The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not a book I have read. Naturally, parts of it have leaked into my consciousness from various sources – it’s a remarkably pervasive fountain of memes.
One of the NPR Planet Money podcasts (I believe it was) mentioned that The Wizard of Oz was full of allegories about gold, because Baum was a “gold bug” – one of those financial woowoos that believe that money only has value if it’s connected to piles of rare materials.
Did you know that? It was a surprise to me!
The Emerald City represents greenbacks. The mighty all-powerful wizard who resides in the city of greenbacks, who is just a sham with no real value, represents the central bank. “Gold bugs” hate central banks because they manipulate the value of money, and worship free markets because they manipulate the value of money. The yellow brick road, naturally, was an allegory for gold. The silver shoes are the ideal footwear for someone who is on the gold standard. I forget but I believe the cowardly lion also was a reference to William Jennings Bryan, the Tin Man represented steel workers and the scarecrow represented farmers, etc.
Apparently these interpretations are not universally accepted as correct; i.e.: Baum may have just written the story based on the popular zeitgeist, and it absorbed memes that way. That counter-argument seems a bit pat, to me. Rather than lift big chunks of text from other sources, here’s a bit [info] and you can go to the source if you want more.
Other putative allegorical devices of the book include the Wicked Witch of the West as a figure for the actual American West; if this is true, then the Winged Monkeys could represent another western danger: Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The King of the Winged Monkeys tells Dorothy, “Once we were a free people, living happily in the great forest, flying from tree to tree, eating nuts and fruit and doing just as we pleased without calling anybody master. […] This was many years ago, long before Oz came out of the clouds to rule over this land.”
“Uh oh…” I hear you thinking, as you connect the dots: “gold bug” -> “gospel of wealth” -> “white man’s burden” -> “white supremacist”
Baum appears to have been one of those typical racist American buttwipes who was trying to embed white supremacy in children’s literature so that kids would absorb it through their skin. That tactic has succeeded spectacularly, of course.
In fact, Baum proposed in two editorials he wrote in December 1890 for his newspaper, the Saturday Pioneer, the total genocidal slaughter of all remaining indigenous peoples. “The Whites,” Baum wrote, “by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation?”
By law of conquest, eh? He’s lucky that the Vikings didn’t annihilate Baum’s German or English ancestors; had they done so it would have only been fair and it would have saved us all from a great big steamshovel-full of schlock.
Baum grew up rich; his daddy was a successful oil-driller. Are you surprised?
By the way, I consider being a “gold bug” to be self-refuting. Why does gold have value? Scarcity. There’s nothing inherently valuable about gold – it’s a good conductor and it’s pretty and it’s fairly malleable but it’s not as cool as titanium or aluminum as far as I am concerned. Of course aluminum was very valuable for a long time because it seldom occurred in large quantities naturally. As soon as a process for producing it cheaply came along, its value went to near zero, comparatively. So, the premise of being a “gold bug” is that media of exchange should be tied to something of real value, and not just paper, but something tied to a market does not have a “real value.” Also, markets exist so that markets can be manipulated, which is what the “gold bugs” accuse central bankers of doing with fiat currency. On the rare occasions I have discussed this with “gold bugs” I usually ask them how they feel about diamonds. That’s a scarcity-based item of value that turns out to be worth about as much as the electricity necessary to make it; carbon is cheap. The vast edifice of diamond-value depends on careful manipulation of the market price by a central bank corporate cartel. If you want some fun, ask a “gold bug” how they would index the value of a diamond to a bar of gold, supposing we wanted to have a diamond-based currency. Either “gold bugs” don’t understand economics (that’s OK, nobody seems to) (I just wish they would stop pretending) or they are much, much, smarter than we sheeple. It’s also fun to ask them about bitcoin – “gold bugs” seem to like bitcoin because they seem to be as ignorant about computer security as they maybe are about economics. Bitcoin is about scarcity without having anything of actual value – what do you even call that?
I grew up reading C.S. Lewis, not realizing that he had forklifted a bunch of christian memes into what would have otherwise been a tolerable children’s adventure book. My dad casually mentioned that, when I was halfway through the series, and it ruined them pretty quickly and – I believe – began my lifetime aversion and sensitivity to propaganda.
Thanks to jrkrideau@[stderr] for suggesting I review some L. Frank Baum books. Unfortunately, I haven’t read any. But thanks for the suggestion!
