The Gold Standard
I watched “The Wizard of Oz” every year that it came on TV and always loved it. Recently I read where the movie was symbolic of the US Money policy. I thought this was interesting because I think that many movies convey a lot of underlying messages.
However I do not think that Dorothy represented the “godlessness” of living in a gold backed money system, just because someone thinks that the yellow bricks led to a place where where everything green had value.
When the USA had the gold Standard for money, everything Green (the US dollar) DID have value..until they stopped the gold standard for money about sixty years ago. But in 1939 when the Wizard of Oz was made, Gold was very much the standard.
I do not think that the color green in Emerald City signaled anything of ACTUAL value in the place called Oz, because Dorothy recognized that once there, the “rainbow” seemed like a bad dream and she “returned” or “woke up”, when she realized she wanted to be back in a world of black and white because “there is no place like home”.
Her hair care products, her clothes, her makeup and her friends in Oz could not take the place of her family. Woke in 1939 was not about staying in the rainbow, it was about leaving it behind.
Home, in The wizard of Oz” was a place where there was hard work, a family who cared, Preachers who visited the sick or injured, and values that did not change. Families had pets but pets were not kept at the expense of other people…including Toto.
Speaking of pets, if Dorothy was representative of someone in that time period, who wanted to run away from their home, it could have been that she was a parody of another Dorothy.
Dorothy Squires as a young girl lived in the UK. In her real life, Auntie Em was actually her mom, and the tin men in her life were actually at a tin factory and she was born in a carnival caravan like the one Dorothy visited in the movie.
In Wikipedia about Dorothy Squires….Born in her parents’ carnival caravan in Pontyberem (about 12 miles from Llanelli), Carmarthenshire, Wales, to a steelworker, Archibald James Squires, and his wife, Emily, she wanted a piano as a child. Her mother bought her a ukulele. While working in a tin plate factory, she began to perform professionally as a singer at the age of 16 in the working men’s club of Pontyberem.
The real Dorothy sang on the radio and even was famous for her gipsy song. Maybe gale, her last name meant that there needed to be strong winds of change for this of “moving to America” to happen for her.
But Instead of traveling to the USA, Dorothy Squires did indeed stay in London, and instead of embracing the black and white of her home country, she seemed dissatisfied and filed many lawsuits apparently, to get what she wanted. Maybe the last name of name of Gale was a parody of the multitudinous lawsuits as there were papers called such…back in the day.
Author Gale, Charles James, 1805–1876.
Uniform Title LLMC-Digital Collection.
Title Reports of cases argued and determined in the Court of Exchequer : with a table of the names of cases and a digest of the principal matters / by C.J. Gale.
Frivolous lawsuits were banned and Dorothy was ultimately banned from going to court. Perhaps the Wizard of Oz was secretly making fun of her while feeling sorry for her at the same time.
But later they stopped feeling sorry for her because I believe that the cartoon character of Cruella Deville in 101 Dalmations was another parody of Dorothy Squires, as an older woman.
Cruella wanted all the dogs that were spotted, that she could not have, perhaps the same way that Squires wanted the fame the “ink spots” got, that she could not have, from recording her song.
Interestingly, speaking of dogs, in the 1930s, in Germany, Hitler was very concerned about the welfare and treatment of dogs, (while he was massacring the Jewish population of people). Treating animals better than human beings is not going to help “the rainbow” of today anymore than it did back then to help Hitler. Just saying…because it is the ultimate hypocrisy.
“The Nazis passed a number of really strict animal protection laws
in 1933 regulating the slaughter of animals. Hermann Goering announced an end to the “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments” and it was said that anyone who treated animals as inanimate property would be sent to a concentration camp. Hitler in 1942 with his…”
But back to The Wizard of Oz as a parody, I read where the cowardly lion represented William Jennings Bryan and I will go with that…not because of his face being an exact match but because his being afraid of maintaining the gold standard, (which prevented inflation and kept the dollar sound) made him a good “cowardly lion”.
He was lion enough to give the gold cross speech, comparing humanity to Jesus on the cross, if we did not change our monetary system, but he did so to cave in to the will of the overspending government.
The next president after Jennings was nominated, was a Republican who reinforced the gold standard of money, and he beat Jennings, and the gold standard stayed in place up until a little more than fifty years ago when it was stopped. Interestingly enough, when the gold standard was removed, because gold was so scarce, the government made restricted the ability of regular citizens to hold large amounts of gold and at the same time, the government hoarded gold.
Republican president McKinley’s “front porch” campaign of sound money, was dead on target. And people responded to his logic.
The inflation today is a result of governments mistaken decision to print money whenever it needs it, contributing to the loss in value of the dollar. But the gold standard could in fact, be reinstated and it would do a lot to curtail government overspending, because the government would need to have in gold, the funds to back its purchases.
