Amusement, Inc.

In Amusement, Inc., Roland Betancourt tells the deep history of Disneyland from its conception to its construction and reveals how it set the precedents that created the modern theme park. To transform an animation studio into a theme park company, Betancourt shows that Disney took its most significant lessons not from other amusement parks of the time but from corporations like General Motors, marshaling funds to systematize the constellation of principles, practices, and structures that defined American Big Business during the 1950s and 1960s. By using these principles to construct a heroic image of the large-scale corporation, Disneyland acclimated Americans to the rhythms and values of corporate capitalism, rendering the corporation's apparatus synonymous with “the good life” in postwar America. Drawing on extensive archival research, Amusement, Inc. reframes the invention of the theme park, offering a new history of how corporate practices shaped the spaces of leisure and entertainment that have defined contemporary American culture.