The Wizard of Oz. 1939 film directed by Victor Fleming, based on L. Frank Baum: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900.
In 1964, a secondary-school teacher named Henry Littlefield published an article which purported to interpret The Wizard of Oz as a parable about American Populist politics of the 1890s. [1] According to Littlefield’s ingenious decoding, the characters in Baum’s story represented various persons or groups embroiled in the money controversies of his time. The Wicked Witch of the East symbolizes the East-Coast financial interests, the Wicked Witch of the West the Western railroad magnates. The Scarecrow is the American farmer; the Tin Man is the factory worker; the Cowardly Lion is the Populist champion, William Jennings Bryan, whose name rhymes with ‘lion.’ The Wizard is President McKinley. Dorothy is the prototypical American. The Yellow Brick Road is the gold standard; Dorothy’s magic slippers, silver in the book, are the silver-backed currency Populists hoped to establish as a means of inflating the value of money and thereby of easing the debt burdens on American workers. “Oz” means “ounce,” the standard unit of measurement for gold and silver. In later elaborations, subsequent writers went so far as to identify the flying monkeys with Amerindians, Toto the dog with Prohibitionists.
Upon questioning, Littlefield explained that he did not so much intend to offer an interpretation of Baum’s book as to demonstrate how he could teach ever-reluctant adolescent scholars about the Populist era. By matching the figures and issues of that time with the characters and motifs of the book—by then a movie whose televised showing had become an annual event in American households—a teacher could hold students’ attention and provide an easy way for them to remember basic facts of the Populist era.
Be that as it may, like all merely historical interpretations, Littlefield’s plays out on too-small grounds. The movie begins with a notice addressed to “the Young in Heart,” citing the book’s “kindly philosophy,” which time cannot put “out of fashion.” “Kind” means both natural and gentle, qualities which transcend fashion and history’s whirligig. (In fact, the director cut one scene, which featured Dorothy and her friends jitterbugging in the Dark Forest, and rightly so, given his intention to portray the timeless.) From its opening moments, The Wizard of Oz invites philosophic inquiry.
The story begins with a question of justice. On her way home from school, Dorothy and her dog, Toto, encountered Miss Gulch and her cat. Dog chased cat, as nature ordains. Miss Gulch hit Toto with a rake. Dorothy complains, first to her aunt and uncle, then to the three farmhands. Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are too busy rescuing a brood of chicks from a broken incubator to deal with the crisis. Turning for help to the farmhands, she finds them also preoccupied, trying to fix a wagon. Hunk gives her prudential advice—don’t walk past Miss Gulch’s place, anymore—but Dorothy whines that he isn’t listening. She’s the one who isn’t listening; Dorothy lacks self-knowledge. On the other hand, so to speak, Hunk tends distractedly to get his fingers in the way of his hammer, so he fails to exemplify the virtue he commends.
Zeke initially brushes her off because he is the ruler of a small city of pigs—really a neighborhood in the small city that is the farm—but then blusters to her about how if he were she he’d spit in the old crone’s eye. Have courage, he tells her. When Dorothy falls into the pigsty and panics among the greasy citizens therein, he rescues her, then starts shaking as soon as they get out; to the amusement of Dorothy and the other farmhands, he doesn’t quite live up to his own advice. (As for Dorothy, she emerges from the pigsty without a mud-spot on her gingham, doubtless a symbol of her innocence.)
As for Hickory, the third hand, his dialogue with Dorothy was cut from the movie. In it he told her that while it is true Mrs. Gulch has no heart, Dorothy should show that she does have one and take pity on her. Himself showing little pity for the girl, he returns his attention to an ‘anti-tornado’ contraption he’s working on, rewarded by getting squirted in the face with oil. Aunt Em puts a stop to the chatter, telling the hands to get back to work, and telling Dorothy to stay out of the way.
As with the American regime, so with the regime of the Kansas farm: The business of America is business. Dorothy wants justice, but she can’t quite say what it is. And even if she could define justice, she’s afraid of standing up for it but at the same too impatient to resign herself to it. She gets some good advice, but unfortunately her advisers’ actions belie their words. The farm regime features the three elements of the regimes, and the souls, described by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, and then some. In words if not in practice, Hunk has prudence, a form of reason; Zeke esteems courage, a form of spiritedness, without fully having it. And the pigs he rules are beings of appetite, eager to be slopped. What Socrates’ regime does not include is Hickory, the somewhat wooden spokesman for the non-classical, Christian virtue of pity, compassion, agapic love of one’s enemy.
