On Fri, 4 Feb 2000, Marilyn Harper wrote:

>      Larry--
>
>      I like the idea and the Cowardly Lion does look a bit like William
>      Jennings Bryan, but I don't buy it.
>
>      Having read MANY of the Oz books when my daughter was little, I can
>      and do testify that Frank Baum was a man of childike (I would say) and
>      wildly creative imagination--flying sofas, princesses that turn into
>      princes, etc.  I find it absolutely impossible to believe that there
>      were political connections to these things--he doesn't strike me as a
>      political person.
>
>      Also, how would trying to get home to Kansas fit into the "crown of
>      gold" scenario??

Actually, it's *cross* of gold and crown of thorns.  Bryan's famous speech
ended with: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of
thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."

My own experience as a child and adolescent with the Baum stories included
both affinity for and suspicion of the "North and South=Good, East and
West=Bad" duality.  For reasons independent of Oz, I went through a period
in which I regarded north and south streets as being morally superior to
east and west streets.  Later, as a teenager, I thought that Baum was
demonizing the seemingly wicked East and West Coasts, while seeing the
sturdy farmers of the North and South as comparative paragons of virtue.
I remember trying to explain this to my young sisters.

Note that in my message I pointed to the Free Silver thing as a theory; I
didn't vouch for it myself.  I heard about it from one of my email
correspondents.  When I did a web search, I was amazed at how much
discussion there was about it.  Among the web sites I listed, some
strongly support the theory, and others scoff at it.

The biggest problem with the theory, as Cecil Adams put it, is that in the
aggregate it doesn't make any sense.  The story as a whole doesn't add up
to any political point.

On the other hand, the self-styled debunkers mostly point to newly
discovered evidence that L. Frank Baum may not have been a Populist or
even a Democrat, contrary to his biographies.  That hardly disproves the
possibility that he may have incorporated political themes.

My own feeling is that Baum was a person of his time.  He was writing
while all this stuff (the free silver controversy) was going on all around
him, especially in South Dakota, and he could not help but be affected by
it.

In 1973, in a creative writing class, I wrote a little piece of fiction
about a very self-satisfied King who brutally suppressed his opponents.
We would all critique each others' work, so it was distributed to the
class, and the teacher began the discussion: "This is one of the better
pieces of satire about Richard Nixon that I've seen..."  I was
dumbfounded!  No, no, I said, this was the Middle Ages, not current
politics!

But then they started pointing out the parallels.  The king's most
troublesome subjects were in the NORTHEASTERN provinces, much as Boston
and New York were anti-Nixon.  And on and on.  There were embarrassingly
many of them, all completely unintentional.  Watergate was in the air, and
I had breathed it.  Clearly, the joke was on me -- and the teacher made
the point that the writer doesn't always know the meaning of his or her
own work.

---
Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com