Teddy's Bear and the Sociocultural Transfiguration of Savage Beasts Into Innocent Children, 1890–1920

November 14, 2002, marked the centenary of President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt's Mississippi hunt during which he declined to shoot an adult bear that had been brutalized by dogs and man. He ordered a member of the hunt party to kill it, which was done by knife; it was then skinned and eaten at camp meals. Despite this outcome, the myth arose that the president released a young bear on humanitarian grounds resulting in the creation of a soft cloth child's toy that became known as the teddy bear in reference to the president's public moniker. Over the first two decades of the twentieth century the teddy itself underwent a transformation from being representative of childhood to being symbolic of childhood innocence. Although the teddy was a fad of adults during the first decade of its creation, including its use as a good-luck token for World War I soldiers, it was not until the mid-1950s that its relationship to adults expanded when the rising popularity of psychoanalysis made notable the reference to the teddy bear as a transitional object as the child learns she is separate from her mother (Winnicott 89–97). The teddy became an adult fetish with self-styled "arctophiles" (lovers of teddy bears) speaking of it as "a leavening influence amid the trials and tribulations of life" (qtd. in Maniera 144). By the end of the twentieth century the teddy bear's iconic status as innocent child imbued it with sacramental powers to heal, protect, and commemorate children and adults: "There's just something about a Teddy Bear that's impossible to explain. When you hold one in your arms, you get a feeling of love, comfort and security. It's almost supernatural" (Ownby "Teddy Bears for Hope"). The donation of teddy bears in the aftermath of accidents and disasters has become for many a form of charitable aid that displaces the giving of food, clothing, or money, and for which Web site solicitations are rhetorically patterned after televangelist ministries. Through analysis of the discursive merging of wilderness ideologies and human developmental theory during late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in scientific and popular culture this article explains the sociocultural possibility of Roosevelt's transmutation from Great White Hunter into mythical humanitarian, and of his battered and slaughtered bear victim into childhood innocent capable of redeeming adult life. On November 13, 1902, Roosevelt and companions disembarked a train at Smedes, Mississippi, for a week-long bear hunt. They traveled on horseback to a wilderness camp where they met up with Holt Collier, an esteemed African-American guide "credited with having been at the death of 1,809 bears. […] nearly 150 in a single season," who was in charge of the dogs ("In Haunt of Bruin" 1). While black bear hunting was a familiar pastime for Roosevelt, the canebrake terrain of Mississippi held new attractions for this populizer of the strenuous life. The hunt dogs, "bred and whipped" to locate, pursue, and harass a bear to its death, or their own, commonly ran a distance of twelve miles in such environ ("Wily Mississippi Bears" 25). If the bear was not chased into an opening where it would be shot by waiting hunters, the dogs would trap it and attack: "Sometimes a huge bear will be entirely hidden from sight beneath an avalanche of dogs […] but it will be but a moment before he has sent enough of them flying through the air to uncover himself as a target for the hunters' guns" ("Wily Mississippi Bears" 25). The hunt started the next day with its progress reported by Associated Press newsmen allowed to visit the camp, in identical stories printed on the front pages of the November 15 Washington Post and New York Times ("One Bear Bagged" 1; "One Bear Falls Prey" 1). The party set out on horseback with "only" eleven dogs, as half the pack had taken off the previous day in pursuit of a deer. A scent was picked up early and the dogs were off into the underbrush. The hunters plunged in to follow, but after a few minutes Collier stationed Roosevelt and another hunter along the trail where he thought the bear would emerge and they would have the best chance of shooting it. When the two men could no longer hear the dogs baying they assumed the bear would not return in their direction and they returned to camp for lunch. Bad luck for them, as the bear, after being chased for hours through the canebrake, emerged where they had been standing. According to the newspaper reports, the bear plunged into a water hole and the dogs "were all over him in an instant." It crushed one and was "making a swipe with its paw at another" when Collier "knocked the game over with a blow on the head" then "roped the bear and tied him to a tree." Roosevelt was fetched to the scene but he refused to shoot the bear and would not allow other hunters to do so. He commanded the hunt manager to "put it out of