THROUGH HISTORY WITH THE WIZARD OF OZ

Editorial cartoonists use Oz metaphors to comment on issues in the 20th Century

by Carl Rexroad

Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 41, no. 1 (Spring 1997), pgs. 20–27

Citations

Chicago 17th ed.:

Rexroad, Carl. “Through History with The Wizard of Oz.” Baum Bugle 41, no. 1 (1997): 20–27.

MLA 9th ed.:

Rexroad, Carl. “Through History with The Wizard of Oz.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 41, no. 1, 1997, pp. 20–27.

(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with images of editorial cartoons that have not been reproduced here. However, typographical errors have been left in place to accurately reflect the printed version.)

Philippines strongman Ferdinand Marcos. Scandal-plagued EPA official Rita Lavelle. Tax-evading hotel magnate Leona Helmsley. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. The Wall Street bull. The Democratic Party’s plan to reform health care.

These assorted and sometimes sordid characters all have one thing in common: Each has been depicted as the melting Wicked Witch of the West by the sharp pens of America’s political cartoonists.

“The melting witch is a great image for a political cartoonist,” says Steve Kelley of the San Diego Union-Tribune. “Evil personified in the form of the witch is so easily identifiable for the reader.”

The melting witch is just one of several visual images from The Wizard of Oz brought to life by the quick wits of today’s editorial cartoonists, who comment through their art and words on current events for newspapers across the country.

Indeed, The Wizard of Oz as a metaphor for today’s politics, state of the economy, world events, state of our health care or just about any other topical event of the late 20^th Century society, is stronger now than at any other time throughout the nearly 100 year history of the book or almost 60 year history of the classic movie.

Every president since Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, and scores of other national, state and local leaders have at some time been presented to the American public as lacking the requisite intelligence, feelings or strength to be completely successful. And when one considers an image that quickly shows the lack of essential traits of leadership, the brainless Scarecrow, the heartless Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion immediately spring to mind.

Reduced to its basic levels, both the movie and book pit good against evil. In a medium where editorial cartoonists depend on the quick read and visual effects to take a position on an issue of public policy, that theme as played  out through the world of Oz makes the literary and movie classic an important contributor to the editorial cartooning genre.

The Wizard of Oz is “one of the few literary works people have in common,” Kelley says. “There aren’t that many movies or books we’ve all seen or read, and because everyone knows this story, it makes metaphorical imagery much easier.”

90 years of visual imagery

The presidential election of 1996 brought a continued interest in Oz as a metaphor for politics. During each of the national elections dating back to at least 1980, Oz has been used to describe some aspect of the election or a candidate. But with the most recent election featuring Republican Bob Dole, his home state of Kansas added fodder for the satire. The campaign trail led along the Yellow Brick Road to the GOP Convention in San Diego in the full-color illustration of a book of editorial cartoons published by San Diego-based Copley Newspapers. That cartoon by Marshall Ramsey dressed Dole as Dorothy. The other presidential hopefuls who had dropped out along the way were costumed as her three companions, including a plaid-shirted Scarecrow/Lamar Alexander. Ramsey was not the only one to cross-dress Dole. Several other cartoons have shown Dole in that role, including several which had Dole waking up in bed after he had been soundly beaten in the election and being told that he had suffered a bad dream. One such cartoon, by Tom Meyer of the San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle included President Clinton as Auntie Em, comforting his vanquished opponent. H. Ross Perot with his oversized ears also was standing in a corner dressed as the Munchkin mayor.

(While Dole was depicted as Dorothy several times as his 1996 campaign ground to a halt, he apparently first appeared in dress and pigtails in 1988, when he unsuccessfully sought the GOP presidential nomination. That work was created by Mike Peters of the Dayton [Ohio] Daily News. President Reagan apparently was the first Dorothy-president-in-a-dress. Seattle Post-Intelligencer artist David Horsey created a color cover for the book, Reaganomics, which was a collection of cartoons lampooning Reagan published in 1984.)

