Whatever the Color, Follow the Money
For too long now, I have been remiss in a promise I made to alobar. For too long, I have been contemplating writing about L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the money parables others have found in it, but not writing it. So, fresh from a road trip to the Oregon Country Fair, today I sat down to actually write it . . . and found out that many, many other have already done so.
Still, having pored through the material available online, and having ordered holds on what books on the topic my library offers, I do think that I can contribute a worth-while synopsis and toss in a few observations I have not seen in the conclusions written to date. Let's follow that Yellow Brick Road and see where it might lead.
First, very few if anyone seriously considered the book anything but fantasy until Henry M. Littlefield published The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism in 1964. From Littlefield's article:
Baum's most thoughtful devotees see in it only a warm, cleverly written fairy tale. Yet the original Oz book conceals an unsuspected depth, and it is the purpose of this study to demonstrate that Baum's immortal American fantasy encompasses more than heretofore believed. For Baum created a children's story with a symbolic allegory implicit within its story line and characterizations. The allegory always remains in a minor key, subordinated to the major theme and readily abandoned whenever it threatens to distort the appeal of the fantasy. But through it, in the form of a subtle parable, Baum delineated a Midwesterner's vibrant and ironic portrait of this country as it entered the twentieth century.
Littlefield, a high school teacher, missed quite a few historical connections, but that has over the years been remedied has other authors, inspired by Littlefield's observations, have done further research.
To understand the World of Oz, though, one must first travel back in time to Abraham Lincoln's preparation for the Civil War. When Lincoln first approached banking interests for war loans to fund the Union, the interest rates reached over 30%; accepting these loans would have bankrupted the North (as it most certainly did the South, which did accept such funding). Lincoln's solution: to print the nation's own money, bypassing the banks entirely. From an entry covering the United States Note:
On January 16, 1862, in a private meeting with President Lincoln, Edmund Dick Taylor advised him to issue greenbacks as legal tender. . . . Congressman and Buffalo banker Elbridge G. Spaulding prepared a bill, based on the Free Banking Law of New York, that eventually became the National Banking Act of 1863. . . . Recognizing, however, that his proposal would take many months to pass Congress, in early February Spaulding introduced another bill to permit the U.S. Treasury to issue $150 million* in notes as legal tender. . . . Despite strong opposition, President Lincoln signed the First Legal Tender Act, enacted February 25, 1862, into law, authorizing the issuance of United States Notes as a legal tender-the paper currency soon to be known as "greenbacks."
(*NB: Other sources place the US Note issue amount at $450 million.)
After Lincoln was assassinated, the banks worked laws into effect to reduce the number of US Notes issued, such as the Contraction Act of 1866, which the treasury to call in and retire some of Lincoln's greenbacks, and the Coinage Act of 1873, which demonetized silver currency and made the US a de facto gold standard country. Western silver mining interests and others trying to fight banking trusts by expanding government-issued currency decried this latter law as the "Crime of '73," and used this name as a rallying cry in future protests and campaigns.
In his movie The Secret of Oz, Bill Still notes that between 1866 and 1886 the US money supply fell from $1.8 billion, or $50.46 per capita, to $400 million . . . just $6.67 per capita, "an 84% decline in just 20 years" (Secret of Oz, 44 minutes, 20 seconds from beginning).
The country in prolonged economic contraction and so obviously controlled by banking interests sparked enormous interest in and protest against issues regarding the currency. In her book The Web of Debt, Ellen Brown describes the political scene:
In every presidential election between 1872 and 1896, there was a third national party running on a platform of financial reform. Typically organized under the auspices of labor or farmer organizations, these were parties of the people rather than the banks. They included the Populist Party, the Greenback and Greenback Labor Parties, the Labor Reform Party, the Antimonopolist Party, and the Union Labor Party. They advocated expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reform of the banking system, and democratic control of the financial system.
Money reform advocates today tend to argue that the solution to the country's financial woes is to return to the "gold standard," which required that paper money be backed by a certain weight of gold bullion. But to the farmers and laborers who were suffering under its yoke in the 1890s, the gold standard was the problem. They had been there and done it and knew it didn't work.
