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

Abstract

November 14, 2002, marked the centenary of President Theodore Roosevelt's Mississippi hunt during which he declined to shoot an adult bear that had been brutalized by dogs and man. He ordered 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 young bear on humanitarian grounds resulting in the creation of 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 transformation from being representative of childhood to being symbolic of childhood innocence. Although the teddy was fad of adults during the first decade of its creation, including its use as 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 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 Bear that's impossible to explain. When you hold one in your arms, you get feeling of love, comfort and security. It's almost supernatural (Ownby Teddy for Hope). The donation of teddy bears in the aftermath of accidents and disasters has become for many 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. you go down to the woods today You're sure of big surprise1 On November 13, 1902, Roosevelt and companions disembarked train at Smedes, Mississippi, for week-long bear hunt. They traveled on horseback to 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 single season, who was in charge of the dogs (In Haunt of Bruin 1). While black bear hunting was 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 bear to its death, or their own, commonly ran 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 huge bear will be entirely hidden from sight beneath an avalanche of dogs [...] but it will be but moment before he has sent enough of them flying through the air to uncover himself as 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 deer. …