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By Root 4371 0

the president didn’t bag a bear. Roosevelt took his failure stoically, saying that it was the “nature of the chase.” But reporters loath a void. Many of the journalists lampooned Roosevelt for his failed hunt, but several wrote glowingly of Collier, describing his almost superhuman single-handed capture of a large, wild bear at the age of fifty-six. Soon other stories were manufactured. By the time Roosevelt left Mississippi, heading north to Memphis, the buzz was that the president had befriended Holt Collier—a black man. This, combined with the lingering effect of Roosevelt’s dinner with Booker T. Washington, perhaps contributed to a boycott by the Tennessee Governor’s Guard and Confederate veterans’ groups of the president’s scheduled parade in downtown Memphis.24

Yet the long-term effect was good for Roosevelt’s reputation. Berryman’s cartoon of the president refusing to shoot a captured bear had captured the public’s imagination. A middle-aged Brooklynite, Rose Michtom, impressed by Roosevelt’s sportsmanship, made two plush toy bears, stuffed with excelsior and adorned with black shoe-button eyes, as a tribute to the compassionate president who had refused to fire on a captive beast. Her husband, Morris, put the stuffed bears in the window of his stationery and novelty store, and they sold immediately. Then Morris Michtom had a brainstorm: why not seek President Roosevelt’s permission to market the toy as “Teddy’s Bear”? Michtom sent a letter to the president, apparently in February 1903. The president supposedly wrote back a few lines, essentially saying OK. “I don’t think my name will mean much to the bear business,” he reportedly said, “but you’re welcome to use it.”25 The couple’s son, Benjamin Franklin Michtom, remembers that his parents framed Roosevelt’s letter and hung it on a wall of their summer home in Florida; after they died and the house was sold, the letter disappeared. No copy has turned up among Roosevelt’s voluminous personal papers, housed at Harvard University, or among his presidential papers at the Library of Congress.26

Although Roosevelt’s letter has been lost and some scholars question whether it was ever written at all, two things are certain: the teddy bear became a rage in the toy business, and the Michtoms made a fortune. Their bears sold for $1.50 apiece, and they couldn’t fill the orders fast enough. By 1907 the demand for the cuddly stuffed bears—most with jointed heads, arms, and legs—was so great that the Michtoms formed the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company and moved to a more spacious factory-style building. Coincidentally, in the small medieval town of Giengen, Germany, Margarete Steiff, a seamstress who had been a victim of polio, was also making little plush bears. In the previous few years, she had created a line of appealingly detailed stuffed elephants, donkeys, horses, camels, and pigs. When her nephew, the artist Richard Steiff, began sketching brown bears at the zoos in Stuttgart and Munich and urged her to design a mohair bear toy, she agreed. At first nobody bought the Steiff bears. When one was put on display at the 1903 Leipzig Fair, however, a wealthy American buyer fell in love with it and ordered 3,000 to be shipped to New York. Upon being presented with one of the Steiff bears, Roosevelt supposedly roared his approval and ordered several hundred to be used as table decorations for his daughter Alice’s wedding reception. That sealed the deal: the Steiffs, like the Michtoms, officially dubbed their new toy the “Teddy Bear.”27

The teddy bear craze set off by Steiff and Ideal Toy and Novelty reached its zenith while Roosevelt was president. In 1903 the Steiffs manufactured 12,000 bears; in 1907 the number had soared to 974,000. Dozens of other companies produced their own teddy bears, with various stylistic alterations. Claiming that its version was the authentic teddy bear, the Steiff Company began sewing a small metal button into one ear of each of its stuffed toys, to hold the trademark label that still distinguishes the Steiff brand. But Roosevelt always gave credit