The Wiz Lives On In The Land Of Oz
In the century since L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the story has become the nation's most beloved home-grown fairy tale.
Never out of print, the story about the little Kansas girl swept up by a tornado to the magical land of Oz has inspired 39 sequels - 13 by Baum himself. It has been retold in five silent movies, countless stage productions and radio broadcasts, and the classic 1939 movie musical starring Judy Garland.
What the people of Kansas could not have imagined, as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz hit their bookstores a century ago, was that it would saddle them with a stereotype known around the world. It is summed up in this exchange from the book:
"I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country, and go back to the dry, gray place you call Kansas," the Scarecrow told Dorothy.
"That is because you have no brains," answered the girl. "No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home."
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Even now, as Oz fans gear up to celebrate the centenary of the May 17, 1900 publication of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Kansans seem unsure whether to thank L. Frank Baum or to wish he'd picked another state to set his story in.
On one hand, they bask in Dorothy's down-home values. On the other, they feel put down as joyless, boring hayseeds - not so much by the book, perhaps, as by the 1939 movie and Dorothy's memorable line (not in the book): “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.”
“It is our blessing and our curse,” said Thomas Fox Averill, an English professor at Washburn University in Topeka who has extensively researched Oz's impact on Kansas culture.
“Dorothy's greatest desire is to find a home and to be at home - this is a great American desire in a nation of immigrants and people who move a lot,” he said. “Finding a home...is a very American desire.”
But the unqualified love so many Kansans have for their state is often accompanied by an inferiority complex about being from Kansas -- an image Averill said is fed by the movie.
“The movie has had a bigger effect, at least a more negative effect, on Kansas,” he said.
Aside from Oz, Kansas has much to distinguish it. It is the geographical epicenter of the contiguous United States, and a stirring symbol of the Old West, with 19th-century wagon-train ruts still creasing its prairies. It gave the nation President Dwight D. Eisenhower and heavyweight boxer Jess Willard, actors Buster Keaton and Jean Harlow, poet Langston Hughes, playwright William Inge, jazzman Charlie Parker and Dr. Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of the planet Pluto.
It was called “Bleeding Kansas" for the violence over slavery that became a sort of rehearsal for the Civil War. Its famously zealous Prohibition movement was personified by Carrie Nation, who smashed her first saloon in Kiowa in 1901. Kansas was also prominent in the women's suffrage movement, and some believe that may be where the author got the idea for setting the book in Kansas. Baum's mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was a leading suffragist and a friend of the feminist trailblazer Susan B. Anthony.
Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, Lucy Hobbs Taylor, the nation's first licensed woman dentist and Lutie Lytle, the first black woman lawyer, were Kansans too.
Claudia Larkin, a director at the state's tourism department believes it is only Kansans themselves who disapprove of the association with Oz, while the rest of the world has warm, positive feelings about it.
The state is always anxious to promote attractions other than the Oz connection. A few years back, the Kansas Department of Economic Development mounted a campaign -- with the slogan “Kansas, Land of Ahs" -- in an effort to show tourists and Kansans alike that there was more to the state than wheat and tornadoes.
The effort got a mixed reception from Kansans, Averill said, and the slogan was dropped in favor of “Ah, Kansas!," followed more recently by “Kansas, Simply Wonderful.”
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Baum was born in upstate New York in 1856. His father got rich from oil, but the son had difficulty settling down. Before turning to writing he raised chickens, was a traveling glassware salesma, a playwright and actor, and a newspaper publisher in Aberdeen, S.D., where he became fascinated with tornadoes -- including one that picked up a house and moved it intact.
He never lived in Kansas, but he traveled there. So it may have come naturally to him to pick Kansas as the setting for the story of a young girl blown away by a house-lifting tornado and deposited in Oz, there to face a mysterious Wizard with no one for backup but a scarecrow, a cowardly lion and a tin man.
The book was a success soon after the first hand-bound copies were in bookstores. And 20 years after Baum's death, Hollywood made it immortal.
The Oz books have been translated into all major languages, and Oz memorabilia are among the hottest collectibles around. Almost no Kansas souvenir shop is without some Oz knickknack or other.
The International Wizard of Oz Club, founded in 1957, is holding a centennial celebration July 20-23 in Bloomington, Ind. The Oz festival in Chesterston, Ind., last year drew 50,000 people, and the town plans another one in September.
The town of Liberal, Kan., has a replica of the Yellow Brick Road and Dorothy's house, and an annual fall festival called Oztoberfest.
The Library of Congress has opened an exhibition to mark the centenary, and the University Press of Kansas has published what it calls the Kansas Centennial Edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Jane Albright, chairwoman of the Oz centennial celebration in Indiana, grew up in Topeka engrossed in the Oz books and has a room full of Oz collectibles in her home in Kansas City, Mo.
“It has made Kansas known around the world, and the fact Dorothy wanted to always go back there would be a compliment to the state,” Albright, 42, said. “She loved Kansas.”