The Wonderful Wisard of Oz as political symbolism and satire
http://www.usagold.com/gildedopinion/oz.html
I just watched the MGM movie based on the book by L. Frank Baum on Turner Classic Movies on television and something came to mind about it possibly being some sort of satire cleverly done. Sure enough, a Google search produced this article with the possibility that it might have been intentionally written that way, or if not, it certainly lent itself easily to an analysis consistent with the politics of that time and hence could be considered a political satire. The book was published in 1900.
(In the original book version Dorothy had silver slippers, not red ones as in the movie. The silver slippers repesented the "free silver" policy favored by the Populist movement in opposition to the gold standard favored by the Republicans, symbolized by the "yellow brick road" and "yellow bricks".)
Adele
The Man Who Made Oz
L. Frank Baum and the first American fairy tale.
By Meghan O'Rourke|Posted Monday, Sept. 21, 2009, at 7:21 AM ET
In 1900, a 44-year-old L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and became the father of the American fairy tale. The book was a commercial and critical success. The story of the orphaned Dorothy Gale, whisked by a tornado away from gray, impoverished Kansas to the magical land of Oz, captured the hearts of children and adults who had lived through an economic crisis but saw all around them the thrum of invention and change. As a young country abuzz with "progress," the United States needed a different kind of fairy tale. A truly American myth could not merely invoke Celtic wraiths or Bavarian dark forest goblins. It would have to include the drive to innovate that launched the Gilded Age and made America the archetypal modern industrial nation during the very decades when Baum's imagination was formed.
Two new biographies, Evan I. Schwartz's Finding Oz and Rebecca Loncraine's The Real Wizard of Ozreleased in conjunction with the 70th anniversary of the iconic MGM filmshow that Baum was uniquely suited for this task. He was poised at the crossroads of his eraswept up in burgeoning feminism, the acceleration of new technologies, and the rise of huckster salesmanship. Born in 1856, he grew up in the bustling canal town of Syracuse, N.Y., after his father made money in the oil fields. A dreamy, sickly child, Baum devoured the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. He told his sisters he would write "a great novel that should bring me fame."
But he also reveled in newfangled inventions like the printing press (which, as a teenager, he used to put out a literary journal) and, later, bicycles, Model Ts, and movies. As a young man, he opened a bazaar, sold china door-to-door, helped manage his father's company, and edited The Show Window,a trade journal instructing storeowners in the art of luring customers with "window dressing." The Baum family home, an idyllic spot known as "Rose Lawn," was bounded by a plank road that led merchants to the Erie Canal. * In Baum's formative years, both biographers remind us, the author would have heard much debate about the rise of robber barons (Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller), Reconstruction, the new energies of spiritualists, and the Manifest Destiny by which the U.S. Army justified its genocidal attitudes toward many remaining Native American tribes.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a traditional fairy tale to which Baum added a peculiarly American twist: the humbug. In addition to the usual talking animals, evil witches, scary forest, and challenges to be overcome, Oz has at its core a fraud. The Wizard is not a real wizard, but a lost American balloonist who uses stage trickshanging a disembodied head by a wire, for exampleto fool people into thinking he is powerful. Deploying spectacle to impress his guests, he sends Dorothy and her companions to kill the Wicked Witch of the West (who has real magic powers). When they return, successful, they discover the truth: Toto, scared by Oz's roar, tips over a screen the Wizard hides behind. There stands "a little old man, with a bald head and a wrinkled face." He pleads, "… don't strike meplease don't. … I'll do anything you want me to. … I'm just a common man." "You're more than that," retorts the Scarecrow. "You're a humbug."
Soon enough, the Wizard recovers from his mortification; he is proud to show off how he duped his guests. "Barnum was right when he declared that the American people love to be deceived," Baum once wrote of one of his heroes. Strikingly, even after the Wizard reveals his con, the Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow still ask for his aid. Like the quack he is, he obliges, stuffing the Scarecrow's head with pins. The Wizard, you might say, is America's first celebrity guru: an ur-Dr. Phil, using charisma and a screen to project authority and wisdom he doesn't truly have.
