This NPR piece is a striking example of that. There was a phrase that stuck with me: "Removing the context is the essence of propaganda". So the situation all those people were in (on both sides) was scary as hell. (Read "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy to get the flavor.) Intending to frighten Mombi, who is returning from a trip, Tip creates a man out of wood, topped with a pumpkin for a. The Marvelous Land of Oz begins not long after the final scenes in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and follows the adventures of Tip, a young boy, whose guardian is the witch, Mombi. No, Native American attacks were happening all around him, and they were brutal as hell. The Marvelous Land of OzWritten 1904Buy on Amazon. "The Indians were doing nuthin'! They were sewing and making popcorn, and for no reason at all L. So let's not be childish and assume he's evil and this crap happened in a void. Slaughters that were occurring in his community, with people that he actually knew. He even concedes that the Indians have been wronged for centuries.īut never forget: He's reacting to massacres that were happening in his day and age. So let's be honest: both sides were killing people based on concepts of racial collectivism. To pretend that we wouldn't be affected by seeing a murdered baby and realizing that that baby was killed because the aboriginal peoples thought it had the wrong colored skin. We've already beaten down the aboriginal peoples of the continent, so we can afford to be magnanimous. Seeing that, and seeing it repeatedly, led to his attitude.īut by removing that context, you make it look like he just woke up, yawned, ate a bowl of cereal and said, "You know what? I'm going to be motivelessly racist today. Baum was probably reacting to one of these massacres, with babies with their heads bashed in and women decapitated. If you look at the time-period, you see that tons of whites were slaughtered.
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If you read "Little House on the Prairie" by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who learn that it's very different from the TV show in one major respect: the family are almost murdered by neighboring Indian tribes, who are angry at white encroachment. He wrote The Wizard of Oz to entertain children, not to lecture them about politics." It would be rather odd for Baum to then turn around and write a book supporting a position he had publicly repudiated.Īs Baum's biographer (Michael Patrick Hearn) wrote, "Baum had little faith in politicians, considering most of them to be, like the Wizard of Oz, humbugs.
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The 12 July 1896 edition of _The Chicago Times-Herald contains a poem by Baum supporting McKinley and decrying the populist "free silver" platform. Littlefield published his article "The Wizard of Oz: A Parable on Populism" in American Quarterly.īaum himself was not, as continually asserted, "a supporter of populism." In the 1896 presidential election, Baum backed William McKinley (and the gold standard), not William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic populist candidate. The notion of TWWoO as a populist tract didn't come about until 1964, when Henry M.
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Nobody in Baum's day, or for a good many years afterward, read or recognized Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" as a political allegory.