Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [103]
Paradoxically, one misadventure worked to his political advantage, and spawned the most enduring of all Rooseveltian myths. Early on the morning of 14 November, Holt Collier’s hounds scented bear and began to yelp. Roosevelt and Foote galloped after the pack, but thickening brush cut them off. Collier tactfully suggested that they stake out a nearby clearing, while he rounded up the critter and drove it past them—“same as anybody would drive a cow.”
The yelping of the hounds receded into silence. Roosevelt and Foote sat for hours, sweating as the sun climbed and cooked the humidity of the forest. Noon came, and with it boredom and hunger. Eventually they concluded that Collier’s bear had gone astray, so they might as well ride back to camp for lunch.
No sooner had they left than a lean black bear burst through the brush with the pack at its heels. Hot and exhausted, it lunged into a pond, and the dogs splashed after it. The bear reared and struck out, crushing one hound’s spine. Collier threw a lariat over the shaggy neck and pulled tight. Then he waded in and cracked the bear’s skull with the butt of his gun—carefully, because he wanted it to stay alive.
Back at the camp, the hunters heard excited horn calls. A messenger from Collier galloped up. “They done got a bear out yonder about ten miles and ‘Ho’ wants the Colonel to come out and kill him.”
Roosevelt rode back at full speed. He was both disappointed and upset, on reaching the pond, to find a stunned, bloody, mud-caked runt tied to a tree. At 235 pounds, the bear was not much bigger than he. He refused to shoot. “Put it out of its misery,” he said. Somebody dispatched it with a knife.
The hunt continued for another three days, but the curse of that tortured bear kept Roosevelt’s bullets cold. He did not know, as he crashed vainly through the mists, that the outside world was already applauding his “sportsmanlike” refusal to kill for killing’s sake. Clifford Berryman, the Washington Post cartoonist, was inspired to make a visual pun linking the incident with the President’s race policy. He sketched a very black bear being roped about the neck by a very white catcher, and Roosevelt turning away in disgust, with sloped rifle. The cartoon appeared on the front page of the Post on 16 November, captioned DRAWING THE LINE IN MISSISSIPPI.
Whether or not readers got Berryman’s pun, they rejoiced in his imagery, and demanded more “bear cartoons” after Roosevelt returned to Washington. Berryman obliged—again and again, as he realized he had hit upon a symbol the public adored. With repetition, his original lean bear became smaller, rounder, and cuter. He drew it as “a poor measly little cub with most of its fur rubbed off, and big ears like prickly pears,” and it became the leitmotif of every cartoon he drew of Theodore Roosevelt.
That winter, by one of the mysterious coincidences that yoke inventions, stuffed, plush bear cubs with button eyes and movable joints began to issue from Margarete Stieff’s toy factory in Giengen, Germany. Three thousand were ordered by F.A.O. Schwarz of New York City, while in Brooklyn a storekeeper named Morris Michtom began producing something similar at $1.50 each. The competing bears soon fused, along with Berryman’s cub, into a single cuddly entity that attached to itself the nickname of the President of the United States. For decades, perhaps centuries to come, uncounted millions of children across the world would hug their Teddy Bears, even as the identities of Stieff, Michtom, Berryman, and Roosevelt himself rubbed away like lost plush.
EDITH ROOSEVELT RECEIVED her husband in a White House immeasurably different from the dark, dank mansion they had inherited from the McKinleys. Gone were the executive offices crowding the second floor, and the malignant outgrowth of greenhouses on the west