Is the Wizard Of Oz really a political cartoon?

Over the last couple of nights I’ve re-read all of Grant Morrison’s brilliant and bizarre run on the Doom Patrol. Some of this run was previously mentioned here in the context of a discussion of Borges and Serafini.

(An aside: this run started almost 20 years ago! I am so old.)

It’s great, great stuff, and if you haven’t read it you should. It’s all available now in a series of six trade paperback collections from DC.

However, that’s not what I want to talk about. I mention it only to explain why I found myself reading through the annotations for these comics online at Doom Patrol online.

That’s where I found this bit:

Doom Patrol online
Actually, Wizard of Oz isn’t a fairy tale, it’s just a big political cartoon about the Populist party which, at the time, wanted to switch from the golk standard to the silver standard. Baum’s father was a big gold standard man, so Baum writes a story about a tornado (political movement) which sweeps across Kansas (like a popular political ideal) and carries this young firl off. She lands in a place where she’s given silver slippers and walks on a gold road (get it?). She meets a scarecrow (farmers) who has no brain, a tim man (industrial men) with no heart and a fierce lion (3rd party members) who has no backbone to back up his ferocious exterior. They travel to Emerald City (Washington) because of the promises of the Wizard (Populist politician), who doesn’t really give them anything and then rides away on hot air! Dorothy returns to Kansas and is wiser for appreciating what she has and not getting carried away by the tornado (Populist movement).

Is that some old rubbish, or is this a generally accepted critical interpretation that I have somehow avoided running into before?

or

Of course in the age of Google such questions are not rhetorical.

• The Rise and Fall of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a “Parable on Populism”
• OVER THE RAINBOW: Once upon a time, The Wizard of Oz was a populist fable
• There’s three pages of this theory at Turn Me On, Dead Man starting here. There’s also some other equally interesting interpretations of the book.
• And, lest any doubt remains that at least some people take this very seriously: serious scholarly texts.

(Oz illustration is one of a set of gorgeous illustrations at BibliOdyssey. Vintage political cartoon is from here, slightly cleaned up for this presentation.)

Update: Oh, it gets better and better. See Eric Shanower‘s comments below for the real scoop.