The Tin man seems to me to represent Herbert Hoover.
The tin man in the movie, wanted a heart which was a parody of some of the public thinking Hoover needed a heart (perhaps because Hoover said in response to the great depression that “Prosperity cannot be restored by raids upon the public Treasury,” in his 1930 State of the Union address.) But later historians would agree with Hoovers refusal to use the government to give out free money from the public treasury. Bad decisions that led to the depression, had consequences just like accumulating credit card debt has bad consequences if that debt is not paid off.
The Straw man, I believe was someone who came along a bit later in history as a supporter of democrat president FDR.
The straw man I think is a parody of Henry Morgenthau Jr. who was secretary of the Treasury. The straw man was playing with fire, literally when he was secretary of the treasury, because he was responsible for collecting a tax on firearms with the National Firearms act.
Playing with peoples guns sir, is definitely playing with fire.
“While the NFA (national firearms act) was enacted by Congress as an exercise of its authority to tax, the NFA had an underlying purpose unrelated to revenue collection. As the legislative history of the law discloses, its underlying purpose was to curtail, if not prohibit, transactions in NFA firearms.”
This was playing with fire, and also playing with constitutional amendments of the people of the United States. Apparently he was “all over the place, an arm over here, and a leg over there” kind of guy.
But the actor who played the part of the straw man was quite the interesting person to read about as I learned from the following article.
https://medium.com/r/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.movieguide.org%2Fnews-articles%2Fthe-wizard-of-ozs-ray-bolger-on-gods-provision.html
The straw man argument was about imposing a tax when it had at its roots a different agenda, making it a straw man fallacy.
“A straw man fallacy is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be “attacking a straw man”.
And finally we have the Wizard of Oz who was the magician, the gatekeeper, the driver, the professor and the doorman. When I think of someone who is involved in all aspects of our lives, I immediately think of the FBI.
And so I think that the Wizard of Oz was Emilio Kosterlitzky who originally was The Russian Cossack turned special agent.
Emilio Kosterlitzky was one of the most colorful characters to ever serve as a special agent.
“A cultured, Russian-born man of the world, he spent four decades in the Russian and Mexican militaries, rising to the rank of brigadier general in Mexico. To avoid the dangerous tribulations of the ongoing Mexican Revolution, he settled down in Los Angeles in 1914.In 1917, the same year as the Bolshevik revolution in his native land, he joined the FBI. He was 63.”
Perhaps he was full of a lot of hot air, who knows but he sure seems to match the character of The wizard. He appeared to do some great things for the FBI as an agent.
At the end of the day, The USA, when it was on the Gold Standard, did not have big government that could authorize overspending accruing billions of dollars of debt and did not have rampant border crossings and giveaways to illegals, because the government did not have the power to just print whatever money it wanted, which is what is now causing rampant inflation.
More taxes without accountability is why people here in the USA left Europe…and why they fought a war…no taxation without representation. Who do you think is representing the average American today… the global elite? The EU? lol
Overspending by big government is the hallmark of a Democratic policy because government does not seem to ever plan to pay anything back. Who is funding these dollars they are wasting…YOU AND ME…MR. And MRS. Average tax burdened American.
Time to go back home…like Dorothy did, to family values, hard work, a smaller and more efficient government, and a money standard based on gold and precious minerals so that big government is stripped of its excessive power and is put back in it’s place as a servant of the people, not a master of them.
I think that the movie is so beloved because people realize that they do NOT actually want that place that is “over the rainbow” no matter how enticing it is, if it means that family is sacrificed. It just is not worth it.
I think that most people then and now, are tired of paying taxes just so the government can randomly give money and supplies away like it has been doing for years, like the 50.1 billion given away in 1941 (equivalent to 773 billion dollars in 2022) given away to the UK, Soviet Union, France, the Republic of China and other allied Nations of which, only 7.8 billion came back in the reverse of the Lend Lease act.
People are tired of being told that the government wants peace and simultaneously wants to tax guns, while secretly trying to take away guns. Even now like then, the government is accumulating guns the same way they stopped personal ownership of gold while hoarding gold themselves.
The Big Government Power play that is trying to secretly control things, like the Wizard; doesn’t carry a lot of weight in liters or ounces (oz) lol. and things that people can actually do for themselves in their own homes, like Dorothy did, that the government is trying to take over, has to stop. Nobody had the power except Dorothy…nobody else could walk in her shoes.
Dorothy went back home, and all the illegals who think that coming to the USA, is like somewhere “over the rainbow”, you are the straw man like in the story of Oz…and the purpose for your life here is not what you think. The reason for letting you in is being promoted by a dishonest man. The argument to help you is a straw man fallacy. Go back home to your homeland and God will help you.
Bible verse randomly chosen for those who want to come into the USA illegally “for unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior which is Christ the Lord. God is telling you to get to church, the savior is within.