its misery," which was done by knife. The carcass was slung over a horse and taken back to the camp where it was weighed and butchered. It was a 235-pound female, a size described as lean ("One Bear Bagged" 1); her meat was consumed over the next two evenings and her paws roasted for Sunday's dinner ("Quiet Day in Camp" 1). The chasing down of a bear with a pack of trained dogs until exhausted and beating it unconscious were turn-of-the-century behaviors characteristic of beliefs held by North American whites that the wilderness was a frightening and chaotic nature threatening to their lives, new world colonization, and civilization (Lutts 8; Nash 51). Conquering the wild was considered necessary by whites for their achievement of supremacy over other races, living beings, and nature itself. This Manifest Destiny entitled whites to assume ownership of North American territories, and to place their interests over the needs of all other humans and animals. Although contested from the 1700s this doctrine remained a dominant ideology validated by theological arguments that invoked the natural rights of man over animals. Bears, as part of this wild, were considered to be inherently dangerous predators that, when not immediately killed, were targets of capture and torment for human entertainment. Child and adult popular culture disseminated the belief that brutal control over bears was necessary for the good of white humankind. For instance, until the early 1900s the eponymous "Three Bears" revert from domesticity to savagery when their domain is trespassed (Ober 1–255) (Image 1). In America, the destructiveness of bears, and therefore the need for them to be destroyed is central to the early biographies of American frontier heroes Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett (Gelo 144–45). The Three Bears. The Three Bears. London: and New York: George Routledge and Co., 1856. 8. Photograph courtesy of the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books, Toronto Public Library, Canada. The celebration of bear death or capture is exemplified by the 1900 Ladies' Home Journal's"Blue River Bear" series, featuring fourteen-year-old Balser: "the happiest boy in the Indiana, for he owned a carbine, ten pounds of powder, and lead enough to kill every living creature within a radius of five miles" (Caskoden 11). He and his father shoot a male bear in retaliation for an attack on Balser and hunt down the sow defending her cubs. Her killing is described with relish: "the report of the two guns echoed through the forest almost at the same instant and the great she-bear fell over on her side, quivered for a moment and then died" (12). The injured Balser cannot help bring home the dead bears: "he was however, proud of his wound, and thought that the glory of killing one bear, helping to kill another and catching two bear cubs was enough for one day" (12). Stories such as these were regularly included in middle-class family magazines. Roosevelt was a vigorous proponent of this attitude, proclaiming through word and deed that killing wild animals was a natural activity of mankind. For whites to maintain what they considered their dominant evolutionary position over other "races," it was essential that males of the species partake in the hunting "instinct"; in the white man's killing of animals the race was redeemed and ennobled (Isenberg 52). Although Roosevelt's devotion to pets, naturalist enthusiasms, establishment of wildlife preserves, and promotion of conservation legislation are indisputable, any dismay he might have felt at the treatment received by the bear of the November 14 hunt was not because he cared about her "feelings" or well-being. He thought bears, along with wolves and cougars, to be "dangerous and noxious," undeserving of conservationist protection and, whenever possible, to be killed on sight (Roosevelt 759). Similarly, his refusal to slay the bear himself by knife was not motivated by compassion for a tormented wild animal. On the contrary, a kill after the hunter had inflicted injury could be boasted about, for it demonstrated the courage and tenacity of both man and animal. Likewise, Roosevelt was not averse to hunting by knife; in a letter of June 10, 1901, he expressed the desire to "kill a big grizzly or silver tip with our knives, which would be great sport" (Morison 90: #2062). The problem facing Roosevelt on the Mississippi hunt was that the bear had been clubbed unconscious by Collier. If Roosevelt or another hunter were to subsequently slay her, he risked the press asserting that it was a successful kill, which would put Roosevelt in contravention of the "fair chase" principles mandated by the Boone and Crockett Club, the bourgeois hunting association he had helped found. As it was, he did not consider this killing to count toward his bag and lamented this in a letter of the same day (Morison 378: #2512). The discourse of the dangerous wild explains the acceptance of the torture and killing of the bear, but Roosevelt's later