Politics & Power Quote by L. Frank Baum

Baum is selling imagination not as a decorative virtue but as an engine of progress, and he does it with the brisk confidence of someone who made a career out of building alternate worlds. The sentence structure is a drumbeat: imagination, then civilization; imagination, then Columbus; imagination, then Franklin. By repeating the claim and upgrading the stakes each time, he turns a squishy word into a causal force. It reads less like a poet praising creativity and more like an American pitchman insisting that the mind is a practical tool.

The subtext is strategically optimistic. Baum’s examples aren’t artists or mystics; they’re brand-name explorers and tinkerers. He’s arguing that the same faculty behind fantasy is the same faculty behind maps and experiments. That’s a quiet defense of fiction in an era that was industrializing fast and increasingly worshipful of “useful” knowledge. If you can credit imagination for electricity, you can stop treating fairy tales as frivolous.

The context matters: Baum is writing from the late 19th and early 20th century, when the U.S. was drunk on invention, expansion, and the story it told itself about both. Invoking Columbus and “discovering America” carries the period’s blind spot: progress framed as heroic revelation, with Indigenous presence erased for rhetorical convenience. That omission isn’t accidental; it’s how the myth keeps its clean line from darkness to light.

What makes the quote work is its audacity. Baum collapses centuries of messy history into a single mental spark, then dares you to deny the power source.