Oz, Race, and the American Dream in Urban Culture

The Wizard of Oz and the Rural-to-Urban Transition

The Wizard of Oz provides Americans with a text that helps them make the transition from the country to the city and sets the stage for the commodified American popular culture of the 20th century. Thanks to its pristine (Emerald) beauty and adventurous episodes, Oz makes "the city" far more appealing than the muted, old-fashioned landscape of rural America. Yet Dorothy ultimately returns to Kansas — someone has to carry back home the message of how wondrous "the city" truly is.

Baum's Oz shows that every man can become a king if he pursues his own desires. The Scarecrow is awarded leadership over the Emerald City, the Tin Man leadership over Winkie County, and the Cowardly Lion kingship over the forest. Each character rises to meet his own personal challenge — and, nonetheless, these are clear examples of how the American Dream is perfectly attainable if one simply determines to set off in search of it.

With the industrialization of America, this Dream seemed more possible than ever. At the end of the 19th century, America had faced several banking crises; its people were picking up the pieces after the horrors of the previous generation's Civil War; and new foreign wars loomed on the horizon — for example, the Spanish-American War and the advent of American imperialism. America as a nation had changed and was changing still more: it was being urbanized as more individuals moved to the big cities to find work, and monopolists like Rockefeller consolidated power. The big bankers would make their gambit for total control of the nation's money supply — and win — in 1913 with the passing of the Federal Reserve Act. In a sense, these men were like the mighty Wizard of Oz: hucksters posing as men of brilliance. The promise of free and easy credit after World War I, coupled with a scofflaw attitude fueled by Prohibition, made the 1920s a "Roaring" time indeed — a boom that ended in a devastating bust.

In one sense, Baum's Wizard of Oz helped prepare the way for these changes and certainly helped Americans transition from the country to the city. Dorothy, for example, is the farm girl from Kansas who is swept off to Oz, where she makes wonderful friends and has fantastic adventures. Baum's American fairy tale also prepares the way for the commodification of 20th-century popular culture by suggesting that abstract ideas like "courage," "brains," and "heart" can be bought and sold by powerful elites — wizards, bankers, corporations — who "magically" know how to produce them for the average citizen who supposedly lacks them.

Baum's book was published in 1900; in 1902 the Broadway musical adaptation was produced; and in 1939 the film version was released — a forty-year span from the text's introduction to its transformation into one of the most iconic films of all time. That transformation mirrored the transformation the nation itself had undergone, as its "brains," "courage," and "heart" were tested by episodes like the Great Depression and both World Wars. Movements like the Harlem Renaissance also helped to shape how Oz was perceived from one generation to the next, as a more dynamic and exciting version — the film — replaced the old print medium.

The American Dream, Power, and Commodification in Oz

If "the City" is so wonderful and magnificent, why does Dorothy still long for home and eventually return to Kansas? The answer has two parts. Just as the artists of the Harlem Renaissance — and, later, of the Hip Hop era — sought to identify themselves by their roots rather than by the white establishment culture they felt forced upon them (Rose, pp. 271–275), Dorothy is compelled by a sense of native identity and homestead belonging to return to her place of origin. The other side of the answer has to do with the fantasy world that is "the big city" and the "American Dream." On this level, Baum returns the reader to his own "home" by taking him out of the fairy-tale world and restoring him, in a sense, to reality — to Kansas, to small-town America.

The Emerald City is wondrous, to be sure, and the adventures are great — but there is an element of make-believe to it all that conflicts with the down-to-earth realist in us. Baum's Oz makes it possible for both the nostalgic, homespun sensibility and the yearning for more glamorous things to be satisfied at once: Oz allows the reader or viewer to have his cake and eat it too. It asserts that one can achieve the "impossible" Dream and yet keep one's innocence, earthiness, good-heartedness, and homespun sensibilities without being corrupted by the big city and its wickedness — represented, of course, by the Wicked Witches.

Most importantly, the power wielded by the Wicked Witches — the silver shoes and the golden cap — has a non-corrupting influence when employed by the pure of heart, as Dorothy and Glinda demonstrate. Baum thus suggests that absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, as has often been said, but that on the contrary, power in the right hands can accomplish great things. This is evident in the consolidation of power by Dorothy's three companions at the end: each is given dominion over a portion of the territory. Viewed in this way, Baum's Oz reflects an affirmation of a dual system of power as the basis of the American Dream — a classless society, or at least a society where one can easily rise from one class to the next, by simply following the right road, obtaining the right commodities, and, of course, having a little luck (like landing on a wicked witch and inheriting her silver shoes).

At the same time, Baum does not forget the role of the shyster in "paradise," embodied by the Wizard himself — a man who in some respects reflects the monopolizing power of Rockefeller, a rival dynasty of the Baums. The Wizard makes people see him as they are wont to perceive things, but ultimately his tricks are exposed and his humanity is touched and restored. The American trickster is thus given a benevolent underbelly, which does not exactly match the reality of the actual American underbelly as it became more and more manifest in the 20th century (Austin & Taylor). Yet it is this insistence upon the benevolence of the "wizard" that helps the reader and viewer transition from the country to the city more easily. It asserts that there is nothing really to fear from the big images and loud voices of the city — that it is all rather harmless and that, deep down, the "wizards" are just like you and me: down-home, earthy, good country people. If one stays true to oneself, the rewards are great, as is evident from the fact that the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Lion are all given great positions of authority. This sense that country folk will not be "out of place" in the city — but will, in fact, find others just like themselves and not only fit in but rise to the top — is part of what makes the allure of the city so tempting. There is, as one statesman put it during a time of mid-century turmoil, nothing to fear but fear itself.