heroization as her protector, and the symbolic transformation of the bear from fighting adult female into the quivering male cub, who in some accountings is deemed no more than eighteen inches tall (Crenshaw 62), needs greater explication. Although Roosevelt placed great importance on his status as sportsman hunter, he feared that his engagement in bear killing while he was president would result in "so much silly and brutal newspaper talk as to leave an unpleasant impression upon the immense number of our people who know nothing whatever of hunting and who accept as true what they see in the press" (Morison 379: #2512). This position—of being torn between his belief in hunting as a sacrosanct activity (at least when conducted according to rules set down by himself)—and the potential for alienating the public was a fairly new development that arose when the advent of nineteenth-century secular thought began to free wild nature its negative associations (Carlson 3). The eighteenth-century bourgeoisie valuing of the wild for aesthetic pleasure and spiritual cleansing (Cartmill 146–48) was expanded during the latter half of the nineteenth century to a more popular conception of nature as capable of rejuvenating the human spirit blighted by urban life. Nature writers Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and John Muir inspired the public to "see" their immediate natural environment as having value for emotional and physical well-being rather than for economic benefits alone. An outcome of this discourse in North America was the establishment of city and national parks; an enthusiasm for camping; the founding of nature organizations such as the Sierra Club in 1892, and the Audubon Naturalist Society in 1897 the development of a nature study educational movement with a focus on creating a sympathetic outlook toward the wild and living "in harmony with nature" rather than from a primarily scientific perspective (Lutts 30; see also Cartmill 151; Van Slyck 3–4 and 11–14). Ernest Thompson Seton was at the forefront of directing the literary view that animals have an inner life as complex as that of humans, imbued with capacities for instinctual learning and with lives governed by a moral order, that while possibly threatening to human survival and requiring humans to kill them, were not inherently evil, and in many ways were superior to human morality (Anderson 57). Seton was the inspiration for Charles G. D. Roberts, whose sympathetic fiction emphasized a Darwinian struggle over food and territory, with the rights of animals positioned against "the assumptions of the human beings who hunt them" (Polk 89). The reverence for nature communicated by Seton and Roberts took the form of anthropomorphic sentimentality in the writings of William J. Long (Lutts 37–68). His stories are based on more than animal instinct, but of their also having human-like abilities for complex thinking such as knowledge of cause and effect that enables them to treat their own injuries and with skills of planning that they use to lure prey to their death. The creatures depicted by the new nature writers were not humans in animal form, as in the case of Kipling's 1894 Jungle Book. Rather, the animals were described as expressing emotions that these authors believed were part of their being. By the late nineteenth century the infusion of the genre with an animal psychology intensified an attitude toward wild animals as sentient beings. While limited in abilities for self-expression, they were, from this viewpoint, as capable as humans of suffering pain and of experiencing a rich emotional consciousness that included affection and sorrow. Adult and children's fiction such as Muir's 1897"An Adventure with a Dog and a Glacier" began to systematically positively unite the wild and the domestic. Incorporated into such fiction were protests against cruelty to animals and crediting animals with positive human attributes. One of the most famous and influential of such representations was Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, which received its American publication in 1890 by the American Humane Education Society. Bears were included in this transformative discourse. While they retained features symbolic of the wild, in illustrations they were portrayed as less fearsome, and in descriptions of their behaviors they were more subdued, with similarities to humans in their yearnings, actions, and foibles. They were becoming, in other words, as safe as nature itself. For instance, the 1900 Animals Comic ABC shows bears dressed as humans to teach the letter "B" along with an intended humorous analogy to the hijinks of schoolboys that includes the word beating, which the bear receives for eating honey (n. pag.) (Image 2). Animal Comic. The Animals Comic ABC. London: Ernest Nister, 1901. n. pag. Photograph courtesy of the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books, Toronto Public Library. Despite this growing inclination for a sublime wild, human domination over animals