Pop Populism

Henry M. Littlefield, "The Wizard of Allegory"

In 1964, I had an article published that suggested a political allegory might be hidden in Lyman Frank Baum's first Oz story. Since then, as The Baum Bugle has informed its readers, much has been made of the idea, and other connections with Oz have been uncovered in such diverse fields as psychology, management and theology.

When I was a twelve-year old, living in New York City in the mid-1940s, a friend of mine introduced me to the Oz books. Being latch-key kids, and since school was no great fun for either of us, we'd go to his apartment in the afternoon and read. Today we'd be called nerds. In those days we had no category, we just went to Oz whenever we could. While I have since enjoyed science fiction and fantasy, I have never gotten too far away from Baum's very special world (or the Oz of Ruth Plumly Thompson, et al

Many adventures and some two decades later, in the early 1960s, I was a teacher and coach at Mount Vernon High School, in New York, just north of the Bronx. In the summer of 1963 I taught students who had to pass U.S. history in order to graduate. It was July, and it was hot and airless on the third floor of the old Davis High School building. But we had the usual public school understanding: the teacher needed the money, the students needed the credit, and we tolerated each other.

Toward the end of July, I was reading the opening chapters of The Wizard to my two daughters, then ages five and two. At the same time, in the history course I taught, we were going through the Populist period and the 1890s. I lived just a few blocks from the school and I remember running to class the next day, on that hot, airless third floor.

I said to my none-too-willing students, "Guess what? In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy wears the Wicked Witch of the East's silver shoes and walks on a yellow brick road!" I waited. And waited. Finally a hand went up, it was even warm in the morning up there on the third floor. "Nah, Teach," came the weary answer, "she wears red shoes, we know the movie."

"Remember yesterday," I said, "we were talking about the campaign of 1896? What about William Jennings Bryan's Populist issue of silver being added to the gold standard to give the farmers more money to borrow at easier rates?" I went on to explain that the Oz book, from which the movie was made, was published in 1900, and that movies often change things around. I showed them a W.W. Denslow illustration of the silver shoes--they knew about the yellow brick road--and from that silver and gold campaign issue, we began to brainstorm some other connections.

The Scarecrow as a farmer came easily to these urban kids, some of whose parents had migrated from the South. I knew about William Allen White's article, "What's the Matter With Kansas?", which historian Richard Hofstadter had anthologized for high school students. The farmers were ignorant and unschooled, White had editorialized in 1896, as the respected editor of the Emporia, Kansas, Gazette. Of course, the scarecrow wanted brains!

The Tin Woodman also seemed easy for kids whose parents were often without jobs. Hearing that the Witch of the East had put a hex on the Tin Woodman when he had his own wood-chopping business, made him a perfect symbol for those workers who feel dehumanized by modern mass industry. His being rusted and unable to move we connected metaphorically to the long industrial depression of 1893. Then we saw Coxey's Army of the unemployed marching on Washington, D.C., in 1894, as a kind of Ozian march on our own Emerald City. From those characters and that city, it was no great leap to see the Wizard as any president from Andrew Johnson to William McKinley, all of whom often "made believe" in office. In fact, our textbook political cartoons of a tiny President Benjamin Harrison in a large oval office chair bore a striking resemblance to Denslow's Wizard!

The Lion was more difficult. I suggested that the only contemporary group I had heard accused of being cowards were Populist politicians who had opposed the Spanish-American War. (Shades of the Persian Gulf!) Then we found that William Jennings Bryan could be referred to in lionesque terms, with his hair, his aggressive speaking style, and his big voice. When someone noticed that Bryan and lion rhymed, the fit seemed almost too perfect. We had a farmer, a worker, and a politician going to their leader to have their problems solved. It still sounds all too familiar, and it was the Populist program!

But who, then, was Dorothy? The girls in the class, who had been fairly quiet over the week of brainstorming, came to the rescue. "She's us," they said. "She wants to go home, so do we! We all have people to take care of and chores to do, and here we are talking about Oz, and wishing we could be home! She's real!"

Of all the characters, only Dorothy has a real problem--she has to go home. The others have largely solved their own self-concerns as they went West in Oz, and dealt with the Witch who used malign nature and the flying monkeys. The Wizard gives cosmetic solutions to each of the characters, but for Dorothy he gets out his hot air balloon. Those "humbug" responses fit most political reactions to constituent issues, real and imaginary, and I can picture Baum's smile!

Dorothy also finds that she has had the answer to her own problem all along. The power of silver in her sole? (Baum loved puns!) So she can go back to the people who need her. That is, after all, where home is.

My intention in this article was to suggest another means to teach a difficult period in American history. The Populists appear less than real to modern urban students. But kids all know Oz, thanks to Judy Garland and television. Oz and Populist America came together so easily that I keep thinking just maybe it was what a mischievous Mr. Baum might have had in mind. First he created a simple story for children, but at another level we can bring our own symbolism to it, with Baum's tacit support built in.

My students, by the way, understood the self-help message in the story. When the article came out they would say to me that it was pretty clear they weren't such bad students after all. They had Ozian proof of that!

The article took about six months to put together, and Professor Fred Kershner at Columbia Teachers College helped with sage advice. For example, he made sure I understood that with Baum, as with most successful writers, the story comes first and any allegorical intent decidedly second.

When the article first appeared in 1964 it got a little publicity and I received a number of nice notes, often from professors, like Russel B. Nye, expert in that historical period. What surprised me was the reaction of some Oz fans. They seemed upset that a perfectly wonderful fantasy had been connected to reality, however tentatively. But teachers loved it, and the article now seems to have become a fixture in college readings about turn-of-the-century America, in keeping with the current emphasis on social history, and on American studies, which combines history and literature.

For me, the article did not cause much of a stir until Gore Vidal mentioned it in 1977 in The New York Review of Books. Earlier, Allison Lurie had cited it (mistakenly writing that I had seen the Wizard as Bryan!) as part of her study of reading and childhood beliefs. But nobody to my knowledge has gotten rich as a result of these allegorical connections.

As a public speaker, I love to give presentations on the story. Baum's comments on leadership, or on Dorothy as Team Builder--and Home Seeker--fairly shout for public forum! But I find it needs a great deal of selling for canny businessmen to hire me to use the story as a base for motivational or team building talks. So I don't see the article as having really been accepted. Nor am I dismayed at that. When I am told the story seems inappropriate for grown business people, I can only think, "Too bad, it's perfect!" Looking back over the twenty-five years since the publication of the article, I realize that it was Baum's genius that gave value to any commentary I might have added.

For Frederick Buechner, a writer who often deals in theology, as for me, fantasy turns out to be a very useful way in which to sense our world anew. He writes, "No matter how forgotten or neglected, there is a child in all of us who is not just willing to believe in the possibility that maybe fairy tales are true after all but who is to some degree in touch with that truth." Buechner reminds us in Baum's subsequent stories how often Dorothy goes back to Oz, "because Oz, not Kansas, is where her heart is, and the Wizard turns out to be not a humbug but the greatest of all wizards."

I can only add, Amen.