(Minor spoilers ahead for both The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Wicked)
I recently went to see the movie adaptation of Wicked (part 1) with a friend who had never seen The Wizard of Oz in any of its incarnations. I was surprised to hear she didn’t know the original story, given how influential it has been to American media. It’s inspired stage adaptations, movies, TV shows, and lots of parodies — maybe because it’s so imaginative, maybe because so few other stories since have been allowed to enter the public domain.
In any case, it gave her friends and I a chance to fill her in on the references she missed, and sparked some conversations about themes in the movie. It also gave me an excuse to talk about the theory that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written by L. Frank Baum in 1900, was a political allegory.
”The Wizard of Oz” and fiat currency
A theory put forth by Henry Littlefield, and discussed further in The Historian’s Wizard of Oz by Ranjit S. Dighe, is that the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is an allegory for the gold and silver monetary standards. For what it’s worth, current scholarly consensus is that the parallels are more likely coincidence than intentional inclusions by Baum, but in any case, here’s the summary:
Dorothy is transported to the land of Oz (ounces?), where she dons the silver shoes—the iconic ruby slippers weren’t introduced until the technicolor film—and journeys down the yellow brick road (symbolizing gold) making new friends along the way. This brings her to the Emerald city (symbolizing greenback paper money), a supposed utopia that turns out to be hollow and fake. She meets the Wizard and finds that he is a fraud. In the end, the magic that brings her home was with her all along — the silver shoes.
For context, when the book came out in 1900, the Coinage Act of 1873 would have still been on a lot of Americans’ minds. Prior to this act, Americans who owned gold or silver bullion could get their metals struck into dollar coins by the US mint. The Coinage Act phased out the silver dollar coin, effectively giving preference to gold and ending “bimetallism” in the US. 1873 also marked a year of economic depression and financial crisis now known to historians as the Panic of 1873 though at the time it was known as the Great Depression (the 1929 financial crash would later steal that title). The deflation that resulted from the new gold standard, and the losses felt by miners and investors who found their silver suddenly drop in value both contributed to the depression, though they were not the only factors.
Knowing this political context gives some weight to the idea that turn-of-the-century Americans, following the “cyclone” of economic disruption, might have seen bringing back the silver standard as a “magic spell” to return them to more familiar times.
”The Wizard of Oz” and fascism
The more modern telling, Wicked, originally a book written by Gregory Maguire in 1995 and later adapted for Broadway by Stephen Schwartz in 2003, is also political allegory. In this case, we don’t need to speculate or theorize. Wicked clearly warns against the dangers of fascism, and wears that fact proudly on its sleeve.
A charismatic Wizard blames animals for all the problems in Oz, rather than address their root causes. His and Madame Morrible’s propaganda urges the people follow a black-and-white morality of “goodness” and “wickedness” marked by an extreme intolerance of otherness. We see this play out in the intimidation tactics and systemic violence levied against Professor Dillamond, the Cowardly Lion, and the other animals. We see it in the way Elphaba is ostracized and vilified both for looking different and for daring to stand up for the oppressed.
Wicked the Broadway show hit the stage amid the Iraq War, and used the opportunity to take some well-aimed shots at the Bush administration. We the audience are invited to draw parallels between the Wizard’s anti-animal crusade and the Bush administration’s scapegoating of Muslims. Broadway’s Glinda pointedly refers to Nessarose’s death as a “regime change”, mirroring the president’s rhetoric in overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
Lessons for 2025
I’m far from the first to have noticed how relevant the political allegory in Wicked is to the Trump administration’s fascist machinations. One only need replace “talking animals” with “immigrants and trans people” in the narrative to see it. What’s strange to me is how relevant the theorized allegory about money from The Wizard of Oz seems. Trump is causing tremendous damage to the economy, to global trade, and to faith in the dollar. His cryptocurrency ventures, built on hype, speculation, and hucksterism, seem to ask that we pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, but perhaps the magic we need is in the financial system we’ve had all along.
Allegories can’t predict the future, nor should we expect works of fiction to contain the answers we need to present-day crises, but they can clue us into historical sentiments we might have otherwise missed.