In the summer of 1924, American comic book readers were introduced to a new kind of heroine: a 10-year-old girl with curly red hair, a witty mouth, and an unwavering tendency to see the bright side of life, no matter how many times she was put down. Her name was Annie – “just Annie,” no surname – and she was “just an orphan,” a nobody, really, but she never let her impoverished background predict her fate. Annie embodied self-determination; as her adoptive “daddy” put it, “Annie doesn’t need a handout – just give her a fair chance and she’ll do the rest.”
Nowadays, the The little orphan Annie The comic strips, which Harold Gray drew from August 5, 1924, until his death in 1968, are less well known than the 1977 musical that adapted the story of the spirited orphan for the Broadway stage and the 1982 film that adapted that Tony Award-winning musical for the big screen. But whatever the combination, Annie has long represented orphanhood—and how to overcome it—in the American cultural imagination. Her rags-to-riches journey has now instilled the values of courage, self-confidence, and optimism in several generations of children, fostering a vision of the American dream that was always impossible. I really wish we would reevaluate Annie’s iconic status, and not just because it completely misrepresents orphanhood. When you really look at it closely, her story is just plain weird.
I spent a lot of time with Annie while researching and writing my next book about orphanhood in America—it would have been impossible to write a book correcting America’s mythical misconceptions about child welfare without understanding the core tenets of her narrative. I even titled the book Tomorrow the sun will not rise: The dark history of American orphanhood to combat the bright sides that Annie tells us to look for in difficult times. We’ve been swimming in Annie’s stories for a century, and we’re only too happy to see the high points of happy endings as inevitable. But as I read more closely about Annie’s hard life, I suddenly realised how bizarre it is – and how bizarre it is that we still love her so much.
Think about it – in In this musical, Annie and her fellow orphans go through a lot of heartache and abuse, but their mistreatment is played for laughs. “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” is a song about orphans being kicked, starving, and dreaming of death (have you ever really listened to the lyrics?), but it’s certainly catchy. I suppose that’s why we continue to share this tune with children without a second thought –Annie Jr. remains a popular production in children’s cinemas, and the junior version, although shortened, contains not only “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” but also its new production.
It’s hard to believe, but the children’s version also includes “Little Girls,” a solo for Miss Hannigan, the cruel and drunken overseer of the orphanage, with lines like “If I wring little necks/ I’m sure I’ll get an acquittal” and “Send a flood, send the flu/ Anything you can do to little girls.” The sheet music for this murderous ditty specifies that it should be sung in the “Plain Mean” style.
The musical’s madness goes beyond the songbook. In order for Annie to get her happy ending with “Daddy” Warbucks, she must learn that the parents she has longed for her entire life – the ones who dropped her off at the orphanage as a baby with a locket to remember her by – are dead. We cheer at this revelation because it means “Daddy” Warbucks can adopt her. This lighthearted treatment of tragic circumstances fits the entire musical’s approach to the hardships Annie endures – they are treated as insignificant in the face of her new life in the Warbucks mansion.
The makers of the musical claim that they have little knowledge of the The little orphan Annie comics, but they certainly seem inspired by the torture Gray inflicts on Annie. In the comics, Annie is quickly rescued from her grim life at Miss Asthma’s orphanage by “Daddy” Warbucks, an industrial capitalist, but her reprieve is short-lived. She is repeatedly orphaned when “Daddy” disappears on business trips, and while he’s away, she learns all about how scheming adults can be. Of course, she already knew a lot about oppression from Miss Asthma, an old crone who is quick to mete out punishments like “a long week without supper” if Annie stands up for herself. But even in the first year of the comic, Gray puts Annie through the wringer. During Warbucks’ first stay, Annie is made an indentured servant by a woman who starves her to death, and she is kidnapped for the first of many, many times. (“Annie has been kidnapped more times than any other child in the world,” joked Jay Maeder, the last person to draw the comic after Gray’s death.)
And that’s just the first year of the comic — later in the 1920s, Annie’s adult colleagues at the circus (yes, the circus) conspire to steal from her, she narrowly escapes a gangster-style shootout while hitchhiking, and she learns from a newspaper article that Warbucks was murdered “by bandits,” to name just a few rough plot points. (“Daddy,” of course, reappears later, only to disappear again a few months later.)
Gray was far from the first to tell a sad story about an orphan character—he drew inspiration from Dickens—but when writing for children in an art form based on caricature, any subtlety was lost. And unlike Dickens, he did not write social literature that sought to show the actual conditions that real orphans and poor children faced in America at the time. Instead, Gray used the The little orphan Annie comics to spread the gospel of self-reliance and perseverance—in other words, the individualistic American dream. In doing so, he wrote strips that read like trauma porn, suggesting that all horrific experiences are redeemable through resilience (the paternal love and support of an industrial giant can’t hurt). The true legacy of Annie is this celebration of perseverance in the face of ongoing injustice, and the placing of responsibility for repairing the damage into the hands of the vulnerable.
When Martin Charnin, Charles Strouse and Thomas Meehan reworked Annie’s story for the stage, they reinforced this message even more. Meehan, who wrote the book (or screenplay) for the musical, explained that he saw Annie as “a metaphorical figure who stood for innate decency, courage and optimism in the face of hard times, pessimism and despair.” (While the comic’s timeline followed current events throughout its run, takes place during the Great Depression.) This seems harmless enough until you really pay attention to how hard and desperate the times are that Annie has to go through, and how lightly she is treated.
I wouldn’t mind so much if our culture weren’t addicted to weaving Annie’s story into every orphan story and continuing to instill an appreciation of resilience and courage that encourages us to overlook suffering and injustice as long as there is a seemingly happy ending. This attitude seeps into our real-world attitudes toward vulnerable children, whom we celebrate for recovering from trauma without closely examining the deeper causes of that trauma. It even seeps into the policies that govern child welfare, which assume that the poor choices of individual adults are to blame for the adversities children face and overlook the societal ills—namely poverty—that are actually at the core of most cases of maltreatment and require systemic solutions. After a century, it’s high time to condemn Annie. relax.
