The Populists not only supported Bryan's stance on the silver situation, they also supported supplementing paper money whenever there was not enough coinage to go around. Under the paper currency that we have today, the Fed controls the money supply and forces deflation and keeps the money supply up with inflation whenever necessary. Therefore, they control the money supply, and increase it or decrease it as they see fit to meet the reserve needs of the banks insured by the government, thus influencing interest rates as well. With the bimetallic monetary system in place, the Fed has little influence over the money supply. The monetary base and money supply are controlled by the supply of the two metals that are the base of the currency, silver and gold. .
We all know how the story begins; Dorothy, who is the main character, lives on a farm in the middle of Kansas with her aunt and uncle. Dorothy is your typical American girl. She is kind, spirited, and honest. Many people believed her to be the portrayal of American people in general. Her family represented the struggling farmers of the Midwest during that era. Her Aunt Em was old and wrinkled; she never smiled and was often described as gaunt looking. Her Uncle Henry also never smiled much. He worked the farm from morning till dark, and never said much. Both of Dorothy's parental figures seemed beaten down by the hardships of farm life, much like the real farmers of that era. Many believed that Baum picked Kansas because starting in 1887 the agricultural struggles got so severe that many of the farmers from western Kansas started moving out of town. Within the next five years, more than half of the farmers had left the state. .
A tornado whisks away Dorothy's house one day with her and her dog Toto inside of it. Apparently, the push for the free-silver movement was called the cyclone of the 1890's. One could obviously make the correlation there between the cyclone that took away Dorothy and her house and the political cyclone that many thought was allegoric to.