Later proven in congressional documents to have been coordinated by bankers to call in loans and refuse new ones, a bank manipulation caused the Panic of 1893, setting the US economy into further chaos (see The Secret of Oz). This fed the Populist uprisings and later brought many populist and progressive candidates into office. In 1894, Jacob Coxey led thousands in his "Army of the Commonweal in Christ," a band most referred to by its leader as Coxey's Army, to Washington, D.C. There they hoped to petition the government to restore the US Note and help the new Greenbacks to fix the economic problems; instead, they were met by the army and arrested for "walking on the grass of the United States Capitol."
In 1896, William Jennings Bryan secured the Democratic nomination for President largely with his "Cross of Gold" speech at the Democratic National Convention, where he famously concluded, "You shall not press upon the brow of labor a crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." (See The Secret of Oz to hear Bryan's voice re-enacting his speech.) "Silverite" Bryan lost to "Goldbug" McKinley, largely on rumors circulated in North Eastern factories that, if Bryan won, the factories would be shut down.
Bryan had as support someone who would, shall we say, later lionize the presidential candidate. Here we learn of a man who pretty much ignored direct political action. . . "[a]side from marching in a few torchlight parades for William Jennings Bryan. . . ." That man was L. Frank Baum.
What Littlefield started, others continued. Bryan became the Cowardly Lion, who joined a rag-tag marching bunch very similar to Coxey's Army. It was led by Dorothy, "Baum's Miss Everyman." Joining Dorothy and her pup was the Scarecrow, who represented farmers oppressed by the debt-money system, and the Tin Woodsman:
Once healthy and productive, the Woodman was cursed by the wicked Witch of the East, lost his dexterity, and accidentally hacked off his limbs. Each lost appendage was replaced with tin until the Woodman was made entirely of metal. In essence, the Witch of the East (big business) reduced the Woodman to a machine, a dehumanized worker who no longer feels, who has no heart. As such, the Tin Man represents the nation's workers, in particular the industrial workers with whom the Populists hoped to make common cause. His rusted condition parallels the prostrated condition of labor during the depression of 1890s; like many workers of that period, the Tin Man is unemployed. Yet, with a few drops of oil, he is able to resume his customary labors-a remedy akin to the "pump-priming" measures that Populists advocated.
(When one recalls that money is sometimes referred to as an economic lubricant, that last sentence makes a great deal more allegorical sense.)
Back to Dorothy. Unlike the MGM version most of us know, her slippers were silver; MGM was just showing off Technicolor when they changed them to ruby. There were a lot of changes that movie made from the book, most all of them worth learning. Without the book's story, the historical allegory makes almost no sense. Take her little dog, Toto, his name a play on words:
Dorothy's faithful dog represented the teetotaling Prohibitionists, an important part of the silverite coalition, and anyone familiar with the silverites' slogan "16 to 1"--that is, the ratio of sixteen ounces of silver to one ounce of gold--would have instantly recognized "Oz" as the abbreviation for "ounce."
Toto's collar even had possible allegorical significance: "Green, often in combination with gold, is also a recurrent image. Then as now, green was the color of paper money. . . . Toto wears a green collar that fades to white (silver), and later he receives a gold collar. . . ."
My favorite allegorical references come in the Emerald City. First, it was not actually green:
He opened the big box, and Dorothy saw that it was filled with spectacles of every size and shape. All of them had green glasses in them. The Guardian of the Gates found a pair that would just fit Dorothy and put them over her eyes. There were two golden bands fastened to them that passed around the back of her head, where they were locked together by a little key that was at the end of a chain the Guardian of the Gates wore around his neck. When they were on, Dorothy could not take them off had she wished, but of course she did not wish to be blinded by the glare of the Emerald City, so she said nothing.
(I emphasized.)
