Follow the red, white and blue brick road

July 9, 2009

Dear Pat,

Getting to know people from foreign lands, I've sometimes told them without really knowing why that if they want to understand America and Americans, watching "The Wizard of Oz" is a good way to start.

Those of us born in the middle of the 20th century watched "The Wizard of Oz" once each year on network TV. It was an event akin to a national holiday. Families gathered around their sole TV, maybe still black and white, to re-experience the wonders of Oz. Once color TVs became common, the Technicolor transformation that occurs after Dorothy's house lands in Oz was a revelation.

I know families still watch it together. Beyond that shared experience, "The Wizard of Oz" portrays the American need to leave home and to return -- maybe only psychologically -- with a new understanding. Embedded in the belief in Manifest Destiny, which in sometimes brutal ways settled this country, was the idea that starting over and striking it rich somewhere else is always possible.

Evan I. Schwartz leans toward those ideas in his book "Finding Oz." Moreover, he suggests that Dorothy's is the hero's journey Joseph Campbell writes of in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," the hero who regenerates society through her or his works and deeds. He thinks the author of "The Wizard of Oz" is such a hero himself.

L. Frank Baum mostly failed as a chicken farmer, actor, traveling salesman, variety store owner, newspaper publisher, oil products salesman and window trimmer. But at the turn of the 20th century he wrote a children's book that became the quintessential American fable.

Baum said the story of "The Wizard of Oz" began coming to him on a snowy day when his children wanted him to tell them a story. Ralph Waldo Emerson described such moments of transformation as a feeling of gladness, Schwartz writes, of knowing "that nothing can befall me in life -- no disgrace, no calamity ... which nature cannot repair."

Schwartz unearths the physical origins of the Yellow Brick Road and the Emerald City, Baum's connections with the women's suffrage movement and theosophy, and the terrible screeds he wrote about the Sioux as a newspaperman in Dakota. Baum lived in an age of wizards named Edison, Rockefeller, Barnum and mystics from the East. Some were better wizards than men.

"I'm a very good man," the Wizard of Oz tells Dorothy. "I'm just a very bad wizard."

"The Wiz," the black update of the movie, starred Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow. Michael certainly could dance, but the role he should have played was Dorothy's. His life, as alien as it might have seemed to most of us, was a journey to return home, Neverland Ranch his own Land of Oz. What boons he brought back and shared with the world.

Baum's book doesn't end as the movie does, with Dorothy almost lamenting leaving Kansas. The movie people wanted a Hollywood ending. In the book, Dorothy is happy to be back with Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, but she also understands something worthy of a very good wizard: that the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion found their heart's desire by wanting to help Dorothy find hers.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.