remained an acceptable theme within mainstream culture. An illustrative example is Roberts's 1896"Do Seek Their Meat from God," which tells of a father who saves his son from two panthers by shooting them but later finds the bodies of the panthers' cubs who had starved to death (11–27). It is an empathetic depiction of panthers engaging in instinctual hunting behavior for the survival of their cubs, rather than of their being "evil monsters" (Polk 84), but it was a story that Roberts had difficulty getting published its still unusual, for the time, "sympathy for dangerous animals" (Polk 84). The contesting perspectives are also found in the December 6, 1902, Washington Post in which appears a positive review, with excerpts, of Roberts's latest book ("Kindred of the Wild" 16) but as well without criticism, a report of the gruesome sacrifice of a frog during the trial of a man charged with poisoning two children. During the trial strychnine that had been taken from the liver of the child who had died was administered to the frog to demonstrate its effects; "in a few minutes the frog went into convulsions. The professor explained the action of the drug as the frog, writhing, exhibited all the agonies the boy had suffered as he died" ("Poisoned Frog" 1). Battle for dominance over the terrain of early twentieth-century wilderness ideology erupted with the fiercely and publicly fought "nature fakers" debate (Anderson 119–23; Mighetto 33–50). It was initiated with a 1903 Atlantic Monthly article by John Burroughs, in which he reviled Seton, Roberts, and Long as deliberately misleading the public asserting that their depictions of animals were based on scientific observations ("Real and Sham History" 298–301). This spawned a dispute that grew into a four-year media battle for readers' allegiance to one side or the other of what was presented as a dichotomy. Roosevelt was the most celebrated supporter of Burroughs's stance, especially against Long. In 1907 he permitted an interview that he had given on the subject, during which he condemned the nature writers as being either ignorant of animal behavior or purposefully deceiving their readers, to be published. "Roosevelt on the Nature Fakirs [sic]" appeared in Everybody's Magazine that June (Lutts 106–07). This was followed by a September issue that focused only on the topic, to which Roosevelt contributed a lengthy article titled "Nature Fakers" that again dismissed the nature stories as fancies and chastised publishers for "holding a position that entitles them to respect, yet condone and encourage such untruth" (qtd. in Lutts 130). While this issue of the magazine did not result in an immediate end to the squabble, Roosevelt's side triumphed. Editors began to reject submissions that claimed fidelity to the wild but that could not pass inspection by new teams of naturalist fact checkers (Lutts 138). Books by Roberts and Long were removed as school readers, and they as well as Seton faded from view as wilderness writers. What had been a radical juxtaposition to the dangerous wild ideology was tempered by Roosevelt's scorn and if not put into full retreat was at least for the time being browbeaten into submission. Given the continued beliefs in, and expressions of, human supremacy through domination of the wild in ways described above and culminating in the "nature fakers" denouement, it should have been unfeasible for Roosevelt's dead bear to be reified as a human-like cub who was released by a mythical presidential aficionado of a before-time PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). But such myth was not only produced, it prevailed against both the news reports of the event and the tide of animal realism that followed on the nature faker controversy. Explanation as to how it was possible for the targeted bear and consequently the teddy bear to become symbolic of innocent childhood can be tracked from the iconography of political cartoonist Clifford K. Berryman. The day after the publication of the outcome of Roosevelt's November 14, 1902, hunt, the Washington Post ran on its first page Berryman's depiction of Roosevelt refusing to kill the bear as part of a four-part montage of political imagery ("Drawing the Line in Mississippi" 1). The animal's captor, shown as a white rustic in place of the African-American Collier, struggles to keep his grip on a rope wrapped tightly around the bear's neck. Pulling strongly back, the bear, clearly a large animal, shows fear in its eyes. Although the newspaper report of Roosevelt's arrival at Smedes describes him in leatherstocking gear, Berryman shows him dressed in neckerchief, riding boots, military jacket, up-turned hat, and spectacles. That a knife and rifle are the only hunter's accoutrements included suggest Berryman wished to priorize Roosevelt's public role as the country's leader as represented by the 1901 Punch drawing of him in his Rough Rider outfit commemorating the anniversary of his presidency (Shaw 75) (Image 3). Drawing the Line, 1st