by Bruce E.R. Thompson.
My father was a collector of rare books, although he had very specific tastes in what he collected. In particular, he was a collector of science fiction novels, and he spent a great deal more on this hobby than my mother thought was strictly within his means. After he died, she sold off most of his collection—and I believe she made a tidy profit on the sale, despite her disapproval. One year, because my father kept a close eye on the rare book market, he had an opportunity to purchase a complete set of the Reilly-Lee Oz books by L. Frank Baum. That was my birthday present for that year.
Having read the books at an early age, it is understandable that I can become quite tedious about ways in which the 1932 movie starring Judy Garland got the details wrong. Never mind. I have long ago made peace with the idea that “ruby slippers” are more cinematic than “silver shoes,” and that, while Glinda is not the good witch that first greets Dorothy when she arrives in Oz, it makes for a tighter script to have Glinda be a composite. And the field of poppies! I could go on, but I won’t.
Clearly the movie was made before Hollywood understood the value of sequels. It is hard to make a sequel to a movie that ends “it was only a dream,” though, of course, some have tried. Baum’s publisher certainly understood. At the publisher’s insistence, Baum had Dorothy visit Oz many times. It is not until his fifth book, The Road to Oz (1909), that we see signs that Baum had begun to run out of ideas. There are fourteen books about Oz written by Baum himself, and perhaps a fifteenth book that had barely been started (if that) when he died in 1919. That book, The Royal Book of Oz (1921), attributed to Baum, was mostly written by Ruth Plumley Thompson, a young writer who was hired by the publisher to finish it. She went on to write nineteen Oz books under her own name. After that several Oz books were written by various authors. To this day the Baum estate hires a talented new writer each year to be the official Royal Historian of Oz. That writer has a contract to write one new Oz book, after which the title of Royal Historian is passed to a different up-and-coming writer. I’ve read some of the more recent Oz books. They are quite good, but Dorothy no longer appears in them. At some point she returned to our world, and the last time I checked in, her two granddaughters, Dot and Emma, were visiting Oz in her place.
Who was the original Dorothy, and what inspired L. Frank Baum to create her and send her to Oz? Scholars of the Oz books have settled on a curious theory, first proposed in 1964 by Henry M. Littlefield. I believe this theory to be mostly correct. The original book in which Dorothy journeys to the Emerald City accompanied by a lion, a scarecrow, and a man made of tin is thought to be a parable about American politics in the final decade of the 19th Century. This is, of course, just a theory, and a relatively recent theory at that. I have seen some articles ridiculing it, but those articles offer no better theory, nor do they challenge the avalanche of details that support this theory. Regrettably, Baum himself is no longer around, so we will never know for certain. Careful speculation is the best we can do.
Let us begin by asking where Oz is. This is not a question that needs to be asked about other magical lands in children’s literature. Lewis Carroll’s “Wonderland” really is just a dream. Narnia is not intended to exist in our world at all. Tolkien tells us that Middle Earth is Europe as it existed in a previous age, and it has the right sort of geography to support this idea. Oz, by contrast, is stranger than Middle Earth, yet more specific than Wonderland or Narnia. Its geography is well defined but makes no sense. It is surrounded by deserts, not oceans; there are rivers, but nowhere for them to flow. Even as a child I understood that Oz was likely to be more allegorical than imaginary.
Oz bears an unmistakable resemblance to the United States of the late 19th Century: a civilization of settled farmers in blue overalls to the east, a vast expanse of yellow grasslands to the west, harsh purple prairies to the north, and a deep, moss-festooned forest to the south. The surrounding deserts are allegorical: Oz is a place isolated from the rest of the world. People of the United States paid little attention to world affairs when Baum wrote his book, and we are even today notoriously provincial.
The last decade of the 19th century was a period of chaos and change in the United States. During that time the United States transformed itself into an industrial powerhouse, but concentration of wealth in the hands of a mere one percent of its citizens led to huge wealth disparities, culminating in a banking collapse in 1893. This was followed by four years of economic hardship: the worst depression in U. S. history up to that time. The 1890s were a “gilded” age, not a golden age. There was a lot of flashy wealth, but that wealth was a thin veneer hiding a cheap substructure, like a cheap porcelain toilet covered in gold leaf.
The wealth disparities of the 1890s naturally led to popular protests called the “populist” movement. One of the most influential advocates for this movement was a former schoolteacher turned lawyer named Mary Elizabeth Lease. She was from Kansas. Her primary contribution to the movement was to bring together farm workers on the one hand with unionized industrial workers on the other. These two groups had not necessarily seen each other as allies, but she convinced them to work together. The cooperation resulted in a new political party, the People’s Party. In 1892 the party ran their own candidate for president, a man named James B. Weaver, a man with an impressive beard and a strong voice. He was a veteran of the Civil War, and if the war had taught him anything, it was that violence is a poor way to solve problems. Mary Lease supported his campaign and even campaigned with him.
