeling to translate complex phenomena and render visible broad expanses of time. Many aspects of natural history—and especially prehistory—can never be fully envisioned. But with animation, single-cell organisms appear as though viewed through a microscope; viewers zoom through outer space and observe the evolution of species in minutes instead of millennia. As American paleontologist and Fantasia project consultant Barnum Brown purportedly remarked, “Mickey Mouse had to be created so we could see the creation of the world” (Lanouette 189).
34Grain’s pointed portrayal of Mesoamerican prehistory—that is, the moment when Native Americans cross-pollinated two wild grasses and planted the seeds of Pan-Americanism—asserts its reliability through the rhetoric of scientific instruction. Three-dimensional modeling emerged as an important pedagogical tool in early science education, and Grain calls upon these data visualization techniques to convey information about genetic ancestry, breeding, and commercial applications of corn (Gaycken 69). Numerous images correspond to illustrations in Bressman’s and Wallace’s book. Already in its fourth edition by 1937, the popular treatise featured an array of photographs, schematic drawings, maps, charts, and graphs. The film’s rendering of a corn kernel, for instance, simplifies the book illustration (fig. 7) by dividing the kernel only into its starch and germ (fig. 8). The humorous marriage procession of two corn plants and their resulting offspring likewise recreates a photograph showing hybridization techniques.
Fig. 7. Diagram illustration of Corn and Corn Growing (New York, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1937), showing a typical kernel of dent corn
Fig. 8. Ed Aardal, Diagram of a corn kernel. Frame from Bill Roberts, The Grain that Built a Hemisphere, 1943
16mm color film.
© Walt Disney Productions, 1943.
35Moreover, the strategic use of maps collapses time and space to underscore the proximity of Latin America and the United States. As historian Daniel Immerwahr has argued, standard maps of the United States generally included only its 48 contiguous states, effectively obscuring its sprawling territorial empire while maintaining global dominance (8-19). Grain strives to achieve this same strategic end, except with a larger territorial footprint. In the opening sequence, the title phrase “The Grain that Built a Hemisphere” overlays a map of the Western Hemisphere. A recurrent motif throughout the film, the contiguous American continents attempt to supplant notions of “America” as the United States alone. Indeed, as Amy Spellacy has shown, the Roosevelt administration advanced inter-American goodwill through a conceptual remapping of the hemisphere that appealed to notions of neighborly friendship and mutual care (42-43). Furthermore, the curvature of the map and its emphasis on the Pacific coast—the region nearest to the Hawaiian Islands, where the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941—serves as a stark reminder of American vulnerability amidst a global war. In addition to being the impetus for U.S. involvement in the war, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor challenged American assumptions about the safety of the geographical position of the United States. For many, this new sense of exposure strengthened the appeal of a hemispheric alliance for its potential to protect the American continents from external invasion.
36Elsewhere, animation activates the maps in Grain to track the development of hemispheric culture over time, a process too slow to perceive with the naked eye or within a single lifetime. Corn—shown initially as a yellow patch extending from Mexico to the Andes—gradually expands to cover South America, then North America, and finally the world. This diagrammatic visualization must have resonated with contemporary viewers, who were accustomed to tracking troop movements (Henrikson 30). Fortune, Life, and National Geographic regularly issued supplemental maps with their war coverage, and President Roosevelt asked radio audiences to follow his remarks using their personal globes. Reversing Axis territorial expansion by showing movement outward from the Americas to the rest of the world, Grain visualizes not only a historical agricultural narrative but also an alternative prospect for the current global conflict. As a symbol of Pan-American culture and its attendant values of peace and democracy, the global spread of corn serves as an anticipatory metaphor for an American-led Allied victory.
- 5 This was not true of all agricultural productions. The OIAA was critical of some educational shorts (...)
37The film was enthusiastically received at the OIAA and paved the way for other nontheatrical agricultural productions.5 Its production at Disney and its animated format enhanced its persuasive aims by disarming audiences, both domestically and throughout Latin America. The OIAA arranged for its distribution through a system of coordination committees across Latin America and inter-American institutes and educational bureaus across the United States (Sadlier 80). Screenings were held for schools, clubs, and public gatherings in metropolitan areas. To reach Latin Americans living in remote rural areas, the agency supplied portable equipment and sound trucks. Operating in itinerant circuits, these mobile motion picture units provided screenings of 16mm newsreels and educational shorts for many individuals who typically would not have had access to a movie theater and for whom printed propaganda would have been less effective (Rowland 77).
38By May 1944, the OIAA was able to report to Walt Disney Studios that the film had reached more than a million viewers (Pierce n.p.). New York Times reporter Paul P. Kennedy surmised that Grain was perhaps “the most popular subject thus far exhibited” in Latin America (Kennedy 3), while OIAA surveys conducted in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay the following year affirmed the positive influence the Motion Picture Division had achieved, pronouncing: “Never have so many Latin-Americans felt the United States closer, friendlier, and trustworthier” than at any other time in the history of U.S-Latin American relations (Sadlier 82). In the United States, the film garnered an equally warm reception. Less than two months after its theatrical debut on January 4, 1943, The Grain that Built a Hemisphere received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary. Although the animated short ultimately did not win, the nomination raised the public profile of the film and bolstered its claim of cinematic objectivity and “truth” in representation.
39Walt Disney Studios’ The Grain that Built a Hemisphere demonstrates how animation, prehistory, and scientific discourse were mobilized to advance the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs’ program of cultural diplomacy during World War II. By framing maize as both an ancient agricultural innovation and a hemispheric symbol of unity, the film naturalized Pan-American solidarity as the foundation of a democratic future. Its juxtaposition of Maya intellectualism against Aztec militarism translated prevailing archaeological narratives into a wartime allegory of Allies versus Axis powers, inviting Latin American audiences to align with the United States and the Allied cause.
40The film’s enthusiastic reception across the hemisphere underscores the power of animation to render political ideals persuasive by cloaking propaganda in scientific authority and cultural heritage. In foregrounding Grain, this article extends scholarship on Disney’s wartime productions beyond the familiar feature films and reveals how prehistory functioned as a diplomatic resource. Far from a neutral chronicle of the past, the film demonstrates that antiquity could be mobilized to soften anti-American sentiment, to construct a shared regional identity, and ultimately to legitimize U.S. claims of hemispheric leadership in the global fight against fascism.