In the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companions follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City.
Is the yellow brick road supposed to symbolise something? Are the yellow bricks supposed to be gold bars, and the road to the Emerald City "paved with gold" just as the streets of London are supposed to be in the 19th-century story of Dick Whittington? Does Frank L. Baum give any indication about the significance of the road itself in his 1900 novel on which the film is based?
Baum was a political activist and his Wizard of Oz, both the 1900 novel and, more directly, the 1902 stage play, directly reference real people and events. However, he is not on record as saying “the yellow brick road means X.”
But …
In the 1890s there was a significant hullabaloo about whether US currency should be gold or silver backed in the context of a prolonged depression caused by the panic of 1893. And you have Dorothy at the mercy of an (economic?) tornado in silver slippers (not the ruby ones of the 1939 film) following a gold coloured road to a greenbacked city where a charlatan pulls levers that do nothing. So, one wonders what he meant.
There is a thesis among some academics (and let’s face it, it’s not a huge topic of academic history) that it represents the folly of the gold standard, and how it hurts the Midwest Americans represented by the companions Dorothy gathers moving from west to east to confront the wicked witch of the east who represents the monied east coasts interests who benefitted from the go,d standard.
Or maybe it’s just a yellow brick road.