11. The cyclone which transports Dorothy to the magical Land of Oz is a metaphor for the political upheaval caused by the Populist political movement in the United States
Although only a minor reference in “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, the cyclone is responsible for transporting Dorothy, her faithful dog Toto, and the farmhouse they inhabit from the Kansas prairies to Munchkin County in the Land of Oz; in so doing the cyclone might be held at fault for the death of the Wicked Witch of the East, with the falling house landing on top of the evil oppressor of the Munchkins.
Not only a meteorological phenomenon and plot devise, but the cyclone also acts as a symbolic representation of the Populist movement during the so-called “Mauve Decade”. During the late 1880s and early 1890s, Populism spread rapidly across the American Midwest, with Dorothy’s home state of Kansas serving as its epicenter and electing a Populist governor, U.S. Senator, and with the movement winning the lower house of the Kansas legislature. Furthermore, Baum was not the progenitor of such iconography, merely reproducing it within his novel, with Mary E. Lease, a Populist orator known as the “Kansas Cyclone”, among those to adopt and utilize the image of a cyclone; several political editorial cartoonists throughout the 1890s were recorded using similar metaphorical depictions for the Populist movement and political revolution.