The Secret of Oz. What was L.Frank.Baum trying to tell us in the classical book "The Wizard of Oz" ? - The Federal Reserve.

Original title page.

L. Frank Baum

The Secret of Oz: Solutions For a Broken Economy   

What's going on with the world's economy? Foreclosures are on the rise, unemployment is skyrocketing and this may only be the beginning. Is it possible that solutions to the world's economic problems were embedded in one of the most beloved children's stories of all time, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?" The yellow brick, the Emerald City of Oz, Dorothy's silver slippers (changed to ruby slippers for the movie version) — all powerful symbols of author L. Frank Baum's belief that the people, not the big banks, should control the quantity of a nation's money.

Political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz include treatments of the modern fairy tale (written by L. Frank Baum and first published in 1900) as an allegory or metaphor for the political, economic and social events of America in the 1890s. Scholars have examined four quite different versions of Oz: the novel of 1900,^[1] the Broadway Play of 1901,^[2] the Hollywood film of 1939,^[3] and the numerous followup Oz novels written after 1900 by Baum and others.^[4]  

The political interpretations focus on the first three, and emphasize the close relationship between the visual images and the story line to the political interests of the day. Biographers report that Baum had been a political activist in the 1890s with a special interest in the money question of gold and silver, and the illustrator Denslow was a full-time editorial cartoonist for a major daily newspaper. For the 1901 Broadway production Baum inserted explicit references to prominent political characters such as President Theodore Roosevelt.

Cartoonist W. A. Rogers in 1906 sees the political uses of Oz: he depicts William Randolph Hearst as Scarecrow stuck in his own Ooze in Harper's Weekly