Magic and Capitalism [Excerpt]

MAGIC AND CAPITALISM

AMBIVALANCE ABOUT THE AMERICAN DREAM REFLECTED IN CULTURE’S TRICKIEST TROPE

[Excerpt of an over 100 page essay that I began in 2006]

Introduction

In early 1990, my ninth grade Advanced Composition teacher, Mr. Winston, passed out to me and my classmates worn paperback copies of a doubly daunting novel. Unlike many of our reading assignments so far (Lord of the Flies, Black Boy, Animal Farm), its title, Winter’s Tale, was unfamiliar. More troubling, though, was its length (688 pages), which foretold months of drudgery if its story didn’t continually pique our capricious teenage interest. I needn’t have worried, though, for I quickly fell in love with this kitchen-sink of an epic by Mark Helprin, as did many of my friends, even those not in that class who were turned onto it by word of mouth. (One girl I knew, who lived in another town, put her hand on it in lieu of the Bible, years later, to swear a marriage oath to her girlfriend, while on ecstasy at a college party). To us, Winter’s Tale became a cult classic, an aberration among the canonical works we had to read. Yet, if we’d really considered the blurb on the cover (“America’s most dazzling bestseller! Over 4 months on the New York Times List!”), we would have realized that not only was Winter’s Tale once well-known, it, as with many other literary successes, was probably at the forefront of a broader cultural trend.

I now believe that that was the case.

Published in September, 1983, Helprin’s magnum opus–which features, among other motley yet cohesive oddities, characters jumping from one fin-de-siècle to the next, a flying horse, a giant bridge made of refracted light, and a supernatural cloud wall surrounding New York City–was the most prominent American entry in a genre that peaked in the 1980’s: magic realism. That was but one tributary, though, into a decade’s worth of arts and entertainment overflowing with all kinds of magic. From the medieval sorcery in Dungeons and Dragons, early heavy metal, fantasy films, television shows (The Smurfs), and comic books (Elf Quest); to the modern conjuring of the popular book and film The Witches of Eastwick; to the many films featuring benevolent extra-terrestrials with magical powers; to the elevation of stage magicians (David Copperfield, Penn and Teller) to prime time television stars–the Reagan years were a veritable cavalcade of magic, so much so that this persistent and pervasive public obsession cries out to be read as an expression of the American people’s attitude toward something else entirely.

That thing, I believe, was the barrage of changes wrought on this country by the Reagan presidency. Like the hollow bumps embossed into a sheet of metal by a hammer and an anvil, the effects of a nation’s political and economic policies are cast into relief by their opposite: the patterns and shadows in its cultural topography.

This occurred to me as I was rereading another New York Times bestseller about magic: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. In addition to also being published in September, Clarke’s 2004 novel mirrors Winter’s Tale in two significant ways. It appeared in the midst of another pan-cultural magic craze and just before the reelection of another ultra-conservative president. It’s true Jonathan Strange was written by an Englishwoman and is (mostly) set in England, yet, like Winter’s Tale, it is rich with subtext about the contrasting values that have increasingly characterized Western society, especially since the Industrial Revolution, and that America stands for more than any other country.

As Carol Lee Flinders lays out lucidly in The Values of Belonging, these characteristics include, on one hand, trust, empathy, mutual reciprocity, respect for nature, and self-restraint; and, on the other, competitiveness, acquisitiveness, ambition, hierarchical structures, and a domineering, utilitarian attitude toward people and nature. “Between the desire to be inclusive, though, and the desire to be wealthy,” Flinders writes, “Between the desire to be egalitarian and the desire to compete uninhibitedly, between the desire to be honest and the desire to get the upper hand in business dealings–between all these pairings a sizable fissure can open up; and perhaps the anxiety associated with that fissure marks Americans as definitively as their values.”[1]

This dangling sword of Damocles feeling has been shown by anthropologists and psychologists to lead to magical thinking. After studying tribal cultures, Bronislaw Malinowski wrote, “We find magic wherever…the emotional play between hope and fear have a wide and extensive range. We do not find magic wherever the pursuit is certain, reliable, and well under the control of rational methods…we find magic where the element of danger is conspicuous.”[2] Studies of modern people in stressful situations have since corroborated his conclusions. In Believing in Magic: the Psychology of Superstition, Stuart A. Vyse describes a study of the behavior of gamblers whose authors “concluded that stress threatens a person’s sense of control and that, conversely, any improved sense of control–even if it is an illusion–can help alleviate stress,” and another in which the comparison of Israeli cities which were and were not under Iraqi missile attack during the first Gulf War resulted in the conclusion that “those living in the more dangerous areas reported higher levels of both stress and superstitious belief.”[3] In this modern age, though, in which subconsciously clashing abstractions are often the only oppressive force we encounter, anxiety such as Flinders describes is as legitimate a threat to our well-being as bad weather and lurking tigers were to our ancestors.

