Yellow road, not gold. And I'd buy into the allegory a lot more if anyone ever tried to explain the parts of the book that *weren't* in the MGM movie version -- what do the Kalidahs stand for? The wolves? The Tin Woodsman becoming the king of the Winkies? The Fighting Trees? China Country? If gold's what the story's about, why not explain the one actual mention of gold in the book, the Golden Cap that controls the Winged Monkeys, which ends up being arguably more useful to Dorothy than the shoes are?

Seriously, the argument that Baum actually encoded political allegory into a children's book so well that it went completely unmentioned for sixty years, until a high school teacher finally cracked the code, is pretty much dead among both economic historians and literary analysts today. It just lingers on because people like smart-sounding ideas that can impress other people at parties, even if they don't hold up to scrutiny.