Wizard Of Oz Political Analysis

If you want to find meaning in a work, you must first understand the context in which it was created. One example of this is The Wizard of Oz. To someone without any understanding of the political situation in the 1890s, it seems like little more than a confusing and silly, but ultimately enjoyable, romp through a fantasy world, perhaps with a parable about knowing who you are or some such. On the other hand, if you compare the story with the monetary politics of its era, its underlying message becomes harder to ignore.
When L. Frank Baum was first writing this novel, America was going through a major political movement. Populists were fighting against proponents of the gold standard over whether or not to incorporate silver, along with gold, as a monetary standard in the United States. There is a theory that several historians have formulated over the years, claiming that Baum intended The Wizard of Oz to be an elaborate allegory for U.S. monetary policy and other related politics of the 1890s. Some such

historians, like Hugh Rockoff, posed that the yellow brick road represents the gold standard, which leads to the Emerald City, which represents the fraudulent nature of green paper money.
Both the novel and film are littered with evidence that supports this theory. Dorothy is from Kansas, which is representative of the American West. This region had a profound monetary interest in silver mining,as well as an interest in steady inflation to promote growth. At the end of the story, she could only return home by using her own silver slippers. She hadn’t realized that the solution to all her problems was right under her feet the entire time. Likewise, Westerners hadn’t realized that the solution to all their monetary problems could be found in their own silver resources.
Dorothy, the little farm girl, represents the United States, which is all of us. The tornado transports her and her house into the Land of Oz. The tornado represents the free silver movement that swept across America at the time. When Dorothy wakes up in Oz, she realizes that her house has crushed the Wicked Witch of the East, who represents the bankers on the East Coast. In essence, this so-called Populist Twister was aimed at the Eastern financial industrial interest, where those political allies and big banks were located.
One major political ally was Grover Cleveland. He was not in favor of having a silver standard, so the Populists made him into a villain, the Wicked Witch of the West. The enslaved munchkins have no understanding of what is truly going on. They knew that the Wicked Witch was bad, the they knew the significance of Dorothy’s silver shoes, and they knew that following the yellow brick road was good. However, they never questioned why a thing was good or bad. This reflects the enslavement of the average person’s mentality. The elite’s took advantage of this weakness. They understood how silver worked, while the farmers simply did not.
Dorothy wonders how she will ever get home. The munchkins tell her to seek out the Wizard of Oz, who lives in the Emerald City, which can be seen as Washington D.C. Her journey to see the wizard represents the Populist’s effort to get enough people on board with their ideas and join them in the movement. Dorothy and her friends face all kinds of hazards along the way. They are turned away by the wizard, who has no sympathy for their plight. The wizard represents the politicians of the time. Politicians often refused to help unless they received something in return. In Dorothy’s case, she must bring the Wicked Witch’s broom to the wizard in exchange for his help. She later learns that the wizard achieved his power through lies and deception, as many politicians did.
There are various other correlations, including the scarecrow representing American farmers and the tin man representing America’s booming steel industry. Historians have been quite exhaustive in pulling meaning from this story. With a quick Google search, you can find numerous theories regarding what each detail represents.
All these interpretations can never be proven as the author’s true intent, but they can make The Wizard of Oz a much more interesting story with historical significance, where you can understand its political underpinnings.

Part of the problem with context is that ideas are formed within a specific moment, and a text with gradually lose its meaning as the interests and squabbles of the time are replaced with new, evolving interests and squabbles. It is a testament then to truly timeless works that they have remained relevant and meaningful to so many people well beyond their original context. Humans have and will continue to change in leaps and strides at such a pace that, in a few generations from now, our successors will hardly understand what our lives were like at all. We will seem alien to them. We can only hope to leave behind enough truly timeless work in an attempt to remind them that our humanity is the same as theirs. It is an important

task.