OK, that’s fascinating – I did not realize all that about the Wizard of Oz or the author. Now, I do wish the price of gold would come down; it’s a lovely metal and I love working in it but only very rarely have the opportunity to do so, because most of my customers simply can’t afford it. In fact when the prices were lower, years ago, I would occasionally cast a piece in 14k just for fun. I sure can’t afford to do that these days.
I too grew up reading C.S. Lewis – and then one day I ran in to the breakdown of the books by Ana Mardoll: http://www.anamardoll.com/2011/02/narnia-narnia-deconstruction-index-post.html I was pretty incredulous at how much BS got shoveled into those books. With the short break down here of Wizard of Oz, I’m pretty sure there is just as much in there. Child indoctrination at its worst.
kestrel@#1:
I wonder if C.S. Lewis was also a white supremacist?
No, I think I’m not going to search that out, right now. I’d guesstimate it’s 98% likely: he was successful, white, American, and at that time period the US was undergoing its first imperial expansion, buttressed by white supremacist ideology all the way.
In fact, I’m not going to do a mental review of the Narnia books looking for racist memes. Because I don’t want to make my day any shittier than it has to be.
I’m with you on the price of gold. Shakudo is so pretty and I could have so much fun with it, except the
bitcoin bubblersgold bugs have made it prohibitively expensive to experiment with.Some other things about L. Frank Baum:
Freethought Trail: Baum, Frank L.
L. Frank Baum, Freethought Firebrand?
@Marcus, #2: C.S. Lewis was British… but yeah, definitely had that colonialist idea about white European males.
And yes, it was incredibly depressing to realize just how horrid some of my previously favorite parts of those books were absolutely awful. Ah, the innocence of childhood…
I had heard various versions of this before. One version has it that the Wicked Witch of the West represented the western bankers. They only had power over the people of the west (the Winkies) due to the ongoing drought; thus, the witch was defeated by water.
I don’t recall hearing the flying monkeys=native Americans before. If so, it actually lets Baum off the hook for racism a bit, since the monkeys aren’t actually malevolent in the book — they only serve the Wicked Witch because she has the magic cap that a different evil witch enchanted to control them. At the end, Glinda sets them free from slavery. Then again, the freedom>slavery>freedom narrative suggests they might represent blacks instead, so I guess not off the hook after all.
The biographies I’ve read of Baum generally try to downplay that editorial by saying, “Oh, he was very young and just trying to goose the circulation of his newspaper.” Not much of an excuse (he was 34!), but perhaps he grew out of his genocidal impulses eventually.
The second book is pretty explicitly anti-suffragette (an all-girl army takes over the land of Oz, but does a terrible job of running it). It also features a transgender protagonist, though — throughout the entire book she is a boy, but she finds out at the end that she is actually a girl who has been transformed into a boy in infancy. She is transformed back to her original form and spends all the rest of the books happily as Oz’s queen. It’s hard not to read some wish-fulfillment in that, especially since he hardly ever uses male protagonists for the rest of the series.
I’ve never read the books, like most I’m just familiar with the movie. That said, I love what Gregory Maguire did with the whole Oz thing through his Wicked book series.
Oh “Oz” is even believed to symbolize the troy ounce of gold.
Yes, and the sad part is that all the crap is so pervasive that it’s all over the place, simultaneously it’s also well enough hidden to ensure that the average child cannot easily spot how they are being indoctrinated. Sometimes there’s even room for plausible deniability (the virtuous protagonist just happens to be a white male, his opponents just happen to not be white males).
And it’s not just racism. It’s a whole plethora of crap. Consider the usually fairytale plot. A distressed and helpless female (often a princess) needs saving. Or all those quests to put the rightful king on the throne. Smarter protagonists would simply let the dragon eat the whole royal family and attempt to establish a better and more democratic government instead of aristocracy.
The same goes for me. I also read some of his books as a child without realizing what crap was hidden in there.
Oh, no, no, no, no!!! Man made diamonds aren’t the real deal, they are inherently different and inferior to the natural ones. Real diamonds are the nature’s miracle; they are rare, eternal, and luxurious. Man made diamonds are inauthentic and used to scam buyers who don’t understand the true value of the real ones. After all, only blood diamonds are forever. /sarcasm
I was going to say that I don’t get this, in my opinion, silly custom to buy diamond wedding rings (and diamond jewellery in general), but I do understand it—genius marketing campaigns can make rational consumers buy pointless things and, as a consequence, fund wars, kill innocent people who happen to have black skin, and destroy the environment.
