“In the Land of Oz they use no money at all”

In The Road to Oz (1909), L. Frank Baum wrote:

“Money! Money in Oz!” cried the Tin Woodman. “What a queer idea! Did you suppose we are so vulgar as to use money here?” . . .

“If we used money to buy things with, instead of love and kindness and the desire to please one another, then we should be no better than the rest of the world,” declared the Tin Woodman. “Fortunately money is not known in the Land of Oz at all. We have no rich, and no poor; for what one wishes the others all try to give him, in order to make him happy, and no one in all Oz cares to have more than he can use.”

That contradicts this detail in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900):

…a man was selling green lemonade, and when the children bought it Dorothy could see that they paid for it with green pennies.

And also The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), in which a ferryman asks for money before rowing Tip across a river, the Emerald City and the Winkie castle have treasuries, and all the characters recognize “dollar bills—and two-dollar bills—and five-dollar bills—and tens, and twenties, and fifties.”

Apparently something happened after Ozma came to the throne of Oz at the end of the latter book, producing an entirely different economic system that Baum explained more fully in The Emerald City of Oz (1910).

However, I was surprised to see that the very first mention of Oz doing without money actually appeared outside the series, and outside the canon. The Woggle-Bug Book, a storybook Baum wrote in 1905, contains this paragraph:

You see, in the Land of Oz they use no money at all, so that when the Woggle-Bug arrived in America he did not possess a single penny. And no one had presented him with any money since.

That book doesn’t offer any ethical lesson to go along with the lack of money, as the Tin Woodman would volunteer in The Road to Oz. It’s just another way that the Woggle-Bug’s native land differs from America.

While featuring a character from Oz, The Woggle-Bug Book is set in America, where we use money. It’s one of what I call Baum’s urban fantasies, taking place in a contemporary, multiethnic American city which nonetheless has magic (in that way contradicting the rules of the Oz books he wrote in the same period).

The Woggle-Bug Book and the Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz comic page that preceded it were never listed as part of the Oz series, and Baum never referred back to them in his later stories. Thus, fans don’t treat whatever those books say about Oz as reliable for the rest of the series. Nonetheless, in that book Baum first tried out what would become a crucial detail of the Ozian utopia.