What does the Wizard of Oz have to do with u.s. history?
The Wizard of Oz was published in 1900, written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W.W. Denslow who shared copyright privileges with Baum. The book was widely acclaimed and well received from the start and does have obvious parallels to the political history of the United States at that time. Baum was born in Chittenango New York, the fifth of six children to Cynthia Stanton and Benjamin Ward Bond. The L. stands for Lyman named after his fathers brother, but Baum did not like the name and preferred to be called by his middle name, Frank.The obvious parallels between U.S. history and The Wizard of Oz begin with the title itself, which the Wizard could be an allusion to the American President. Indeed, The President in office at the time that The Wizard of Oz was published was William Mckinley Jr. who was often referred to as a wizard for his political skills. The imagery of wizards and mystical magic was used by politicians of the late 1800's quite often and the great debate between the silver and gold standard that raged at this time was rife with Senators and Representatives using terms such as wizard to characterize their opponents. In fact, one Senator referred to Senator Cockrell of Missouri in this fashion:"We all know of the performances of the worlds magicians, but it has remained for the Wizard of Missouri to wave his magic wand or his magic head and double the price of silver of the world."Dorothy represents the naive and youthful American people who are caught in a gray and drab world of hardship and despair. Unhappy with her/their circumstances Dorothy wishes for a better life; "some where over the rainbow." Her adventure to find her "American dream", begins with a cyclone or tornado that whisks her away from the comforts of home and thrusts her into the strange and wonderful world of Oz, where her house splats on top of the Wicked Witch of the East that gets the attention of the Glenda the Good Witch who offers Dorothy the Wicked Witch of the Easts shoes to make her journey down the "yellow brick road." Anyone who has seen the movie knows that those shoes are a spectacular ruby red shoes, but in the book they are silver shoes that she must wear to walk down the "yellow brick road." Silver leads to gold which all roads lead to the Emerald City that may represent the greenback dollar that only pretends to have wealth.Along the yellow brick road she first meets the Scarecrow who wishes he only had a brain. The Scarecrow so clearly represents the American farmer which William Allen White had written an article in 1989 that asked: "What's the matter with Kansas?" In this article White characterized the farmer as ignorant, irrational and possessing a general "muddle-headedness". The Scarecrow joins Dorothy in her journey to Emerald City to ask the great and powerful Oz to give him a brain. All Dorothy wants, of course, is to go home again. The next character Dorothy meets is...The tin woodsman which is an obvious parallel to the modern man of the industrialized world dehumanized by the automation of assembly line work and rendered rusted and immobile after the panic of 1893. The Wicked Witch of the East was the evil capitalist businessman who abused the suffering tin men before being felled by a tornado that represents a political revolution that frees labor from the chains of greedy businessmen. Labor is joined by the American farmer as Dorothy, The Scarecrow and The Tin Man (similar to the Farm-Labor Party of Minnesota), happily skip down the yellow brick road where they're "off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz."Before making it to the Emerald City, where the Wizard might help Dorothy get back home, give the Scarecrow a brain, and the Tin Man a heart, they are accosted by The Cowardly Lion. If President Mckinley is the obvious parallel to the Wizard then surely The Cowardly Lion is none other than William Jennings Bryan. Mckinley had defeated Bryan for the Presidency and it was the firebrand Bryan who gave the famous "cross of gold" speech arguing in favor of keeping the silver standard, Mckinley upheld the gold standard. Bryan may be represented as the cowardly lion, who only thinks he lacks the courage, but is of course, a lion and lions do not lack courage. Bryan himself, had run for the presidency four different times losing each time. This made him a quirky footnote to history, (That and his prosecution in the Scopes monkey trial, where once again he lost, this time losing that case to Clarence Darrow's defense.), but in the struggle between coining money and choosing the silver standard or the gold standard, Bryan was a lion amongst sheep.And so, Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion all merrily skip down the yellow brick road off to see the Wizard and all the while watched and plotted against by the Wicked Witch of the West. If the Witch of the East represents the cold calculated world of the industrial revolution and the factories that followed the the Wicked Witch of the West must represent the West where a vast majority of the raw materials mined and gathered and the building of the railroads linked the two. The winged monkeys therefore may represent the Chinese workers who were slaves to the west and minions of the railroad. Another parallel of the wing monkeys could be in the Native Americans most commonly referred to at that time as "red skins". In the book, the Monkey King explains to Dorothy; "Once we were a free people, living happily in the great forest, flying from tree to tree, eating