version. Berryman, Clifford. "Drawing the Line in Mississippi" [1st version]. Cartoon. Washington Post 16 Nov. 1902: 1. Berryman's refusal to elucidate the drawing's title and imagery left both open to multiple interpretations by latter-day fans of the teddy bear and Roosevelt. The most common contemporary reading of the caption is that it references Roosevelt's being in Mississippi to negotiate a border dispute between that state and Louisiana, with the hunt having been arranged during a break in the proceedings. This version describes the hunting party, sans Roosevelt, as having captured a cub (or sometimes an old female bear) and holding it for him to shoot as compensation for the lack of success at the end of a week of hunting. The president, because of his animal humanitarianism, was disgusted by the men's actions and demanded the animal's release. The claims of this tale are effortlessly dismissed: there was no such border discussion at that time (Dalton 233); Roosevelt had planned the hunt as a holiday after the arduous months of working to settle the anthracite coal strike ("President's Trip" 9); the bear—captured on the first day of the hunt—was, as shown in Berryman's drawing, an adult; rather than the hunt party overstepping any fine feelings held by Roosevelt toward animal killing, he was well known for his enthusiastic hunting practices. Nevertheless, this account is endlessly repeated for adult and child consumption, including on the Smithsonian Web site (http://www.smithsonianlegacies.si.edu) such that it has become accepted as fact despite some sources of teddy bear lore providing the corrective information (such as Kail 294 and Mullins 50). An alternate explanation, less favored but still widely disseminated especially on Web sites, is that the caption and drawing refer to the "color line," with Roosevelt's "stop" gesture toward the neck-roped black bear being an antilynching stance (for example, Crenshaw 62).2 Although Roosevelt's trip was not explicitly politically motivated, the taking place of the hunt in Mississippi might have been a show of support for its governor, Andrew Longino, against the white supremacist and gubernational-hopeful James Vardamann. However, while Roosevelt objected to southerners' propensity for the lynching African Americans, he had maintained that it was appropriate in cases of rape and that African Americans were prone to engaging in that crime (Sinkler 430). Moreover, his "demonstration of presidential paralysis" in matters of lynching was exasperated by his belief that taking a leadership role against it would not make any difference except to destroy his political life (Sinkler 420; 430–34). Further evidence against the cartoon being an antiracist statement either satirical toward, or commending of Roosevelt, is Berryman's replacing of the African-American Collier in the same cartoon with a white man, his caricatured depiction of Collier in his November 19 "After a Twentieth Century Bear Hunt," and the overall lack of critical racial commentary in his oeuvre. In place of these two well-worn but inaccurate suppositions, this article argues that analysis of the wilderness ideologies within which the hunt took place and of Berryman's later use of the bear image to blatantly censure Roosevelt's hunting activities point toward the cartoon's being a not-so-nuanced sardonic pronouncement on Roosevelt's conservationist proclamations and his accusations of extravagant hunting practices of others, while himself engaging in excessive animal slaughter. Evidence for this interpretation is found in the caption, which can be recognized as an oblique reference to the eighteenth-century writings of the Virginian survey commissioner William Byrd II, whose History of the Dividing Line has been described as "the first extensive American commentary on wilderness that reveals a feeling other than hostility" (Nash 51). An edition of Byrd's writings was published in 1901 (Nash 51), likely inspiring the well-read Berryman with its parallels between Byrd being a plantation owner, socialite, nature writer and Roosevelt being a nature enthusiast, writer, member of the social and economic elite, and whose November 14 hunt took place on land surrounded by the former plantation of a Confederate general ("President on His Way" 1). Further evidence for this interpretation comes from Berryman's following cartoons that include the bear character. His "After a Twentieth Century Bear Hunt" (1) published on November 19 is unambiguous. Printed next to the front page report on the injured and exhausted sate of the dogs at the November 14 hunt's completion it shows a bear observing hunters departing with injured or dead dogs. One drags a live bear by a rope around its neck, attached to which is the note, "Back to the Zoo" (Image 4). After a Hunt. Berryman, Clifford K."After a Twentieth Century Bear Hunt." Cartoon. Washington Post 19 Nov. 1902: 1. Berryman thereafter cast the bear, which he referred to as "Bruin," in the role of political commentator. Bruin