On November 14, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt was on a hunting trip in Mississippi. The hosts, eager to please, captured a black bear cub and tied it to a tree for the President to shoot. Roosevelt refused. He considered it unsportsmanlike.
The Washington Post cartoonist Clifford Berryman immortalized the moment in a cartoon titled “Drawing the Line in Mississippi” — showing Roosevelt with his hand raised, refusing to shoot a helpless bear cub. The cartoon went viral (in the 1902 sense of the word — reprinted in newspapers nationwide).
A Brooklyn candy shop owner named Morris Michtom saw the cartoon and had an idea. He and his wife Rose made a stuffed bear cub, placed it in their shop window with a sign reading “Teddy’s Bear,” and sold it the same day. The response was overwhelming. The Michtoms founded the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company, which became one of the largest toy companies in America.
At almost the same time in Germany, the Steiff company — run by Margarete Steiff, a woman who had been wheelchair-bound since childhood — had already begun producing stuffed animals. Her nephew Richard designed a bear with jointed arms and legs, first shown at the Leipzig Toy Fair in 1903. An American buyer ordered 3,000. Steiff’s “Bear 55 PB” became the template for every teddy bear that followed.
The teddy bear is the rare children’s object whose origin story is known, documented, and tied to a specific political event. Every bear — from the $5 drugstore valentine bear to the museum-quality Steiff — traces its lineage back to a cartoon and a candy shop.
Today, the teddy bear is so embedded in childhood that we rarely think of it as an invention. But it was. And its origin reveals something about why stuffed animals matter: they are objects of protection in a world that does not always protect.