Speaking of pointless waste of resources, edible gold leaf really bothers me. Gold is rare on this planet and mining it causes environmental pollution. So humans mine it just to poop it and flush it down the toilet. I’m fine with using gold for artworks and jewellery. After all, the artwork is intended to last a long time and bring joy for every person who looks at it. But flushing it down the toilet in human poop, that’s just such a sad waste of a valuable resource.
Yes, me too, gold is fun to use for artworks. Gold leaf, paintings done with shell gold, metalpoint drawings made in gold. . . It’s sad that imitation gold leaf cannot be used in the same way as one made from real gold (due to the imitation gold leaf tarnishing). Well, at least I can use gold for metalpoint drawings. The technique utilizes so little metal, that a single $50 gold wire lasts a very long time.
In modern times a lot of gold bugs seem to have migrated to Bitcoin because there is an upper limit on the number of Bitcoins built into the protocol; it seems you cannot visit a Bitcoin (or general cryptocurrency) forum, apparently, without seeing some kind of spittle-flecked rant about “fiat currency”. David Gerard’s blog and accompanying book, Attack of the 50ft Blockchain digs into the ideological underpinnings of Bitcoin in Austrian school economics via online libertarianism; in this he draws from David Golumbia’s book, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism. I wonder how many dabbling in crypocurrencies realise how out-there the political and economic ideas behind this stuff is.
I will attempt to derail by reminding you all of the beauty of anodized titanium (oooh, pretty surface colors) and the utility of dyed anodized aluminum. And the anodizing process is generally safer* than anything else done in metal working, except maybe tapping decorative patterns in.
*”Never let the anode and cathode pieces touch each other; short-circuit arc welding is a technique not covered here.” — Mr. Titanium
With certain preconceptions, and a particular attitude, and a good dose of the fundamental attribution error, and an USAnian perspective, I suppose it could be seen that way.
My only exposure to that work was the movie, which I saw when I and my three sisters were little ones and my (single, divorced, Catholic) mum took the opportunity to take some time off minding us (obs, I only deduced this after the fact, many years later) and allowed some Mormon missionaries to host us (with a bunch of other childred) for a screening of the film* (sometime around 1973, in Adelaide, South Australia) — I remember it was supposed to be a big deal and they did give us a bowl of ice-cream (so it was not entirely a loss), though it was a disappointing experience. My impression was that it was a shitty movie, until it went to colour, whenceupon it became mildly entertaining, if stupid and childish. Also, the fucking singing was very mockable. But I did get what I thought was the intended message, which was “be satisfied with what you have”.
None of the alleged racist messaging made any impression either on me nor on my sisters, we all thought it was silly if somewhat entertaining film.
(Need I add that they rang my mom and we left early, because I became (ahem) disruptive? :))
They’re pretty fucking laboured. So, duh.
(Relatedly, Tolkien outright denied TLOTR was an allegory for WW1)
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* They also left a copy of the book of Mormon, which they assured me was an entertaining and exciting story. Heh. I had a go at reading that dreck, and when they returned, I emphatically expressed my opinion is my youthful way, which is to say, rather uncharitably (but honestly), since they asked. Never had any more interaction with them in that household.
dashdsrdash, you’re not derailing. But I surely don’t get whatever you ostensibly seek to intimate.
(Care to clarify?)
Maybe dashdsrdash meant to comment in one of Marcus’s metallurgy threads.
chigau, maybe, but then it wouldn’t be an attempted derail, would it?
John Morales
I never understand any of that metal stuff.
dashdsrdash could be offering a dire insult among the blacksmithing crowd.
chigau, well, more arty than smithing (artyfacts?), but thus my parenthetical.
That said, at least Marcus works to seek aesthetics within the constraints of form and function. That I can respect.
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Also, I must now concede that dashdsrdash has achieved a derail, as demonstrated by our exchange.