If Oz and its sequels are shaped by Baum's sharp eye for the theater of commerce, they are also shaped by his wishful revisions of social conflict. Notably, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz offered a paean to strong women at a moment when suffragettes were agitating for the vote. The book's hero-protagonist, obviously, is a girl. In Kansas, her lively laugh repeatedly startles her worn-down aunt. In Oz, she effortlessly (and intuitively) kills the evil witches subjugating the natives. Indeed, all of Oz's strongest figures are womenGlinda, the Good Witch of the South; the Good Witch of the North (not in the film); and the two Wicked Witches.
Baum, who publicly supported women's right to vote, was deeply affected by his beloved, spirited wife, Maud, and her mother, Matilda, an eminent feminist who collaborated with Susan B. Anthony and publicized the idea that many "witches" were really freethinking women ahead of their time. In Oz, Baum offers a similarly corrective vision: When Dorothy first meets a witch, the Witch of the North, she says, "I thought all witches were wicked." "Oh, no, that is a great mistake," replies the Witch of the North. In sequels, Oz's true ruler is discovered; it turns out to be a girl named Ozma, who spent her youth under a spellone that turned her into a hapless boy. One can imagine Baum winking on the page at his wife and mother-in-law. In his own life, Maud was the strong, practical one who kept things running. By comparison, he must have seemed the feckless humbug, trying one endeavor after another before succeeding as an author.
Or so Baum at times viewed himself, his biographers suggest. His careerhe began as a salesman of the family axle oil ("so smooth it will make your horse talk," he would say) and ended brokeindeed lacked a steady literary trajectory. But he was not a mere hack, though he wrote scores of schlocky books for children under pseudonyms to make money. At his core, Baum was an impresario of illusion, fascinated by the allure of utopian possibility, however implausible. Often read as a political allegory about the move away from the gold standard (you can learn more about that interpretation here), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is more broadly a portrait of a country America promised to be but never became. The book and its sequels offer a recuperative vision, born of intense hopes and disappointments that did not add up in life. And if the tensions show through, that is part of the works' power.
Thus in Oz, different races (the Munchkins in the East, the Winkies in the West, and the Quadlings in the South) mingle democratically, and war is the ultimate ill. * In one way, Baum was writing here against himself and demonstrating his own deep ambivalences. While he lived in the Dakota Territory, shortly before the Battle of Wounded Knee, he published two militant editorials calling for the extermination of the remaining Sioux on the grounds that the men of the tribe had lost their authentic strength, becoming little more than "whining curs." Here is the flip side, perhaps, of his dreams of female powera profound sense of disappointment in male potential, not just among tribal warriors. For Baum, the lure of progress was similarly double-edged. "There's no place like home," a feel-good refrain in the movie, is a far more complex statement in the book. On the one hand, the old familiar world seems better to Dorothy than this bright new one (to the bafflement of the Scarecrow, who attributes his confusion to his lack of brains). On the other, Oz is clearly the more beneficent land, and later in the series Dorothy and her family end up living there. For friends they have companions like the Tin Man, a woodsman who has replaced his flesh limbs with metal onesat once a chilling and a curative vision in an era haunted by amputated Civil War veterans. Baum, like many of his peers, was at once enthralled and unnerved by mechanization.
After the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it looked as though Baum were on track to a fairy-tale ending himself, as a wizard supplying just the fantasies Americans wanted. He helped fashion a popular musical based on the play. Later, he moved to Hollywood and started a film production company, exploring, ahead of his time, the possibilities of special effects. But in the end, Baum's profligacy and grand movie ambitions ruined him financially. He ended up a cautionary figure for an era of speculative overreaching, and a victim of overworka man, in other words, for our own economic season. Eventually, Baum sold the copyright to The Wonderful Wizard and died of exhaustion in 1919, 20 years before the MGM film was made. It seems fitting, in retrospect, that while in Baum's book Oz is a real place, in the film it is just a dream.