Given that, it should come as no surprise that an interest in magic should rise to prominence in the zeitgeist at the same time that widespread support for aggressive conservative values results in the reelection of the president representing them. Repression of the values at the other end of the spectrum within individuals, as well as the general disregard of the segment of the public actively advocating them, points toward a half-blind societal point of view that calls to mind the final conclusions of the Israeli study referenced above: “People with lower tolerance for ambiguity [which is characterized by the ability to accept ambiguous situations without feeling threatened] were more superstitious, regardless of where they lived…The author concluded that low tolerance for ambiguity may itself be a stressful condition that encourages superstitious belief.”[4] Such polarized thinking, as I’ll show, results from our chosen economic system, which handicaps us, without our consciously noticing it, like a piece of metal lodged in our collective mind’s eye. Magic, even when just seen as or in entertainment, fills this rift in our identity, and, at a remove, we can read into it the pressures of history as a geologist does with a wedge of rock.

Magic is a metaphor, here, for the effects of capitalism on the psyche.

Since I couldn’t expect my idea to be taken seriously with just two examples, I pored over the annals of U.S. presidents and found not just another Republican reelected as another magic craze reached its peak, but one whose reelection occurred only two months after the publication of what remains this nation’s most famous magical novel: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Part One

Of course, William McKinley, to whom I am referring, was assassinated in 1901, the following year, but what matters to me are the direction he led the country up until his death, the fact that the majority of his fellow Americans approved of it, and the way the strong interest in magic back then–typified by the immediate popularity of L. Frank Baum’s book–reflects both that approval and serious misgivings on the part of the populace.

“Reflects” will be a key word here, for by the turn of the 20th Century the use of mirrors to create illusions was commonplace among stage magicians. A layperson attending a show put on by one of the 4,000 magicians performing in vaudeville theaters between the 1890’s and 1930’s[5] may not have known the precise optics involved, but the mirror’s presence on stage was surely taken for granted by most people so many decades after London’s Professor Pepper began using Henry Dircks’s 1858 invention to make phantasms appear in short plays (and explaining to some audiences how it worked).[6] This duality of understanding what is really being done and ignoring this knowledge is at the heart of magic appreciation, as well as the parallel I’m drawing here to certain political trends.

The evidence that for far longer than this people had been aware of magic’s potential to be seen as a symbol of consensual deception is right there in the word’s etymology. “Magic” comes from “magi,” meaning the Persian Priests who, as with other religious wonder-workers of ancient times, “played on the superstitions of their followers by performing impressive feats. [They] employed the same basic principle–misdirection to divert attention from the method to the effect–as the conjuring entertainers, who candidly admitted they were only human.”[7] While “consensual” would be inapt for many believers in that earlier time, it clearly describes the situation adherents of Spiritualism–the pseudoreligion cousin of 19th Century stage magic–placed themselves in when believing in something frequently exposed as a fraud. Many magicians began their careers by revealing the parlor tricks employed by mediums (early on, Harry Houdini actually was one in medicine shows[8], though later he went after them with a vengeance[9]), but even the 1888 New York Academy of Music demonstration by Margaret Fox Kane–one of the two sisters whose childhood prank, when exploited by a third sister, began Spiritualism–of her toe joint-cracking method for faking dialogue with the spirits failed to squash the movement. In fact, Kane, a penniless alcoholic, returned to the fold the following year, when she realized she could make more money as a fake than as an apostate.[10] “[Seldom] do the crude gimmicks […] deceive people. The audience is taken by the hand and led to deceive themselves”[11]–as are the performers, when you consider that in life we are our own first witness. That quote from a book on stage magic could as easily be about not just Spiritualists, but Americans of all stripes in that era.

