The Real Meaning of Oz

__"Silver Slippers and a Golden Cap: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Historical Memory in American Politics" by Gretchen Ritter, in Journal of American Studies (Aug. 1997), Cambridge Univ. Press, Journals Dept., 40 W. 20th St., New York, N.Y. 10011–4211.__

L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz has enjoyed a century of popularity. But few of today’s fans, introduced to the story by the classic 1939 movie, even guess at the rich cultural and political satire readers found in it when it was a best seller in 1900, writes Ritter, a political scientist at the University of Texas, Austin.

The young heroine, Dorothy, part of a struggling farm family, begins her journey in Kansas, the nation’s heartland. When she arrives in Oz, Ritter writes, she finds it has a sectionalist geography that bears a striking resemblance to the late-19th-century Populists’ America: "the North and South are lands with good rulers, while, in the East and West, the people may be good, but their leaders are oppressive." The strongest power resides in the East—until the cyclone brings Dorothy’s house down on the Wicked Witch of the East.

As Dorothy travels west toward the Emerald City (read: Washington, D.C.), she is joined first by the Scarecrow, an agrarian figure (no accident here) in quest of brains who eventually learns that real intelligence comes from experience, which he has in abundance. Then the Tin Woodman falls in with them. A worker from the East, he has been turned into a heartless machine by the Wicked Witch of the East. Next comes the Cowardly Lion, who may represent William Jennings Bryan, the failed Populist (and Democratic) candidate in the 1896 presidential contest.

The Populists bitterly opposed the gold standard—Bryan’s famous Cross of Gold— and favored a silver standard to ease the flow of money and credit in rural America. "Oz is an abbreviation for ounces, one measure of the worth of gold and silver bullion," Ritter points out. "In the land of Oz, gold and silver are often the arbiters of power." In Oz, a brick road the color of gold leads to the Emerald City. Ruled by the Wizard of Oz, who turns out to be a fraud, the Emerald City, Ritter notes, "is made out to be a place of illusions where deception and aloof behavior provide the basis for authority."

In the book, Dorothy dons silver slippers (not ruby ones, as in the movie) that had belonged to the Wicked Witch of the East. When she travels in them along the yellow brick road to the Emerald City, Ritter says, she is in effect practicing the bimetallism (a standard that mixes gold and silver) favored by some reformers.

Only at the book’s end does Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, reveal to Dorothy that the slippers " ‘ can carry you anyplace in the world in three steps.’ " With this knowledge, Dorothy is able to return to Kansas. On the trip, however, she loses the slippers. "The Ritter. Just as the hidden meaning of Baum’s mysterious power of silver has disappeared tale was lost by the time Hollywood put it on before it was ever broadly tested," writes the big screen in 1939.