In my AP US History class, our teacher actually discussed the allegory in
The Wizard of OZ for the Populist movement, as well as other key issues at the time in American history. I remember writing a couple things down (i usually slept in that class, but the mention of Oz woke me up).
According to the ever-right-and-rightoeous Mr. Smith, the
Wicked Witch of the West was a symbol of the
western wilderness the United States was trying to conquer and control, the Wicked Witch of the East being the same, but the house dropped on her symbolized the fact man had already conquered out East. Since the Western wilderness with it's moutains and Indians were the farmers enemy, the government would rather blame that as the ecomonic problem than confront a suggestion like a silver standard.
The
silver shoes were supposed to represent the
silver standard farmers were trying to push (since it in such abundance after silver mines in the Nevada/Idaho area had been uncovered), traveling the
gold standard/yellow brick road to the
Emerald City/Washington DC, a glorified capital city, disguised in colour to fool citizens into thinking everyone was good.
All i remember of Dorothy's traveling companions was that the
Scarecrow was supposed to represent the
impoverished farmers, trying to get the
gold standard to
Washington.
It's been a while since that class. L'anyhoodle, a lot of the ideas in
Wicked, the novel, seem to support this sort of interpretation of the events in Oz.
Oh, and for the record, in the novel of
Wicked, it says about the shoes:
"From a pile of ash shavings she withdrew a shoe, and then another. Were they silver?--or blue?--or now red?--lacquered with a candy shell brilliance of polish? It was hard to tell and it didn't matter; the effect was dazzling...the surface of the shoes seemed to pulse with hundreds of reflections and refractions. In the firelight, it was like looking at the boiling corpuscles of blood under a magnifying glass." It seems Gregory Maguire tried to combine all the incarnations of the shoes into one.
"Umm...A1 is a steak sauce."
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