Dorothy has no place in the farm regime. She is a schoolgirl, a youth who performs no useful tasks at home. She longs for “someplace where there isn’t any trouble,” someplace “over the rainbow”—probably the only colorful thing she’s ever seen, above Kansas shades of grey. She goes off to sing a song about a song, a lullaby about a land over the rainbow where dreams come true. Lullabies are for very small children, bridges to dreaming. Dorothy longs to return to childhood. If bluebirds fly over the rainbow, “Why, then, oh why can’t I?”
The answer to her question is simple: She is not a bluebird. She lives on a farm but she doesn’t know what nature is, what her ‘kind’ or species is, lacks self-knowledge or perhaps, in her childish pout, doesn’t want to know. She is a utopian. In her dream to come she will blend the human farmhands with a scarecrow (Hunk), a lion (Zeke), and a tin man (Hickory); as for Miss Gulch, she’ll become a witch. The inner natures, the souls, of each person will remain but their bodies will look more like what their souls are; their bodies will be ‘idealized.’ This is what will teach her what she needs to know: who and what she is, who and what the real persons she knows are, and what the farm is. For now, she can think of no way to find happiness—the thing bluebirds traditionally symbolize—in a real regime.
That household regime is part of a larger regime, one in which Miss Gulch looms quite large. She arrives on her bicycle, claiming that Toto bit her. In her answer to Aunt Em’s words of defense—Toto is “gentle with gentle people”—Miss Gulch will not melt, silently admitting the charge. She threatens a lawsuit against the humans and seizes the dog on authority of a sheriff’s order which she has in hand. Aunt Em tells her she can’t say her opinion of her, because Aunt Em is a Christian woman. Her Christianity leaves her partly speechless and entirely powerless, since Miss Gulch owns “half the county” and evidently can ride over her unequal fellow-citizens.
When Toto escapes and returns to Dorothy, the girl decides to run away from home, to exile herself from its regime. The first and only person she meets is Professor Marvel, a mountebank fortune-teller who claims the acclaim of the crowned heads of Europe, owing to his alleged prophetic powers. He welcomes girl and dog, saying that Toto is welcome to eat the sausage he’s cooking for dinner, “as one dog to another.” But of course: Professor Marvel is a philosopher of sorts. His cynicism has distinguished forbears—the Cynics, which means ‘dog-like.’ Dogs sharply distinguish friends from enemies (as Toto has done) and they are shameless. In these ways Professor Marvel runs true to type, except that on the surface he is an anti-Diogenes. Diogenes searched the city for an honest man, but his latter-day imitator won’t find one if he looks in the mirror, or gazes into his crystal ball.
In one way, however, the mountebank is indeed a truth-seeker, as he must be to perpetrate his ignoble lying. When he offers to tell Dorothy’s fortune, he has her shut her eyes; this gives him the chance to look through her purse, where he finds a picture of Aunt Em. He can then ‘tell her fortune,’ in fact giving her advice, by awakening her sense of compassion for Aunt Em, who must be worried sick about her. She heeds his advice, as she hadn’t heeded Hunk’s advice, because Professor Marvel appeals to her compassion and her love of her own, instead of simply telling her what the smart thing to do would be. Professor Marvel is wise and just in his own modest way, knowing that orphan girls are better-off with their guardians than they would be with the likes of himself, or on the road. A philosopher is never truly at home, always on the road. Dorothy’s philia will never be for sophia, but it can be directed back to her home, toward ‘her own,’ and he has done that good thing.
Dorothy and Toto head home, but nature has other plans for them. Nature isn’t all rainbows and bluebirds. A tornado whips up. All the members of the farm household get into the storm cellar, bolting the door behind them, leaving Dorothy outside to face not the fear of falling under the hooves of swine but the fear of violent death, prefigured by the menacing death’s head Professor Marvel put over the door to his broken-down medicine-show wagon. In Plato’s Republic the philosopher must be dragged into the cave, representing the city and its conventions, after escaping and undertaking a journey in nature. Here, the non-philosophers seek refuge in the cave, and Dorothy very much wants in, finding nature to be anything but a thing of enlightening ideas or appealing dream-cities. Socratic irony teaches gently and with words what nature itself teaches harshly, with violent wind.
