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Great Moments in Kiddie Marketing

Teddy Bears

Theodore Roosevelt--a president who'd busted trusts, initiated digging the Panama Canal, and mediated the Russ-Japanese War--is celebrated to this day through the plush, cuddly creatures known as Teddy Bears.

On official business in Mississippi in 1902, President Roosevelt took some time off to go bear hunting. But when his gracious host presented the president with a cub to gun down for a photo, the president declined the offer. Days later, a newspaper illustration depicting Roosevelt's heroic stance caught the eye of toy store owner Morris Michton. Inspired, Michton and his wife promptly cut out and stuffed a plush brown bear and put it in their store window alongside the newspaper clip and a sign that read Teddy's bear.

The bear sold quickly, as did its several successors, so Michton--a marketing man's marketing man--wrote Roosevelt and requested permission to use the president's name to sell the stuffed animals. Roosevelt wrote back and said he doubted his name would carry much weight in the toy business but that Michton was welcome to it.

By 1905 mass-produced Teddy Bears were a full-blown craze. Spin-offs from fads had become common at the turn of the century, and the bear thing had more than its share: there was the Teddy and the Bear band, a board game, a battery-operated toy called Electric Bright Eye Teddy, ceramic and porcelain novelties, stationery, targets, paper dolls, party games, blocks, scarf pins, rubber stamps, water pistols, cotillion favors, briefcases (of plush), rocking horses, squeeze balls, a hammock, a kiddies' pedal car, muzzles, and leashes, all bearing the name of the president. There was even a species of crossover dolls that had Teddy with a doll's face and a doll with a bear's face.

The fad persisted for three years. And worried people. A priest claimed that bearmania among little girls, who had all but abandoned dolls, destroyed the very instincts of motherhood, threatening the extinction of the species. --Carrie McLaren

(source: Panati's Parade of Fads, Follies, and Manias, by Charles Panati.