Huh, I though it was just FDR generated propaganda to get

Quote:

Historian Quentin Taylor sees additional metaphors, including:
The Scarecrow as a representation of American farmers and their troubles in the late 19th century

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_inter...zard_of_Oz

The Tin Man representing the industrial workers, especially those of American steel industries

The Cowardly Lion as a metaphor for William Jennings Bryan

Taylor also claimed a sort of iconography for the cyclone: it was used in the 1890s as a metaphor for a political revolution that would transform the drab country into a land of color and unlimited prosperity. It was also used by editorial cartoonists of the 1890s to represent political upheaval.[10]

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."[9]

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?"[13][14]

Other writers have used the same evidence to lead to precisely opposite allegorical interpretations.[7]

Apart from intentional symbolism, scholars have speculated on the sources of Baum's ideas and imagery. The "man behind the curtain" could be a reference to automated store window displays of the sort famous at Christmas season in big city department stores; many people watching the fancy clockwork motions of animals and mannequins thought there must be an operator behind the curtain pulling the levers to make them move (Baum was the editor of the trade magazine read by window dressers).[15]

Additional allegories have been developed, without claims that they were originally intended by Baum. The text has been treated as a theosophical allegory.[16] In 1993, W. Geoffrey Seeley recast the story as an exercise in treachery, suggesting the supposed "Good Witch Glinda" used an innocent, ignorant patsy (Dorothy) to overthrow both her own sister witch (Witch of the West) and the Wizard of Oz, leaving herself as undisputed master of all four corners of Oz: North, East, West and South (and presumably the Emerald City). She even showed her truest "Machiavellian brilliance" by allowing the story to be entitled after the weakest of her three opponents.

Glinda could have told Dorothy that the "silver slippers would easily do the job [of returning Dorothy to her beloved home] but decided that a destabilizing force such as Dorothy might be just the thing to shake up her other rival [The Wizard of Oz]."[17] Kassinger, in her book Gold: From Greek Myth to Computer Chips, purports that "The Wizard symbolizes bankers who support the gold standard and oppose adding silver to it... Only Dorothy's silver slippers can take her home to Kansas," meaning that by Dorothy not realizing that she had the silver slippers the whole time, Dorothy, or "the westerners," never realized they already had a viable currency of the people.[18]