How Did the Teddy Bear Get Its Name?

Perhaps the question first occurred to you in the toy aisle when you were picking out a present for the kid in your life. Or maybe it was when you were cleaning out your old toys from the attic of your childhood home that you asked yourself, “How did stuffed bears come to be called ‘teddy bears,’ anyway?”

It’s a story involving President Theodore Roosevelt, a bear hunt, a political cartoon, and a candy shop owner in New York.

The Hunt

In November 1902, Mississippi governor Andrew H. Longino invited Roosevelt on a bear hunt, and the president—who would be in the state to try to settle a border dispute it was having with Louisiana—eagerly accepted.

His luck, however, was terrible: For the first few days, there was not a bear to be found near Roosevelt, let alone shot. Anyone on the hunting party who did spot an ursine was forced to hold their fire. According to biographer Edmund Morris in Theodore Rex, Roosevelt “insisted on first blood,” writing ahead of the trip, “I am going on this hunt to kill a bear, not to see anyone else kill it.”

(Roosevelt had an interesting history with bears: He was nearly killed by a grizzly on a solo hunt in Montana in 1889, and some of his supporters from West Virginia sent him “a small bear”—which his children named Jonathan Edwards, after the revivalist preacher—as a pet in 1900. He wound up giving the bear to the Bronx Zoo the next year because “we do not have the accommodations to keep him.”)

Things came to a head on November 14. Holt Collier—a formerly enslaved man and legendary bear hunter who was serving as Roosevelt’s tracker—and his dogs flushed out a black bear into a clearing where the president was supposed to be waiting. The dogs chased the bear into a pond, where, Morris wrote, “Collier threw a lariat over the shaggy neck and pulled tight … and cracked the bear’s skull with the butt of his gun—carefully, because he wanted it to stay alive.”

Unfortunately, Roosevelt was not where Collier thought he would be. After waiting in the designated area for hours, the president and his hunting companion assumed no bear was coming and returned to camp for lunch. A messenger was dispatched to get Roosevelt, who rushed back to the scene to kill the bear—but when he saw that the scrawny creature was tied to a tree, he refused to shoot it. Someone else ended up killing the bear (not with a gun, but with a knife).

Ultimately, Roosevelt didn’t bag a single bear on the trip—but in a strange twist, he would soon end up lending his name to one.

The Cartoons

Reporters checked in on the hunt once a day, and it wasn’t long before reports of Roosevelt’s refusal to kill a restrained bear made the papers; the president was lauded for his sportsmanlike behavior. (The papers had harsher words for the bear, derided as “incorrigible and uncultured,” and for “these Mississippi people,” which one paper opined “seem as ignorant of modern methods as they are lacking in the finesse and technique of true sport.”)

Washington Post  political cartoonist Clifford K. Berryman, reading about the event, found himself struck by inspiration: He drew a black bear—“a poor measly little cub with most of its fur rubbed off,” he would later write—with a white handler holding its leash. Roosevelt holds one hand out; in the other is his gun, butt on the ground, muzzle up. The illustration appeared on November 16, 1902, and  was captioned “Drawing the Line in Mississippi.”

“I drew the cartoon of it from the description as sent by the Associated Press,” Berryman recounted later. One senator “thought it so good that he ’phoned to me and asked me to make another bear cartoon when Roosevelt returned to the city.” The resulting illustration, published November 19, was captioned “After a Twentieth Century Bear Hunt.”  

“It seemed to make a hit,” Berryman said, “with the result that I continued the bear in all future cartoons in which the President appeared.” The bear got more adorable with time; you can see all of Berryman’s bear illustrations in this collection from the Theodore Roosevelt Center.

The Toy

As Berryman created illustration after illustration featuring Roosevelt and an adorable bear, Morris Michtom sensed an opportunity.

The Brooklyn-based candy store owner had his wife Rose hand-sew a cuddly stuffed bear, which he placed in their store window; it quickly sold. Rose made more, ultimately selling so many that the Michtoms began mass producing what they called “Teddy’s Bears” in 1903 (apparently with Roosevelt’s blessing, though the president apparently believed the toy would amount to nothing). Around the same time, the German toy company Steiff made its own stuffed bears, shipping 3000 of them to U.S. toy stores. Soon, the cuddly toys were going by “Teddy Bears.”

Roosevelt himself used the teddy bear in his 1904 re-election campaign, even though he hated the nickname Teddy (perhaps because it was used by his first wife, Alice, who died after giving birth to their daughter, also named Alice). When a lawyer used the nickname in his presence, Roosevelt declared it an “outrageous impertinence.”

The toy took off, selling in the tens of thousands, enduring a brief controversy, and paving the way for beloved bears like Winnie the Pooh, who was inspired by a teddy bear purchased for A.A. Milne’s son Christopher. 

There was also an unsuccessful imitator: Billy Possum, which was presented to then-President William Taft, Roosevelt’s successor, on a trip to Atlanta in January 1909 and was, according to the Theodore Roosevelt Center, “designed to replace Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘Teddy Bear.’ ” Taft endorsed the cause, and soon, there were Billy Possum stuffed animals, buttons, and posters. But Billy Possum was ultimately a failure; the toy’s time in the spotlight was over by the time the holiday season rolled around in December.

The teddy bear, however, has never ceased to be popular. Today, the stuffed animal remains a popular gift and the industry was valued at about $6.4 billion in 2022. It’s also the state toy of Mississippi, and a Michtom-made bear owned by Roosevelt’s descendants has a spot in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

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