Silver Slippers and a Golden Cap: L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Historical Memory in American Politics

Journal of American Studies

Volumn 31, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 171-202

  Ritter, Gretchen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85012514600     PISSN: 00218758     EISSN: 14695154     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875897005628     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Henry M. Littlefield, “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism,” American Quarterly, 16, 1 (1964), 47-58, quotes appear on p. 50. William Leach, Land of Desire : Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1994), 250-51.
2. Herbert S. Schell, History of South Dakota, 3rd edn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), Ch. 16.
3. Hearn, Annotated Wizard, 38-39. Baum's introduction to American Fairy Tales is quoted on p. 39.
4. While it seems merely coincidental, Dorothy is the title character for a story (not written by Baum) published in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer on 20 December 1890. The story tells of a maid in colonial times who is loyal to her master and willing to be falsely punished for it. In the end she is saved and adopted by the master.
5. Baum, The New Wizard of Oz, (Chicago: M. A. Donohue & Co., 1903) 11-13 and 254. On Kansas populism, see Gene Clanton Kansas Populism: Men and Ideas (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1969) and Walter T. K. Nugent, The Tolerant Populists : Kansas Populism and Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). On the agrarian politics in the Dakotas see H. Roger Grant, “Origins of a Progressive Reform: The Initiative and Referendum Movement in South Dakota,” South Dakota History, 3. 4 (Fall 1973), 390-407; Larry Remele, “God Helps Those Who Help Themselves’ : The Farmers Alliance and Dakota Statehood,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 37. 4 (Autumn 1987), 22-33; Orland A. Rothlisberger, “The Populist National Convention in Sioux Falls, South Dakota History, 1. 2 (Spring 1971), 155-65; and Schell, History of South Dakota, Ch. 16. Baum's response to this criticism of his political sympathies was to suggest that many Independents were wayward Republicans “like naughty children ‘’ who would eventually return to the fold. Baum was critical of many Populist programs which he found to be pessimistic and naive. See the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, 18 Oct. 1890.
6. In his editorials during the fall of 1890, Baum endorsed a constitutional amendment that would grant women suffrage in South Dakota. (He also supported a measure designed to deny Native Americans the right to vote.) See, for instance, the 8 Nov. 1890 issue of the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. On the South Dakota Populists’ endorsement of women's rights, see Schell, History of South Dakota, Ch. 16. Nancy Koupal of the South Dakota State Historical Society told me in a telephone interview on 8 June 1994 that Susan B. Anthony had spent time at the Baum household while she was in South Dakota campaigning for suffrage.
7. The passage from The Marvelous Land of Oz is quoted in S. J. Sackett, “The Utopia of Oz,” in Hearn ed., Wizard of Oz, 216.
8. Baum, New Wizard, 23.
9. History of South Dakota., 38, 45, 47.
10. History of South Dakota., 189, 197.
11. History of South Dakota., 58-59. This interpretation is consistent with the one offered by Littlefield. There are other passages from Baum's work that suggest his ambivalence toward technology. Baum was enthralled by electricity and even published a story on this theme entitled The Master Key: An Electric Fairytale (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1901).
12. Baum, New Wizard, 68, 190.
13. For accounts which connect the Cowardly Lion to Bryan, see Drier, “True Story,” Littlefield, “Wizard of Oz,” 372; and Rockoff, “The ‘Wizard of Oz’,” 748.
14. Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, 8 Nov. 1890 and 17 Jan. 1891.
15. Baum, New Wizard, Ch. 11.
16. To my knowledge, I am the first to note the numerical reference to 1894 in the Baum text. This reference further substantiates what other authors have suspected-that the disappointing return to the Emerald City after the defeat of the Wicked Witch is a reference to Coxey's Army's march on Washington. Baum, New Wizard, 189. On Coxey's army, see Carlos A. Schwantes, Coxey's Army: An American Odyssey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). Schwantes describes the marchers banners on p. 6, where he also mentions that Coxey brought his two-month-old son with him to Washington. The infant was named Legal Tender Coxey. With regard to organized labor, Baum may have been sympathetic to the Knights of Labor, who he praises in a brief piece in the 1 Nov. 1890 issue of the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer.
17. Baum, New Wizard, 248, 254.
18. Political metaphors may be seen as representing political identities and interests. On the use of metaphor to create meaning through disjunction, see Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto, 1977).
19. Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, 13 and 20 Dec. 1890.
20. Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, 3 Jan. 1891.
21. See chapter fourteen of Baum's New Wizard. The quote appears on p. 172.
22. Baum, New Wizard, 145, 151.
23. History of South Dakota., 159, 163.
24. Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1971).
25. Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), quotes taken from pp. 231, 230, and 238.
26. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California., 231.