The tornado appears to uproot both Dorothy and her house, landing her in Munchkinland, in Eastern Oz—which, famously, isn’t Kansas. The vertigo of the tornado matches the vertigo of a dream. Reacting to the bright colors all around her, she tells Toto, “We must be over the rainbow.”
The fact that she’s not in Kansas is confirmed when Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, manifests herself. Dorothy has the conventional view of witches—that they are all bad and ugly—but Glinda is a witch of a different color, a benevolent sort who explains that Dorothy’s house has squashed the Wicked Witch of the East. She summons the native Munchkins out of hiding, who proclaim this happy event “a miracle.” Now it is Dorothy who is the realist, telling them that a natural force has caused an accidental event. Miracle or accident, the Munchkins don’t much care; they’ve been freed from the tyranny of the witch.
The small and numerous Munchkins, citizens of an emergent democracy, officially determine that the tyrant is indeed dead, then declare their independence. The abuse of law for petty revenge, seen in Miss Gulch, contrasts with their proper use of law. The first main difference between The Wizard of Oz and the Republic was the addition of pity or compassion to the parts of the soul; the second main difference is that the utopia here is a democratic republic, complete with such civil associations as the Lullaby League (echoing Dorothy’s song) and the Lollipop Guild. Here, the demos consists of the innocent and jolly Munchkins—childlike, miniature adults, fit for self-rule except for the fact that they are incapable of defending themselves against tyrants. They are quite unlike the democrats one meets in Plato’s dialogues: fickle, impassioned, occasionally dangerous. They even have a generous sense of honor, promising Dorothy a place of glory in their history, a sort of immortality in name if not in fact.
This turn of events has enraged the Wicked Witch’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the West. When she learns that it was Dorothy’s house that crushed her sister-tyrant, she can do nothing; the ruby slippers, which her sister wore and which evidently gave her the power to rule, are now on Dorothy’s feet. She wants the slippers for herself, as their possession will give her the greatest power in Oz, greater than that of the Good Witch of the North. Since there seems to be no good or bad Witch of the South, no southern province of Oz, the alliance of evil witches who had enjoyed preponderance of geopolitical power in Oz has been ruined. The only way to get it back is to do to Dorothy what the tornado-lifted house did to the tyrant. But with the Good Witch standing by, the Wicked Witch can do nothing.
As possessor of the slippers, Dorothy seems to have absolute power, but unlike witches good or bad she has no ambition to wield it. She just wants to return safely home. The Good Witch then tells her what will turn out to be a lie, but a noble lie. Only the Wizard of Oz, in the Emerald City, knows how to get her home. She must travel to him, ask him to grant her release. With that, the Good Witch evanesces. “People come and go so quickly here,” Dorothy notices. If Kansas is colorless, dull, and stable, Oz is brilliant, festive (when not tyrannized), and mercurial—a vivid, shape-shifting dreamscape, although (as she will find) in parts nightmarish.
Before departing, the Good Witch told her that the Yellow Brick Road will lead her to the Emerald City. But she encounters a fork in the road. There hangs her first companion, the Scarecrow, the Land-of-Oz equivalent to prudent but easily distracted Hunk. Forced to make a decision, Dorothy asks for the right way to Oz. The Scarecrow can’t tell her which path to take because “I can’t make up my mind,” and he can’t make up his mind because he has no brain, only straw in his head. Dorothy quite reasonably wants to know how he can talk if he has no brain, to which he wittily replies that some people who have no brains do “an awful lot of talking”—at most proving that a mind might be disembodied, a thing that can inhabit a headful of straw. This would be a radical form of Platonism, indeed.
At any rate, he seems to lack not wit but will. Without decisiveness, he can’t scare anything, can’t perform his function; he can’t even scare crows. And although he can make sharp observations, he has no capacity for theoretical or generalizing reason; if he only had a brain, he says, he could solve riddles—use reason to discover the causes of the things he observes.
Because he is indecisive he can advise but he promises not to rule, which is music to willful but advice-needful Dorothy’s ears. Unlike Dorothy, he has no fear of witches, only of fire, as befits his nature as a straw man.
