In the interpretation I heard: - Dorothy is the regular naïeve American - the yellow brick road is the gold standard - Dorothy's silver shoes (ruby on the movie because it looked better) are a metaphor for the usefulness of the silver standard, - "Oz" is a reference to the symbol for the ounces of gold favoured by the industrialists - the cowardly lion who has a great roar but doesn't actually do anything, is populist 3 time predidential candindate William Jennings Bryant
Additionally Wikipedia says that: "The Scarecrow as a representation of American farmers and their troubles in the late 19th century The Tin Man representing the industrial workers, especially those of American steel workers"
Is there any truth to this, or just some creative interpretation of a story that came out in the populist era?
Carrying on from what I said in the other thread, "Oz" is actually believed to have come from a filing cabinet in Baum's study-- it had three drawers, one of which was labeled O-Z. My source (and one of my favorite sources for information about the genesis of Oz) is The Annotated Wizard of Oz by Michael Patrick Hearn. However, Baum was fond of pithy two-letter names (compare the neighboring land of Ev, or the characters of The Great Ak and The Great Bo in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus), so he may have just made it up whole cloth using a pattern he often favored.
While there’s always more to say on the subject, this has been discussed before with u/grantimatter and, more to your question, u/LibraryLass.