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FEATURE ESSAY

Date:___________________

THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ

CHAPTER 21 restless dreamer, Frank Baum tried his hand at several careers before he gained fame and fortune as a writer of children’s literature. From 1888 to 1891, he ran a store and newspaper in South Dakota, where he experienced the desolation and grayness that accompanied agrarian discontent. An avid supporter of William Jennings Bryan in the “battle of the standards,” Baum wrote an enduring allegory of the silver movement, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Published in April 1900, it was an immediate success. The book opens with a grim description of Kansas:

A

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else. Kansas had not always seemed that way. After 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened to settlement its 50 million acres of grassland, people poured into the state to stake their claims. Many came from the hilly timbered country to the east, and breaking onto the prairie, they saw “a new world, reaching to the far horizon without break of trees or chimney stack; just sky and grass and grass and sky. . . . The hush was so loud. . . . The heavens seemed nearer than ever before and awe and beauty and majesty over all.” In later years railroads crisscrossed the state, and advertisements touted the fertile soil. Land was plentiful, rainfall somehow seemed to increase each year, crop prices held at levels high enough to pay, new farming implements yielded larger crops, and property values increased. Yet life on the prairie was never an easy matter. Flat, lonely, and windswept, the land affected

people in ways that were hard to describe to the folks back East. When Aunt Em, Dorothy’s aunt, came to Kansas to live, she was young and pretty, but the sun and wind soon changed her. “They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also.” Like Aunt Em, Uncle Henry never laughed. “He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was.” After 1887, a series of droughts struck Kansas, and as many as three out of four farms were mortgaged in some Kansas counties. Thousands of settlers like Aunt Em and Uncle Henry gave up and retraced their steps East; others trusted in the Farmers’ Alliance and pinned their hopes on the free coinage of silver. While gold as a standard of currency symbolized the idle rich of the industrial Northeast, silver stood for the common folk. Added to the currency in the form of silver dollars, it meant more money, higher crop prices, and a return of prosperity. Or so the supporters of silver coinage believed. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy (every person) is carried by a cyclone (a victory of the silver forces at the polls) from drought-stricken Kansas to a marvelous land of riches and witches. Unlike dry, gray Kansas, Oz is beautiful, with rippling brooks, stately trees, colorful flowers, brightfeathered birds. On arrival, Dorothy disposes of one witch, the Wicked Witch of the East (the eastern money power and those favoring gold), and frees the Munchkins (the common people) from servitude. To return to Kansas, she must first go to the Emerald City (the national capital, greenback-colored). Dorothy wears magical silver slippers and follows the yellow brick road, thus achieving a proper relationship between the precious metals, silver and gold. Like many of her countrymen, she does not at first recognize the power of the silver slippers, but a kiss from the Good Witch of the North (northern voters) protects her on the road. Dorothy meets the Scarecrow (the farmer), who has been told he has no brain but actually possesses great common sense (no “hick” or “hayseed,” he); the Tin Woodman (the industrial worker), who fears he has become heartless but discovers the spirit of

THE AMERICAN NATION

love and cooperation; and the Cowardly Lion (reformers, particularly William Jennings Bryan), who turns out not to be very cowardly at all. When the four companions reach the Emerald City, they meet the “Great and Terrible” Wizard, who tells them that, to gain his help, they must destroy the Wicked Witch of the West (mortgage companies, heartless nature, and other things opposing progress there). Courageously, they set forth. Dorothy dissolves the witch with a bucket of water (what else for drought-ridden farmers?), but when they return to the Emerald City, they find that the great and powerful Wizard (the money power) is only a charlatan, a manipulator, whose power rests on myth and illusion. “‘I thought Oz was a great Head,’ said Dorothy. . . . ‘And I thought Oz was a terrible Beast,’ said the Tin Woodman. ‘And I thought Oz was a Ball of Fire,’ exclaimed the Lion. ‘No; you are all wrong,’ said the little man meekly. ‘I have been making believe.’” Dorothy unmasks the wizard, and, with the help of Glinda, the Good Witch of the South (support for silver was strong in the South), uses the silver slippers to return home to Kansas. Sadly, the shoes are lost in flight. Back in Oz, the Scarecrow

“THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ” FEATURE ESSAY

2

rules the Emerald City (the triumph of the farmers), and the Tin Woodman reigns in the West (industrialism moves West). Oz was a familiar abbreviation to those involved in the fight over the ratio of silver to gold—16 ounces to 1. Baum wanted to write American fairy tales to “bear the stamp of our times and depict the progressive fairies of today.” The land of Oz reflected his belief in the American values of freedom and independence, love of family, self-reliance, individualism, and sympathy for the underdog. Oz, he said in the original introduction, “aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.” The Oz stories have remained popular, and they still rest on many children’s bookshelves. A 1939 film starring Judy Garland as Dorothy, with Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow, Jack Haley as the Tin Woodman, Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion, and Frank Morgan as the Wizard, was spectacularly successful. Released in the midst of another depression, the film included songs designed to escape hardship, as Dorothy once had, “somewhere over the rainbow.”

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