To the right of me in my bookcase is a copy of Gregory Maquire's 1995 novel Wicked. It's sitting right beside two of his two other, novels, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Son of a Witch.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I didn't much care for Mr. Maquire's novel in 1995; neither its tone nor its politics resonated with me. I found it sanctimonious, overt and distractedly preachy. And when its premise was pared down and leavened into a frothy Broadway spectacle, the film version of which is now predictably finding its way into cinemas, I cared for it even less.
I suppose my first issue with Mr. Maquire's novel was its reliance on the 1939 movie. Now don't get me wrong, I have always been a fan of the 1939 movie as entertainment, but to anyone who has ever read Frank L Baum's novel that started it all, it's easy to see that the ambiguous, dreamlike adaptation with Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, Margaret Hamilton, and Frank Morgan was a far cry from the harsh and "survival-of-the-fittest original."
Before I delve into what was really happening in Oz at the turn of the twentieth century, I should perhaps start with a little summary of the novel. Much like the 1939 movie, Dorothy Gale is an orphan living with her stern and puritanical (in the work-ethic sense) aunt and uncle on a gray, dusty, impoverished Kansas farm. With her is a little black dog, Toto, that is her sole respite from the gray monotony of prairie life. When the ever-present, sudden death on the prairies horror of a tornado threatens, Dorothy misses the chance to get into the storm cellar and is hurled to Oz in the paint chipped farmhouse, landing in the eastern province of Oz (Munchkin Land) and on top of its tyrannical ruler, the Witch of the East (more on her later).
Unlike the movie, Dorothy's first encounter with sorcery in Oz is a wizened old woman, the Witch of the North, who after consulting a magic tablet balanced on the end of her nose, sends Dorothy to the Emerald City to seek the advice of the book's eponymous wizard, but not before giving her a pair of silver shoes (which Baum makes a point of emphasizing) that will be more durable on the yellow brick road that Dorothy must take to the Emerald City.
On her first day out she meets a day-old Scarecrow that she befriends, the next day out, a tin woodsman who has been hacked to pieces through the paid intervention of the Witch of the East, and repaired by the local tinsmith, and finally on the third day out, a cowardly lion. What Baum skillfully does here is set together a party to support the "every-man" Dorothy whose individual strengths combine well, especially as juxtaposed against their purported shortcomings. The "brainless" scarecrow is repeatedly the problem solver and strategist, the "heartless" tin man a rank sentimentalist pining over the several murders he must commit for the safety of the group, and the cowardly lion, a repeatedly brave if circumspect tactician.
The novel is more cavalierly violent than the movie in a way I feel is perfectly consistent with a pioneer's viewpoint of frontier life. The many harsh dangers encountered by Dorothy and company are met pragmatically and dispatched with deadly efficiency by either design or accident. This is especially true of the unrelated East and West Witches. One is hit by a falling house, the other liquidated by a bucket of scrub water. In a glaring underscore of this pragmatism, when Dorothy kills the Witch of the West, she carefully draws another bucket of water, throws it over the brown mess of the melted witch which is quickly spreading across the kitchen floor, sweeps it away, retrieves her purloined silver slipper, polishes it, and slips it back onto her foot. She is neither awed nor triumphant, she merely is. Baum says a lot about the American character in this passage, but he also points out in a subtle way that sudden death and tragic accidents are not unusual things to a young girl from Kansas. Dorothy is, after all, an orphan. Likewise, at no point in the novel is Dorothy ever portrayed as being afraid let alone terrified. She is merely moving along through a series of steps toward the realization of her and her friends' goals.
After the Wizard is revealed as a fraud (one more weak, benign and frightened than malevolent) Dorothy and company head south to seek the advice of Glinda the Witch of the South. This too is telling. In the first quest, the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion are symbiotic supplicants, all seeking a boon from Oz along with Dorothy. In this quest it is quite different. The Scarecrow has been made the ruler of the Emerald City; the Tin Man the ruler of the West; and the Lion the ruler of a forest in the south. Each of these three accompany Dorothy at risk to their personal prosperity, and out of loyalty and affection for Dorothy.
