National American Teddy Bear Day
National American Teddy Bear Day celebrates the cuddly stuffed animal with a remarkable history that includes a US president and a preacher spouting conspiracy theories.
Today’s date coincides with a hunting trip taken in November 1902. The governor of Mississippi invited Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States, to a bear hunt, but after three days, Roosevelt hadn’t spotted one. To keep the president’s trip from ending in failure, the guides set the dogs loose; they tracked down an old black bear and attacked it.
They brought the wounded bear back to camp and tied it to a tree for the president. When Roosevelt saw the old bear, he refused to shoot it because to do so would be unsportsmanlike. However, since it was injured, Roosevelt directed the men to put the bear down to end its suffering.
Word traveled quickly across the country. The Washington Post ran this headline on November 15, 1902:
PRESIDENT CALLED AFTER THE BEAST HAD BEEN LASSOED,
BUT HE REFUSED TO MAKE AN UNSPORTSMANLIKE SHOT
Political cartoonist Clifford Berryman drew a single panel that appeared in the Post the next day. In it, the president stands in the foreground, a guide and bear behind him. Berryman depicted the bear as a cub trembling in fear. He began to include the cub in other drawings of Roosevelt, forever linking him to bears.
Morris Michtom, a Brooklyn candy shop owner, saw Berryman’s cartoons and was inspired to make a stuffed bear. Michtom wrote to Roosevelt and asked his permission to call the toy “Teddy’s Bear.” Although the president agreed to lend his name to the new invention, he is said to have doubted it would ever amount to much in the toy business.
The runaway popularity of the cuddly bears led Michtom to mass-produce them, forming the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company in 1903. It soon became a multimillion-dollar business. By 1907, the toy had become so popular that a preacher in Michigan warned that replacing dolls with toy bears would destroy little girls’ maternal instincts. Reverend Michael G. Esper raised the alarm:
Race suicide, the gravest danger which confronts this nation today, is being fostered and encouraged by the fad for supplanting the good old dolls of our childhood with the horrible monstrosity known as the ‘Teddy Bear.’
Newspapers in 27 states picked up his sermon, including the Boston Daily Globe and The Washington Post, which ran it on its front page. More than a hundred stories promoted Esper’s dire warning, an early example of a crackpot theory going viral. Of course, if the fearmongering prediction had been true, there would be no one left to read (or write) this.
A Teddy’s Bear made in 1903 is owned by the National Museum of American History. It’s in perfect condition. And the human race carries on.
Happy National American Teddy Bear Day!