As well as being a fairly talented children's writer L. Frank Baum was highly political. In some respects he was a rather extreme right-winger, in others he was relatively left-wing - as manifested, for instance, in the quasi-socialist
utopian economy of
Oz. Many of his books contain political allegories or symbolism of one kind or another, in a way somewhat reminiscent of
Gulliver's Travels;
The Marvelous Land of Oz, for instance, was an obvious satire on
feminism and the
suffragette movement, while an examination of
The Wizard of Oz with respect to turn-of-the-twentieth-century politics is revealing. He also advocated the wholesale extermination of the remaining
Native Americans, a view which doubtless seemed a lot less disgustingly callous to many of his contemporaries:
‘The nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they should die than live the miserable wretches that they are.’
- quoted on ZNet, and in the book American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World