(No biggie, but)
re: the attempted derailment by dashdsrdash: I think what is being alluded to is the beauty of gold when compared to that of titanium and aluminum, and yes, you can make them very interesting colors. However… there is more to it than that, dashdsrdash! Gold is amazingly easy to coerce into doing one’s will. That’s part of the joy in working it, not merely the beauty. (Although it is beautiful too I must admit, even though I’m not a “gold” person.)
Very sadly I am allergic to titanium so I have no interest in working it. Aluminum is doable but not very interesting to me personally. As far as safety? Not sure I agree with your statement. Hammers can be dangerous, true, if you smash your hand or drop them on your toe… but normal cold forging is very safe indeed. No arc welding is even possible with normal forging, polishing and finishing most metals.
Maybe dashsdrdash thinks the yellow brick road would have been nicer as the anodized titanium brick road.
I have 24″ of victorian derail in my metals archive. It’s work-hardened steel – simply beautiful stuff… uh, how dat for derail?
I don’t think that it was supposed to be anti-suffragette — wasn’t Baum’s mother-in-law a suffragette/proto-feminist, with whom he got along well?
I also don’t recall General Jinjur being any worse of a ruler than the Scarecrow had been. But there were, as I recall, a few scenes where the men were portrayed as doing the household chores formerly done by women.
Another Baum book that did some possibly interesting stuff with gender was John Dough and the Cherub. John Dough is a literal human-size man made of gingerbread (not a cookie cutout; rather a crafted dough sculpture), brought to life by magic. He’s made with dough clothes that look like a formal suit of the 1900s, and is treated as male throughout the book, despite the fact that the baker who sculpted him almost certainly did not make him anatomically correct under his clothes. On the other hand, Chick the Cherub is a human child about eight years old who wears a unisex pajama-like outfit, and whose gender is never revealed in the book; I think there are occasional uses of “it” as a pronoun.
But content note for racism in the book. There’s a wooden cigar-store American Indian (we are not told how he came to life), who is portrayed with the stereotypical appearance and behaviors held by white Americans of Indians.
Another racist bit I remembered from others of the Oz books: Baum explicitly portrays Hottentots as jolly, playful & childlike (Patchwork Girl of Oz), and also as subhuman (Rinkitink in Oz). There may well be other tropes that are not coming immediately to mind.
Regardless of what Baum may have intended with his symbolism, I don’t quite see how reading The Wizard of Oz would result in a child becoming a staunch advocate of the gold standard. If kids can’t yet grasp the concepts behind the symbols, how can they have an effect?
To a child, the Yellow Brick Road is not made of gold bars, but bricks like the houses or sidewalks in their neighborhood that are mysteriously yellow and not red or brown. Emerald City isn’t greenbacks, it’s a beautiful crystal palace, which is cool because it’s not something you see every day. I’m not saying propagandistic children’s literature has no effect (sexism, racism, nationalism and such can be communicated to kids that way quite efficiently, but those are part of kids’ experience of the world even if they don’t have a name for them yet). It’s just that obscure symbolism of concepts that are equally obscure to children seem to be simply exercises in self-indulgence on the part of the author. I don’t see the harm in that, except insofar as the author might be successfully proselytizing the parents through their children’s literature. But in the case of Oz even adults fail to see the symbolism to the point that experts can’t agree on what the symbolism symbolizes, so I don’t see the problem.
You can’t swing a dead cat in some circles without hitting a Baum theory. His books are socialist! They’re pro-capitalism! They’re anti-war! They’re pro-war!
One thing I can say is that Baum was a feminist in life. He and his wife were active in supporting feminist causes. He was actually the secretary of a local women’s suffrage group. At lot of his views wouldn’t seem feminist today, of course, but that would apply to everyone at the time. This seems contradicted by the second Oz book, but that was meant not as a critique of feminism itself, but as a critique of what he considered flaws in the some parts of the feminist movement. The army is incompetent because it is ALL-women, symbolizing those that advocate female superiority. The very same book then ends with the now-female Ozma taking over, advocating equality, and leading men and women into an egalitarian utopia (well, until the next book). Subsequent books featured an all-male army that was also rather ineffective. Of course, MOST government institutions in Oz books end up being rather ineffective. I guess Baum was secretly a libertarian. : – )
My attempt at chaos partially succeeded. I was riffing off of “it’s a good conductor and it’s pretty and it’s fairly malleable but it’s not as cool as titanium or aluminum”.
