Not in Kansas any more

Everything, apparently, has hidden meaning, including L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s classic, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

As reported yesterday on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday”, assistant professor of history and political science at Rogers State University, Claremore, Okla., has revisited a 1964 analysis maintaining that Oz is a populist parable. The idea, posited by historian Henry M. Littlefield, is that Baum was reacting to the economic crises of the 1890s that lead to an extended depression and particularly affected farmers throughout the West.

This led to the rise of the Populist movement that for a while pitted rural against urban interests.

The farmers lost.

Anyhow, Littlefield conjectured that the characters and plot of Oz represented America, with the Emerald City standing in for Washington, D.C. Thus, Dorothy (representing Everyfarmer) and her band (Scarecrow being “muddle-headed” farmers, Tin Woodman the eastern industrial workers and the Cowardly Lion William Jennings Bryan, who led the Populist charge on the silver standard).

The Wizard, of course, is the charlatan and fraud of the US president and eastern capitalists.

Taylor has updated Littlefield’s thesis with more detail.

But in his conversation with NPR’s Scott Simon, he also extends the allegory to our current crisis, suggesting who the characters might represent in the post-AIG apocalyptic US:

I’m frankly not seeing Sarah Palin as Dorothy, although I’ll give Taylor the “somewhat provincial” part.

Shrub as the Scarecrow? “Thought to be without a brain, given to stumbling and bumbling.” Okay. “Well-intentioned”? Well…maybe. But a deadly characteristic when combined with world power and no brain.

The Wizard is apparently a toss-up between Dick Cheney and Alan Greenspan, as the men behind the curtain thought to be “great, all-powerful, wise and wonderful ruler, but in the end…exposed as a charlatan and a fraud.” Yeah.

Barney Frank as the Cowardly Lion—’nuff said.

The wicked witches turn out to be the AIG execs, the Bernie Madoffs and everyone else whose combination of personal greed and corporate power got us into this mess.

Al Gore is the Tin Woodman—a little rusty, but truly having a heart.

I think the one I love the most is Nancy Pelosi as the Queen of the Field Mice. (You’ll have to go back to the book to find her; she wasn’t in the 1939 film.) Seeing as to how the Speaker of the House presides over a collection of diminutive, chattering rodents.

Pelosi doesn’t hold a candle to Mary Elizabeth Lease, a Populist crusader who agitated for equality and opportunity. She is well known for advising an audience in rural Kansas audience, “What you farmers need to do is raise less corn and more Hell.”



She was right, of course. But the farmers still lost.