Annie's Creator Really Didn't Like FDR

Which is one reason why the "treacly" musical is better than the comic strip:

The strip, launched in 1924, quickly became a huge success and a pop culture landmark. It was also one of the few popular voices raised in opposition to the New Deal.

The treacly 1977 Broadway musical Annie and the film adaptation that followed five years later glorified a lovable Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Annie creator Harold Gray (1894–1968) would have been appalled. “I…have despised Roosevelt and his socialist, or creeping communist, policies since 1932, and said so in my stuff,” Gray once wrote.

...But as Heer notes, Annie had something over many Dickens children: “Her goodness is not passive but active.” When competitors try to drive her from the corner where she sells newspapers, she doesn’t just cry “woe-is-me”; she smacks ’em with a horseshoe.

The strip sneered at organized and impersonal charity. But to survive, Annie counts not only on her own grit but on the direct kindness of strangers, at the same time having to avoid the depredations of the professional do-gooder. The comic’s early days hold a winningly libertarian disdain for the uplifters and professional licensing and child labor laws that stymie Annie’s attempts to support herself and others who fall under her care.

Heer once characterized Gray’s philosophy as a sort of “two-fisted conservatism.” These first two volumes of the series, both of them pre–New Deal, are individualistic, but the anti-government mood is generally quietly suggestive, not obtrusive. The subtle politics are highly individualistic, promoting the virtues of the hard-working common man. The strip was suffused with Midwestern values (hard work and cheerfulness) and prejudices (pro-fisherman, anti-beard) and a very populist sense that it was who you were inside, not money or station, that mattered, and that “just plain folk—and plenty of ’em” were best.

In the 1930s, as the New Deal proceeded and Gray became increasingly appalled, his opposition became more apparent. He never named the president, but it was obvious where he stood.