BUSINESS AND SOLITUDE

Extract

Thomas Augst, The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)

Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as the historian William Leach has written, is a fairy tale about faith and capitalism in modern America. First published in 1900, L. Frank Baum's long-loved work tells the story of two ordinary Midwesterners in a country where wishes come true: a farm girl named Dorothy and a phoney wizard whose only real power turns out to be that of “making believe.” By pretending to bestow brains, heart, and courage upon Dorothy's fellow pilgrims, the “great humbug” turns their faith in him into faith in themselves, in the untapped powers they have held all along. “All you need is confidence in yourself,” he says, and his gift makes them rulers in their own lands much as he rules over his. Viewed as a spiritual quest, Dorothy's odyssey is about living in a world with no higher power than oneself. But like Norman Vincent Peale's later bestseller, Baum's sunny story joins the “power of positive thinking” to the Emerald City; the yellow-brick road is also the road to riches, to wondrous works as well as self-fulfilling faith. Like the alternative Americas depicted in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and more than a hundred other utopian novels of the late 1880s and 1890s, Oz is a promised land where faith supplants politics, less a commonwealth than a common dream.