The teddy bear is a children’s toy that gained its name and its prominence after a hunting story featuring President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) became national news. The legend has it that Roosevelt showed both compassion and sportsmanship when, on a hunting trip in Mississippi, he refused to shoot a tied-up bear cub. This, according to popular accounts, inspired the creation and marketing of bear dolls that in turn were named after the president, with his approval.
The actual hunting trip, during a 1902 mid-November vacation for the president, featured no bear cub at all. Following long negotiations in a United Mine Workers of America strike in the fall of 1902, President Roosevelt headed to Mississippi for a vacation at the invitation of Governor Andrew Longino. On the hunting trip Roosevelt was eager to hunt bears. To please the guest of honor the guide, Holt Collier (ca. 1846–1936), tracked, cornered, clubbed, and tied up an old bear for the president to shoot. Roosevelt declined, deeming it unsportsmanlike, but ordered it be put out of its misery. The accompanying press saw a fun anecdote in the event and reported it. As the story spread across the country, cartoonist Clifford K. Berryman (1869–1949) picked it up and added the title “Drawing the Line in Mississippi,” possibly as a metaphor for Roosevelt’s opposition to lynching in the South or as a comment on his criticism of excessive hunting practices. Another unsubstantiated telling has it that “drawing the line” refers to Roosevelt’s attempt to settle a land dispute between Mississippi and Louisiana and that this was the true purpose of his trip down South.
The myth of the cute bear cub that Roosevelt refused to shoot is mainly a result of Berryman and his cartoon of the incident in the Washington Post (November 16, 1902). The front-page cartoon was an immediate success and spread around the country together with the story of the noble president. Various accounts tell that he took the bear as a pet or to a zoo rather than ordering it to be killed. In fact, the cartoon was so successful that for the rest of his career Berryman included cute bear cubs in his cartoons of Roosevelt. As the original cartoon was lost, in the following years Berryman drew a new version at the request of the National Press Club, this time making the bear considerably smaller and cuter, while also polishing the image of Roosevelt by leaving out a large hunting knife featured in the original. President Roosevelt himself took part in reiterating the connection between him and bear cubs, widely using teddy bears in his reelection bid in 1904.
According to the popular version, the path from a presidential hunting trip to commercial success is a veritable American dream come true. In Brooklyn, NY, an immigrant couple, Morris and Rose Michtom, decided to make a plush bear to stand in the window of their candy store. As several customers inquired into the possibility of buying the toy bear, the Michtoms decided to start producing more of them. Morris Michtom even sent the original as a gift to the president and requested permission to use the term “Teddy’s bear” for the toy. Roosevelt wrote to the Michtoms that they were free to call the toys teddy bears, even though he personally disliked the nickname, noting that he did not believe the use of the name would make much difference in the “bear business.” Teddy bears proved so popular that the Michtoms were able to leave the candy business, founding the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company.
The story has it that at the same time that the Michtoms in Brooklyn read Berryman’s cartoon and invented the teddy bear, an American toy buyer visiting Germany saw the same cartoon in the Washington Post and suggested to Margerette Steiff, a doll and soft toy manufacturer in Germany, that they make bear cubs. Other sources suggest, however, that the first Steiff bear, Steiff Bär 55 PB, was the result of Richard Steiff’s visits to the local zoo and had no connection to Theodore Roosevelt. At the 1903 Leipzig Toy Fair an American importer saw the bear and ordered a large shipment. The Steiff teddy bears then became a hit at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 with more than 10,000 in sales. By 1907 the Steiff Company alone produced close to one million teddy bears, most for export to the United States. Today the teddy bear industry includes children’s soft toys as well as teddy bears for adult collectors and exceeds $1.2 billion annually.
