The Political Interpretations of Oz

I recently got a nice two volume set of all 14 Oz books by L. Frank Baum. They were books that I dearly loved when my mother read them to me as a child, and since I hardly remember anything about them anymore, I've been eager to read them again. Tonight I finished the second book, The Marvelous Land of Oz. I've certainly been enjoying them, but what I've found particularly interesting is that there is strong reason to believe that the original Oz book (not the 13 sequels) was written as something of a political allegory. I discovered this before starting the first book, and there were several things that caught my attention as a result. One in particular caught my attention. If you somehow are unfamiliar with the story of the Wizard of Oz, then this will be a bit of a spoiler:

The Scarecrow was now the ruler of the Emerald City, and although he was not a Wizard the people were proud of him. "For," they said, "there is not another city in all the world that is ruled by a stuffed man." And, so far as they knew, they were quite right.

It's impossible to know if he meant that as a specific jab or not. He always maintained that he meant the book purely as a children's story and nothing more.

There were quite a few other things I found interesting. To name a few:

• There are huge sections of plot that were omitted from the famous movie. Similarly, there are major sections of the movie that do not exist in the book.
• The compass on the official Oz map shows east pointing west and west pointing east. At first I assumed he must have been a Mudder, although that seems unlikely since he died in 1919.
• It turns out that originally he didn't intend to write more than one, but the flood of letters he got eventually inspired him to keep writing.

Ok, I think that's enough of my ramblings for tonight.