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Populism and the World of Oz (2016)
Curator Peter Liebhold takes a trip to the children's section of the library for inspiration in understanding the economic factors that promote populism.
Similar to parties on our political landscape today, the Populist movement was a rising third-party campaign of angry disenfranchised “plain people” (farmers and, to a smaller degree, factory workers) seeking to wrest power from bankers and business leaders. Littlefied was inspired to write the article because of his experiences as a high school teacher, and his analysis of The Wizard of Oz has all the markings of a pedagogical technique: he created a fantastic quest that required participants to understand the history of the Populist movement in order to find the clues in Baum’s book. Mayhew observes that in the modern world farmers “found the railroad agent, the bank officer, the equipment salesman, and the grain elevator operator tyrannical because they did not respond, as the country store owner had earlier, to tales of a bad year, family illness, or other such problems.”
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