Political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Biographers report that Baum had been a political activist in the 1890s with a special interest in the money question of gold and silver (bimetallism), and the illustrator William Wallace Denslow was a full-time editorial cartoonist for a major daily newspaper.

[12] Moreover, following the road of gold leads eventually only to the Emerald City, which Taylor sees as symbolic of a fraudulent world built on greenback paper money, a fiat currency that cannot be redeemed in exchange for precious metals.

[12] It is ruled by a scheming politician (the Wizard) who uses publicity devices and tricks to fool the people (and even the Good Witches) into believing he is benevolent, wise, and powerful when really he is a selfish, evil humbug.

When Dorothy is taken to the Emerald Palace before her audience with the Wizard she is led through seven passages and up three flights of stairs, a subtle reference to the Coinage Act of 1873 which started the class conflict in America.

"[11] Baum professed strongly racist views towards Native American peoples, arguing for their genocidal extermination in two editorials published in his newspaper, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, in 1890 and 1891.

[16][17] However, some commenters have argued that certain passages in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published almost a decade later, reflect greater nuance with regard to the plight of Native Americans, containing allegorical references to their treatment.

[18] Dorothy responds that they were “lucky in not doing these little people any more harm.”[18] Baum was also influenced by his mother-in-law, activist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who convinced him to write down his Oz stories.

The "man behind the curtain" could be a reference to automated store window displays of the sort famous at Christmas season in big city department stores; many people watching the fancy clockwork motions of animals and mannequins thought there must be an operator behind the curtain pulling the levers to make them move (Baum was the editor of the trade magazine read by window dressers).

[21] In a 2020 edition of the Rose Croix Journal, an article written by Timothy J. Ryan argues The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is "an allegory of the mystic's journey, using classic alchemical symbols and operations as Dorothy sojourns along the golden path toward reintegration and the discovery of the Philosopher's Stone.

"[22] L. Frank Baum was a member of the Theosophical Society and a student of Helena Blavatsky, along with his mother-in-law Matilda Joslyn Gage, the famous American suffragist.