Local legend in Colorado tells a different account of the origin of the teddy bear, though President Roosevelt is the main character in this story as well. Though later debunked, the story claims that the source for the teddy bear can be found in the Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. The president was a frequent guest at the hotel, in fact so frequent that it earned the nickname “The Little White House of the West.” The story, still told at the hotel, claims that the teddy bear was the result of two different visits by Roosevelt. During a visit, Roosevelt shot a grizzly bear and upon photographing his game Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, supposedly called the dead bear “Teddy,” making it the first connection between a bear and the nickname for Theodore. When he stayed at the Hotel Colorado for a subsequent and unsuccessful hunting trip, the maids of the hotel tried to cheer up the president by presenting him with a small soft bear; again Roosevelt’s daughter is claimed to have named the toy bear Teddy. In reality Alice Roosevelt never accompanied her father to the Hotel Colorado, nor is there any support for the claim that the teddy bear was born there—Roosevelt’s second visit to the hotel was in 1906, some four years after his Mississippi hunting experience, Berryman’s cartoon, and the commercial production of teddy bears.
Soon the teddy bear became a part of American culture and the favorite toy of boys especially. This can be seen in everything from popular rope-skipping rhymes, “Teddy bear, teddy bear, turn around,” to popular music, “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic,” “I’ve Lost My Teddy Bear,” and “If I Could Teach My Teddy Bear to Dance,” but is especially clear in literature. Bear cubs in children’s stories naturally predate Roosevelt’s 1902 encounter with the bear: from Aesop’s fables to “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” bears have been a part of folk tales. In America, Jimmy Swinnerton’s comic strip The Little Bears, featuring cute bear cubs, gained popularity in the 1890s before he switched newspapers and changed it to The Little Tigers at the request of William Randolph Hearst. The teddy bear, which is explicitly a bear toy and not a real bear cub, however, has enjoyed far greater international success in children’s literature and television since the early twentieth century, even if the first book based on Roosevelt’s hunting trip, Seymour Eaton’s The Roosevelt Bears (1906), was about actual live bears. Especially successful renditions include not only A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh (1926), but also Corduroy (1968) by Don Freeman, Sooty (1948) created by Harry Corbett, Rilakkuma (2003) by Aki Kondo, and the Care Bears (1981) originally created by Elena Kucharik for greeting cards. Among the better known examples of bear characters inspired by the success of the teddy bear and merchandised as teddy bears are the United States Forest Service mascot Smokey the Bear, created as part of an advertising campaign in 1944, and Yogi Bear created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for The Huckleberry Hound Show in 1958 and soon featured on his own television show, The Yogi Bear Show.
The teddy bear serving to safeguard children from the turmoil of the adult world is central in the image of the toy and can be seen in fictional stories as early as 1907. Its function as a therapeutic artifact can be seen in the commemorative black Steiff bears produced following the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and in the small teddy bears marketed in Britain to young soldiers serving in World War I. This role has grown substantially during the second half of the twentieth century, becoming a part of adult culture as well, and so teddy bears became an integral part of the remembrance of, and coping with, such tragedies as the AIDS crisis, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Hurricane Katrina. Emergency personnel also carry teddy bears to alleviate stress and psychological trauma among both children and adults.
Oscar Winberg
See also Legends; Mickey Mouse
Further Reading
Buchanan, Minor Ferris. 2002. Holt Collier: His Life, His Roosevelt Hunts, and the Origin of the Teddy Bear. Jackson, MS: Centennial Press.
King, Gilbert. 2012. “The History of the Teddy Bear: From Wet and Angry to Soft and Cuddly.” December 21. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-history-of-the-teddy-bear-from-wet-and-angry-to-soft-and-cuddly-170275899/?no-ist/. Accessed September 24, 2014.
Mullins, Linda. 2002. The Teddy Bear Men: Theodore Roosevelt & Clifford Berryman. 2nd ed. Grantsville, MD: Hobby Horse Press.
Tamony, Peter. 1974. “The Teddy Bear: Continuum in a Security Blanket.” Western Folklore 33 (3): 231–238.
Varga, Donna. 2009. “Gifting the Teddy Bear and a Nostalgic Desire for Childhood Innocence.” Cultural Analysis 8: 71–96.