The Arms Race of Ideas Part I: Liars and Tyrants and Banks, Oh My!
Written by John Carroll
Our study of the conspiracy to establish a one world government often takes us back hundreds of years, but in America, one specific year stands out in particular. After 1913, things seem to have gone from bad to worse, with intermittent economic booms simply keeping our people blind to the growing evil beneath the surface. The hypnotic magic of Hollywood was a crucial tool for herding the masses in a direction chosen by the few. The subliminal messaging that comes out of Hollywood is a common theme on Quite Frankly, but The Wizard of Oz presents a special case. It opens a door into the age before everything was lost, and highlights the kind of American history that isn’t taught in schools today.
In 1900, over a generation before Hollywood dazzled audiences with technicolor, Lyman Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a charming, and seemingly benign children’s tale. Readers of the book didn’t suspect it could have been a case study of the events leading up to the financial enslavement of the nation. That is, until 1964, when Henry Littlefield published The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populismin the spring edition of American Quarterly. The first clue that the story was actually about monetary policy is a big one. In Baum’s book, Dorothy’s slippers weren’t ruby red. They were silver.
I’ll leave it to the reader to research the sinister meaning of red shoes in Hollywood, but for now our focus is on silver. In 1789, the Constitution created a bimetallic monetary policy, in which dollars were backed by, and could be converted into, both gold and silver. Several years later, Alexander Hamilton set a fixed exchange rate between the two metals, which doomed the system because the government ratio differed from the market ratio. Hamilton’s blunder created an arbitrage opportunity for speculators to capitalize on, which in turn began draining US gold reserves. As a result, the Coinage Act of 1873 banned the US Mint from creating silver dollars, and put the country solely on a gold standard. Keep this in mind for later.
After the election of President Rutherford B. Hayes and the Compromise of 1877, America steamrolled into the Gilded Age and Industrial Revolution, and the economy skyrocketed. Naturally, bubbles formed in the midst of the growth, and the biggest bubble was the railroad industry. In what became known as the Panic of 1893, the railroad bubble burst, and the whole economy crashed down with it.
Unemployment reached 20% in the second-worst depression in US history, and many paused to consider what the nation had become. As industry had grown, so too did the big cities, at the expense of the small towns. Entire rural communities disappeared, and farmers, who couldn’t move their businesses, were hit especially hard. Baum lived in the Midwest during the hardship, and empathized with the political force it unleashed. Littlefield believed his characters represented different groups in America at the time.
The Tin Man, cold, mechanical and lacking a heart, symbolized the factory workers who seemed to have lost their humanity by becoming cogs in the machine. The Scarecrow alludes to the farmers. He’s missing a brain and is thus presumed to be stupid, yet consistently comes up with ingenious solutions to help the group through the obstacles on their journey, all before being awarded a worthless degree. Dorothy, of course, represents the average American. She’s ignorant of the larger evil at play, but is beautifully innocent and pure of heart.
Getting back to the history, the farmers quickly organized themselves politically, and rejuvenated the Populist Party. By 1896, their movement had morphed into a full-on populist revolt, and they found their champion in a man named William Jennings Bryan. Bryan himself was a Democrat, not a Populist, but he was a common Midwesterner who took up the cause of the common man. He hijacked the Democrat Party with his populist agenda, and stunned its leadership by securing their presidential nomination at the Democrat National Convention. The Democrat Establishment was disgusted by Bryan, who they viewed as backwards and unqualified. Many of them abandoned the party, and even sided with the Republicans against him in the general election. Sound familiar?
The Election of 1896 was truly a watershed moment in America, as the political tropes of “we the people vs. the elites” and “income inequality” as we know them today, were born. As we find ourselves in the midst of an even bigger populist uprising today, and prepare to embark into uncharted waters, it’s important to consider the shortsightedness of the 1896 populists, which allowed the elites to successfully employ a bait-and-switch.
The Populist Party platform called for an income tax on millionaires and the direct election of senators. They eventually got both in 1913, with the ratification of the 16th and 17th amendments. The anger the populists felt about the gross wealth and power disparities was absolutely justified, but they failed to recognize how their movement came to embody “The Tyranny of the Majority” James Madison warned of in Federalist No. 10. The income tax would creep over time to apply to all Americans, and the democratization of the Senate effectively ended our republican form of government. Similar to the modern dilemma posed by Big Tech, the populists also wanted to nationalize the railroad and telegraph companies, without considering the effects of giving the federal government power over the utilities they depended on in their daily lives.
The signature issue on the Populist platform, however, was “Free Silver.” They advocated for the Treasury to reinstate silver as legal tender, and to resume the minting of silver coins. Inflating the money supply with silver would have provided immediate economic relief to the farmers, who could have paid off debts to the big banks, and raised crop prices. Although gold is sound money, it was mostly in the hands of the bankers. If the money supply was inflated with silver while the bankers’ gold reserves remained constant, the percentage of the money supply they controlled would drastically decrease, which also translated to a loss of political power.
Austrian economists are right to decry runaway inflation, but deflation, or contraction of the money supply, crashes economies much faster. Businesses can’t grow, and workers can’t accumulate savings when money is too scarce, but silver was abundant in 1896 America. In his most famous speech, William Jennings Bryan declared, “Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
Bryan’s campaign for the presidency ultimately fell short, and he was accused of not fighting hard enough for the populist cause. Littlefield identified him as the Cowardly Lion. The crux of Littlefield’s theory, however, lies in the primary symbolism in Baum’s book. The entirety of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, he argued, was an allegory for the Free Silver issue. Take the name of the magical land itself. Oz. is an abbreviation of ounces, the metric used to measure precious metals. The Good Witches are from the North and the South, representing the humble, agrarian people, as opposed to the Wicked Witches of the East and the West, home to the coastal banking elites. After Dorothy kills the Wicked Witch of the West by dousing her with water, the Wizard even remarks, “Oh, you liquidated her, eh?”
The Yellow Brick Road, which may symbolize the gold standard, leads to the Emerald City, which we discover is only propped up by lies and deceptions. What else is green and backed by nothing? Federal Reserve Notes. At the end of the story, Dorothy is told that the power of her magic silver slippers will carry her away from all the madness. As we’ll see in Part II, the film may have changed the color of the slippers for a specific purpose, one much more consequential than the usual Hollywood shenanigans. The change may have actually been aimed at cementing the reality of the political course the country was set on after 1896.
If Littlefield was correct about Baum’s true intentions, then the moral of the story becomes clear, and is even more relevant today. It is to reject the forced reality projected by the elites, click our heels together, and return to what we know in our hearts is right. In other words, there’s no place like home.
