LJWorld.com

• Email
• iPod-friendly
• Print

L. Frank Baum's fairy tale about a Kansas girl swept by a tornado to a magical world of munchkins and witches made both author and state synonymous with Oz.

Sheryl Williams, curator of the Kansas Collection at KU's Spencer Research Library, displays a first edition copy of the L. Frank Baum book "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" with illustrations by W.W. Denslow. L. Frank Baum's fairy tale about a Kansas girl swept by a tornado to a magical world made author and state synonymous with Oz.

So deeply is "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" ingrained in American popular culture that a development company is poised to build an $861 million Wonderful World of Oz theme park and resort near DeSoto to capitalize on the tale's popularity. If built, the Oz development would stand as a tribute to a genius storyteller whose essential work spawned the most-watched film ever, "The Wizard of Oz."

But one slice of the story is largely ignored.

It is the piece of Baum's legacy that belies his place as the man who captured the imagination of children with a book about the adventures of Dorothy, Toto, Tin Man, Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion. And it's contrary to a notion expressed in "The Wizard of Oz" that creatures of great diversity can put differences aside and work together in respect and harmony.

Step back in time to Aberdeen, S.D., in late 1890. Conflict among white settlers and American Indians was intense.

It was a decade before "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" became a bestseller.

Genocidal editorial

Salesman, typesetter, press operator and editor L. Frank Baum was the publisher of The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. It was in the pages of his weekly newspaper that Baum left his mark as a racist who repeatedly called for the mass murder of American Indians.

Baum's first appeal for genocide was printed immediately after the slaying of Sitting Bull and 10 days before U.S. Army troops, supported by Indian mercenaries, killed about 300 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee Creek, S.D.

Here is what Baum wrote:

"The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies, inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With this fall the nobility of the redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs.

"The whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.

"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. We cannot honestly regret their extermination."

Theme park hurdle

Chief Sitting Bull, seated center, is surrounded by members of his family in this 1882 photo taken at Fort Randall in The Dakota Territories. After Sitting Bull was killed, 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' author, L. Frank Baum, decreed that the "nobility of the redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs."

On Jan. 3, 1891, after Wounded Knee, Baum published an editorial suggesting that the remnants of a dying culture should be eradicated to make safe the ascendancy of another.

"The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians," he wrote. "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."

Jimmie Oyler, a resident of DeSoto and self-described principal chief of United Tribe of Shawnee Indians, said an Oz theme park on former Shawnee lands near DeSoto would be offensive.

"He more or less said kill them all," he said. "If it has anything to do with Baum ... it's never going to be on Shawnee land."

Joe Reitz, a business professor and director of the International Center for Ethics at Kansas University, said the Baum editorials were sufficient reason to rethink the Oz project.

"To build a monument to a man who advocated genocide among Native Americans in this part of the country seems to be financially suicidal," he said. "If you give people a reason not to spend money, they probably won't do it."

Other hurdles

But Kristin McCallum, a spokesperson for Oz Entertainment Co. in Los Angeles, said Baum's 110-year-old editorials weren't relevant.

"I don't see the relation," she said.

Oz Entertainment has negotiated draft agreements with state and federal agencies to transfer 9,000 acres to the company in exchange for the firm's commitment to spent an estimated $45 million to clean up industrial contamination at the former Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant.

Before the transfer can occur, the Johnson County Commission and the Kansas Development Finance Authority must approve Oz's redevelopment plan.

McCallum called immaterial the fact that American Indians were once occupants of land where World of Oz would be located. She said there were many regrettable episodes in U.S. history that shouldn't have a bearing on World of Oz.

What about the writing?

Sally Roesch Wagner said Baum's writings all of them are worth exploring. Every element of his character should be open for discussion, she said.

Wagner was raised in Aberdeen and now lives in the former Fayetteville, N.Y., home of Baum's mother-in-law, feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage. Wagner is executive director of the Gage Foundation and plans to turn the house into a museum that interprets Baum's life.

She said there was benefit to studying both laudatory and loathsome aspects of his personage.

"I think we need to understand him as both," Wagner said. "He was both a man who wrote these (Oz) books and a man who called for the extermination of the entire Sioux nation."

It's useful to put Baum's unfortunate editorials in the context of the times, said Nancy Koupal, director of research and publishing at the South Dakota State Historical Society in Pierre, S.D.

The society recently published a book, "Baum's Road to Oz: The Dakota Years."

Baum was concerned for his safety and that of other settlers, she said. But the genocide of Native Americans wasn't a common theme in his later writing and novels.

"He didn't spend much ink on the subject," Koupal said. "It was not a deeply felt conviction. I don't think this was a big side of Baum. You scratch any of your heroes, you're not going to like what you find in the closet. There is no perfect man."

Intellectual freedom

Leonard Bruguier, a Yankton Sioux and director of the Institute of American Indian Studies at University of South Dakota in Vermillion, S.D., said Baum's views were repugnant. But, he said, the author had the right to express his opinion in 1890. That same intellectual freedom should be granted citizens today, he said.

"There are skinheads, neo-Nazis saying 'Do away with people of color.' I have to tolerate their opinion," Bruguier said.

Donald Fixico, director of KU's indigenous studies program, said the editorials shouldn't necessarily doom the Oz project. He said Baum's commentary should stand as a cautionary lesson to young writers.

"You never know when you're going to write something influential like the Wizard of Oz," Fixico said. "Some things may come back to haunt you."

Perhaps, Bruguier said, it's fitting irony that World of Oz developers want to build a memorial to "The Wizard of Oz" on land ravaged by pollutants from the manufacture of munitions.

"Maybe they deserve each other," he said.