Who represented William Jennings Bryant in wizard of oz?

Answer 1

No, William Jennings Bryan [March 19, 1860--July 26, 1925] didn't have a direct role in 'The Wizard of Oz'. He wasn't listed among the characters in the original 1900 book edition or the beloved 1939 film version. But yes, there are those who assign to the Oz characters symbolic roles that include one for Bryan. For example, some of these interpreters have seen Bryan in the character of the Wizard. But author and Oz series originator Lyman Frank Baum [May 15, 1856-May 6, 1919] never identified other than an enjoyable fairy tale adventure role to his book.

Given that he had been dead for over a decade before they made the movie, he was obviously not in it.

Answer 2

William Jennings Bryan was a US politician in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was the Democratic candidate for President on three occasions, and was most closely associated with the movement known as "Populism."

The notion that he was somehow connected with the L. Frank Baum story The Wizard of Oz arose from a paper published in the 1960s; the author of the paper (Henry Littlefield) saw similarities between the politics of Bryan's (and Baum's) day and the story itself. Specifically, he saw The Wizard of Oz as a populist (don't worry too much about this) allegory, with Baum showing, through his story, how the bimetallic standard (again, don't worry about it) could save the common people of the country (represented, according to Littlefield, by Dorothy).


The problem with this interpretation arose when later scholarship revealed that Baum was not only not clearly a supporter of Bryan, but that he had actively published a poem in a Chicago newspaper supporting McKinley... one of Bryan's (successful) opponents. Also, he had purchased a newspaper in South Dakota, and in it took a fairly strong stance against the Democrats and for the Republicans. It's hard to reconcile this with the notion that Baum had written The Wizard of Oz as a populist allegory, and Littlefield himself has since conceded that there is no basis in fact for considering Baum a supporter of the populist movement.