President McKinley himself epitomized this phenomenon. Even one of his “most favorable” biographers (according to a later one)[12] has this to say about how McKinley balanced his personal integrity with the machinations that held together the political system he led: “Some private legerdemain must have reconciled him to the ‘practical’ methods that were employed […] He scrupulously shunned the bribe and the bargain, but his purity must have involved an intricate self-deception, a timely looking away and convenient forgetfulness.”[13] (“Legerdemain,” a stage magic term, means “light of hand” in French, which evokes Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” economic concept, to which I will return shortly). Despite having advocated for labor interests as a representative and then governor of Ohio (and continuing to do so tepidly when president)[14], McKinley won his first run for executive office on the strength of so much corporate money that he outspent his Democratic rival, William Jennings Bryan, by nearly 12 to 1.[15] “Among Republicans,” in fact, “there was real fear that a Democratic victory, coming after the violence of [the] Homestead and Pullman [strikes], would mean overturn of the capitalist system. Factory owners told their men that if Bryan were elected ‘the whistle would not blow on Wednesday morning.’”[16] That was the 1896 election, during which McKinley’s campaign manager was Mark Hanna, a Republican strategist idolized by Karl Rove.[17] In 1900, with Hanna at the helm again, McKinley beat Bryan by an even wider margin.[18]

The contradictions between McKinley’s professed beliefs and his actions as president extended to other areas, such as the civil rights of blacks and women[19], but what leads us most directly to The Wizard of Oz is this metastasizing of capitalism. Presiding over the final years of America’s “Gilded Age” (a term coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner to contrast ironically with a “Golden Age”)[20], McKinley led the country through a simultaneous implosion and explosion of money-hungry changes.

Companies gobbled each other up until a handful of monopolies represented the spectrum of industries; enforcement of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act wouldn’t really begin until Teddy Roosevelt succeeded McKinley.[21] Largely due to corporate pressure to secure colonies for resource extraction and markets for finished products, the U.S. government entered the imperialism race with such momentum that almost immediately it outpaced its closest rivals. During McKinley’s five years in the oval office, we annexed Hawaii[22]; went halvsies on Somoa with Germany[23]; pushed Spain out of Cuba (only to keep part of it for ourselves to this day and handpick its rulers for decades), as well as Guam and Puerto Rico (which are still our territories) and the Philippines (which we occupied until 1946)[24]; and got the ball rolling on taking charge of the canal being built across Panama (which we’d control for the next century).[25]

Matching this large-scale consumption outside our borders was an increase of materialism within them. “Mind-cure,” a term describing the philosophy shared by numerous religious sects in the late 1800’s, spelled out what even unaffiliated Americans must have felt: there’s plenty for everyone, you should take what you want now rather than wait, and poverty and inequality are just a case of weak willpower, or rather the wrong state of mind. Theosophists, a branch of Spiritualists, believed that “God was […] a complete abundance accessible to everyone […] the embodiment, in effect, of a child’s [sic] wish–the wish for love, protection, and sustenance at any moment.”[26] Thorstein Veblen, the economist of that era most critical of this outlook, argued that a culture of “make-believe” had taken over, that merchants, offering consumers “personal prestige and status” and other slippery abstract concepts “irrespective of any inherent merit in the goods,” were exploring “the frontiers of the magical art.”[27]

But, of course, that was the theme all over the place–not just on stages and around séance tables. Magical tropes made regular appearances in political discourse, from one senator in early 1900 throwing down the gauntlet to another with “We all know of the performances of the world’s magicians, but it has remained for the wizard of Missouri to wave his magic wand or his magic head and double the price of the silver of the world.”[28] to political cartoons depicting not just McKinley and Hanna as witches, but Bryan and his Populist followers dancing around cauldrons too.[29] The ambience of magic’s traditional setting, the fantastic realm of fairy tales and myths, permeated advertising, from Maxfield Parrish’s enchanting scenes to department store magnate John Wanamaker’s hyperbolic, early 20th Century advertising copy, whose tone arose from the fairy tales he’d written for his grandchildren.[30] Two of the most famous English magicians, John Nevil Maskelyne and David Devant, incorporated tricks into skits that regularly included witch characters.[31] Another Englishman, Aleister Crowley, the West’s most notorious “real” magician, lost faith in his mentor during a schism within The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1900, and began a solo career as a provocateur that would keep him in the public eye all his life.[32]

