The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood

Religious indoctrination, capitalist exploitation, and racial oppression motivated 19th- and early-20th-century America’s methods of dealing with orphans, an attitude that still has ramifications today, argues PW contributor Martin in this powerful debut study. Martin, who is herself a “full orphan”—someone who had both parents die as a child—draws on a deep well of research to show that, despite popular culture’s “fixation” on orphans as avatars of can-do bootstrap-ism, most American orphans were—and continue to be—forcibly separated from at least one living parent. Indeed, Martin paints popular orphan stories like Little Orphan Annie and the Boxcar Children as a pernicious form of propaganda to justify America’s penchant for family separation—a legacy that she argues has been repressed via a kind of “historical amnesia.” To make her case, Martin recaps numerous examples of family separation—from the forced removal of Indigenous children from their homes to the turn-of-the-20th-century practice of transporting poor white children west as frontier laborers. She also traces the federal government’s long-term (and ongoing) resistance to providing financial support for poor families with children, despite a robust history of advocacy from reformists (even the New Deal’s welfare program was so loaded with caveats that it didn’t do much to keep families together, Martin writes). It’s a damning assessment of America as a society built on the exploitation of children. (Jan.)