In the Merry Old Land of Oz!

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a fun, fanciful read that really helps you get to know and care about the characters better than the movie. It's an easy read (go figure, it's a children's book). I enjoyed reading it myself so much that I decided to start reading it as a bedtime story to my 6 and 9 year old daughters, and they're loving it too! There are a lot more adventures and the friends encounter more strange creatures than in the movie. Of course, the witches are also a lot more vulnerable and Dorothy is much less musical than in the film too.



Simple, sweet and American classic that it is- legend has it that it is a political allegory of the gilded age. I'm not sure how well it stacks up to other satires like Dante's Divine Comedy or Voltaire's Candide, but as a former high school American History teacher, I did a little digging around and this is what I found.



Midwestern farmers (The Scarecrow)



Urban industrial workers (the Tin-man)



William Jennings Bryan, populist presidential candidate (the Cowardly Lion), although some theories say that the lion represents the organized Church and religious leaders.



Yellow brick road (the gold standard), in spite of what Glenn Beck and Tea-Baggers think these days, Baum apparently thought of it as a road to nowhere.



Emerald City (Either paper money & finance, or perhaps Washington DC)



Wizard of Oz (the President) OR... Oz is an abbreviation for gold, which was a hot political topic with people rallying for a fixed ratio of silver and gold, OR... Mark Hanna, the chairman of the Republican party at the time.



Dorothy, the symbol of Everyman, us, U.S. (Although, another theory is that she represents Theodore Roosevelt, the United States president. Some people believe this theory more than the other because of the similarities in the names: Dor-o-thy and The-o-dore.



Silver shoes (the proposed system of basing backing the Dollar at least partly with silver, popular with Western miners and farmers)



Wicked Witch of the East symbolizes the large industrial corporations and eastern finance. But some think of the Witch of the West as the Railroad Barons, but others say she is William McKinley who ran against William Jennings Bryan and won.



Good Witch of the North is thought to represent the workers of the north, whereas the Good Witch of the South is thought to represent the farmers of the south. This contrasts the wicked industrialists of the east and the railroad moguls of the west.



Uncle Henry: In the late 1800's, there was a famous farmer who was the editor of a leading farm magazine. His name was Henry Cantwell Wallace, and everyone called him Uncle Henry.



The flying monkeys represent Native Americans.



The basic moral seems to be that the "powers-that-be" can only remain in power through deception- our ignorance and "red-neck-hood" allow the powerful to manipulate and control us.

Ha - ha - ha, Ho - ho - ho - And a couple of tra - la - las
That's how we laugh the day away, In the Merry Old Land of Oz!

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