27. Daniel Liestman, “The Chinese in the Black Hills, 1876-1932,” Journal of the West, 27. 1, (Jan. 1988), 74-83. The newspaper quote appears on p. 76. In the 25 Oct. 1890 issue of the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, a news article reports on a raid against opium dens in New York: “Chinamen were watching at every room on the upper floors to sneak them [prostitutes escaping the police] in and hide them.” These immigrants are represented not only as sneaky and watchful, but also as cowardly and barbaric. “There is a sub-cellar here [at a house in Chinatown] and the Chinamen retreat to it when they think the police are after them. Recently a dead Chinaman was taken from there by some of the tenants and thrown into the street.'’
28. Rockoff, “The ‘Wizard, of Oz,’”. The discussion of the “Crime of ‘73” appears on p. 750. For a similar argument about the validity of the antimonopolists’ economic vision, see Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks, Chs 3 and 5. The events surrounding the “Crime of ‘73” are discussed by Weinstein, Prelude to Populism: Origins of the Silver Issue, 1867-1878 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 8-32.
29. Baum, New Wizard, 25. There is an oft-told tale that Baum came up with the name Oz from the order of the lettering on his filing cabinets. While Michael Patrick Hearn has questioned this account as an easy after the fact explanation, what is interesting about the story is that it suggests, once the series was successful, Baum may have come to the books more in terms of their juvenile appeal than the elements of social satire present within them. See Hearn, ed., The Annotated Wizard of Oz, 103 n. 12.
30. The quote from Oklahoma appears in Gilbert C. Fite, “The Election of 1896,” in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections, Vol. ii, p. 178. See also Marion Butler, To Stop the Further Issuance of Bonds (Washington, 1896), 4.
31. Apparently there was a “green room” in the White House in the 1890s. This room was brought to the public's attention after an intruder's assault on the drapes and furniture in the room was reported by the national press in 1893. Schwantes, Coxey's Army, 3.
32. Culver, “What Manikins Want.” 102-03. This creative and provocation article offers an insightful reading of the Baum book which emphasizes the emergence of a mass consumer culture (to which Baum was both a witness, and a salesman, a participant) in the early twentieth century. Culver also appears to be one of the few scholars that have addressed Baum's chapter 20, “The Dainty China Country.” The quote from the “Our Landlady” column appears on p. 102 of the Culver article.
33. Baum, New Wizard, 173-75, 254-59.
34. Lawrence Goodwyn, the last chapter of The Populist Moment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Richard Slotkin explores a similar theme in Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (New York: Harper, 1992), Pts 1 and 2. Likewise, political economy historians like James Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), and Martin Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), speak of similar transitions.
35. See Hayden White, “Introduction : Tropology, Discourse, and the Modes of Human Consciousness,” in Tropics of Discourse : Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1978), 1-25. This summary of White's argument does not address the question of what a fact is, which is relevant both to White and to other social theorists writing on this subject. Nonetheless, I am willing to preserve some (culturally mediated) distance between material reality and cultural understandings. %& James Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve, and Stuart Culver, “What Manikins Want.'’
36. See Gretchen Ritter, “Third Party Alternatives and the Construction of Historical Coherence in the 1890s,” (unpublished, 1996).
37. When I talked about The Wizard of Oz at the CUNY Graduate Center in April 1995, someone in the audience suggested that it would be interesting to compare Oz to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The latter was also an enormously popular, politically imbued, children's tale. But this story, which was published in the 1850s before the Civil War, was appreciated mostly for the political lessons that it offered.
38. Note that this discussion is concerned with what is lost from Baum's 1900 version of Oz rather than what is gained in the 1930s MGM version.
39. The most significant role for the South under corporate liberalism came as part of the New Deal coalition. Given the seniority of southern Democrats in Congress (achieved because the South had a one-party system in which many citizens were excluded from political participation), they were able to limit the social democratic initiatives of the New Deal coalition and to retain a greater degree of local political control. Yet, from the perspective of economic and political pwoer, the South remained a laggard (e.g., with no postbellum elected presidents until 1976) until the Civil Rights movement began a process of political geographic realignment.
40. One recent article which attempts to bring the illiberal practices of American history back to the center of an analysis of American politics is Roger Smith's, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz; The Multiple Traditions in America,” American Political Science Review, 87. 3 (1993) : 549-66. See also footnote 8 above.
41. Augustine, The Confessions, book XII. The notion of a politics of care comes from Heidigger, Being, and Time. My attention to Augustine and Heidegger's writings on history and time comes from Paul Ricoeur's “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative,” in Ricoeur's A Ricoeur Reader (Toronto, 1992).