| The Walt Disney Company is celebrating its hundredth anniversary this year, an auspicious occasion that has grown complicated, in some quarters, in ways that its namesake could hardly have imagined. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis seems to enjoy feuding with the company for political gain; the corporation also finds itself swept up in debates over diversity, representation, and how it treats employees. Walt Disney, who established the company as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, with his older brother Roy, had it relatively easy back in 1931, when The New Yorker published an early Profile. A native of Chicago, Walt Disney had just turned thirty, but was already a veteran advocate for Mickey Mouse, a character that film distributors initially rejected. Three years after Mickey’s big-screen début, Disney was no longer drawing the mouse—Gilbert Seldes, the author of the piece, describes Disney as a “mediocre draughtsman”—but he maintained a “deep personal relation to the creature” by providing his voice. The resulting short films quickly spawned fan clubs with hundreds of thousands of members, and Mickey was soon onscreen “in every country to which equipment for projecting sound films has penetrated.” A growing array of products, from stationery to radiator caps, featured Mickey Mouse, and his young creator’s prospects appeared unlimited. “Experts,” Seldes writes of Disney, “think that he is only at the beginning of his great success.” | 
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