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...The Wonderful Wizard of Oz reflected Baum's belief in theosophy, a spiritualist/occultist quasi-religious movement that was popular in the late nineteenth century. Specifically, the book emphasized an aspect of theosophy that Norman Vincent Peale would later call "the power of positive thinking": theosophy led to "a new upbeat and positive psychology" that "opposed all kinds of negative thinking--especially fear, worry, and anxiety." It was through this positive thinking, and not through any magic of the Wizard, that Dorothy and her companions (as well as everyone else in Oz) got what they wanted. "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was an optimistic secular theraputic text," wrote Leach. "It helped make people feel at home in America's new industrial economy, and it helped them appreciate and enjoy, without guilt, the new consumer abundance and way of living produced by that economy." Leach concluded that "the book both reflected and helped create a new cultural consciousness--a new way of seeing and being in harmony with the new industrial order."
The Rise and Fall of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a "Parable on Populism"
by David B. Parker
published in the JOURNAL OF THE GEORGIA ASSOCIATION OF HISTORIANS, vol. 15 (1994), pp. 49-63.
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L. Frank Baumn
[From American Theosophist 74 (1986:270-73)]
JOHN ALEGO
© 2004 Online Teosofiska Kompaniet Malmö
"What is not so well known, however, is Baum's interest in theosophy. Michael Patrick Hearn, one of the best of Baum's biographers, has made the most extensive, and virtually the only, acknowledgment of that interest..."
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Over the rainbow
The Wizard of Oz captured the optimism of America at the start of the 20th century - so why was it banned for decades in US schools? As a stage version opens in London, Marina Warner reflects on the visionary ideals on which the Emerald City was built
Saturday July 19, 2008
The Guardian
'A modernised fairytale' ... a still from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Photograph: Allstar/Getty
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2291662,00.html
(...) L Frank Baum, the writer who invented Oz, moved his family to Chicago two years before in order to be there for the opening of the World's Fair, and his Land of Oz is buoyed by the same determined optimism of America at the turn of the century. The fair pressed sincere wonderment into knowledge and power, and armchair tourism into global entrepreneurism; it also brought the outside world home to America - far-distant peoples were exhibited in person, in mock-ups of their culture; it displayed the astonishing technologies and discoveries of the time, and included a Women's Pavilion, where the different roles of women all over the globe were explored and Mary Cassatt painted a beautiful cycle (since lost) about female activities. Much of the fair expressed values that haven't lasted and now seem downright distasteful. But in 1893, it promised the New Jerusalem, and it made a deep impression on visitors, its influence spreading far and wide in different quintessential American expressions of hope. From initial gawping and cries of "Ooh!" and "Aah!", the fair set out to fashion the future; Baum's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which first appeared in 1900, exudes the same spirit.
In a short preface, Baum proclaimed that his book "aspires to being a modernised fairytale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out". It introduced characters we now know so well that they can step into other stories, into proverbial speech, into folk memory. It was the first book of a series that was to grow to 17 volumes, with more sequels written by other hands after Baum's death in 1919, as well as a plethora of stage and film adaptations before the 1939 classic movie musical with Judy Garland. Like Robin Hood, Hamlet, Alice or Winnie the Pooh and Eeyore, Baum's inventions - the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodman, the Wizard and the Wicked Witch of the West, as well as Dorothy, her ruby slippers and her dog Toto - have become the mythological furniture of our children's minds, and of our own and our parents'. (...)
But Baum was an optimist. He followed the giants of American self-belief: he was modern, and with Whitman he sang the body electric. When he began writing for children in the persona of "Father Goose", he set out to distance his work from "old-time fairy tales": "the time has come," he wrote, "for a series of newer 'wonder tales' in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incident devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral . . . The Wizard of Oz was written solely to pleasure children of today." (...)
Humbug was a word greatly bandied about in the debates about magic and other worlds at the time: when the genuineness of a medium was exposed, he or she was called a humbug. Baum reveals the Wizard of Oz to be an impostor, who works the marvellous machinery of his magic with circus skills; he is also a balloonist, a mimic and a ventriloquist - a showman, an entertainer, a "flimflam man". (...)
Like many progressives in the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods, both in Europe and the US, Maud Gage Baum rejected organised religion and was attracted instead by new thinking about the supernatural - spiritualism, psychic research and theosophy. The Baums became theosophists in the 1890s, and their four boys, at their grandmother's insistence, were not baptised. They were sent to Chicago's ethical school instead, where religion was not taught. Traces of the movement's beliefs show in Oz's structure - its matriarchal tendencies, and its freedom from established churches of all kinds. The Baums were not alone in combining thoroughly modern tendencies with what now seems crankery: there were two other enthusiastic visitors to the 1893 Chicago fair who were profoundly influenced by its universalist vision.
The architects Walter Burley Griffin and his future wife Marion Mahony were both working in the office of Frank Lloyd Wright at the time; like the Baums, they were idealistic American democrats, disciples of Whitman and transcendentalism, and eventually theosophists and pioneering eco-planners. In 1912, they won the international competition to build the new city that would be the capital of Australia. Marion's beautiful, visionary drawings for Canberra look just like a dream of the Emerald City. It's an odd thought that the nearest realisation of the modern fairy-tale dreams that inspired Baum's Oz - and that aren't the result of stagecraft or film or other illusion - can now be found in the southern desert of Australia.
1903 poster of Dave Montgomery as the Tin Man in Hamlin's musical stage version.
But Baum was not only building cities; he filled them with characters and situations. This is how Baum describes his vision in The Emerald City of Oz (1910):
There were no poor people in the Land of Oz, because there was no such thing as money ... Each person was given freely by his neighbours whatever he required for his use, which is as much as anyone may reasonably desire. Some tilled the lands and raised great crops of grain, which was divided equally among the entire population, so that all had enough ... Oz being a fairy country, the people were, of course, fairy people; but that does not mean that all of them were unlike the people of our own world. There were all sorts of queer characters among them, but not a single one who was evil, or who possessed a selfish or violent nature ...
A recent book by a religious historian, Jeffrey J Kripal, explores what he terms "the religion of no religion" that has taken hold in the US - often scorned as new age mishmash (as in Francis Wheen's very funny attack How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World).
However, Kripal, like Harold Bloom, makes a strong case for paying more attention to this strand of thought in American history, which connects Emersonian transcendental tendencies to activist politics, and turns religion into secular spirituality and utopian social vision. Baum's Land of Oz belongs in this tradition, and he was banned for decades in US schools and libraries for exhibiting communist tendencies. (...)
The showbiz history of Baum's imaginary utopia has patted it into a more fairy-tale shape; in their comic, upbeat way, later variations on Oz have kept up with the return of religion, credulity and apocalyptic dualism in contemporary thinking, and evil forces eclipse good in their irrepressible and seductive vitality.
· The Wizard of Oz is at the Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 from July 23 to August 31. Box office: 0871 663 2500, southbankcentre.co.uk
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