Frank Baum was my favorite writer when I was a little kid. He wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and more than a dozen sequels - and I read them all: old-fashioned hardcover books with a lovely, full-color illustration every 25 pages or so.

L. Frank Baum was also a shocking racist, advocating without equivocation the extermination of American Indians. His newspaper editorials were printed more than 115 years ago, but they were news to me recently, and it was crushing.

What are we to think when beloved artists turn out to be despicable people? Or otherwise nice people with one horrifying point of view? Or good guys who used to be bad guys?

Can we enjoy literature or art or music without worrying too much about the person behind it? Is the work tainted in ways we don't even see?

It's not a new question. I boycotted John Irving's wonderful novels for a while after his particularly cruel pronouncements about poor schoolchildren in Vermont. Barbara Walters has pledged to stay away from Mel Gibson movies after his latest bizarre, anti-Semitic episode. Germans this summer are fretting over the long-overdue admission by Gunter Grass that he was drafted into the Waffen SS as a teenager as the Third Reich was coming to an end.

Baum's case is particularly puzzling: How do you square the wonderful values espoused by the wonderful wizard with the outrageous views expressed by the man behind the man behind the curtain?

I've been squirming about it for days and haven't come to an easy answer.

Story behind the story

The first time I saw the movie The Wizard of Oz, my parents sat close by to protect me from wicked witches and flying monkeys. It was 1969, and when Oz burst onto the screen in glorious Technicolor, alas, the effect was lost on our black and white television.

The second time I saw The Wizard of Oz, it was on the big screen. Jenny Campbell's fifth birthday was announced outside on the marquee, and at intermission (!) we ate hot dogs and cupcakes in

the lobby. I was hooked!

I saw the movie again and again. I read the books. I attended a stage production of The Wiz. And in college a terrific American history professor clued me in to the secret grown-up allegory behind the children's story:

Baum, it turned out, was a silverite, part of a populist Western movement to switch the U.S. dollar from the gold standard, favored by Eastern power brokers, to silver. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's first conquest is the wicked Witch of the East- which frees the Munchkins from servitude.

Her slippers are silver (not ruby, as in the film), and she follows the yellow brick road, creating parity between silver and gold. Along her journey she meets the Scarecrow (symbolizing the small farmer), who's been told he has no brain; the Tin Woodman (the industrial worker), who fears he has become heartless; and the Cowardly Lion (reformers who had lost the courage to fight).

The wizard, ruling a city the color of money, turns out to be a charlatan. Even "Oz" was actually a familiar abbreviation to those involved in the silverites'"16 (ounces) to 1" fight.

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