Theodore Roosevelt and the Teddy Bear
How did Washington Post cartoonist Clifford Kennedy Berryman – with a little help from Theodore Roosevelt – spark the creation of the world’s favourite soft toy?
Children’s dolls, when not in human form, have often been based on cartoon characters, from Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, Bonzo the Dog and Bugs Bunny in the 1920s and 30s to Snoopy, Garfield and Pingu in more recent times. Bears have also been popular – Rupert, Winnie the Pooh and Paddington being celebrated examples. Most of these were originally designed as merchandizing spin-offs from comic strips, children’s books or animated films that were read or watched by children. It is extremely rare for a child’s toy to derive from a political cartoon as these are aimed at adults. However, one of the most popular children’s toys of all time had its origins in a political cartoon published in the Washington Post in 1902. It concerned the Republican US President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), was drawn by the paper’s editorial cartoonist Clifford Berryman, and the soft toy it gave birth to was the Teddy Bear.
Clifford Kennedy Berryman (1869-1949) was the tenth of eleven children of James T. Berryman and was born on April 2nd, 1869, in Clifton, Kentucky in the USA. His father owned a general store and entertained his children by sketching caricatures of local personalities on the shop’s wrapping paper. Clifford inherited his father’s skill at drawing and in 1886 became a draughtsman in the US Patent Office in Washington DC.
Berryman continued to sketch cartoons in his spare time and in 1891, soon after having a drawing accepted by the Washington Post for $35, he left the Patent Office to join the paper as a staff cartoonist. Berryman later became chief political cartoonist on the Washington Evening Star and remained there for more than thirty years (1907-49), winning a Pulitzer Prize for a wartime cartoon about Franklin D. Roosevelt (‘But Where is the Boat Going?’ August 29th, 1943). In 1949 he suffered a stroke while at work in his office and died a month later on December 11th, aged sixty. (He was succeeded at the Evening Star by his son, James, who also later won a Pulitzer Prize for his own political cartoon work.)
Despite his countless drawings during the First and Second World Wars, Berryman is still best known for his ‘Teddy Bear’ cartoon. It came about as a result of a trip made by President Theodore Roosevelt, a keen hunter and sportsman, to the southern states of the USA in November 1902. He had been invited by the Governor of Mississippi, Andrew Longino, to settle a dispute about the borderline between Mississippi and the neighbouring state of Louisiana. While in the area the President accepted an invitation by his host to go out bear-hunting.
The hunting trip took place near the town of Smedes on the Little Sunflower River in Sharkey County, Mississippi. On the afternoon of Saturday November 15th, 1902, after an unsuccessful morning, the party stopped for lunch while their guide, Holt Collier – an expert African-American hunter who had been a scout for the Confederate Army in the American Civil War – continued tracking with his dogs. Collier eventually caught up with a large 235lb old American black bear and cornered it at a watering-hole. Here the exhausted bear managed to kill one of the hounds before being knocked unconscious by Collier who clubbed it over the head with the butt of his rifle. He then lassoed it around the neck, tied the half-dead animal to a nearby oak tree and blew his bugle to alert the hunting party.
When Roosevelt arrived he was presented with the bear and invited to shoot it so that he could have a trophy to take home. However, confronted by the stunned and bleeding bear the President is alleged to have said: ‘Spare the bear! I will not shoot a tethered animal.’ The press quickly picked up on this apparent act of generosity and the Sunday papers were full of tales of his sportsmanship and magnanimous conduct. What they failed to mention was that Roosevelt did not set the animal free but instead ordered it to be put out of its misery. It was promptly killed by a hunter with a Bowie knife and brought back to camp on the back of a horse.
Nonetheless the story persisted and on Monday November 17th, 1902, Berryman drew a cartoon about the incident as part of a composite illustration on the front page of the Washington Post entitled ‘The Passing Show’. Captioned ‘Drawing the Line in Mississippi’ – punning on the border dispute – it showed Roosevelt in hunting gear with his back turned and refusing to shoot the large black bear held by a fellow hunter.
No sooner was it published than other artists began to draw the situation and before long the story had been changed still further. The animal now turned from a huge old bloody black bear mauled by hunting dogs into a cute little cub with appealing eyes and round ears – Berryman himself even redrew it in this guise and included it in his later cartoons as a mascot.
At the same time Berryman’s original drawing inspired Morris Michtom and his wife Rose, the owners of a candy store in Brooklyn, New York, to design a toy bear in black plush with black button eyes. Once made they put it in the window of their shop beside a print of the original cartoon and called it ‘Teddy’s Bear’. This led to many orders for the toy which became so popular that within a year they closed the candy store and founded the Ideal Novelty & Toy Co, which soon became one the biggest toy companies in the world.
Meanwhile, in Germany, another company had independently produced an articulated bear doll that also later became known as a Teddy Bear. This was the creation of Margarete Steiff, of Giengen, southern Germany, who had been manufacturing soft toys, notably stuffed elephants, since 1880 (and soft-filled bears since 1892). The new bear had been designed by her nephew Richard who had been inspired by performing bears at Stuttgart Zoo to make a toy bear that could stand upright. The new product, in mohair plush with glass eyes, was first exhibited at the Leipzig Toy Fair in March 1903 and Hermann Berg of the New York toy company Geo Borgfeldt & Co. – aware of the new Teddy Bear craze back in the USA – bought 3,000 of them. By the end of 1904 12,000 had been sold and before the outbreak of the First World War many millions of the Steiff bear alone had been bought in the USA, UK and Germany.
President Roosevelt was delighted with the toys and gave official sanction to the use of his name. The original 1903 American bear was later presented to him and kept by his family until his grandson, Kermit, donated it to the Smithsonian Institition in Washington DC. The story of the Teddy Bear also led to a massive boost in Roosevelt’s popularity and he was re-elected in 1904. Other American versions of the toy created during his lifetime were the 1907 Laughing Roosevelt Bear (its mouth opened to show large teeth like Roosevelt’s) and the 1917 Patriotic Bear (red, white and blue with electric lightbulbs for eyes).