Google paid homage to the Wizard of Oz's 71st birthday today, Thurs 12th, with a custom banner ad. Take a peek before midnight. That's the anniversary of the movie, not the book; Lyman Frank Baum published his story in 1900 and it wasn't until 1938 that the Technicolor explosion featuring Judy Garland was released. 

The well-loved story of the ragtag band of...interspecies, variously-animate, accidental friends questing towards a way back to Kansas, a heart, a brain and courage in the magical kingdom of Oz is so preposterously imaginative and utterly crazy that it must have some basis...in reality.

That reality would be the divisive monetary policy debates of the late 19th century, set against an economic depression not unlike what we're now experiencing.

A ton of academic literature has been devoted to unpacking the political parable that is the Wizard of Oz. Baum's politics swayed sympathetically towards the ascendant Populist movement whose members identified themselves with the geographical "West," an amalgamation of interests and values representative of a heartland bloc of provincial farmers, workingmen and frontiersmen. They contrasted themselves against the orthodox and monied power structures neglecting the country from places like Washington and New York, the seat of the intelligentsia.

Their differences took shape in the monometallic vs. the bimetallic standard debates. The US was then operating on the gold standard - a monetary system which valued the dollar according to the quantity of gold. The Populists wanted the free coinage of silver to join gold as a source of money. This move, they argued, would increase the US money supply, raise price levels - which had fallen by about 22% in 16 years- and reduce farmers' debt burdens. Farmers, not surprisingly, were among those most adversely affected in this extended period of deflation and depression.

What's this got to do with Dorothy? Well, you'll have to read this seminal study for all the juicy analysis, but I'm sold. Baum modeled the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsmen and the Cowardly Lion after the Western Farmer, the Proletariat and Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, respectively. That march to Emerald City? That's a march on Washington, "where many ladies and gentlemen of the court, all dressed in rich costumes...had nothing to do but talk to each other." The Yellow Brick Road and every gold-inflected detail in the story correspond to support for the gold standard way of life; the starkest example might very well lie in the name "Oz" - ounces (of gold). The Wicked Witch of the East is naturally President Grover Cleveland.

You decide if this theory is coincidence or coherence - Baum's grandson is reported to have said that these interpretations were "insane" - but allegories exist to illustrate a coherent doctrine outside the fiction. These are two parallel realities to explore if we are open to perceive - and two can only make us smarter.

The world gold supply increased in the 1890s, reversing the deflation and muting the Populist cry. And all we got was the Wizard of Oz.