The Wizard of Oz's wizard was a racist, but his mother-in-law was le awesome

Today was one of those read-all-the-internet days. And after hours of random reading, I came across two editorials L Frank Baum wrote calling for the genocide of the Sioux. w...t...f...

He was living in South Dakota at the time of Wounded Knee. He felt that, thanks to white people, the honorable days of the Indians were behind them. (Clearly the Noble Savage trope goes well back into the 1800s.) They were now reduced to miserable cowards, and it was better to kill them all, and let us just remember them As They Used to Be.

"With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them.... Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are."

Which just sounds like justification for the other part of his argument--that the Plains Indians will be so filled with desire for revenge, no white settler is safe unless they're all killed off. (I guess he didn't know ethnic cleansing would work just fine.)

"Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth."

You can read the short editorials here, as well as a good commentary on them. As this professor wrote, you can try to read them as satire (à la Modest Proposal) but they probably weren't. Even the best thing an Oz fan blog can muster is that this was a very dark time in his life and he might have done it to sell his paper.*

So from most accounts he was a kind man, against bigotry on principle, but at the same time a reflection of the worst of his time and place. But here's the weird part. His mother-in-law was one Matilda Joslyn Gage, and someone he greatly admired and was influenced by. Because of her he was a feminist.

Gage: (1) was part of the Underground Railroad; (2) was a radical suffragette who successfully confronted police, and believed in equality not because women were morally superior, but because it was their right; (3) was religious, but highly critical of the church; (4) before Baum's editorials, wrote in defense of upholding Indian treaties, and later praised the Iroquois notion of inherent rights, spent time with them, and was adopted into a clan. So very much not of her time and place. Very much ahead of her time. My new hero.




...I can only conclude that she was out of town when the first editorial was printed, and after the second one she chased him around the house with a broom, and hit home over the head with his own paper. And then I hope he changed his views.

To add to this story, the tribe fighting the Washington Redskins is going to open an Oz themed casino.

Man o man. People are complex. More on that tomorrow.

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* Boy can I respect a fan page that goes into a detailed description of all the racism in its author's books.