‘Wicked,’ ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and the Blacklisted Lyricist Yip Harburg

People around the globe have been watching the blockbuster musical film “Wicked” this holiday season. Based on the Broadway musical, it serves as a backstory to the 1939 film, “The Wizard of Oz,” casting that film’s villain, the Wicked Witch of the West, in a positive light, as a misunderstood and bullied child who goes on to challenge authority and expose wrong-doing.

From the mid-1950s until the early 1990s, long before streaming platforms and video on demand, television audiences dependent on just a few major broadcast networks had to wait for the annual chance to see “The Wizard of Oz.” The much-anticipated special broadcast would typically air between Thanksgiving and Christmas, attracting millions of viewers across the country. This shared cinematic tradition popularized the fantastic tale of Dorothy, her dog Toto, and the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion.

The film also brought global acclaim to its musical score, with songs like “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” “Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead” and the world-renowned classic, “Over the Rainbow.” Less well-known is the writer of the lyrics to those songs: E.Y. “Yip” Harburg. In an era of rising authoritarianism, growing inequality and an ascendant billionaire class, Harburg’s socially conscious songs, and his own struggle to overcome poverty during the Great Depression and then blacklisting during the McCarthy era — even as “The Wizard of Oz” gained fame — serve as both an inspiration and a warning.

Harburg was born in 1896 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to poor Jewish parents who fled the anti-semitic pogroms of eastern Europe along with so many others.

In high school, he was seated alphabetically next to Ira Gershwin. They began a friendship that lasted a lifetime and shaped 20th century American song and culture. Ernie Harburg, Yip’s son and co-author of the biography “Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?,” said in a 1996 interview on the Democracy Now news hour, “Yip knew poverty deeply … it was the basis of Yip’s understanding of life as struggle.”

Yip Harburg was deep in debt after the 1929 Wall Street crash. Gershwin suggested Harburg write song lyrics. Before long, he wrote the song that captured the essence of the Great Depression, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” which became a national hit and remains a timeless anthem for hard times, corporate greed and the dignity of working people:

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.

Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

“The Wizard of Oz” was based on the 1900 novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum. Prior to the commercial success Baum enjoyed from the book, he worked an array of jobs, including a stint in South Dakota owning the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer newspaper, from 1890-1891. There he wrote editorials, including two that called for genocide against Indigenous people. Just days after the Wounded Knee massacre of Dec. 29, 1890, in which an estimated 300 Lakota elders, women and children on the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation were slaughtered by the U.S. Army, Baum wrote, “Our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians … wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”

Harburg’s writing, conversely, dignified the downtrodden, the working class, immigrants and other marginalized groups. These themes were central to the two Broadway hits he wrote, Bloomer Girl, about the women’s suffrage movement, and Finian’s Rainbow, which celebrated immigrants and the struggle against racism. His lyrics attracted the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led a deeply destructive “hunt” for communists within the government and leading institutions, including Hollywood studios. McCarthy was aided by the red-baiting lawyer Roy Cohn, who would later serve as mentor to a young Donald Trump. Harburg was among hundreds of writers, actors and others banned from working in film and television for the duration of the 1950s. McCarthy and his anti-communist crusade were eventually discredited, and Harburg continued his creative human rights work until his death in 1981 at 84.

Harburg’s best-known and most loved work remains his lyrics for “The Wizard of Oz.” The film was released in the tumultuous year of 1939. Fascism was on the march in Europe and Asia, the economic impacts of the depression still plagued the working class, and racist Jim Crow laws oppressed millions of people of color.

With just weeks from Trump’s inauguration to his second term as president, and with a timely focus on challenging authority ushered in by the hit movie “Wicked,” now is a good time to recall the incredible work and lyrical lessons of Harburg, the man who put the rainbow in “The Wizard of Oz.”