“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Now, as a Kansan born and raised, like most, I’m ambivalent about that classic cinematic observation. Yet considering our enduring fascination with The Wizard of Oz and the prequel phenomenon Wicked, let’s ponder how the wonderful world author Frank Baum created may not be where, or what, we think it is. First published in 1900, released as a movie in 1939, and since 1956 a television event, it seems highly likely that this familiar children’s fairytale is actually a clever political allegory, symbolically chronicling the rise, and fall, of the Populist Party in the 1896 presidential election.
So, listen up my pretties. I’m Joel Rhodes “Telling History.”
The Populists – or People’s Party – were an agrarian political movement in the last quarter of the 19th century, a third party giving political voice to forgotten Midwestern farmers and economic justice for working Americans. And like a proverbial prairie fire, for a brief historical moment Populism mounted a serious challenge to laissez-faire capitalism and our inflexible two-party political system.
Frank Baum was an avid supporter, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz follows this classic story of the Powerless vs. Powerful.
You see, Populist farmers faced any number of natural and manmade hardships beyond their control... wicked witches if you will. The witch of the West represents the natural – weather, floods, insects. What better way to end a drought than throwing water on her? The wicked witch of the East is the manmade – capricious market forces, banks, railroads, and an unresponsive government. Munchkins are just common folks enslaved by predatory capitalism back East... until that witch is flattened by voters riding an electoral tornado.
Populist’s chief issue was a bi-metal currency system based on both paper money backed by gold and silver dollars using a ratio of 16 ounces of silver to 1 ounce of gold; a complex, confusing, and ultimately flawed idea, but meaningful to the story. The abbreviation for ounce is, OZ. And Populists saw the coinage of silver as an economic panacea capable of magically solving their economic problems, a wizard.
So, we’re off to see that wizard.
Dorothy is every American. With silver slippers whose power she doesn’t initially understand – the shoes only became ruby in the technicolor movie – she follows a yellow road (again gold and silver co-existing) to the Emerald City, or Washington colored green like money due to Gilded Age corruption.
Along the way she forms an alliance with a Scarecrow (farmers dismissed by elites as hayseeds), a Tin Man (industrial workers whose humanity is lost on the assembly line), and Lion (Democrat William Jennings Bryan, the failed Populist candidate for president in 1896).
Just as Midwestern Populists needed Northern and Southern support at the ballot box, those two “good” witches aid the travelers along their way: a seemingly unbeatable political coalition.
Alas, just as the Wizard proves to be a charlatan, the Populists and their Democrat allies were soundly defeated in 1896 by Republican William McKinley, and what is arguably the most successful third-party in American politics largely disappeared into history. Yet Baum’s ending suggested what might have been... after Dorothy returned to Kansas, the Scarecrow wisely ruled the Emerald City, the Tin Man compassionately oversaw the West, and the Lion courageously protected all forest creatures.