Certainly 1996 was rich with Oz-based satire of the presidential election, but the origins of such visuals date back 90 years earlier. The opinionated Harper’s Weekly magazine cast newspaper publishing magnate and political candidate William Randolph Hearst as the brainless Scarecrow in a series of five weekly cartoons based on the character played by well-known comedian Fred Stone. Those cartoons, which were drawn by W. A. Rogers, ran in the weekly publication in October and November 1906. Stone had been touring with the stage musical, The Wizard of Oz since early in that decade. The play ran off and on over several years on Broadway, and toured nationally over an almost 10 year period.

Hearst, who through his New York World newspaper was blamed for stirring up the Spanish-American war, had sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1904 and was the Democratic nominee for governor of New York in 1906, when the cartoons appeared. The first cartoon shows Hearst as a caricature of the Stone Scarecrow and is labeled “The Wizard of Ooze.” The mud in which he is standing symbolizes the sensational news gathering of his newspaper empire. Hearst’s own political ambition is criticized in another cartoon as he tries to step over the statehouse in Albany into the White House. That cartoon was selected for inclusion into a newly published work, Drawn and Quartered, The History of Political Cartoons, edited by Stephen Hess. The five-cartoon series criticizes Hearst’s news-gathering, his truce with corrupt Tammany Hall leader Charles F. Murphy and his overall ambition, which created dreams of the White House.

Those cartoons appeared in a magazine known for its sharp comment on the days’ events, made famous in the mid-to-late 1800s by artist-commentator Thomas Nast, who is generally seen as the father of the editorial cartoon genre. The artist who created the Hearst-Oz series, W. A. Rogers, was fairly well known in his day. His work was compiled into two books, one in the late 1800s and one about the time of World War I.

Rogers’s 1906 cartoons represent the first and only known use of the Oz metaphor to comment on current events until the famous movie itself was released in August 1939. Newspapers of that time period were filled with news of Adolf Hitler and the brewing war in Europe. Editorial cartoonists, who sometimes were published on the front page of the papers in that era, also commented virtually daily on Hitler’s actions.

On August 30, 1939, just shortly after the movie’s first theatrical release, a young cartoonist named Herbert Block merged Hitler and the newly released movie into an editorial cartoon delivered to newspapers across the country by the Newspaper Enterprise Association.

Block, who draws under the name Herblock, is still going strong today at the Washington Post. He has won the Pulitzer Prize for cartooning three times. The Pulitzer is journalism’s highest honor. (In fact, at least 14 Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists have used the Oz theme in their work.)

Herblock’s 1939 cartoon depicted Hitler as the Wicked Witch. Perched on his shoulder is Italian henchman Benito Mussolini, portrayed as a Flying Monkey. Britain is cast as the Lion, Poland as the Scarecrow, France as the Tin Man, and Dorothy as the European Community. Hitler/Witch is threatening the four with a burning broom, while Mussolini says, “Hey Boss — Maybe that lion isn’t so cowardly!” The cartoon is headlined, “In the Not-So-Merry Land of Oz.”

Herblock’s cartoon is important for several reasons. It is, of course, contemporary with the release of the movie that has continued to serve throughout the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s as inspiration for numerous editorial cartoonists. But it also was extremely rare for an editorial cartoon of that time period to use pop culture to make its point. While it cannot be said definitively that Herblock’s cartoon is the only 1939 cartoon using the Oz theme, searches of major newspapers’ microfilm reveal no others in that time frame.

“You wouldn’t know in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s that people were flooding to movie theaters,” says V. Cullum Rogers, editor of The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists trade journal, The Notebook. Rogers, a cartoonist and cartoon scholar, says that the habit of using pop culture as inspiration for editorial cartoons didn’t get going until the 1970s. The movie Jaws, released in 1975, was the first movie to really inspire a wave of cartoons based on pop culture, Rogers says. Movies, TV and advertising, of course, are now deeply imbedded in our culture.

