The truth behind the cuddly teddy bear

I went for a walk in Lyttelton. Teddies to the left, teddies to the right, teddies in windows, teddies in doors, teddies on garages, teddies on floors, teddies climbing trees, a teddy on a trapeze, and one teddy swinging from a gallows. And I was only out for half an hour.

Teddies are among the most enduring toys. Both boys and girls like them and many continue to like them into adulthood. The first stuffed bears were made by Steiff in Germany around 1900. Find an original Steiff in your attic and you’re a hundred thousand dollars richer.

But Steiffs were just toy bears. Teddies were the American version, named, as everyone knows, after Theodore Roosevelt. But I, for one, didn’t know why, so I went online to find out. And ooh it was instructive.

The baseline story is that President Roosevelt took part in a bear hunt in Mississippi in 1902. It was a competitive event and everyone was popping off bears left and right while poor old Roosevelt shot nothing.

Of course it would never do for a president to be bested like this, so one of his attendants captured a black bear, tied it to a willow tree and invited Roosevelt to bag it. But Roosevelt declined on the grounds that it was unsporting to shoot a captive bear.

Soon the story of Roosevelt sparing the bear got out (or was artfully released) and the public drank it down. Whereupon an enterprising toy company, which knew a good thing when it saw one, started making toys that it called Teddy’s Bears. These proved popular, so Roosevelt, who hated being called Teddy but who also knew a good thing when he saw one, campaigned in the next election as Teddy and won in a landslide.

All of which, as I’m sure you’ll agree, begs one question, which is how the attendant managed to tie the bear to the willow tree. For this we have to go beyond the legend to the truth. And the truth is far more interesting.

It transpires that the attendant in question was a freed slave called Holt Collier, who was renowned as a bear hunter in his own right. And in his bid to help the president save face, Collier used a pack of dogs to chase down a black bear. He then whipped the dogs off, clubbed the bear into submission, tied it up and invited the president to shoot it.

Now it is true that Roosevelt declined the invitation. But it is also true that he ordered the bear to be shot by someone else, because, after undergoing the attentions of a pack of dogs and Holt Collier’s club, the creature was too far gone to survive. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how cuddly teddy bears came to be.

The teddy-bear story illustrates our capacity for self-delusion. It plays up human decency while downplaying human blood-lust, violence, cruelty, deference to power and emotional manipulation to retain power.

And just as the story misrepresents us, so the teddy bear misrepresents bears.

Bump into a black bear in the wild and its distinguishing features in the order in which you are likely to notice them are: its size, its aggression, its claws, its teeth and, just possibly, its reproductive organs. None of which you’ll find in a teddy.

In short then the whole business implies not only that we are nicer than we are, but also that the natural world is nicer than it is. Which makes the teddy bear a suitable consolatory falsehood to put in our windows right now.

The teddybear story illustrates our capacity for selfdelusion.