THE POLITICS OF OZ
Peter Dreier
The 50th anniversary of the film, “The Wizard of Oz,” is introducing an entire new generation to the Tin Man, The Lion, The Scarecrow, The Witch and The Wizard himself. What Most Americans don’t know, however is that the story was originally written as a political allegory about grassroots protest.
It may seem harder to believe than the Emerald City, but the Tin Woodsman is the industrial worker, the Scarecrow the struggling farmer, and the Wizard is the President, who is powerful only as long as he succeeds in deceiving the people.
“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was written by Lyman Frank Baum in 1900, during the collapse of the Populist movement. Through the Populist party, Midwestern farmers, in alliance with some urban workers, had challenged the banks, railroads and other economic interests that squeezed farmers through low prices, high freight rates and continued indebtedness.
The Populists advocated government ownership of railroads, telephone, and telegraph industries. They also wanted silver coinage. Their power grew during the 1892 depression, the worst in U.S. history until then, as farm prices sank to new lows and unemployment was widespread.
In 1894, Jacob S. Coxey, a Populist lumber dealer from Massillon, Ohio, led a mass march of unemployed workers to Washington, DC to demand a federal works program. That same year, President Grover Cleveland called in federal troops to put down the nationwide Pullman strike - at that time, the largest strike in American history. As the Populists saw things, the monopolies were growing richer and the workers and farmers, ever poorer.
In the 1894 congressional elections, the Populist party got almost 40 percent of the vote. It looked forward to winning the presidency, and the silver standard in 1896.
But in that election, which revolved around the issue of gold versus silver, Populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan lost to Republican William McKinley by 95 electoral votes. Bryan, a congressman from Nebraska and a gifted orator, ran again in 1900, but the Populist strength was gone.
Baum viewed these events in both rural South Dakota - where he edited a local weekly - and urban Chicago - where he wrote Oz. He mourned the destruction of the fragile alliance between the Midwestern farmers (the Scarecrow) and the urban industrial workers (the Tin Woodsman). Along with Bryan (the Cowardly Lion with a roar but little else), they had been taken down the yellow brick road (the gold standard) that led nowhere. Each journeyed to Emerald City seeking favors from the Wizard of Oz (the President). Dorothy, the symbol of Everyman, went along with them, innocent enough to see the truth before the others.
Along the way they meet the Wicked Witch of the East who, Baum tells us, had kept the little Munchkin people “in bondage for many years, making them slave for her night and day.” She had also put a spell on the Tin Woodsman, once an independent and hardworking man, so that each time he swung his ax, it chopped off a different part of his body. Lacking another trade, he “worked harder than ever,” becoming like a machine, incapable of love, yearning for a heart. Another witch, the Wicked Witch of the West, clearly symbolizes the large industrial corporations.
Like Coxey’s Army, the small group heads toward Emerald City where the Wizard rules from behind a papier-mache façade. Oz, by the way, is the abbreviation of ounce, the standard measure for gold.
Like all good politicians, the Wizard can be all things to all people. Dorothy sees him as an enormous head. The Scarecrow sees a gossamer fairy. The Woodsman sees an awful beast, the Cowardly Lion “a ball of fire, so fierce and glowing he could scarcely gaze upon it.”
Later, however, when they confront the Wizard directly, they see he is nothing more than “a little man, with a bald head and a wrinkled face.”
This was Baum’s ultimate Populist message. The powers-that-be survive by deception. Only people’s ignorance allows the powerful to manipulate and control them.
Dorothy returns to Kansas with the magical help of her Silver Shoes (the silver issue), but when she gets to Kansas she realizes her shoes “had fallen off in her flight through the air, and were lost forever in the desert.” Still she is safe at home with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, simple farmers.
Baum realized perhaps that the silver issue had been lost, but that silver was not the crucial issue anyway. The Populists had been led astray-- the real question was that of power. With the Wizard of Oz dethroned, the Scarecrow rules the Emerald City, the Tin Woodsman (industrial workers) rules the East, and the Lion (Bryan) protects smaller beasts in “a small old forest.” In Baum's vision farm interests gain political power, industry moves West and Bryan, perhaps, returns to Congress.
The political parable within Baum’s original story was recovered by Henry M. Littlefield in a 1964 essay in American Quarterly. But Littlefield’s discovery has had little impact on the way Americans view the Oz story. Each time it has been transferred to the wide screen - from the 1925 silent version to Walt Disney’s 1885 “Return to Oz” - Hollywood has cashed in on the fantasy, leaving the political allegory behind.
Now the 50th birthday of MGM’s 1939 classic, and its re-release in both theaters and the home video market, may renew interest in the Oz fables - and the political tale that started L. Frank Baum on his own Yellow Brick Road to immortality.
