Why learn about the Gilded Age?

Figure 1. L. Frank Baum’s story of a Kansas girl and the magical land of Oz has become a classic of both film and screen, but it may have originated in part as an allegory of late nineteenth-century politics and the rise of the Populist movement.

L. Frank Baum was a journalist who rose to prominence at the end of the nineteenth century. Baum’s most famous story, The Wizard of Oz, was published in 1900, but “Oz” first came into being years earlier, when he told a story to a group of schoolchildren visiting his newspaper office in South Dakota. He made up a tale of a wonderful land, and, searching for a name, he allegedly glanced down at his file cabinet, where the bottom drawer was labeled “O-Z.” Thus was born the world of Oz, where a girl from struggling Kansas hoped to get help from a “wonderful wizard” who proved to be a fraud.

Some scholars have speculated that this favorite children’s story is an allegory for some of the major political challenges of the late 1800s. Dorothy, a simple but virtuous and sympathetic farm girl, is caught in a chain of events that she does not understand. Similarly, many farmers felt overwhelmed by an economy and a political system that bore little resemblance to earlier generations. They had a great deal of debt, a depressed money supply, and were often at the mercy of railroad companies that were free to charge ruinous rates to ship their crops.

And just like Dorothy, these farmers sought allies who also needed help. There is some speculation that the Scarecrow is meant to represent other farmers, the Tin Man stood for industrial workers, while the Cowardly Lion represented the well-meaning but ineffectual politician William Jennings Bryan. Ultimately, the Wizard in the big city was just a humbug, manipulating events behind the scenes, but possessing little power. Many farmers came to the same conclusion about their government in Washington. Dorothy ultimately realized she had the power to bring herself back to Kansas all along, by using her silver slippers (the famous film changed this to glittering ruby slippers to better take advantage of filming in color). In a similar fashion, the true-to-life farmers of the late 1800s took matters into their own hands. In organizing for fairer practices and debt relief, they too looked to silver—flushing the economy with silver coinage—as the solution to their dilemma.

In this module, we will explore how, in the face of an ineffectual and unresponsive government in Washington, ordinary people worked to create a better system of politics to serve them. They formed a number of different organizations to do this, but collectively, we remember them as the Populists. Alongside farmworkers, reformers, and the first generation of freed Blacks, they attempted to stymie the corruption and backhanded deals that characterized a period we call the Gilded Age.

Since then, many have speculated that the story reflected Baum’s political sympathies for the Populist Party, which galvanized midwestern and southern farmers’ demands for federal reform. Whether he intended the story to act as an allegory for the plight of farmers and workers in late nineteenth-century America, or whether he simply wanted to write an “American fairy tale” set in the heartland, Populists looked for answers much like Dorothy did. And the government in Washington proved to be meek rather than magical.