next appeared in a Thanksgiving cartoon; he is an adult with claws and roughened fur who sits aloft a tree expressing thanks "that he did not end up in the White House" ("They're so Thankful" 1). A cartoon of November 29 shows a lion representing the Trusts in tears after reading a sign posted in the wilderness announcing, "The President will go after the Trusts in his usual style" as Bruin tries to console him: "Don't worry; you may escape. I did" (untitled 1). While smaller than before, the bear is still an adult who is realistic in appearance and shown in his natural setting. A December 1 drawing of Bruin is significantly different with the bear having shifted from a contented outsider to Roosveltian team player. In this drawing ("Lined Up" 1) Roosevelt captains a rugby team and Bruin, diminutive and dressed in a sporting costume, stands on hind legs to his right and a step ahead of the others (Image 5). Lined Up. Berryman, Clifford K. "Lined up for the Last Half." Cartoon. Washington Post 1 Dec. 1902: 1. Berryman's cartoons of December 3, 4, 5, and 7 increasingly anthropomorphize Bruin as political pundit and Roosevelt's supporter and friend. However, the relationship of this bear to Roosevelt is not all affection and reverence, for Berryman also uses him to persist with criticizing the president's hunting practices but now from within the White House and Roosevelt's circle of advisors. For example, a December 25 front-page cartoon shows Bruin, on a four-poster bed with sheets, awaking in terror after having a nightmare about a giant bear skin being nailed to the front of the White House ("Christmas Dreams" 1). In the same edition, "Columbia in Wonderland" (3) shows numerous winged Bruins escaping from the gun sights of Roosevelt and a fellow hunter. Berryman's revising of Bruin to be Roosevelt's political companion and confidant rather than adversary positioned him to opine on the President's hunting behaviors while being safeguarded from the label of antihunting crank. It thus provided Berryman's Bruin cartoons a greater chance of avoiding the wrath of the media-sensitive Roosevelt and gaining wider public acceptability with its potential for greater influence. Teddy bear admirers and mystifiers refuse to acknowledge such images as censure of Roosevelt, choosing instead to believe that these are evidence of Berryman's humorous cartooning of him as compassionate sportsman. Public enthrallment with Bruin apparently resulted in a National Press Club request that Berryman provide it with "Drawing the Line" for display and archival purposes, but when he could not locate the original he drew it anew (Mullins 43). The date of occurrence remains obscure, but likely took place between 1903 and 1906. The differences between the first and the second images are notable (Image 6). Drawing the Line, 2nd version. Berryman, Clifford K. "Drawing the Line in Mississippi." Cartoon. The Mentor Aug. 1926: 62. Compared with the first, in the second cartoon the scene is more pastoral than wild, and the bear's captor more civilized than rustic, wearing clothing more suitable for strolling city streets and parks than crawling through Delta canebrake. Roosevelt is less a poster boy for the Rough Riders and more the comfortably paunched male favored by his social class, who no longer carries his hunting knife in readiness for the kill. This bear is diminutive, wide-eyed, and vulnerable. As its size makes it of no use as meat and of no danger to humans the cartoon removes the dominant ideological reason for its killing. In this drawing Berryman succeeds in strengthening his antihunting message by merging the discourse of the sublime wild with the increasing popularization of the seventeenth-century writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that posited childhood as a period of moral innocence and of early nineteenth-century theological assertions that children were "angels incarnate" who had "entered this world with the innocence and sanctity of heaven still clinging to them" (Calvert 104–05). Literary representations that epitomized the innocent child, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Evie in the 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin and George Elliot's Eppie in the 1885 Silas Marner, provided for a widespread consciousness of the white child as a heavenly god's earthly emissary (Boas 58). This idea of the innocent child was given scientific credence in the late nineteenth century through G. Stanley Hall's application of recapitulation theory to human development (Ross 309–40). Based on the Lamarkian premise of inheritable abilities, recapitulation theory posited that individual development was a successive passage through the evolutionary phases of one's race (Gould 135–47). Infants and young children were in a stage of unenlightened morality analogous to animals. In white bourgeois and middle-class cultures the physiognomic evidence of childhood innocence was chubby limbs, symbolizing infancy—the most innocent of ages; wide