Kim Myers
MGM's THE WIZARD OF OZ: Political Satire of FDR and His "New Deal"
MGM's film version of The Wizard of Oz was released in 1939. The basic storyline was left intact (from the original novel published in 1899), and again it seemed to be some sort of political satire, but this time the focus was not on the bimetallism issues popular at the turn of the century. This time the focus seemed to be on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and optimism for the damaged American recently hit hard by the Great Depression. There were many factors contributing to this change in the underlying meaning which constituted the new version. First, the fact that it was now forty years later meant that the audience would have a new set of values and social/political concerns on their minds while trying to connect to the author's work (Lifton). Second, the story was taking the form of a completely different text, a musical instead of a novel, so that there would be a new type of audience and no longer one author, but in-fact many "authors" who contribute to the content, form, style, and overall tone of the piece. Some of the influential "authors" of this text include: (1) L. Frank Baum, author of the novel, (2) Mervyn LeRoy and Arthur Freed, producers, (3) at least four different directors, including Victor Fleming who left after just a few weeks to work on Gone With The Wind, and (4) E.Y. Harburg,"Yip", songwriter (Rushdie, 16).
Perhaps the most influential in the shaping of the underlying meaning was Yip Harburg, the lyricist for the musical. A Socialist who actively supported F.D.R.'s policies, Harburg frequently used fantasy to make a political point. He has been quoted as saying:
"Through fantasy, I feel that a musical can say things with greater effectiveness about life . . . of course I want to send people out of the theatre with a glow of having a good time, but I also think the purpose of a musical is to make people think (MacDonnell, 72)."
Although a songwriter is not usually seen as someone with much control over a film, this was not the case for The Wizard of Oz. With more than four different directors and two producers, no single one of these "authors" had much individual power over the outcome of the film. Meanwhile, Harburg was selected as songwriter because of his experience with fantasy. He was given total freedom in his songwriting and by the films end, he had written the cue-ins to all the songs, a good portion of the rest of the script, and had edited the entire script (MacDonnell, 72). Therefore, it is not surprising that Harburg believed he was in a good position to "express myself in terms I had never been offered before" though he realized the satirical elements would have to be fairly subtle because MGM wouldn't stand for it otherwise (MacDonnell, 72).
After completion of the film, though under scrutiny, Harburg maintained that "the Emerald City was the New Deal" (MacDonnell, 72) and even Variety magazine thought "Oz has a message well timed to current events" (Variety, 14).
In the film, a tornado rips Dorothy from the security of her previous life and she abruptly enters a strange, harsh, new world. Audiences in the thirties would have easily related to this tornado as the Great Depression stripping them of their economic security and thrusting them into a strange, uncertain, new America. Also, for the Midwestern farmer of the thirties, another connection could be made, for in the time of the Dust Bowl, it was a common tall tale that "a farmer could sit by his window during a dust storm and watch all the Kansas farms as they blew by" (MacDonnell, 73).
Although Kansas obviously represented a landscape recognizable to Americans of the period, so too, were the landscapes of Oz. Three rural landscapes were shown: farmland (fields of corn), orchards (apple trees), and meadows (poppy fields). Along with the rural landscapes were the wilderness (Lion's forest), the small town (Munchkin City), and the metropolis (Emerald City). The "Yellow Brick Road" is a symbolic landscape signifying hope and freedom, just as it had for the pioneers who set out for a better life. "No matter what perils Dorothy and her friends encounter along the way, after all, they are free and hopeful as long as they . . . 'follow the Yellow Brick Road'" (Nathanson, 124).
Once in Oz, Dorothy begins her search for home just as Americans were searching for a way out of the economic crisis. Dorothy and her three companions: the Scarecrow, the Tinman and the Lion, put faith in the all-mighty Wizard to solve their problems, much like the Americans: the Midwest farmer, the unemployed industrial worker, and the bankrupt businessman, had faith in Roosevelt to spring them from the Depression. Indeed, the Wizard was able to restore confidence in the three symbolic characters and make them realize they possessed the necessary qualities for success all along. Similarly, F.D.R. restored confidence in the American people.
Near the end of the film, the Wizard gives symbols or trophies to the three characters to represent the qualities which he claims they possessed all along. These trophies were supposed to help them remember that they were in-fact already blessed with their respective strengths. This scene signifies Roosevelt's New Deal which "promised to give Americans a brain, a heart, and courage" (MacDonnell, 74).
The president's flooding of Washington with experts from Columbia and Harvard in essence gave the nation the "brains" necessary to deal with the national crisis. He referred to them as the "Brain Trust" (World Book, N, 169). Later this "Brain Trust" is literally formed in the movie when the Wizard is about to leave in his balloon and he puts the Scarecrow in charge of Oz "by virtue of his truly superior brain . . . assisted by the Tinman by virtue of his magnificent heart, and the Lion by virtue of his courage" (Fleming).