After a few more southbound travails, the four arrive at Glinda's palace where she takes possession of the Winged Monkeys, freeing them after the completion of their last task: taking the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion to their new domains. She then instructs Dorothy on the use of her teleporting silver shoes, and before she knows it, Dorothy is rolling across the dusty prairie in her stocking feet, the silver shoes having been lost in the Ozian desert along the way.
All of this is a very charming fairy tale right? Well. Most likely. Not so much.
In 1964, Henry Littlefield posited a theory that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was in fact less fairy tale than it was a political allegory reflecting the politics of the 1896 Presidential Election. Whereas some of Littlefield's suppositions were deemed erroneous by his peers since those suppositions were sometimes based on a limited knowledge of the period in question, other historians more familiar with the political cartoon imagery and timbre of the times do agree that most likely very little in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was accidental.
In a 19 February 2024 article in Medium entitled: Behind the Curtain: The Wizard of Oz’s Political Allegory Decoded BW Harris explores this theory in great depth, especially the idea that the eponymous wizard in question was none other than perennial presidential candidate and Scopes "Monkey" Trial prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan. Mr. Harris' essay aside, here are my own observations on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and how our present political world can benefit from revisiting its ideas.
In the United States of the late ninetieth century, monetary policy was a major concern. The "Gilded Age" was giving way to the "Progressive Era" and capital was still tightly controlled as was credit. The great bankers in particular favored the stability of the Gold Standard especially in light of new silver such as that pouring out of the Comstock Lode entering the marketplace, which had the potential of inflating the money supply and thus, spurring inflation. Farmers, tradesmen and other small business concerns however, weren't so in love with gold, wanting instead a looser more fluid monetary supply provided by the unlimited minting of silver.
On 09 July 1896 Bryan delivered his famous "Cross of Gold" speech at the Democratic national Convention in Chicago in support of "free silver" (i.e. bimetallism), which he believed would bring the nation prosperity. In it he decried the gold standard, concluding the speech with his famous admonition that, "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold".[1] Bryan's address won him the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, and is still considered one of the greatest political speeches in American history regardless of the eventual outcome. In an era before the return of a central bank in the United States, monetary supply could only be controlled via a metals standard, since we did not have a fiat currency like we do today. In Baum and Bryan's day, whatever banknotes there were, were valued (and could be redeemed) for the actual metal backing them.
With all this in mind consider the following: A young girl from an impoverished Kansas farm is wretched from the heartland and dropped in the eastern section of a country named for the unit of measurement for tradable metals, the ounce (i.e. Oz). Also keep in mind, The United States' east coast was (and is) the epicenter of banking and finance. Her humble house lands on and kills the tyrant of this region, and in the process, she acquires a pair of silver shoes (Free Silver) that will allow her to follow a yellow brick road (The Gold Standard) to the Emerald City (Greenbacks i.e. fiat currency). Of course that yellow brick road is fraught with dangers.
Her first ally is the Scarecrow (agriculture) who is thought of by the elites of the time as "brainless" but is in fact, clever and resourceful. Next she meets a Tin Woodsman (skilled labor) whom the elites view as heartless since in this era, factory workers and other technicians were very much considered cogs in a corporate machine, and of very little humanitarian concern (think Dickens). Finally she meets a Cowardly Lion (pandering politicians) a creature who bloviates and roars but without much substance or conviction. Together she and her allies traipse down the path of the Gold Standard encountering some nearly impassible gulfs and coursing rivers that they use their combined skills to overcome, before at last arriving at the Emerald City. Now the Yellow Brick Road was supposed lead to their salvation right? Not so fast it seems. The Wizard (who appears differently to each of them in a charming nod to political chicanery) says not so fast... they must go west and vanquish yet another tyrant... the Witch of the West.
Baum loves colors. The East likes Blue, the Emerald City Green, and the color of the Land of the West is Yellow... you know... like Gold. Once the party gets out west they are captured by Winged Monkeys (a not so subtle and racially insensitive allegory for native Americans, made all the more obvious when their king tells Dorothy their history later on in the novel) and dealt with harshly by the Witch of the West. The Scarecrow (agriculture) is torn to shreds, his stuffing knocked out and strewn around. The Tin Man (industry) is thrown into a rock strewn gully and left battered and bruised to rust in its depths. The lion (feckless politicians) is harnessed by the witch to be used as a beast of burden, but finally resists and fights her efforts at domesticating him to her will. Dorothy, our all-American every-man, is enslaved and reduced to being a house servant.
