By following the yellow brick road toward oz in order to get to get back home, Dorothy realized that in spite of all the grandeur of this beautiful, magical land, there really is no place like home.

There's no place like home is the message that we get from the surface of the story. Sometimes, we are so hung up in the plot of the story that little do we know the real message is actually embedded not in the plot or theme of the story, but in the very symbols (or roles the characters play) in the story. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is really a parable on Populism. The devastating loss of the Populists(I will explain more about them later) to William McKinley in the election of 1896 broke the heart of a young newspaper columnist. And so Lyman Frank Baum set out to tell the whole world about one minor groups fist for relief. The movement was called the Silver movement in which the Populists sought to use the power of the ballot to push the value of silver to that of gold in order for them to make back the money they lost to bankers and big businesses, like the railroads.