Glasses fastened by "golden bands" that turned everything green sounds a lot like green paper money backed by gold, at least to me (and others). When brought into the Palace of Oz, Dorothy was led to her room "through seven passages and up three flights of stairs," a strangely specific set of directions, until one remembers the famous Crime of '73.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is like a big puzzle of monetary history, one piece after another looking strange until it is fitted with its real-world historical context. I'll let you explore that puzzle yourself, rather than recapitulate every single interpretation here. Instead, I'll close by noting that after Littlefield's article, several came to debunk his thesis. One such debunking was noted here, after quoting the following poem Baum quoted in a Chicago newspaper:
When McKinley gets the chair, boys,
There'll be a jollification
Throughout our happy nation
And contentment everywhere!
Great will be our satisfaction
When the "honest money" faction
Seats McKinley in the chair!
No more the ample crops of grain
That in our granaries have lain
Will seek a purchaser in vain
Or be at mercy of the "bull" or "bear";
Our merchants won't be trembling
At the silverites' dissembling
When McKinley gets the chair!
When McKinley gets the chair, boys,
The magic word "protection"
Will banish all dejection
And free the workingman from every care;
We will gain the world's respect
When it knows our coin's "correct"
And McKinley's in the chair!
Hardly the writings of a silverite! Michael Patrick Hearn, the leading scholar on L. Frank Baum, quoted this poem in a recent letter to the New York Times. Hearn wrote that he had found "no evidence that Baum's story is in any way a Populist allegory"; Littlefield's argument, Hearn concluded, "has no basis in fact."
Really?!? When I read that poem, the scare quotes jumped out. If you embrace McKinley's honest money, why put it in suspect quotes? Same goes for calling gold-backed coin "correct." To me, this poem reads like pure sarcasm. The article Mr. Hearn published must have been taken at his word, though. "A month later, Henry M. Littlefield responded to Hearn's letter, agreeing that 'there is no basis in fact to consider Baum a supporter of turn-of-the-century Populist ideology.'" So much for our ability to recognize and appreciate sarcasm, it seems.
In conclusion, the beginning of Baum's book hit me with an element I doubt even Baum considered allegorical: "Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles."
If I ever get around to it, I hope to try and show how that might just be the most important second sentence to consider when trying to work out the details of our present economic challenges and puzzles involving monetary reform.
X-posted to talk_politics.
Still, having pored through the material available online, and having ordered holds on what books on the topic my library offers, I do think that I can contribute a worth-while synopsis and toss in a few observations I have not seen in the conclusions written to date. Let's follow that Yellow Brick Road and see where it might lead.
First, very few if anyone seriously considered the book anything but fantasy until Henry M. Littlefield published The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism in 1964. From Littlefield's article:
Baum's most thoughtful devotees see in it only a warm, cleverly written fairy tale. Yet the original Oz book conceals an unsuspected depth, and it is the purpose of this study to demonstrate that Baum's immortal American fantasy encompasses more than heretofore believed. For Baum created a children's story with a symbolic allegory implicit within its story line and characterizations. The allegory always remains in a minor key, subordinated to the major theme and readily abandoned whenever it threatens to distort the appeal of the fantasy. But through it, in the form of a subtle parable, Baum delineated a Midwesterner's vibrant and ironic portrait of this country as it entered the twentieth century.
Littlefield, a high school teacher, missed quite a few historical connections, but that has over the years been remedied has other authors, inspired by Littlefield's observations, have done further research.
To understand the World of Oz, though, one must first travel back in time to Abraham Lincoln's preparation for the Civil War. When Lincoln first approached banking interests for war loans to fund the Union, the interest rates reached over 30%; accepting these loans would have bankrupted the North (as it most certainly did the South, which did accept such funding). Lincoln's solution: to print the nation's own money, bypassing the banks entirely. From an entry covering the United States Note:
On January 16, 1862, in a private meeting with President Lincoln, Edmund Dick Taylor advised him to issue greenbacks as legal tender. . . . Congressman and Buffalo banker Elbridge G. Spaulding prepared a bill, based on the Free Banking Law of New York, that eventually became the National Banking Act of 1863. . . . Recognizing, however, that his proposal would take many months to pass Congress, in early February Spaulding introduced another bill to permit the U.S. Treasury to issue $150 million* in notes as legal tender. . . . Despite strong opposition, President Lincoln signed the First Legal Tender Act, enacted February 25, 1862, into law, authorizing the issuance of United States Notes as a legal tender-the paper currency soon to be known as "greenbacks."