While fads (and movies) come and go, Oz has stood the test of time. There are few other movies of any time period that could lend themselves to a quick visual read that an audience would understand.

The Baby Boomers who entered the job market in the late 1960s and early 1970s were the first generation who grew up with an annual diet of The Wizard of Oz from its television presentation. The messages and images of the movie apparently stuck with them—both the creators of the cartoons and their readers.

There is little competition from pop culture to compete with Oz as an instantly recognizable theme. From the fiction-fairy tale genre, only Pinocchio and Frankenstein come close. Certainly a lying politician’s growing nose and the monster image are quickly shown and recognized. Other tales, such as Snow White, Hansel and Gretel and Alice in Wonderland exist but are not nearly as predominant. From the pop culture growth era of the ‘70s, Star Wars character Darth Vader could continue to be drawn and instantly recognized, as could certain elements of the TV-movie series Star Trek. But even renowned movies can provide a visual metaphor for cartoonists from only one scene. Gone With the Wind, also released in 1939 and a classic in its own right, has been used with representation of the Clark Gable character holding the Vivien Leigh character to make a statement. But few other scenes in that movie would lend themselves to instant recognition. The 1996 blockbuster Independence Day inspired a spate of cartoons, all of which drew from the scene of the giant space ship hovering over the White House. As the year ended, several cartoons based  on Disney’s live-action 101 Dalmations appeared on editors’ desks. Will these two movies serve as inspiration for editorial cartoonists 60 years in the future? Only time will tell.

 

Recurring themes in cartoons

Oz stands virtually alone with a multitude of images upon which an editorial cartoonist can draw inspiration. Indeed, that is one reason for its popularity, says Mike Thompson, editorial cartoonist for The Springfield [Illinois] State Journal-Register.

“The classic scene that everyone knows is with the group standing in front of the giant head and flames are shooting out,” he says. “And everyone knows the songs, ‘If I Only Had a Brain, Heart’ and so on.”

Indeed, the melting Wicked Witch and the missing key attributes of leadership are but two of several other themes drawn by editorial cartoonists.

Thompson notes how many other scenes exist in The Wizard of Oz to pull cartoon readers in—following the Yellow Brick Road, Dorothy’s home falling on the Wicked Witch of the East and the Flying Monkeys.

The image of our leaders or institutions without brains or heart or courage make for the most-often used visual metaphor among the cartoons uncovered in this search. Of course, a person has three chances to land in trouble if he or she lacks a necessary attribute. Heaven forbid that any president should lack for brains and heart and courage all at the same time!

A sample of the heart-brain-courage theme includes:

— President Carter was drawn during his re-election campaign of 1980 as the Scarecrow without brains. Joining Carter in the cartoon by Stephen Sack of the Fort Wayne, Ind., Journal were Ronald Reagan as the Tin Man with no heart, and third-party candidate John B. Anderson, who as the Lion was singing a variation: “If I Only Had a Chance.” Shown in the background was Dorothy, who was representing the voters when she groaned, “If I Only Had a Choice.”

— Eight years later, Los Angeles Times political cartoonist Paul Conrad commented on the 1988 election with Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis as the heartless Tin Man; President Bush as the courage-less Lion and Vice-President Dan Quayle as the Scarecrow with no brains.

— In 1993, President Clinton got his turn in the hot seat, joining the traditional artists’ renderings of the Tin Man and Scarecrow. Dressed in a business suit, Clinton nonetheless is skipping along arm in arm with the others crooning, “If I Only Had a Spine. ” That depiction was created by Mike Peters of The Dayton Daily News, who also has used Oz themes in his daily and Sunday cartoon strip, “Mother Goose & Grimm.”

