Getting Oz Censorship Right

This week’s posting at Banned Books Awareness highlighted L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a story kept off certain shelves over the years. Unfortunately, it overstated the case with this anecdote:

In 2004 both Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson conspired to get the movie banned from broadcast on public television because of “moral turpitude.” Robertson would publically state that “The Almighty told me that flying monkeys and witches are an affront to all good Christians.”

When asked at the time if either had ever seen the movie or read the book, they denied, saying that they “feared ungodly influence.”

Those quotes and the story came from this story at Deadbrain.com, a parody site that describes itself as “America’s least reliable news source.” Falwell, Robertson, and the FCC were too politically savvy to take on an American institution like the television showings of the MGM Wizard of Oz.

Complaints about how Baum depicted witches as potentially good, like Glinda, did fuel some small-town religious challenges to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the late 1900s. However, religious objections had little to do with the policy of several big library systems not to stock the Oz books in the middle of that century. I think there’s a risk of projecting present-day issues back into earlier controversies.

As memos reprinted in The Baum Bugle in 2000 showed, some American librarians objected to restocking the Oz books because they were:

• fantastic and unrealistic.
• a long series of increasingly indifferent literary quality.
• cheaply made (and enthusiastically read) and thus quick to wear out.

Glinda had nothing to do with it.

In 1957, this Toledo Blade article shows, Detroit library head Ralph Ulveling told a state library conference: “There is nothing uplifting or elevating about the [Oz] series.” He said they promulgated “negativism” and have “no value.” [Not “no value for children of today,” as the Banned Book Awareness article and other webpages render the quotation.] Some sources state that Ulveling also said the books dragged children down to a “cowardly level,” but that’s a paraphrase from the Blade’s editorial against Ulveling’s policy.

Two years later, Florida librarian Dorothy Dodd wrote a memo calling the Oz books “unwholesome for children in your community.” But, as this editorial in Life magazine shows, she didn’t single out the Oz books. She grouped that series with “Uncle Wiggly [sic], Tom Swift, Tarzan, the Bobbsey Twins,…Horatio Alger, the Campfire Girls, the Hardy Boys, and others of the ilk.” That editorial also reports and exemplifies the reaction against Dodd’s edict.

The 1950s brought to light other examples of librarians choosing not to stock or shelve the Oz books. But that institutional disapproval wasn’t really a reflection of the decade. In at least some cases, those practices had been in place for years. Responding to critics, Ulveling protested that he was simply explaining a policy that was three decades old.

The fact that people were asking about the Oz books and newspapers were covering the controversy showed how Americans of that decade wanted more access to the series. Few people complain about libraries stocking books that nobody wants. In 1956, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz entered the public domain, and in 1959 the MGM movie was shown on television for the first time. Widespread access to the original story cemented its place in American culture, good witches and all.

Characters in Need of Unresolvable Foundational Conflicts

In a traditional story with a closed ending, we want the main characters to resolve some conflict. Bud (not Buddy) finds a family. Jim in Treasure Island finds the treasure. Harriet the Spy learns a valuable lesson about friendship. Huck Finn manages to get freedom for Jim. That resolution doesn’t have to come at the end of one book: Harry Potter doesn’t defeat Voldemort until book 7/movie 8.

However, when authors ask us to follow characters through a series of stories with no planned ending, those characters need some foundational conflicts that they don’t resolve. If they ever put those conflicts to rest, then their story has effectively reached an ending. And perhaps run out of fuel for more.

That foundational conflict could be a frustration that will never end: Bruce Wayne will never get his parents back, for instance, and he will never preserve Gotham City from all crime. It may be an internal contradiction: Princess Ozma’s wish to be kind to all will always make it hard for her to deal with really nasty people.

To be sure, there are some characters in series whose personalities and situations don’t include some unresolvable. The Hardy Boys, for example, don’t have inner lives or difficult circumstances. But kids don’t read those books (at least the older versions) for character growth; they’re all about external events, and they depend on a never-ending supply of crime. If criminals ever stay out of Idaville or Bugs Meany gets sent away to reform school, there would no longer be an engine to produce Encyclopedia Brown stories.

Applying this thought to the Oz books, at the end of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, all the main characters have had their problems solved: Dorothy is back in Kansas, and her three companions have gained what they thought they were missing.