When the Witch (gold) steals one of Dorothy's silver shoes, Dorothy, in a pique of anger, douses her with water (cleansing the market of gold) and liquidates her (Baum's term... not mine). Freed of the witch (gold) Dorothy restores her friends to their former condition, and all four of them set out for the Emerald City (fiat currency) yet again.
Well, this time around the Emerald City (fiat currency) is revealed for what it really is. All the inhabitants and visitors to the "magnificent" capital are required to have goggles locked onto their faces at all times, ostensibly to protect their eyes from the radiance of the gems (greenbacks). However, shortly after discovering the Wizard of Oz (Bryan) is nothing of the sort, but rather, a shady Midwestern carny who drifted into public prominence in Oz by his balloon landing in the city at a critical moment in its history, we further learn that everything in the city is just plain glass, and that the goggles in question are green glass lens designed to fool the populace into believing the sham opulence of the city.
Like most shady populists, the Wizard (Bryan) is given a reprieve of fate when his hot air balloon (yes. hot air balloon: as in lofty, populist rhetoric balloon) that he intends to use to take he and Dorothy back home, leaves her and takes him. His rhetoric saves him no doubt... but Dorothy... the every-man stranded in the land of metal-based monetary policy... not so much.
Dorothy has now vanquished both gold and fiat currency, and her companions have benefited mightily. The Scarecrow (agriculture) has now replaced the fraudulent wizard as the ruler of Oz. The Tin Man (industry) has taken preeminence in the west, and our feckless politician who has finally acquired courage and resolve, has taken his place as king of the forest. Once Dorothy reaches Glinda, the good, wise Witch of the South, she learns the truth: her silver shoes (Free Silver) will take her home in a flash and could have done so from her very first day in Oz. Alas, Dorothy does make it home, but these wonderful silver shoes that did so much to drive the story from beginning to end? They were lost in the vast, deadly deserts that surround Oz and cut it off from the "civilized" world (again Baum's term... not mine).
All this allegory makes sense academically, but what was Baum really trying to tell us philosophically? Obviously he was no fan of William Jennings Bryan (or other populists for that matter), and his own political views at the time bear that out. But where did he personally stand regarding monetary policy?
My personal take is that Baum was an economic agnostic, who really didn't know where he stood on monetary policy, but was willing to keep an open mind. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Silverites may have thought they had an ally in Baum as they moved on from the beginning of the novel, but at the very last minute, Baum dispels that idea by leaving the silver shoes (so integral to the novel's plot) lost in a desert.
As we look into the face of a $36,000,000,000,000.00 debt triggered by the unrestricted printing of fiat currency, the 1890's concerns over the unfettered coinage of silver might seem quaint by comparison. But we can still learn a great deal from Baum. Gold certainly takes a beating in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz but nothing compared to fiat currency. True, the Yellow Brick Road is fraught with dangers and uncertainties, prosperity and depression. It has deep gulfs to cross and raging rivers to forge, and even a field of intoxicating poppies that can lull you into a profound financial stupor. But Baum's real contempt is reserved for fiat currency. The Emerald City is a pretentious capital of disconnected elites, their eyes locked behind green glass goggles that prevent them from seeing just how ordinary and out-of-touch their city really is, be this Washington or New York. This plain glass city of poseurs is led by a charlatan who hides in his palace, and if ever seen by anyone, does so behind a series of masks and disguises.
I think Baum would find much to write about in 2024. I also think, based on his well-known and sometimes not very favorable (by twenty-first century standards) racial views, that he would have found the premise of Gregory Maquire's novel very off-putting, especially since he based the character of Glinda on his own beloved mother-in-law Matilda Joslyn Gage, a well-respected activist and suffragette writer who was hardly a character anything like the one Maquire envisions or describes in his novel, and was actually a huge advocate for native American rights and diversity in general.
So if you go to see Wicked this holiday season, and someone complains about its political overtones, remind them that Oz has always been a land of politically charged subjectivity. It might be advised however that you reread Baum's 1900 masterpiece. As far as real politics goes, it has a lot more to offer to the modern reader than Mr. Maquire's homage does, at least in this author's humble opinion.