Wizard of Oz comments

[mandielise]

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mwickedwitch.html

I had heard in my American History class that the whole book was a political statement; that everyone and everything in it was a symbol. The Wicked Witch of the West melted because she was in fact symbolizing drought, as Cecil had eluded to towards the end of his reply. But it goes further…

The Wizard himself symbolized the government. I’m sure everyone remembers the song where each character is ready to ask the wizard for something: the tin man a heart, the lion courage, the scarecrow a brain, and Dorothy a way home. The Wizard was supposed to be able to fix all the problems, but they found out later there wasn’t much he could do!

The class was about 4 years ago, so I don’t remember the rest, but I think the Wicked Witch of the East was supposed to symbolize the industrial belt, and how they manipulated the midwest farmers. I don’t really remember. But I thought the author had written another book which explained everything.

[Nametag]

You can’t have read DEX’s article all that thoroughly; you’d have seen that it actually refers to an earlier article by the Master himself, which would contains a link to this Web page, which pretty thoroughly debunks any intentional allegory, including this:

In the summer of 1896, the year of the election that would mark what has been called “The Climax of Populism,” Baum published a poem in a Chicago newspaper:

When McKinley gets the chair, boys,
There’ll be a jollification
Throughout our happy nation
And contentment everywhere!
Great will be our satisfaction
When the “honest money” faction
Seats McKinley in the chair!
[editorial snip of two more verses of really bad poetry]

Michael Patrick Hearn, the leading scholar on L. Frank Baum, quoted this poem in a recent letter to the New York Times. Hearn wrote that he had found “no evidence that Baum’s story is in any way a Populist allegory”; Littlefield’s argument, Hearn concluded, “has no basis in fact.” A month later, Henry M. Littlefield responded to Hearn’s letter, agreeing that “there is no basis in fact to consider Baum a supporter of turn-of-the-century Populist ideology.”

I should mention that Littlefield is the guy who started all this fuss; actually, he was interested in drawing allusions to populism for teaching purposes, and really didn’t give a rat’s patootie whether that’s what Baum had in mind

[mandielise]

I stand corrected! As I had said, I was taught this in my high school history class as fact, so I took it as such. Thanx for the enlightenment!

[tomndebb]

You might consider printing off this thread (along with the articles by Cece and Dex) and sending them to your old history teacher with a plea to stop spreading ignorance. (Politely, of course. )

[C_K_Dexter_Haven]

High school history teachers, stop spreading ignornace?

… half of them would be out of a job.

[Nametag]

Oh, yeah; take a look at “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” a review of U.S. history textbooks; you can find it on Amazon.

[mandielise]

Well, I also went to elementary and high school in upstate NY, and now I’m at college in Baton Rouge. It’s funny to hear about the civil war from both places. Each leaves out a lot of important information, and adds stuff that’s not quite true.