(*NB: Other sources place the US Note issue amount at $450 million.)
After Lincoln was assassinated, the banks worked laws into effect to reduce the number of US Notes issued, such as the Contraction Act of 1866, which the treasury to call in and retire some of Lincoln's greenbacks, and the Coinage Act of 1873, which demonetized silver currency and made the US a de facto gold standard country. Western silver mining interests and others trying to fight banking trusts by expanding government-issued currency decried this latter law as the "Crime of '73," and used this name as a rallying cry in future protests and campaigns.
In his movie The Secret of Oz, Bill Still notes that between 1866 and 1886 the US money supply fell from $1.8 billion, or $50.46 per capita, to $400 million . . . just $6.67 per capita, "an 84% decline in just 20 years" (Secret of Oz, 44 minutes, 20 seconds from beginning).
The country in prolonged economic contraction and so obviously controlled by banking interests sparked enormous interest in and protest against issues regarding the currency. In her book The Web of Debt, Ellen Brown describes the political scene:
In every presidential election between 1872 and 1896, there was a third national party running on a platform of financial reform. Typically organized under the auspices of labor or farmer organizations, these were parties of the people rather than the banks. They included the Populist Party, the Greenback and Greenback Labor Parties, the Labor Reform Party, the Antimonopolist Party, and the Union Labor Party. They advocated expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reform of the banking system, and democratic control of the financial system.
Money reform advocates today tend to argue that the solution to the country's financial woes is to return to the "gold standard," which required that paper money be backed by a certain weight of gold bullion. But to the farmers and laborers who were suffering under its yoke in the 1890s, the gold standard was the problem. They had been there and done it and knew it didn't work.
Later proven in congressional documents to have been coordinated by bankers to call in loans and refuse new ones, a bank manipulation caused the Panic of 1893, setting the US economy into further chaos (see The Secret of Oz). This fed the Populist uprisings and later brought many populist and progressive candidates into office. In 1894, Jacob Coxey led thousands in his "Army of the Commonweal in Christ," a band most referred to by its leader as Coxey's Army, to Washington, D.C. There they hoped to petition the government to restore the US Note and help the new Greenbacks to fix the economic problems; instead, they were met by the army and arrested for "walking on the grass of the United States Capitol."
In 1896, William Jennings Bryan secured the Democratic nomination for President largely with his "Cross of Gold" speech at the Democratic National Convention, where he famously concluded, "You shall not press upon the brow of labor a crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." (See The Secret of Oz to hear Bryan's voice re-enacting his speech.) "Silverite" Bryan lost to "Goldbug" McKinley, largely on rumors circulated in North Eastern factories that, if Bryan won, the factories would be shut down.
Bryan had as support someone who would, shall we say, later lionize the presidential candidate. Here we learn of a man who pretty much ignored direct political action. . . "[a]side from marching in a few torchlight parades for William Jennings Bryan. . . ." That man was L. Frank Baum.
What Littlefield started, others continued. Bryan became the Cowardly Lion, who joined a rag-tag marching bunch very similar to Coxey's Army. It was led by Dorothy, "Baum's Miss Everyman." Joining Dorothy and her pup was the Scarecrow, who represented farmers oppressed by the debt-money system, and the Tin Woodsman:
Once healthy and productive, the Woodman was cursed by the wicked Witch of the East, lost his dexterity, and accidentally hacked off his limbs. Each lost appendage was replaced with tin until the Woodman was made entirely of metal. In essence, the Witch of the East (big business) reduced the Woodman to a machine, a dehumanized worker who no longer feels, who has no heart. As such, the Tin Man represents the nation's workers, in particular the industrial workers with whom the Populists hoped to make common cause. His rusted condition parallels the prostrated condition of labor during the depression of 1890s; like many workers of that period, the Tin Man is unemployed. Yet, with a few drops of oil, he is able to resume his customary labors-a remedy akin to the "pump-priming" measures that Populists advocated.