— The ruling body of college sports, the NCAA, has also been held up as brainless in cartoons by San Diego’s Kelley and Drew Litton of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. In addition, Springfield’s Thompson has criticized a 1996 federal farm reform effort through the Scarecrow, who is both brainless and leaving the farm behind, while the farming couple watch and comment, “Guess we’ll just have to struggle along without him. “

The no brains, heart or courage theme has showed up In some form in 20 cartoons uncovered during this search.

While the melting witch is readily called to mind by most anyone asked to think visually about Oz, the giant disembodied Wizard’s head from the throne room has been used almost as often as the witch.

Dick Locher of The Chicago Tribune portrayed President Carter in 1978 in one cartoon as the giant head and in another as the weaker real man behind the curtain. Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton also have done their turns in scenes where their reality doesn’t match the larger-than-life image of the Wizard and his head.

And if size of ego is any relation to the size of one’s head, then it likely comes as no surprise that presidential hopeful Perot and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich have on more than one occasion taken on the form of the giant head. Iran-Contra figure Ollie North and fallen Congressman Dan Rostenkowski also have been revealed behind the curtain as flawed—indeed, criminal—men, all the while projecting a virtuous image through the Wizard’s head.

Thompson created the Rostenkowski image, but in retrospect didn’t like the drawing or the idea.

Other recurring themes revolve around the movie’s final dream scene—most often with Dole waking up back in Kansas after his presidential defeat. San Diego’s Kelley, however, re-created the dream scene during O. J. Simpson’s criminal trial, when the court was hearing arguments over an issue about whether a dream Simpson supposedly had about his ex-wife’s death was admissible as evidence against him.

The tornado itself appears less often. A 1982 cartoon by Bill DeOre of the Dallas Morning News features a family being swept away in the tunnel labeled “Social Security.” A voice says, “Maybe the Wizard can get us our benefits, Ma?” In 1992, Brian Duffy of the Des Moines Register created a cartoon showing a newspaper reader and the headline, “More quakes rock California.” In a second panel, a house is shown inside a tornado, with a voice coming from it. “Aren’t you glad we don’t live in California, Toto.” And in the summer of 1996, The Wizard of Oz met Twister, a movie containing its own Oz references. A funnel cloud inspired by the new tornado movie was labeled “Polls.” It was sweeping up a house labeled “Dole Campaign,” from which was coming, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

In addition to several uses of that famous movie line in regard to the Dole campaign, it has been used numerous other times as well, including such variations as Clinton’s ArKANSAS, and former NFL quarterback Joe Montana’s move from San Francisco to KANSAS City.

The Flying Monkeys also appear more than once, but not often. Mussolini in Herblock’s 1939 image is one of only a few known uses. In 1981, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Pat Oliphant cast the IRS in the role of the Wicked Witch as she sent her flying monkeys in the guise of IRS auditors off to Michigan to put down a tax revolt there. And in the 1996 image of Dole at the San Diego convention by Marshall Ramsey, reporters as Flying Monkeys encircle the Republican leaders with notepads in hand.

While all of these cartoons immediately signal Oz to the reader by their visual depictions, other cartoons contain no such visual clue that they are Oz-related. In such cases, they must be read completely to make the connection. After the United States’ 1983 invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, readers of Bill Garner’s cartoons in The Washington Times saw only the United Nations building as the image. A text balloon off to the side read, “While we’re at it, let’s condemn Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion for liberating the Munchkins. “ (In point of fact, as Oz aficionados will quickly note, the quartet liberated the Winkies; only Dorothy and her house liberated the Munchkins.}

Another extremely subtle use of Oz involved Dole again. Cartoonist Jeff Danziger of The Christian Science Monitor in November 1995 lampooned Dole’s criticism of the movie industry for contributing to the country’s social decay. A headline above the cartoon, which shows Dole standing in a room filled with the scripts from violent movies, reads, “Senator Dole Blames Hollywood for Violent Crimes.” Another small figure in the background peeks over a wall and says into the room, “Yeah . . . like when you click your heels together and go back to Kansas. “

 

Inspired by Oz book illustrations

Virtually all of the Oz-themed cartoons from the 1970s to the present draw their inspiration from the film classic of 1939. But there are a few notable exceptions where the artists’ style seem to have more in common with illustrations from the originalbooks.