Roosevelt gave America a "heart" with his massive relief programs. It was indeed much kinder than the "trickle down" policies of the Hoover administration (MacDonnell, 74). For instance, a lot of farm aid was provided in the Agricultural Adjustment Act which rewarded farmers with money if they limited their production so that supply would decrease, increasing produce prices and eventually increasing farmer's income. In this way, the farmers improved purchasing power would create a stronger market for the industrial products of the east (Life, v.11, 12). Also, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 created the National Recovery Administration (NRA) which set minimum wages and maximum hours for industrial workers. It also supported the workers' rights to form labor unions (World Book, N, 170). Note that these unions are also illustrated in the film through the "Lullabye League" and "Lolipop Guild" of Munchkin City.
THE LOLIPOP GUILD
Finally, the president's determination throughout the hard times, and his famous phrase, ". . . the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" helped give the nation the courage to lift itself from the Depression (MacDonnell, 74).
Frank Morgan's main character, the Wizard ( along with the several other characters he played in the movie), was created to possess characteristics similar to F.D.R. The actor's character copied the president's "colorful personality, friendly smile, flashing bright eyes, genial manner, and warm pleasing voice" (World Book, R, 413).
Indeed, it was normal to refer to representatives of the New Deal as "strange and mysterious magicians" (MacDonnell, 74). The audience's first view of the "great and powerful Oz" showed a large green head on a screen that was certainly mysterious and looked somewhat like a large brain. This, again, may signify the fact that most of F.D.R.'s know-how came from his "Brain Trust" (note: the picture shown was a version of the "Oz" that was later modified because this one was deemed too scary for children). Though Frank Morgan's character is unveiled as a "humbug" the Wizard is nonetheless a charming and beloved leader. He also seems to be an experienced political leader, just like Roosevelt, in that:
"He makes promises he's not quite sure he can deliver on, he has a speech ready for every occasion, and he is quite literally an expert at pulling levers from behind the scenes (MacDonnell, 74)."
It has already been explained that the Wizard restored confidence in the characters, just as Roosevelt did for his Americans. In addition, the Wizard's willingness to attempt to float Dorothy back to Kansas in his balloon after admitting that he didn't even really know much about balloons is a tribute to F.D.R., the great experimenter, who was willing to try anything which may help America out of its economic troubles.
When Dorothy and her three friends approach the Emerald City, the audience hears the song, Optimistic Voices: "You're out of the woods, You're out of the dark, You're out of the night, Step into the sun, Step into the light." Harburg was quoted as saying he especially liked this tune because "it heralds not only the four principals' escape from the woods and an evil spell but, on another level, the end of the Depression" (MacDonnell, 73).
In summary, the tornado, which ripped Dorothy from the safety of her home, parallels the Depression which was an upheaval for Americans. The landscapes seen in the movie could be recognized by the audience as representations of the United States during that time period. The journey to the Emerald City by the four characters along with their blind faith in the Wizard, signifies the faith that the Americans had in Roosevelt to lift them from the Depression. Finally, the Wizard portrayed by Frank Morgan in the film is a warm-hearted rendition of F.D.R. both physically, and through his actions.
Note: both pictures came out of The Wizard of Oz: The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History
REFERENCES
Fricke, J., J. Scarfone, and W. Stillman. The Wizard of Oz: The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History. New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1989.
Leuchtenburg, W. E. 1933-1945: New Deal And War. Vol. 11 of The Life History Of The United States. 12 vols. New York: Time-Life Books, 1964.
Lifton, M. Professor, Comparative Literature, University of Maryland. Personal interview. 17 Apr. 1995.
MacDonnell, F. " 'The Emerald City was the New Deal': E.Y. Harburg and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." Journal of American Culture 13.4 (1990): 71-76.
Nathanson, P. Over The Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991.
"New Deal." The World Book Encyclopedia. 1971 ed.
Rushdie, Salman. Wizard Of Oz. London: British Film Institute, 1992.
The Wizard of Oz. Dir. Victor Fleming. Lyricist E.Y. Harburg. MGM, 1939.
"The Wizard of Oz." Variety 16 Aug. 1939: 14.