Thus, the world was ripe for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but especially America, with its new mantle as the champion of capitalism. As historian William Leach writes, L. Frank Baum’s

portrait of the Wizard and the tale itself can be interpreted as a tribute to the modern ability to create magic, illusions, and theater […] to make people believe in spite of themselves. For even though the Wizard is exposed as a charlatan […] without any magical powers in the fairy-tale sense, nevertheless he is powerful. He is powerful in the modern American capitalist sense […] because he is able to manipulate others to do his bidding, to make them believe what is unbelievable, to do what they might not want to do (or to buy what they might not want to buy) […] Oz excites a completely misplaced trust, but “the people” adore him anyway. […] This conviction is self-deception on a massive scale.[33]

Dorothy is ostensibly the main character of the book, but it is the Wizard who is extolled in the title and who lives by his wits, curing his problems with his mind, as it were. In contrast, Dorothy has almost everything she needs handed to her, a socially frowned upon attribute back then. In other words, Baum’s book promotes the idea that someone myopically pursuing their own needs, even through deceitful means, should be able to get away with it (as the Wizard literally does in his hot air balloon) and be looked upon by society as having done it a favor (as the Wizard is revered after leaving, not just by the residents of Emerald City, though, but by the Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman, who even credit him–not themselves and Dorothy–with extricating them from their earliest predicaments).

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it echoes Adam Smith’s reasoning in his “Invisible Hand” theory, the magical foundation holding up modern capitalism’s house of cards. In 1759 he wrote, “[The rich] consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal proportions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”[34] Buried in that statement is the strange, yet compelling, suggestion that capitalism and communism arrive at the same place by different routes. In 1776, he wrote, “[Every individual] generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestick to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”[35] Smith (who blathers on quite a bit about the nuances of compassion in The Theory of Moral Sentiments)[36] probably would have taken offense at the way his thoughts have become synonymous with social Darwinism[37], but, nonetheless, his metaphor perfectly captures the specious aspect of capitalist apologists’ argument: depending on this hand to take care of the fate of others would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that it’s invisible because it doesn’t exist. Like the seemingly supernatural effect produced by a stage magician’s prestidigitation, the impression that society’s rent fabric can be mended by a force created from humanity’s deliberate disregard of it is an illusion. Time has proven that about capitalism, as it has belied the lack of egalitarianism in communism.

A middle path exists, though, in the example of Native American culture, not just the holistic approach to economic and social organization common among many tribes[38], but the self-sufficiency that requires respect for the Earth, cooperation, and all the other positive values Carol Lee Flinders describes. The sole part of Western society that closely resembles this style of living is the rural, agrarian community, especially as it existed in the 19th Century.

On another level, then, The Wizard of Oz can be seen as a nostalgic tribute to the role of the farm in America at the very moment in history when its influence was waning. As Ranjit S. Dighe writes in The Historian’s Wizard of Oz, “The decades after the Civil War marked America’s passage from a rural-agrarian society to an urban-industrial one […] [In] 1870 […] people in rural areas [outnumbered] urban dwellers nearly three to one. Nearly half of all American workers were farmers […] By 1900, factories produced double the value of output of the farms […] [By] 1920, the nation would be majority-urban and factory workers would outnumber farm workers.”[39] The most inexplicable part of The Wizard of Oz is the fact that Dorothy forsakes her friends and the plentitude of Oz to return to her aunt and uncle, for whom she has never expressed any specific longing. This can be reconciled by viewing their Kansas farm and Oz as two reflections of the same thing. In this sense, Dorothy’s journey suggests how Americans can return, themselves, to an appreciation of the heartland’s contribution to the nation–not just in terms of economic output, but social values. This kind of reminder wasn’t unusual back then. In his 1896 Democratic nomination acceptance speech, Bryan proclaimed: “The great cities rest on our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country”[40]

This contrast of the earthy and fertile with the anthropocentric and industrial dovetails neatly with another piece of the Wizard of Oz puzzle: the emphasis on feminine power. The main character is a plucky young girl, who leads a band of insecure male companions, and she and the witches are the only ones who can really practice magic. The Wizard, of course, is actually impotent in that department; he’s a man who’s built an empire out of lies.