A 1974 editorial cartoon by the late Guernsey LePelley cast the Tin Woodman as the “Western World.” He is not only rusted to a standstill, but covered with cobwebs. Behind him holding the oil can is the character of a sheikh, labeled “Arab World.” The cartoon is headlined “Tin Woodman of Oz,” the title of Baum’s 12^th book. It appeared in The Christian Science Monitor at the height of the oil embargo and gasoline shortage in the United States. The cartoon was selected for inclusion in Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year, 1975 edition, and it is not known if LePelley made more use of the Oz theme in his work.

George Fischer, retired cartoonist of the Arkansas Gazette, also used an art style more reminiscent of the books’ characters than the movie in several of his cartoons. Dorothy, her three companions and Toto watch President Reagan viewing movies through a “rear view projector” in one creation, and he casts President Bush as the heartless Tin Man in a 1990 cartoon dealing with the slaughter of the Kurds in Iraq around the time of the Gulf War. Astute Oz observers will see the closer affinity with the books in these two cartoons, although Fisher also has created a melting witch metaphor that obviously is inspired by the movie scene.

The metaphor of Oz: Too much of a good thing?

Many award-winning cartoonists have made multiple use of the Oz metaphor to comment on the real world. Because the top cartoonists are syndicated to numerous large and small newspapers and news magazines across the country, their cartoons are seen by millions of readers. Several examples of Oz cartoons by local cartoonists have turned up as well, appearing in weeklies and small dailies, often done by free-lancers.

As a result, several of today’s artists use the word “cliché” when responding to questions about any use of Oz in editorial cartoons.

Marie Woolf, an artist for Chicago Sun-Times Features, says she tries to avoid popular metaphors because she sees a risk in “gag-driven, low-comedy” cartoons. “One too many cartoons on O. J. or Paula Jones and we’re not visual journalists, we’re fruit flies.” She feels that “late-night, stand-up comedy has no place on the op-ed pages.”

“Obviously the Oz metaphor has staying power,” Woolf says. “If a cartoonist uses a metaphor creatively or unexpectedly, then it’s a good idea.”

Woolf has created one Oz cartoon in her career—from the 1992 election showing the potential First Ladies as Oz characters. Mrs. Perot was shown wishing for a brain, because of her absence from her husband’s campaign, while Hillary Clinton was shown as lacking a heart. Barbara Bush was holding the First Dog Millie in a basket and declaring, “I’m not a witch at all.”

Woolf and every other cartoonist interviewed readily admit that deadline pressures can make the cartoonist reach for an obvious idea, but one that may not necessarily be the best.

Springfield’s Thompson agrees with others when he says that “any cliché can be overused, beaten into the ground.”

But when casting about for a metaphor or analogy to hang a hook on, The Wizard of Oz is something everybody’s seen, Thompson says. He believes that an analogy has to be universal or at least understood by a majority of readers to be effective, hence their continuing use.

Rogers, too, says that editorial cartooning is an art form that thrives on cliches. “The danger is taking a formula and shoving situations into it,” he says, “but repeated use of a visual metaphor is acceptable if it’s appropriate.

“You don’t always have to use the Scarecrow to show lack of brains. A dunce cap or showing someone trying to pound a round peg into a square hole also conveys that message.”

It’s also important to note that in the world of editorial cartooning, the use of the Oz theme seems more frequent when all the cartoons are gathered together. Indeed, it is an extremely important metaphor for the genre, if not the single-most used one in the era of pop culture commentary. But with several hundred cartoonists creating multiple images each week over a period of several decades, it is likely that the casual reader doesn’t feel an overload of Oz.

