Teaching American History with Teddy's Bear | Miriam Forman-Brunell

Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 15, No 4
Summer 2001

Teaching American History with Teddy’s Bear

Miriam Forman-Brunell

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) is home to “Teddy’s bear,” a brown, fuzzy stuffed animal with child-like proportions and cub-like characteristics. Interestingly, Teddy’s bear is in the NMAH’s Division of Political History, not in Domestic Life. Such placement reflects the stuffed animal’s American origins, which have been traced to a cartoon published in the Washington Star in 1902. Clifford Berryman’s cartoon depicted Theodore Roosevelt (president from 1901 to 1909) sparing the life of a trapped bear cub while on a hunting expedition. Inspired by the cartoon of a bear, which also happened to be a symbol of her national origins, Russian immigrant Rose Mitchum created “Teddy’s bear.” She placed the stuffed animal along with a letter from the president in the front window of the neighborhood store she ran with her husband, Morris Mitchum, the future founder of Ideal Toys. What began as a novelty soon became a fad, as other manufacturers produced their own versions and toy companies offered toy banks, puzzles, and tea sets. Clowns and chorus girls dressed as bears in vaudeville shows told risqué jokes, such as: “Question: If Theodore Roosevelt is President of the United States with his clothes on, what is he with his clothes off? Answer: Teddy Bare!”

Teddy’s bear is historically significant for the light it sheds on American culture and society during a period in which Victorian notions of womanhood, manhood, and childhood were changing. As New Women entered the public sphere as workers, reformers, and professionals, they contributed to the erosion of the Victorian gender ideology that had prescribed private roles for women and public roles for men.

The opportunities that the new social and sexual order afforded women, however, generated cultural anxieties about male identity, as suggested by the bawdy vaudeville joke about Theodore Roosevelt, whose identity had been shaped by this crisis in masculinity. Bespeckled and asthmatic, Roosevelt’s reputation had been besmirched several decades before the publication of the bear cub cartoon. In the early 1880s, newspapers had ridiculed the youthful New York assemblyman for his fancy clothes and high-pitched voice. Derided as the quintessence of effeminacy, Theodore did not like being called “Teddy” or being compared to Oscar Wilde. Determined to eradicate this public image, Roosevelt used his persona as a virile Rough Rider who championed “the strenuous life,” in order to construct a new identity as the epitome of turn-of-the-century masculinity. In order to do so, according to Gail Bederman, Roosevelt drew upon a discourse about civilization to justify imperialist domination by virile white American men over racially inferior dark ones, often gendered as female.

In addition to the profound transformations that affected turn-of-the-century men and women were those that shaped boys along with girls, and civilization together with nature. As former suitcase makers and future dollmakers, Teddy bear producers contributed to a new consumer culture for children. Middle-class families spent more money on new types of toys for their fewer children, who were now endowed with emotional worth instead of instrumental value, as Viviana Zelizer has demonstrated. Influenced by a newly constructed childhood ideal, parents became consumers of toys and indulged children’s imaginations, as the significance of fantasy achieved broader social and cultural acceptance.

Teddy bears—now a staple of American childhood—can be useful in teaching twentieth-century gender history and material culture studies. Their widespread popularity among fin-de-siécle children, for example, can be explained in part by the emergence of new androgynous emotional standards. In order to prepare boys for success in the corporate order, explains Peter Stearns, the Victorian boyhood ideal of courage yielded to a more useful concept of cooperation and consensus. For girls, newly emerging ideals about a more androgynous girlhood led them to embrace Teddy bears and to neglect their china dolls.

At the same time that new girlhood ideals incorporated more masculine characteristics, the increased emotional value of animals led to Teddy’s transformation from ferocious to feminine: Teddy’s bear would be a pal, providing emotional security in a rapidly changing world. The cartoonist’s sympathetic rendering of the cuddly creature captured the public’s sympathy and imagination at a time when “attitudes toward the animal world were being charged with new cultural values and emotional content,” according to Jonas Frykman and Orvar Löfgren. Theodore Roosevelt, himself a conservationist, helped to generate new notions about nature through the expansion of the national forests and wetlands. As a passionate outdoorsman, Roosevelt sought to control, manage, and protect what was left of the American wilderness.

By examining everything from the first bear’s hinged hips to Teddy Ruxpin’s computer chips, students can decode the more elusive ideals embedded in the artifacts of childhood. They can accomplish this by analyzing documentary sources (e.g., patents, advertisements, commercials, magazine articles, catalogs, postcards, illustrations, and photographs) in addition to material culture. For example, students could learn how to “read” Teddy’s bear as a cultural text by posing questions such as: Why is Teddy’s bear represented as male? Who produced, purchased, and played with him? Why is his fur dark brown? In what ways is the bear represented and why?

Questions like these might lead to answers with ambiguities, contradictions, and uncertainties. But like many historical sources, Teddy’s bear represents ideals in conflict as well as in flux. For example, the masculine bear (often dressed as a Rough Rider or cowboy and mounted to car hoods driven by men) simultaneously embodied male dominance and female nurturance. The domestication of the dark-skinned bear (and the connotation of its possession by another, as suggested by “Teddy’s Bear”) manifested turn-of-the-century notions of white racial supremacy over inferior “others.” Teddy’s bear also symbolized the ideas of conservationists aimed at managing nature while at the same time advancing a manly civilization. And the cultural symbolism of Teddy bears was not limited to a single era. For instance, Gary Cross argues that the introduction of the Care Bears in the 1970s was a cultural strategy to avoid engagement in the bitter battles over women’s roles.

Whether particular interpretations compel universal assent, there is no doubt that Teddy bears, along with other toys, are meaningful cultural texts that can provide student scholars with an important body of evidence and serve as a useful tool to teach them the methodologies of critical analysis.

Bibliography

Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the U.S., 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Cross, Gary. Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Frykman, Jonas, and Orvar Löfgren. Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle-Class Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

Zelizer, Viviana A. Rotman. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

Miriam Forman-Brunell, an associate professor of history and women’s and gender studies at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, is the author of Sitting Pretty: Fears and Fantasies about Babysitters (forthcoming); and Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930 (2d ed., 1998). She is the editor of Girlhood in America: An Encyclopedia (2001); and The Story of Rose O’Neill: An Autobiography (1997). Dr. Forman-Brunell has received grants and fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others.