(When one recalls that money is sometimes referred to as an economic lubricant, that last sentence makes a great deal more allegorical sense.)
Back to Dorothy. Unlike the MGM version most of us know, her slippers were silver; MGM was just showing off Technicolor when they changed them to ruby. There were a lot of changes that movie made from the book, most all of them worth learning. Without the book's story, the historical allegory makes almost no sense. Take her little dog, Toto, his name a play on words:
Dorothy's faithful dog represented the teetotaling Prohibitionists, an important part of the silverite coalition, and anyone familiar with the silverites' slogan "16 to 1"--that is, the ratio of sixteen ounces of silver to one ounce of gold--would have instantly recognized "Oz" as the abbreviation for "ounce."
Toto's collar even had possible allegorical significance: "Green, often in combination with gold, is also a recurrent image. Then as now, green was the color of paper money. . . . Toto wears a green collar that fades to white (silver), and later he receives a gold collar. . . ."
My favorite allegorical references come in the Emerald City. First, it was not actually green:
He opened the big box, and Dorothy saw that it was filled with spectacles of every size and shape. All of them had green glasses in them. The Guardian of the Gates found a pair that would just fit Dorothy and put them over her eyes. There were two golden bands fastened to them that passed around the back of her head, where they were locked together by a little key that was at the end of a chain the Guardian of the Gates wore around his neck. When they were on, Dorothy could not take them off had she wished, but of course she did not wish to be blinded by the glare of the Emerald City, so she said nothing.
(I emphasized.)
Glasses fastened by "golden bands" that turned everything green sounds a lot like green paper money backed by gold, at least to me (and others). When brought into the Palace of Oz, Dorothy was led to her room "through seven passages and up three flights of stairs," a strangely specific set of directions, until one remembers the famous Crime of '73.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is like a big puzzle of monetary history, one piece after another looking strange until it is fitted with its real-world historical context. I'll let you explore that puzzle yourself, rather than recapitulate every single interpretation here. Instead, I'll close by noting that after Littlefield's article, several came to debunk his thesis. One such debunking was noted here, after quoting the following poem Baum quoted in a Chicago newspaper:
When McKinley gets the chair, boys,
There'll be a jollification
Throughout our happy nation
And contentment everywhere!
Great will be our satisfaction
When the "honest money" faction
Seats McKinley in the chair!
No more the ample crops of grain
That in our granaries have lain
Will seek a purchaser in vain
Or be at mercy of the "bull" or "bear";
Our merchants won't be trembling
At the silverites' dissembling
When McKinley gets the chair!
When McKinley gets the chair, boys,
The magic word "protection"
Will banish all dejection
And free the workingman from every care;
We will gain the world's respect
When it knows our coin's "correct"
And McKinley's in the chair!
Hardly the writings of a silverite! Michael Patrick Hearn, the leading scholar on L. Frank Baum, quoted this poem in a recent letter to the New York Times. Hearn wrote that he had found "no evidence that Baum's story is in any way a Populist allegory"; Littlefield's argument, Hearn concluded, "has no basis in fact."
Really?!? When I read that poem, the scare quotes jumped out. If you embrace McKinley's honest money, why put it in suspect quotes? Same goes for calling gold-backed coin "correct." To me, this poem reads like pure sarcasm. The article Mr. Hearn published must have been taken at his word, though. "A month later, Henry M. Littlefield responded to Hearn's letter, agreeing that 'there is no basis in fact to consider Baum a supporter of turn-of-the-century Populist ideology.'" So much for our ability to recognize and appreciate sarcasm, it seems.
In conclusion, the beginning of Baum's book hit me with an element I doubt even Baum considered allegorical: "Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles."
If I ever get around to it, I hope to try and show how that might just be the most important second sentence to consider when trying to work out the details of our present economic challenges and puzzles involving monetary reform.
X-posted to talk_politics.