Lions and tigers and ineffective religious opposition – Oh, my!

The first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. (Image courtesy of Google Images.)

A lion, a tin man, and a scarecrow walk into a bar and bond over no-good tequila shots and secular humanist ethics – or so The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s opposition would like one to believe. While the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz has met little controversy over the years, the children’s book is no stranger to the courtroom.

In the same year that Ferris Bueller decided to take his famous day off, angered Tennessee parents decided to fight Federal District Judge Thomas Hull regarding their children’s literacy education in the public school system. That’s right, folks: In 1986, America’s beloved fairy tale about the adventures of Dorothy and her friends was nearly booted from certain Tennessee schools for infringing upon the community’s prevailing Christian beliefs.

But when the story was first set to paper, it was not author L. Frank Baum’s intention to create a tale of religious insolence. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the first book in a series 14 strong, was published in 1900 after Baum penned the bedtime stories that he had created and told to his children.

The gang’s all here! From left: Jack Haley as the Tin Man, Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow, Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale, Frank Morgan as the Wizard of Oz, and Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion in Victor Fleming’s 1939 film adaptation of Baum’s book. (Image courtesy of Photosofwar.net)

Often pegged as America’s first fairy tale, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz follows the adventures of Dorothy Gale and her dog, Toto, after a tornado transplants their Kansas home to Munchkin County in Land of Oz, an action which facilitates the death of the Wicked Witch of the East, the Munchkin’s evil dictator. Although she appreciates her new surroundings and the beautiful pair of silver slippers that appear on her feet, Dorothy longs for home. The tale follows her journey along the Road of Yellow Bricks with Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, and Cowardly Lion in order to meet the Wizard of Oz in the City of Emeralds. There, the group asks for his help: The scarecrow for a brain, the tin man for a heart, the lion for courage, and Dorothy for a safe return to her aunt and uncle in Kansas. Through a plot line that includes the wizard providing each group member with a fake symbol of what each desires and Dorothy being captured by the Wicked Witch of the West and forced into the life of a house slave, the protagonists realize that they have had the ability to satisfy their desires all along – all they had to do was to trust in themselves and to drive their own destinies.

A bit different from the movie? Professor John Funchion of the University of Miami argues that Americans challenge The Wonderful Wizard of Oz more often than the book’s film adaptation because the former contains a greater number of political and societal allegories. The 1880s and ‘90s saw an increase in economic stability that lead to wanderlust. More travelers resulted in a more people who questioned and learned how to approach other cultures, so there was more relative intercultural acceptance than ever before.

But as Fuchion explains, “expansionism reignited a popular and clinical fascination with the countervailing phenomenon of nostalgia, or homesickness.” Cosmopolitan travel seemed to contrast with the nostalgic feelings of the soldiers who had fought in the Civil War, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American War.

Still of Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale. 1939’s The Wizard of Oz uses black and white film for the nostalgic Kansas scenes and technicolor for the Land of Oz. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The professor continues, “Baum…had written a fantasy that imagined how cosmopolitan and nostalgic desire could work in antagonistic tension with one another.” Dorothy had the best of both worlds: She was able to visit a land of riches and ideals while balancing it with finding her way back home.

Then why would seven families in a Tennessee school district attempt to ban the book? In the Oz series, Dorothy later abandons her Kansas homeland in favor of living in Oz permanently. Rather than viewing this act as a metaphor for the abandonment of political and social ideology, parents claimed that it encouraged their children to abandon their Christian God in favor of secular humanism, a philosophy that accepts human ethics, morals, and reason while rejecting religion and deities.

According to Karl J. Franson, professor of English at the University of Maine at Farmington, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz “…depicts a Grail-like quest during which each traveler seeks to conquer an inner emptiness or deficiency.” While Baum’s purpose may not have been to create a religious allegory, to some, this is exactly what he did.

A full-color illustration from the book’s first edition. (Image courtesy of Google Images.)

Tennessee parents brought their case to Judge Hull, stating that U.S. law prohibits educators to teach religion in schools – to these parents, including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the public school curriculum was a violation of both the law and their religion. Personal development conflicted with God’s plan (yes, we are still talking about the 1980s here).

Judge Hull ruled that the book was religiously neutral and did not violate any constitutional rights, so rather than removing it from public school curriculum, he advised parents to have their children opt out from reading lessons surrounding the book.

According to Anthony Podesta, then president of People for the American Way, the ruling would lead to disaster: “It encourages the publishing community to water down books, search for the lowest common denominator…a way of teaching in which no one is offended, but no one is engaged.”

And for several angry plaintiff parents, the ruling was a disaster – they felt that they were forced to choose between having their children practice Christianity and enrolling them in public school. In response, two parents started a private Christian school that served K-12 students, and others decided to shuttle their children up to 25 miles each day in order to place their children in different schools.

Ah, the United States of America: A country that (usually) fights censorship while its citizens condemn children’s classics. There really is “no place like home.”