Prior to running for president, Weaver had served in congress, representing Iowa. While in congress he had introduced legislation trying to eliminate the “gold standard,” under which money issued by banks in the United States must be backed by gold. Weaver thought that only the federal government should issue money, and that it should be backed by any valuable commodity that came to hand, including silver. He understood that the gold standard gave too much power to private bankers, such as J. P. Morgan. It allowed them to concentrate wealth in their own hands by monopolizing the supply of gold. At the time the idea that only the federal government should issue currency—and back that currency in any way it liked—was considered radical!
In 1894, the year after the disastrous run on the banks, a march was organized by a ruined businessman named Jacob Coxey. The idea was for a group of desperate men to walk to Washington D. C. to submit a petition. They would throw themselves on the charity of people they met along the way. The idea caught on. Called Coxey’s Army, a hundred men walked from Massillon, Ohio, all the way to Washington D. C. Along the way they met with James Weaver, who cheered them on, but reminded them that they must not engage in any violence. More men joined the march. By the time they reached Washington they were 500 strong with others following in their wake. Other similar marches were organized starting in California, but the distance was just too great. They dissipated in Missouri and in Ohio and never made it all the way. Only Coxey’s army made it to Washington. Once there, Jacob Coxey insisted on meeting with the president, but President Grover Cleveland turned him away. Coxey and his army were arrested and fined for “walking on the grass.” Coxey himself spent several nights in jail.
So, to spell it out, there is a journey to the capital city, inspired by a girl from Kansas who has managed to convince farmers (represented by a scarecrow) and factory workers (represented by a man made of tin) to work together as friends. Along the way they encounter a fierce lion who is notorious for his cowardice. To reach the capital, they must follow a road made of yellow bricks representing the gold standard. (Even as a child I knew this was a reference to the golden “bricks” kept at Fort Knox.) Their leader wears upon her feet a weapon that she herself does not yet understand: shoes made of silver. When they reach their goal, they encounter a weak, feckless ruler who initially turns them away, and probably does not have the power to grant their wishes in any case. They must go further and win the battle on their own.
Most critics who advocate this interpretation of the story cast William Jennings Bryan in the role of the Cowardly Lion, but I believe there is a better candidate. Bryan was the most famous leader of the populist movement, but he came to the movement later. Mary Elizabeth Lease did not particularly care for him (or he for her), and he was not involved in Coxey’s march to Washington. I believe Baum had James B. Weaver in mind when he created the Cowardly Lion. Unlike Bryan, Weaver had a shaggy beard that made him look like a lion, he knew Mary Elizabeth Lease well, and his strong pacifist views might have been mistaken for cowardice by those who did not know him.
Other details are sometimes cited in support of this theory, hidden like Easter eggs in the book. Baum critics love to go looking for them, but I will resist. My main reason for holding this theory is that it comports well with Baum’s other writings. The second of the Oz books, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), is transparently a satire of the suffrage movement. In that book General Ginger’s girl army marches on the Emerald City and easily overthrows the Scarecrow, who had been left as ruler of Oz at the end of the first book. The Scarecrow must then journey, with the help of new friends, to ask Glinda to restore him to the throne. She refuses. Instead, she offers to help find the rightful ruler of Oz, who turns out to be a woman: a lost princess named Ozma. Baum was apparently sympathetic to the suffrage movement but couldn’t help satirizing its stridency and methods. The seventh Oz book, The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913), introduces us to Scraps, a life-sized doll stitched together from different pieces of colored cloth like a crazy quilt. She is magically brought to life just to be a servant. That this is an allegory about racism and servitude could hardly be more obvious. Baum made a habit of using politics and social movements as the inspiration for his Oz books. Why should his first Oz book have been any different?
Understood as an allegory about the populist movement, I believe Baum’s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), asks us to consider what is genuinely valuable. It’s not gold, that’s clear enough, and silver is not much better. How about books? I think books are valuable. If I were President-Wizard of the United States, I’d have Fort Knox emptied out and replaced by an archive to house rare books. I’d use that to back the value of money! Rare books hold their value better than gold. My father spent about $45 to buy me that entire set of Oz books. Today some of those books could be resold for more than $300 individually. Together their combined value may be in the thousands.
But to me they are beyond price, and why shouldn’t they be? They were given to me by my father.