I like the visuals of an anodized titanium road, but it wouldn’t retain beauty for long. Gold, of course, would be a terrible road surface.
Further complicating the symbology is the fact that the Emerald City isn’t actually green at all. All visitors and inhabitants, even animals, have special glasses locked onto their heads, supposedly to protect their eyes from the gorgeousness of all the emeralds. Of course, when you take off the glasses, the city, while still quite beautiful, is no longer exclusively green. I don’t know what the heck that would symbolize.
Ozma gets rid of the spectacles, but it’s still caused the Emerald City. In fact, according to the Ozpedia, she got rid of money entirely. (It’s been a while since I’ve read the books.)
On the subject of the values of things, there is a story in my family of an ancestor who was given a choice, at his 19th-century retirement, of a cane with a handle made either of platinum or aluminum, then of equivalent value. He chose aluminum because he thought it was cooler. I don’t know what happened to the cane, alas.
If I was going to tie a currency to something real that has actual value, the obvious choice would be energy. 1000 megajoule coins make a gigajoule note …..
Unless it’s illustrating hypocrisy, this sentence makes no sense, but I can’t guess what it should actually say.
Huh. I read The Wizard of Oz a couple of years ago, and I found it annoying and a bit of a slog. That could be because I already knew the basic story. Either way, neither the book nor the movie washed my brain into advocating for the gold standard – but then, just because the symbolism is in the book, doesn’t mean it’s meant to be an educational material. People can’t help writing what they know, and all the imagery and storyline they come up with is from their own imagination – saturated with their own biases and beliefs, fears and preferences, so it’s not surprising that all this gold standard stuff can be teased out of the text (the racism is there, too – it’s hard not to see it, once you take a closer look). But that’s a far cry from saying the lessons are absolutely intentional, and that the Oz books are an introductory manual in someone’s idea of economics.
As for goldbugs and bitcoin, I would say there’s definitely an association: the one true goldbug I know has gone into bitcoin with a vengeance. And he’s also got a strong libertarian streak, but I don’t know if that’s related or not. #anecdata?
I was thinking about the whole “goldbug” interpretation of Wizard, and it occurred to me that it made no sense because Baum never wrote anything else suggesting any kind of interest in monetary systems. Contrast that with C. S. Lewis, who not only wrote the Narnia books to be explicitly Christian in symbolism, but also wrote much nonfiction that was deliberately pro-Christian, and wrote other works of fiction to be pro-Christian (The Space Trilogy; the Screwtape Letters, etc). Christianity was the core of Lewis, and it informed all of his creative output.
Baum’s nonfiction includes a book about stamp collecting, a book about chickens, a book about decorating shop windows . . . nothing about money/gold/fiat currency vs hard currency
I’m pretty sure the goldbug interpretation is apophenia.
Just one example that springs to mind from the Narnia books: the Calormenes are a pretty nasty stereotype of (a colonial British version of) generic-Middle-Eastern people.
Owlmirror@#29:
I was thinking about the whole “goldbug” interpretation of Wizard, and it occurred to me that it made no sense because Baum never wrote anything else suggesting any kind of interest in monetary systems.
That’s a really good point. In my experience “gold bugs” won’t shut up about it – so we’d expect that he’d have offered endless opinions on the topic, elsewhere. Any your point regarding Lewis is also well-taken.
On the other hand (how many hands do I have?) the allegorical references seem plentiful and they can be formed into a narrative. Now I’m wondering if it’d be possible to analyze some other random book in the same sort of way. Perhaps Ayn Rand… no. Never mind.
ridana@#27:
Unless it’s illustrating hypocrisy, this sentence makes no sense, but I can’t guess what it should actually say.
I was trying to be confusing, to simulate the kind of confusion that “gold bugs” leave in me, when I’ve tried to sort out what they believe.
I see. Well, you succeeded! : )
Take a look at Baum’s “The Woggle-Bug Book”. As Wikipedia describes it, “Baum’s text has been controversial for its use of ethnic humor stereotypes.” Including Swedes. See http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21914/21914-h/21914-h.htm .
Marcus:
Now I’m wondering if it’d be possible to analyze some other random book in the same sort of way. Perhaps Ayn Rand… no. Never mind.
There’s no need. In each book, she has at least one of her characters very plainly explain what she means, in a long, boring speech.
But yeah, no.
The one hand, the other hand, and the gripping hand.