The Fortress of Solitude: Race, Magic, and Urban Identity

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem explores the issues of race, popular culture, and magic. The novel highlights, in the style of fantastic realism, the nature of urban life in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and how races and cultures mixed, intertwined, and reacted to one another. It is a novel about minorities struggling to fit in and find their place. Despite the urban nightmare that is their reality, the two main characters — Dylan and Mingus — maintain a degree of innocence as children, represented by their discovery of the "magic ring," which acts as an equalizer. The ring does not care about one's race or ethnicity; it is effective for whoever wields it. Yet the novel simultaneously describes and accentuates the intersection of race and culture, where whites, blacks, and Jews meet in the city — a crossroads of personalities, ethnicities, and cultures.

For Dylan, his path leads toward a separate outcome from that of his friend Mingus — due partly to his race and ethnicity and partly to his culture, which is oriented somewhat differently. Dylan's trajectory is more "conventional" in a white sense and involves an all-white public school, college, and "liner notes" — artistic commentary rather than art itself. Mingus, on the other hand, represents the art that Dylan can only comment upon. Dylan's father is an artist but also, in a sense, a sellout: he must provide for the family by painting science-fiction magazine covers. Mingus and his father do not sell out but rather develop their magic and face the consequences — cocaine for the father, jail for Mingus. Yet their magical abilities to create music and artistic works, including graffiti, provide others like Dylan with a way to transcend their surroundings and troubles.

Dylan wishes to be part of that movement of transcendence, that unity of spirit and soul, and he illustrates this by tagging under Mingus's name "Dose." But ultimately Dylan too sells out and becomes a distant human being, observing life and art and magic through his tiny "liner notes" — his "objective" commentary, which keeps him at arm's length and isolated from reality.

In this way, the novel's title is compelling: what is "the fortress of solitude"? At different stages in the characters' lives, it is different things. For the boys, it is comics and the magic ring — the thing that unites them in spite of their racial and cultural differences. As they grow, the fortress becomes art and music — but already they are being pulled in different directions and the fortress's walls are threatened. For instance, the boys must keep their friendship quiet at school because of societal pressures (in Brooklyn, whites are the minority). Later, college comes calling for Dylan, while a life of petty street crime and street art calls Mingus. And later still, Dylan's fortress of solitude becomes less pleasurable; rather than uplifting him and offering a place of transcendence, it becomes a kind of wall that separates him from his childhood and his life. His solitude grows isolating and self-defeating. Rather than a place where he can be himself and remember who he is, he feels displaced by both time and space, with no real home or identity except in the margins of larger creative works.

Conclusion: Race, Culture, and Transcendence Across Three Texts

Ironically, Murphy's character likely would not have risen had it not been for the intervention of the old cronies — but the same may be said of McKay. Upward mobility for Dorothy comes in the form of a twister. This intervention of some sort appears necessary: individuals in lower castes cannot, it seems, rise entirely on their own but need to be lifted by something or someone higher. For the hip-hop generation, this is true as well — they turned to the inspirational messages of the leaders of the 1960s, men like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. To rise, they had to be lifted by the music, words, and magic of the generation before them — men and women who planted cultural seeds for them to find and use to grow. In growing, they developed new forms of expression and new ideas to share with their own audiences.

In this sense, it may be argued that while race is not destiny, destiny is to a degree shaped by race and by the intervention of others. The relationship between self and destiny cannot be conceived in simplistic terms — but ultimately, as Murphy demonstrates in Trading Places, the relationship depends upon more than race and talent alone.

Baum's Wizard of Oz, in conclusion, is a work that appeals to the dreams and ambitions of the rural individual and invites him to engage with the big-city life that awaits him "over the rainbow." In the 20th century, it helped draw the rural individual to the urban square — but its promise of a golden cap and silver shoes most likely eluded many. That didn't matter in Oz, however, because as Baum suggests, one could always return home simply by clicking one's heels. In the fantasy, this was so — but in reality, returning home was never so easy, as Mailer's "hipsters" showed — in search of a new code to fill the gap left by their departure from "home," where things were, or at least should have been, defined. In this sense, the Munchkins and the various inhabitants of Oz are like the urban black communities whose culture attracted so many whites in the 20th century: those whites had become disenfranchised and disillusioned and saw in black culture a new type of "city" with new "charms" — but this, too, was illusory in its own way.

Works Cited

Baum, F. The Wizard of Oz. Chicago, IL: George M. Hill Company, 1900.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952.

Jones, E. Michael. Sexual Liberation and Political Control. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2000.

Landis, John, dir. Trading Places. Los Angeles: Paramount, 1983. Film.

Lethem, Jonathan. The Fortress of Solitude. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Mailer, Norman. "The White Negro."

Rose, Tricia. "Hip-Hop Nation." In Popular Culture in American History.