Such may not be true in Kansas itself, where Wichita Eagle-Beacon cartoonist Richard Crowson is very careful with the images he creates.

Some Kansans are quite sensitive, he says, about how Kansas is portrayed—as flat, gray and colorless and bleak. “It galls a lot of Kansans, because they think Kansas comes off badly.”

So Crowson has even used Oz to portray this anti-Oz sentiment. During the 1988 Final Four appearance by the University of Kansas basketball team, the TV announcer kept waxing eloquent about Kansas and Oz. So Crowson captured the excesses of that scene in a cartoon showing all the inanities flowing from the TV screen. The viewer kicks his shoe through the screen and asks, “Do you ever find yourself wishing Dorothy had lived in some other state?”

Nonetheless Crowson has created Oz allusions that fit well with the Kansas setting in which he works. Several years ago the state legislature was debating the merits of open admission versus qualified admissions to its universities. “I couldn’t resist showing the Scarecrow being brainless and still being admitted to school in Kansas,” he says. And he’s used Oz in cartoons about favorite son Dole, too, although in a more positive vein than some of the national election year portrayals.

For any future cartoons, Crowson is interested in exploring parts of the story which have not previously been used to make a point. Indeed, he created the only known use of the poppy field as metaphor, a 1994 cartoon showing the sleeping characters in the field labeled “National Health Care Debate.”

Crowson also is familiar with the theories about L. Frank Baum creating Oz as a political tract. “If that’s true, then it’s kind of funny that cartoonists are using what in essence amounts to a political cartoon on its own to make their points,” he says.

Whether Baum intended the specific political satire that some have seen in his work or not, it is clear over the past 90 years, and especially the last two decades, that through the genre of editorial cartooning, Oz as metaphor is now deeply entrenched in both our political system and popular culture.

The Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion have all at some point been depicted as farm interests, industry, and Wall Street. Many of our politicians have either lacked one important attribute of brains, heart or courage, or have been unmasked as a humbug Wizard, making big promises but failing to deliver. The Emerald City has come to represent Washington, D.C., a state house, or a city hall—a place where answers are sought but not necessarily discovered. And Dorothy is the quintessential symbol used to represent any plucky underdog who will not be deterred from reaching her goals.

The symbolism drawn from a story almost 100 years old continues to grow and embed itself even deeper in our collective soul, thanks in large measure to those editorial cartoonists who point out some of the many absurdities and foibles of America’s culture and institutions through their depictions of this likewise uniquely American fairy tale.

(The search for Oz cartoons uncovered almost 150 separate uses of themes from the story. The author wishes to thank everyone who contributed, especially Richard Rutter, who shared his extensive collection, as well as Mildred Martin and Clara Houck. V. Cullum Rogers, editor of the Association of American Cartoonists, shared his knowledge of the field and poured over countless volumes to bring some of these cartoons to light.)

SIDEBAR: A Variety of Cartoonists View Oz

“I would never, ever completely swear off using Oz, because as soon as I do, a house will fall on Newt Gingrich. Hey, that kind of happened, didn’t it? The House came down on Newt. I might have an editorial cartoon for tomorrow’s paper.” —Richard Crowson, Wichita Eagle

“Thank God cartoonists have a metaphor like Oz to help us along.” —Dick Locher, Chicago Tribune

“Most classic allusions have some sort of message to teach you—especially for children who might learn . . . “The Wizard of Oz” is colorful, exciting and well-known. I don’t use Oz any more than others, but I use all the metaphors—Alice in Wonderland, Moses off the mountain. You run into problems using metaphors people don’t know.” —George Fisher, retired, The Arkansas Gazette

“Obviously the Oz metaphor has staying power. If cartoonists use a metaphor creatively or unexpectedly, then it’s a good idea.” —Marie Woolf, Chicago Sun-Times Features

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