the nuts and fruits, and doing just as we please without calling anybody master. This was many years ago, long before Oz came out of the clouds to rule this land."There are easy to infer parallels between winged monkeys and the Great Plains Indians, and Baums own cool sympathetic view of the Native Americans can be better understood by an editorial he wrote for the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer about the death of Sioux Chief Sitting Bull:"Sitting Bull, most renowned Sioux of modern history, is dead. He was not a Chief, but without Kingly lineage he arose from a lowly position to the greatest Medicine Man of his time, by virtue of his shrewdness and daring. He was an Indian with a white man's spirit of hatred and revenge for those who had wronged him and his. In his day he saw his son and his tribe gradually driven from their possessions: forced to give up their old hunting grounds and espouse the hard working and uncongenial avocations of the whites. And these, his conquerors, were marked in their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood and treachery. What wonder that his wild nature, untamed by years of subjection, should still revolt? What wonder that a fiery rage still burned within his breast and that he should seek every opportunity of obtaining vengeance upon his natural enemies. The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are."Whatever sympathies Baum might have had for the Indians of the Great Plains that he might characterize them as winged monkeys is not so hard to believe. Whatever Baum actually intended when writing this children's story, it is not just silly historical research for people with too much time on their hands to draw the historical parallels that have been made. Indeed it was Henry M. Littlefield who most probably started what would be an avalanche of historical comparisons and academic analysis of The Wizard of Oz when he published in the "American Quarterly" of 1964 an article called: "The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism." The scholarly papers that followed culminated into essay published in the Washington Post that recast Glenda the Good Witch as a Machiavellian genius who manipulated an innocent patsy in Dorothy and used her to kill her own sister and unseat the Wizard leaving her as the undisputed ruler of the four corners of Oz, ruling the North, East, West, and Oz presumably being the South. True to Machiavellian form, the post points out, Glenda even "allows" the title to be named after her weakest opponent.There have been other parallels drawn between Baums characters and his story, and perhaps because Baum had joined the Theosophist movement in 1897 and because of the affiliation of Theosophy with Free Masonry and because of the affiliation of Free Masonry with the Illuminati there is, of course, the whole conspiracy theory thing, where Baum has written a children's book that effectively programs the children into becoming "Monarchy slaves" or some sort of zombie for the Illuminati, simply by reading the book. The parallels made by the conspiracy types is this:Auntie Em = H.P. Blavastsky's "Mulaprakriti" andUncle Henry = Blavastsky's "Unmanifested Logos"Whatever that means...Dorothy is whisked away by a cyclone which in the Greek translation represents a coil or snake or serpent. So, it is the serpent who takes Dorothy to Oz. Dorothy's three companions, the Scarecrow, Tin Man and the Lion all represent the mental, emotional and physical bodies that Blavastsky wrote about. According to the Theosophist's, when coming into incarnation they will encounter these three bodies. Blavastsky wrote: "There is no danger that dauntless courage can not conquer; There is no trial that spotless purity can not pass through; There is no difficulty that strong intellect can not surmount." The yellow brick road, suggestive of gold which is a pure and divine metal in occult religions, is linked to the road that Blavastsky writes about when she says: "There is a road, steep and thorny, beset with perils of every kind, but yet a road, and it leads to the very heart of the universe." The obvious message and moral to Baums book is that we should look to ourselves to find the intellect, heart and courage that we need to face our troubles and find our way back home. This message is in line with Theosophy.Whether Baum intended to parallel his story with U.S. history or whether he intended to use the book to promulgate his own religious beliefs is not clear if we rely on Baums own words as to why he wrote the Wonderful Wizard of Oz:"The old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as "historical" in the children's library; for the time has come for a series of newer "wonder tales" in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and bloodcurdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident. Having this thought in mind, the story of 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out."Whatever historical and religious parallels this book and the subsequent movie with Judy Garland may conjure, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz remains, after more than one hundred years, a story that captivates and mystifies both children and adults alike, and that it has attracted so many scholarly essays and articles about it makes sense, a certain kind of historical sense, because generation after generation has grown up either reading the books or watching the movie year after year after year as if it were some sort of sacred ritual or esteemed tradition...a distinct sort of American tradition.
