When I was a kid, I was enamoured with a history teacher. He made history so fascinating. One of the things he told us was that the Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a metaphor for the debate regarding the gold and silver standard in the United States.
He really explained for us, down to the last detail, how everything we knew about the story was really a metaphor for this late 19th century political issue.
Anyhow, I recently googled the claim about the book being a metaphor, and supposedly the experts (“literary historians”) deny the interpretation taught to me by my old history teacher. I also found that folks have found evidence of Republican views from Baum, including alleged ‘smoking guns’ like a poem by Baum which seems to support not-populist sentiment. The guy who initially had written about the theory, Henry Littlefield, apparently wrote a letter to the New York Times about how he only meant it as a teaching mechanism and "“there is no basis in fact to consider Baum a supporter of turn-of-the-century Populist ideology.”
I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist though, but what our history teacher told us just sounds so perfect. It struck me as extraordinarily compelling that OZ really does stand for “ounces” (ounces of gold, ounces of silver)…and the city was a metaphor for DC; people thought the president could just solve their problems, that he was a wizard. The flying monkeys were immigrants. The lion was William Jennings Bryan, while Dorothy’s companions represented the farmer and the factory worker. I also see that some historians agree that while Baum probably wasn’t a supporter of populism, his book works really really well as a teaching mechanism about populism. Again, I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it works too well, doesn’t it?
In summary: Okay, I can’t deny it, the evidence really does seem to indicate Baum wasn’t a populist at all…but then, the book works so damn well – too well – as a metaphor for the issue of Baum’s day. Is it really just one giant coincidence that the book is so good as a metaphor for said issue?
best one I heard was that it’s an allegory for the failure of Socialism:
the Tin Woodsman is the typical American worker
Lion = the psyche of the collective American zeitgeist
Scarecrow = farmers
Dorothy = naive young person, open to all, willing to be led down the ‘yellow road’ to whichever philosophy is right.
The flying monkeys, a none-too-subtle jab at the Black underclass (the interpreter of Baum’s message’s words, not mine) - attacking the travellers on their way to Emerald City (Washington DC).
Yellow Brick Road = Gold Standard
Good witch of the North = the good people of the liberal Northern states, who want everyone to have their chance at a fair share of the American dream, urging them forward on the gold Standard.
Wicked witch = anti-gold Standardites.
But, once they get to their destination, and the big reveal is done, the big badass powerful Wizard is powerless to stop them - since they had the brains, courage, and heart to figure out the way to ‘see the yellow brick road all the way thru to its terminus’. Then, the Good Witch explains to Dorothy how she had the power to get home all along. When she clicks her heels to ‘find her way home’ (i.e. come to her senses, snap out of it) - she realizes it was all a dream - the lure of the gold standard is a siren song, sung by ‘dreamers’. She’s back in (presumably middleclass) Kansas, and realizes the true path to ‘Emerald City’ has no shortcuts - the yellow brick road is ‘just a dream’, and the true path is hard work.
Well, at least it’s more entertaining than ‘Hunger Games’
I’m curious about the phenomenon where an author disavows an allegory, but the allegory seems to work so well for an issue current to the time he’s writing. For example, Stephen King IIRC gets pissed off that anyone would assert that his short story “The Long Walk” could be an allegory for Vietnam, since he wasn’t thinking of Vietnam when he wrote it. But if you read the story, it actually seems pretty obvious. Maybe Frank Baum could have been been a similarly unwitting recorder of his times?
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…”
** -Sigmund Freud**
Baum said in an interview that OZ was the label on the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet.
According to both his mother-in-law and his kids, he used to make up fantastical stories to tell his kids. Maybe we shouldn’t read too much into it. Maybe we’re reading too much into the film adaptation (where, for example, the cowardly lion looks/sounds like Jennings? Or any pompous politician of the day?) than the original book from 1900.
Ask yourself if the other hundred or so children’s books Baum wrote are also extended political metaphors. Has anyone gone through them line by line and image by image to test out analogies?
Take a book and make a list of twenty of the characters in it.
Take some philosophical concept and make a list of twenty of the elements in it.
Now put your two lists side by side and draw lines connecting the characters from the book with the elements of the philosophical concept.
Congratulations, you’ve just turned the book into a metaphor. Go write a thesis.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a metaphor for the Cold War? Sure, why not? Huckleberry Finn is the United States. Tom Sawyer is Western Europe. Pap is the Soviet Union. Jim is the Third World. The Duke and the King are fascism and monarchism. The Widow Douglas and Miss Watson are liberalism and socialism.
So Western Europe used to be the dominant power of the west but now the United States is. The United States struggles with the Soviet Union and attempts to help the Third World. In order to triumph, the United States has to reject monarchism and fascism, which are anti-communist but too extreme, and liberalism and socialism, which are well-meaning but too easily subverted by communism. Eventually the Soviet Union collapses and everyone can live happily together.
Too obvious to need explaining. Tinkerbell and the Lost Treasure is a clear metaphor for the collapse of the British Imperial system. Terence, of course, is Jomo Kenyatta.
At first I was going to suggest that you quit reading books about conspiracy theories (and listening to people who advocate them). But really I think that the way to get over being obsessed with conspiracy theories is to read and hear about lots of them. Read about as many of them as you can, being sure to get your conspiracy theories from as many wildly different sources as possible. You will discover that they all sound at least halfway plausible, even when they can’t possibly be made to fit with each other. At that point you will have to take one of the three (at least) possible positions about conspiracy theories:
Your favorite theory is right and everybody else’s one is wrong, even though you have no more evidence for it than other people do for theirs. You can’t have other people advocating for their theories over yours. It would be best to eliminate them.
All conspiracy theories are right, even though they assert contradictory things. There is no such thing as truth, and anything you or anyone else asserts is true (and, yeah, that doesn’t make sense already). You should all live together in harmony, even with the people who are going to kill you because you don’t agree with them.
Discovering whether any given theory is true is hard work. There are often accidental resemblances, mistaken data, and cases where incorrect theories almost seem to explain things. You have to look more carefully when you’re shown any theory that superficially works. Sometimes you will have to go back to examine a theory that seemed to work when you find that it doesn’t quite explain everything.
But I don’t believe in any conspiracy theories! Ever since I left a fundamentalist religion a bit less than 2 years ago, I haven’t believed in any.
I’m not obsessed with conspiracy theories and haven’t read a book about them in a year or so. I don’t think the author was talking about populism. I was just expressing my wonderment at how perfect it seemed as a literary metaphor. Clearly my reading’s just off, or my brain’s forming imaginary associations that weren’t intended, okay.
I don’t think we skeptics – and yes, I am one, fan of James Randi, atheist, and all – should belittle the expression of bewilderment and deny our own readings of the literature.
The theory that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is about populism is somewhat of a conspiracy theory. It’s all right. We all go through this stage. We’re told complex theories about subjects that we know little about and shown how the theory explains everything. It’s only later that we say to ourselves, “Wait, that doesn’t quite work.”