The Scarecrow quickly proves himself prudent as well as witty. When they find an orchard of apple trees, which turn out to be grouchy beings, capable of speech and movement, and highly possessive of their apples, he taunts them, suckering them into throwing their apples in anger. Which Dorothy can now eat. His prudence knows how to supply the necessary desires of the soul.
The next companion Dorothy meets is the Tin Man, equivalent to Hickory. While the Scarecrow fears fire, the Tin Man fears water, which has rusted him immobile. They lubricate him with machine oil from a conveniently-placed can, enabling him first to speak, then to move. He too describes himself as lacking in full humanity—in his case, a heart, with which he could become “kinda human,” a being capable of love and art, jealousy and devotion, and even a bit of a Franciscan, a friend of sparrows. Like the Scarecrow, he already exhibits the quality he supposes he lacks; he sings, in tune, which more than suggests that he already loves at least one of the arts. And as a man made of tin he himself is a product of technē.
The three companions follow the Yellow Brick Road into a forest, where Dorothy tames Zeke’s equivalent, the Cowardly Lion, who lunges at Toto. She punishes him by smacking him in the face—a girl’s version of Zeke’s boyish advice to spit in the eye of old Miss Gulch. Dorothy is preeminently a lover neither of wisdom or of courage, nor is she a person of extraordinary compassion. Fortunately, she has no irregular yen for satisfying bodily appetites. But she is a formidable lover of ‘her own.’ Just as she liberated the Scarecrow from the pole he’d been hung on, and the Tin Man from the rust that paralyzed him, she liberates the Lion from the forest, and from his own bluffing, setting him on the path to the Emerald City.
As for the Lion, of the three companions he most radically lacks the virtue he seeks. While the Scarecrow evidently has mind (if not a brain) and the Tin Man has heart, if not a heart, the Lion’s only exhibition of courage is pure bluff. He really is a blowhard, if a loveable one. At best, he can rule pigs, the appetites, themselves creatures that are all grunt and no bite. He wishes he could fulfill his nature as a lion, to have courage.
Her reinforcements by her side, Dorothy continues on the road to the Emerald City and the Wizard. Each one hopes for a gift from the Wizard. The Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion seek a virtue, but Dorothy is seeking a path, the way out of Oz and back home. Nonetheless, the Good Witch tests her by making the path to the Wizard’s Emerald City a way sufficiently confusing and dangerous that she will need all the virtues her companions desire.
Togehter, they make a mistake. Seeing the Emerald City in the distance, they leave the road the Good Witch set them on, taking a short-cut through a field of poppies. The Wicked Witch has empowered the poppies by casting a sleep-inducing spell; that is, she has brought out the narcotic inner nature of the poppies to overpower her enemies, preventing them from approaching the purportedly great and powerful wizard who can give them the things they seek and defeat her ambition for imperial rule. The Good Witch awakens them with snowflakes—cold and white, unlike the warm, red field of flowers. Socrates criticizes athletes for sleeping too much, lacking the more important kind of stamina, intellectual stamina. These skipping, dancing, singing questers needed a lesson in alertness, and as their victory song does indeed contain the line, “Step into the Sun, step into the Light,” they evidently have learned it.
The gatekeeper of the Emerald City admits them only after he sees Dorothy’s ruby slippers, proof that the Good Witch sent them. He is also the driver of the coach drawn by the Horse of a Different Color. The old expression, ‘That’s a horse of a different color,’ registers distinction, implies typology. This horse, however, remains the same even as it regularly changes color. In doing so it does not violate the elementary logical principle of non-contradiction, that the same thing cannot do or suffer opposites at the same time, in the same part, in relation to the same thing. The hide of the Horse of a Different Color does change color, but at different times. The Wizard’s Emerald City may be beyond the rainbow, but it is natural at its core. It differs from Kansas, not only in its many different colors but in being a land of laughter and leisure. When its residents quest for joy, their quest is not joyless. The four companions are physically restored there—cleaned and groomed by some of the friendly Emeraldians. Emerald is the gemstone of love, and also of light, of clarity. The color green itself symbolizes natural growth, which is what each of the companions needs. The city has every appearance of a place where at least three of the four companions will receive what they seek, and Dorothy, who does not seek any natural virtue but nonetheless needs a few, can also take heart.
