The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was

Introduction

Introduction In 1957 popular culture was not yet an acceptable academic discipline : a Pulitzer prize-winning scholar would, in those days, have been expected to concern himself with weightier matters. Russel Nye, however, was a different kind of scholar, a scholar whose Jeffersonian political ideals extended beyond politics into a popular culture that others were denouncing as "middlebrow." When Nye teamed up with Martin Gardner to bring out a new edition of L. Frank Baum's children's classic The Wizard ofOz and Who He Was the politics of culture came briefly into focus. Martin Gardner in his introduction to the new edition addressed the question of "who he was" with a brief biographical essay on Baum. Lyman Frank Baum, we learn from Gardner, was born in 1856 near Syracuse, New York. He began his writing career in 1875 by founding the New Era, a newspaper still published in Bradford, Pennsylvania. He went on to manage opera houses, act in the theater, and establish a magazine for window dressers. In 1900 he wrote the first of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz books. Its popularity kept him writing Oz books for the rest of his life: and even beyond his life, for after he died in 1919 others were commissioned to write more books about the Wizard. Clearly, Baum was an American original, a gifted writer and a flamboyant promoter. In 1905 he purchased Pedloe Island off the coast of California and announced plans to build a miniature land of Oz for children. What might have been America's first theme park was never built, but Baum's Oz film company founded in 1914 did produce some silent screen versions of his tales. • ix· THE WIZARD OF OZ The 1939 film, starring Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, and Bert Lahr, was, in fact, the third film presentation of Oz. Russel Nye's contribution to the new edition, aptly titled an "appreciation," was a masterful combination of enthusiasm and scholarship, an overview of the world Baum created in fifteen admittedly uneven stories. Nye heard the echoes of Ben Franklin in Baum's voice and noted specifically American virtues blended with European fairy-tale tradition. Nye's praise of Baum was tempered, however, by restraint and precision: he fairly acknowledged Baum's limitations, as well as his gifts. Baum's most unique gift, his uncanny understanding of children, explains, Nye noted, his failure to achieve critical or official popularity among the professional arbiters of children's literature. The absence of overt moralizing provided parents with "little help in adjusting and civilizing the young." The writer's understanding of children is one that the scholar seems to have shared. Commenting on Baum's subtle and gentle humor, for example, Nye confidently predicted that children would enjoy the humor "if adults can be prevented from explaining the joke." It should be noted, then, that Nye's "appreciation" of Baum is, most refreshingly, an appreciation of children, their needs, their joys, and, above all, their intelligence. The urge to adjust and civilize was, it turned out, as compelling in 1957 as it had been years before when The Wonderful Wizard of Oz first appeared. When the Michigan State University Press published Nye and Gardner's new edition with the original illustrations of W. W. Denslow no one expected that this children's book would become a battlefield of clashing viewpoints. The director of the Detroit Library, one Ralph Ulveling, triggered the battle when he attended a librarians' conference at Kellogg Center. It had long been rumored that the Detroit library had been censoring books and Ulveling in his remarks about the Wizard seemed to confirm the rumors. Addressing the conference on April 3, 1957, or, as he later claimed, responding to a reporter's question about The Wizard of Oz, Ulveling criticized the books for their "negativism." "Instead of setting a high goal," he continued, "it drags young minds down to a cowardly level." The Oz books, he • x • Introduction added, were old-fashioned and inferior to "the modern books we stock." Although he acknowledged that there had been some demand for the book after the 1939 movie, he assured his audience that "kids don't complain." Ulveling's anti-Oz comments might have gone unnoticed if the Lansing State Journal's staff reporter Neil Hunter hadn't featured his remarks under the headline "Librarian raps Oz books." Aroused by the ugly odor of censorship...