But the 1903 Broadway hit produced a market for a new book, and L. Frank Baum came up with The Marvelous Land of Oz. That story also seemed to end with resolutions all around: Oz has a rightful ruler, Tip has found a new life, and the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman can go off into the sunset together.

Returning to Oz for more books, however, Baum chose to tell more stories about Dorothy. For the next three adventures, she’s once again faced with the conflict of the first: she’s away from home and wants to go back. Each book ends with her back with her family, so what’s the foundational conflict? It’s how she’d be welcome (and powerful) in the beautiful Emerald City, but needs to return to her family.

At the start of The Emerald City of Oz, Baum resolves that foundational conflict for Dorothy. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em loses their farm to the mortgage-holder, and Dorothy insists that they all move to Oz. So Dorothy no longer has an unresolved foundational conflict.

The rest of the book has a mildly adventurous travelogue interspersed with the Nome King’s preparations for a terrible invasion. That takes us to Ozma’s foundational conflict: how she can preserve her values even when faced with such a threat. The Scarecrow helps her, and then (as quoted back here) Glinda apparently removes all such threats in the future. So Ozma no longer has an unresolved foundational conflict.

That wasn’t a problem because Baum planned to end the series with that book. He had brought his main characters to resolutions of their problems. There was no evident engine for future stories.

TOMORROW: But what about the next eight books?

Dick Grayson Gives a Book Talk

These panels from Batman comic books published over twenty years apart show that Dick Grayson (alias the first Robin, the Boy Wonder) had good reading habits, to the extent of not worrying about good reading posture.


But what exactly did he read? This weekly Robin offers practical advice to young detectives in training by borrowing panels from Flash Plus (1997), script by Mark Waid and Brian Augustyn, art by Eduardo Barreto and Gerry Fernandez.

For the uninitiated, the shaggy fellow in black and blue is Dick Grayson, now all grown up and fighting crime under the name Nightwing. The man in red is the Flash, who at this point is also Dick's oldest and best friend in the superhero game: Wally West, the former Kid Flash. They've gone on vacation to New Orleans and found themselves in a hotel across the street from an unusual murder scene.


Once again, those endorsements from one of the DC Universe's greatest detectives are:

• The Thinking Machine stories by Jacques Futrelle, the best mystery writer ever to go down with the Titanic. (Many digital texts available at that website.)
  
• The Encyclopedia Brown stories by Donald J. Sobol, maybe.
• Not the Hardy Boys.

[ADDENDUM: Tim Drake gives a book talk.]

Brothers Undercover: Hardy Boys Go Comics

I decided to ease into reading Japanese-style comics through American adaptations of the style--specifically, one of Papercutz's manga-style additions to the Hardy Boys books. This one was called, somewhat ironically, Identity Theft.

In this revamping of the Hardy Boys series (the third major reworking in its history, I believe), Frank and Joe have been granted several attributes that the heroes of adventure comics usually have. They now have secret identities as agents for A.T.A.C. (American Teens Against Crime, but that's a secret). They sky-dive. Joe wears bicycle gloves throughout the adventure, showing how edgy he is.

And the bigger change is in their personalities. When I was a boy, all Hardy Boys books were hardcover novels, and all Hardy boys were alike. Frank was a year older than Joe, but otherwise their characters were the same. Or, as the New York Times noted in 2001, their "personalities...barely extend beyond the color of their hair." (Joe's the blond one.)

Now Failure Magazine reports:

Frank and Joe are now exhibiting stronger and better-differentiated personalities. In the Digest series [started in 1979], "Joe is a bit more impulsive and Frank is described as 'studious,' but the reader can't tell them apart," reminds Gutman. "We're going to exaggerate their personalities. Joe will be younger, hipper, more impulsive and reckless. Frank will be more mature, grounded and perhaps a little nerdy. Think of Joe as Mel Gibson and Frank as Danny Glover from Lethal Weapon."

So basically the Hardy boys are now acting like the Sprouse twins--or at least the version that shows up in their TV show.

Still, I didn't expect them to go all shōnen-ai.

(And in case these new Hardy Boys comics on top of the old books aren't enough, here's a link for clean Hardy Boys fanfiction.)

The Most Exciting Part

I'm off to visit my godson and his brother and cousins. They're all reading now.