But for all its inner goodness, the Emerald City does have foreign enemies. The Wicked Witch, a demon of the air, writes “Surrender Dorothy” in the sky with black smoke, frightening the people. They rush to the Wizard for security, and for an explanation; like the Munchkins, the Emeraldian demos is readily frightened by a tyrant. Meanwhile, the Lion imagines himself as he would be if he had courage: not a tyrant, he would be King of the Forest, enjoying respect and deference from his subjects, whom he would rule with compassion whilst wearing a green robe, courteously provided by the Emeraldians. The color of emerald green is associated with eloquence and bearing. The Lion takes on the spirit of the city. Courage, he proclaims, makes a king of a slave—a touch of somewhat exaggerated Hegelianism amidst Dorothy’s Platonic reverie.
When they finally encounter the Wizard, “Oz the Great and Powerful,” a giant, translucent talking head—image of an Absolute Spirit—he orders them out of his presence, only to relent when “the small and meek” Dorothy breaks down and cries, guilty over the fears she has thoughtlessly caused Aunt Em. That is, Oz reverses the procedure of Professor Marvel: Marvel figured her out, then prompted her compassion for her kindly guardian and sent her home; Oz prompts her compassion first, then changes his command. Instead of simply sending them away he sends them away but with a mission and a promise. He will grant their requests, but only if they bring him the broomstick of the Wicked Witch, which they can only do if she’s dead.
It’s off to see not the Wizard but the Witch. In the Land of the West the Witch’s castle is surrounded by a haunted forest. The Witch sends her expeditionary forces, the flying monkeys, to seize Dorothy and Toto. The Witch offers to exchange Toto for the slippers, but, as with her sister, the slippers can only be removed if the wearer dies. This can be arranged, but the Witch needs time to consider how to do it, and the wait will only torment the girl more. When Toto escapes and returns to the companions, the Scarecrow is the one who understands that the dog wants to lead them to Dorothy. And he is the one who has a plan to get into the heavily guarded castle. They overpower three guards, who discovered and attacked them, dress themselves in their clothes, enter the castle when the guard changes. In using both force and fraud, not only does the Scarecrow exhibit prudence, and the Lion (remarkably) courage, but the Tin Man uses his axe to break down the door where Dorothy is imprisoned. Led by Toto, Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Man repay the debt of liberation each owes to her.
But not so fast. The Wicked Witch still rules here, and her guards corner the interlopers. Always a being of heatedness, with her rage and her smoke-writing, she sets the Scarecrow’s arm on fire. When Dorothy throws a bucket of water on it, some of the water splashes on the Witch, and it douses her fiery spirit, causing her dissolve. In nature, fire melts snow and ice; here, cool water melts the bodily vessel of fire. As she melts into the ground, the witch laments, “You’ve destroyed my beautiful wickedness.” The self-described beauty of the Witch’s wickedness bespeaks her attempted transvaluation of all values. She is the nihilist annihilated, the negation negated. Once again the liberator, as she had dreamed of being, for herself in Kansas, and as she has been, throughout her journey in the Land of Oz, Dorothy is again celebrated by the demos, this time the flying monkeys, soldiers, and guards, all whom had suffered under the Witch’s tyranny.
There is one more despot to face. Back in the Emerald City, witch’s broomstick in hand, Dorothy faces the Wizard. He blusters and filibusters, telling them to return some other time. But Toto pulls back a curtain, revealing city’s gatekeeper and wagon driver, the Emeraldian equivalent of Professor Marvel. The Absolute Spirit turns out to have been a hoax, similar to the Professor’s crystal ball. Accused of badness, he defends himself and confesses in one sentence: I am a good man but a very bad wizard. If nothing else, he retains his gift of gab. From him, he Scarecrow receives not a brain but a certificate testifying thereto, a diploma. The Lion receives a medal for courage. The Tin Man receives a testimonial certificate of his philanthropy. That is, they aren’t given what they’ve already demonstrated they had all along, their natural virtues, but they are given public recognition for having those virtues. The Hegelian mountebank has retained the sounder piece of Hegel’s system—not the grand Absolute Spirit, supposedly ruling over all, but the recognition of the human need for recognition.
What about me, Dorothy wants to know. Ah, the Wizard promises to take her back to Kansas, back to the land of moderation and loving limits. Before leaving, he acts not as Hegel but as Plato’s Socrates, installing as the Scarecrow, with his practical wisdom, as the ruler of the Emerald City and therefore of the Land of Oz, to be assisted by the courageous Lion and (in the characteristically Christian supplement to Socrates’ regime of city and soul) the compassionate Tin Man. The philosopher-mountebank will return to Kansas, return to the cave of convention, with Dorothy: bringing back the good instead of scamming the good. And unlike a Socratic philosopher, he returns to the cave voluntarily, not by compulsion.