Among many facets of the book whose origins and intended implications are nebulous due to scanty information, here we have one that can be traced back to a concrete source: L. Frank Baum’s Theosophist, feminist mother-in-law Matilda Gage. It was she who encouraged him to write down and publish the Oz stories he’d been telling his sons.[41] Earlier, she had been living with the Baums while writing Woman, Church and State: A Historical Account of the Status of Women Through the Christian Ages: with Reminiscences of the Matriarchate, which was published in 1893 and widely acclaimed by first-wave feminists for its thorough exposure of the Church’s oppression of women and its empowering revelation that those accused of witchcraft had often been among the wisest people of their times.[42] Leonard Shlain, in 1998’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, an uncredited riff on Gage’s work, writes, “I propose that a holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world are the essential characteristics of a feminine outlook; linear, sequential, reductionist, and abstract defines the masculine.”[43] The latter list of words could be used to describe the stacked, acquisition-oriented approach of the Gilded Age, and the former, in addition to overlapping with the positive traits on Flinders’ list, are likely to turn up in a modern book on “real” magic. This accounts for the fact that, in The Wizard of Oz, the Good Witch of the North tells Dorothy, “In the civilized countries I believe there are no witches left; nor wizards, nor sorceresses, nor magicians. But, you see, the Land of Oz has never been civilized...”[44] The trends of modernity, Baum seems to insinuate, strip away much that was good within society.

These undercurrents help create a sense of friction in the book representative of Americans’ ambivalence about the changes in the country at the turn of the century, but, in the end, its capitalist-cheerleader aspect turns the tide of interpretation. After all, not only does the Wizard get away and enjoy an untarnished reputation, Dorothy’s three friends each are left ruling an area from which they didn’t originate. In acts of benevolent imperialism, to which Americans in 1900–fresh off the success of the Spanish American War–could relate, the Tinman becomes ruler of the Winkies, after defeating their enemy, and the Lion becomes ruler of the beasts in the forest, after chopping up a giant spider that anticipates Tolkien’s Shelob. The Scarecrow, meanwhile, is asked by the citizens of Emerald City to rule over them after the Wizard and Dorothy leave–never mind that it would seem more fair for one of their own to sit on that throne. After gaining renown in America for his escape acts, Harry Houdini crossed the Atlantic the same year as The Wizard of Oz’s publication and, according to stage magic historian Jim Steinmeyer, “[in] Europe he became famous as an archetype of the new world, arrogantly challenging anyone to restrain him,”[45] an apt metaphor not just for U.S. foreign policy at the time, but for the naked take-over/take-what-you-want message Baum’s readers are left with after his characters tramp across the land of Oz.

The witches, both good and bad, may wield the only real magic in this place, but, remember, their realms are at the periphery and the Emerald City is at the center. It’s the standard by which the rest of the country must be judged and, as the Wizard tells Dorothy, “In this country everyone must pay for everything he gets.”[46] –as in, “No handouts here; those with unmet wants will have to appeal to a kind of magic.” This is the direction America was heading then and, like a meretricious exhibit at the Pan-American Exposition where the anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley, Baum’s Emerald City seems like a prediction of the future’s perfect city, but it gleams falsely and becomes the setting for a dubious lesson in destiny.

The realization of one’s own place in the world–of the complexity of one’s character–is the lesson of all fairy tales, but the implications in Baum’s book stretch this net to include every American back then, like a crucible testing our country’s questionable mettle. Although Baum didn’t chose it with the public in mind, this format actually reinforces the pro-and-con capitalist message that can be read in his story. Fairy tales, according to Bruno Bettelheim, familiarize us with dark parts of ourselves, sources of anxiety and obstructions to personal growth. Dreams do this too, but chaotically, while fairy tales give this struggle structure and resolution. They perform at the communal level the service personal fantasies (in a healthy psyche) perform for the individual: teach children to rely on their own resources.[47] In other words, the time for the helping hand is over–though not quite. As Bettelheim writes, “The fairy tale offers the child hope that someday the kingdom will be his. Since the child cannot settle for less, but does not believe that he can achieve this kingdom on his own, the fairy tale tells him magic forces will come to his aid.”[48] This kingdom is all that capitalism makes people believe they deserve. Ideally, children leave the crutch of magic by the wayside when applying the lesson of a fairy tale to real life, but Baum’s readers in 1900 were already living in that kingdom with the help of all the magic surrounding them, so no lesson was really learned. They shut his book and remained stuck in their childlike world.