Or so he intends. However, like many another philosopher, he is deficient in practical wisdom. Thanks to his bumbling, his hot-air balloon floats off with him in it, leaving Dorothy behind. This is altogether right; the philosopher can’t very well take the non-philosopher with him. The dreaming non-philosopher will need to find another way back to Kansas. With this, the Good Witch appears.
Glinda is the only important character in Oz who has no obvious equivalent in Kansas. She is also the only character in either place who could be described as serene, never fearful. With the deaths of the wicked witches and the departure of the Wizard—who likely ruled the Emerald City by her good graces—she has won the geopolitical struggle to rule the Land of Oz. She’s done so without lowering herself to direct conflict, preferring to use proxies—Dorothy foremost among them. Indeed, Dorothy is her only conceivable rival, so long as she wears the ruby slippers and enjoys the love of the people she has liberated. But Dorothy has never wanted anything more than freedom, conceived as a beyond-this-earth utopia where troubles melt like lemon drops and (as it happens) so do the wicked witches. And since her encounter with Professor Marvel, all she’s wanted to do is go home to Aunt Em and the good if busy people on the farm.
If Glinda the Good Witch has any Kansas equivalent it is Aunt Em—another kindly ruler, the co-ruler, with her husband, of the farm. Aunt Em, however, is human. And as a Christian woman she not only can do nothing to protect her niece or Toto from Miss Gulch, she can’t even say anything unpleasant to her. Glinda is invulnerable to the other witches, and they to her, and she has the power to protect Dorothy and her companions from the wicked ones. We now see that she was the real power not only in the eastern region of Oz but in the Emerald City, protecting the mountebank Wizard and his deluded subjects from the evil witches. Her path to empire requires prudential exploitation of a rare set of circumstances, beginning with the heaven-sent farmhouse that lands on one of her rivals.
She is the one who really knows how Dorothy can get home. All Dorothy needs to do is to click the ruby slippers together, a power she had at her command from her first day in Munchkinland. But she must match this power to her sincere desire to use it. To return to the farm she must not only take an action but unite the action with words, telling herself, “There’s no place like home.” Why hadn’t the Good Witch told her so, back in Munchkinland? Because, Glinda explains, she wouldn’t have believed the slippers had this power until she learned what her heart’s desire was, something she couldn’t learn by being told—something about herself she had to learn for herself. “If it isn’t there,” Dorothy says, “I never had it in the first place.” With this self-knowledge she will no longer be ‘flighty,’ no longer wish she were a bird instead of a girl. With the end of her girlishness, she also will no longer need to be commanded so often. She now will heed prudent advice when it’s offered, and probably start giving it to herself, as well.
She returns with Toto. ‘Toto’ means complete, all together, ‘total.’ Toto was the archē, the efficient cause of Dorothy’s journey to self-knowledge. Toto is the only thing belonging to Dorothy, the lover of her own (other than her person and clothing) that stays with her from beginning to end. Toto is the one who led the companions to her when she was imprisoned, and was also the one who discovered the ruling lie of the Wizard of Oz, exposing it (and him) for the companions to see. If Professor Marvel/Wizard of Oz is at least nine-tenths rhetorician and Cynic, at best one-tenth Socrates, Toto is the truer dog-philosopher—plucky, smarter than any of the humans in the story and more loyal than most, but as defenseless as any philosopher, a kindly being in need of a kind but strong ally. Toto now has one. After she recovers from the injuries sustained during the tornado strike, Dorothy might well find a way to protect her own beloved ones and beloved place from the likes of Miss Gulch.
One commentator on Plato’s Republic called its ironic treatment of the quest for justice the most magnificent cure of political ambition ever devised, an invitation to the philosophic life delivered to potential philosophers, who must learn to be politic, and to rank politics according to its worth, neither too high nor too low. A sweet, merry cure for day-dreamy utopianism, The Wizard of Oz is Plato’s Republic for the American girl.
Note
- See Henry Littlefield: “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism.” American Quarterly, Volume 16, Number 3, Spring 1964.
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