By “childlike,” I don’t mean those kids on the cusp of maturity who can perceive magic, on some level, as an illusion or a symbol of something, but, rather, “three-year-olds [who] believe there’s an answer to everything and fully accept magic as a reasonable explanation for things that don’t otherwise make sense to them.”[49] Those around that age share another, telling trait with The Wizard of Oz’s first readers, which is drolly represented in this take on their perspective: “If I want it…It’s mine. If I had it…It’s mine. If I thought about touching it…It’s mine…If you have it and I want it…It’s mine. If I might want it at any time in the future…It’s mine.” That’s one of many variations on an internet parenting joke. Psychologist John Gottman calls his own, shorter version the “Toddler Rules of Ownership.”[50]

There surfaces my hidden point, by which I can pull the stitching of my conceit tight: Taken by the hand. Light of hand. Invisible Hand. A child’s wish. No handouts here. The time for the helping hand is over–though not quite.

Capitalism is a child’s economic system writ large, with magic playing the part of the math supposedly backing it up.

End Notes

1.Carol Lee Flinders, The Values of Belonging: Rediscovering Balance, Mutuality, Intuition, and Wholeness in a Competitive World, New York, HarperCollins, 2002, p. 145

2. Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essays, New York, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955, pp. 139-140
3. Stuart A. Vyse, Believing in Magic: the Psychology of Superstition, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 132-133

4. ibid, p. 133
5. Christopher Milbourne, The Illustrated History of Magic, Portsmouth (NH), Heinemann, 1996, p. 274

6. Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear, New York, Carroll & Graf, 2003, pp. 25-32

7. Milbourne, pp. 10 &12

8. ibid, p. 345

9. Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits, New York, Arno Press, 1924
10. Steinmeyer, pp. 55-56; Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox, New York, Harcourt, Inc., 2005, pp. 303 & 307

11. Steinmeyer, p. 17

12. Kevin Phillips, William McKinley, New York, Times Books, 2003, p. 38

13.Margaret Leech, In the Days of McKinley, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1959, pp. 35-36

14. Phillips, pp. 37-39; 125

15. Richard F. Hamilton, President McKinley: War and Empire, Vol. I, New Brunswick (NJ), Transaction Publishers, 2006, pp. 62-63 & footnote 82

16. Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: a Portrait of the World before the War, New York, MacMillan, 1966, p. 145

17. Phillips, p. 6

18. Tuchman, p. 166
19. Phillips, pp. 30, 148-149

20. Judith Freeman Clark, America’s Gilded Age: An Eyewitness History, New York, Facts On File, 1992, pp. xi-xii

21. H. W. Brands, T. R..: The Last Romantic, New York, Basic Books, 1997, pp. 434-435

22. Phillips, 99

23. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/aq.html

24. Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, New York, Times Books, 2006, p. 95; Phillips, 96-97

25. Kinzer, pp. 44 & 89, 58 & 244

26. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, New York, Vintage Books, 1993, p. 228
27. Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America, New York, A.M. Kelley, 1964, pp. 301-302, 309

28. Orville H. Platt, The New York Times, February 16, 1900, p. 1

29. Ranjit S. Dighe, The Historian’s Wizard of Oz: Reading L. Frank Baum’s Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory, Westport (CN), Praeger, 2002, unnumbered mid-section

30. Leach, p. 210

31. Steinmeyer, pp. 102, 266, & 135

32. John Symonds, The Great Beast: The Life of Aleister Crowley, New York, Rider, 1951, pp. 32-34
33. Leach, p. 254

34. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Oxford, Claredon Press, 1976, pp. 184-185

35. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1976, p. 456
36. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Oxford, Claredon Press, 1976, p. 9

37. “Adam Smith was in favor of markets because he thought that people ought to be completely equal―completely equal,” Noam Chomsky writes in On Anarchy. “[When] the University of Chicago publishes a bicentennial edition of Smith, they have to distort the text (which they did): because as a true classical liberal, Smith was strongly opposed to all the idiocy they now spout in his name.” (NYC, The New Press, 2013, p. 36)

38. Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of Indian Nations, San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1991, pp. 214-221

39. Dighe, p. 29
40. Phillips, pp. 76-77

41. Katherine Rogers, L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2002, p. 54

42. ibid, pp. 52-53

43. Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, New York, Compass, 1999, p. 1

44. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986, p. 20
45. Steinmeyer, p. 149-150

46. Baum, p. 124
47. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, New York, Knopf, 1976, pp. 8, 36, 88-90, 121-122, 278

48. ibid, p. 133

49. Harvey Karp, Md,, The Happiest Toddler on the Block, New York , Bantam, 2004, p. 72

50. John Gottman, Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child: The Heart of Parenting, New York, Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1997, pp. 196-197 v

[1] Carol Lee Flinders, The Values of Belonging: Rediscovering Balance, Mutuality, Intuition, and Wholeness in a Competitive World, New York, HarperCollins, 2002, p. 145

[2] Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essays, New York, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955, pp. 139-140

[3] Stuart A. Vyse, Believing in Magic: the Psychology of Superstition, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 132-133

[4] ibid, p. 133

[5] Christopher Milbourne, The Illustrated History of Magic, Portsmouth (NH), Heinemann, 1996, p. 274

[6] Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear, New York, Carroll & Graf, 2003, pp. 25-32

[7] Milbourne, pp. 10 &12

[8] ibid, p. 345

[9] Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits, New York, Arno Press, 1924

[10] Steinmeyer, pp. 55-56; Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox, New York, Harcourt, Inc., 2005, pp. 303 & 307

[11] Steinmeyer, p. 17

[12] Kevin Phillips, William McKinley, New York, Times Books, 2003, p. 38

[13] Margaret Leech, In the Days of McKinley, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1959, pp. 35-36

[14] Phillips, pp. 37-39; 125

[15] Richard F. Hamilton, President McKinley: War and Empire, Vol. I, New Brunswick (NJ), Transaction Publishers, 2006, pp. 62-63 & footnote 82

[16] Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: a Portrait of the World before the War, New York, MacMillan, 1966, p. 145

[17] Phillips, p. 6

[18] Tuchman, p. 166

[19] Phillips, pp. 30, 148-149

[20] Judith Freeman Clark, America’s Gilded Age: An Eyewitness History, New York, Facts On File, 1992, pp. xi-xii

[21] H. W. Brands, T. R..: The Last Romantic, New York, Basic Books, 1997, pp. 434-435

[22] Phillips, 99

[23] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/aq.html

[24] Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, New York, Times Books, 2006, p. 95; Phillips, 96-97

[25] Kinzer, pp. 44 & 89, 58 & 244

[26] William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, New York, Vintage Books, 1993, p. 228

[27] Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America, New York, A.M. Kelley, 1964, pp. 301-302, 309

[28] Orville H. Platt, The New York Times, February 16, 1900, p. 1

[29] Ranjit S. Dighe, The Historian’s Wizard of Oz: Reading L. Frank Baum’s Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory, Westport (CN), Praeger, 2002, unnumbered mid-section

[30] Leach, p. 210

[31] Steinmeyer, pp. 102, 266, & 135

[32] John Symonds, The Great Beast: The Life of Aleister Crowley, New York, Rider, 1951, pp. 32-34

[33] Leach, p. 254

[34] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Oxford, Claredon Press, 1976, pp. 184-185

[35] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1976, p. 456

[36] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Oxford, Claredon Press, 1976, p. 9

[37] “Adam Smith was in favor of markets because he thought that people ought to be completely equal―completely equal,” Noam Chomsky writes in On Anarchy. “[When] the University of Chicago publishes a bicentennial edition of Smith, they have to distort the text (which they did): because as a true classical liberal, Smith was strongly opposed to all the idiocy they now spout in his name.” (NYC, The New Press, 2013, p. 36)

[38] Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of Indian Nations, San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1991, pp. 214-221

[39] Dighe, p. 29

[40] Phillips, pp. 76-77

[41] Katherine Rogers, L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2002, p. 54

[42] ibid, pp. 52-53

[43] Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, New York, Compass, 1999, p. 1

[44] L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986, p. 20

[45] Steinmeyer, p. 149-150

[46] Baum, p. 124

[47] Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, New York, Knopf, 1976, pp. 8, 36, 88-90, 121-122, 278

[48] ibid, p. 133

[49] Harvey Karp, Md,, The Happiest Toddler on the Block, New York , Bantam, 2004, p. 72

[50] John Gottman, Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child: The Heart of Parenting, New York, Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1997, pp. 196-197 v