If you were an immigrant kid in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, the candy store was the center of your world. You went there to kibbitz and schmooze, to get away from the crush of tenement life and the glare of the beat cop, and, of course, to eat sweets—Tootsie Rolls and Chicken Feeds and as many chocolate pennies as a copper one could buy. Should you have walked by the candy store at 404 Tompkins Avenue in Brooklyn one November morning in 1902, you would have spotted something stranger but no less enticing: a small brown bear gazing solemnly back from the front window.
As the story goes, the stuffed animal was the brainchild of Morris Michtom, the shop’s owner. A few days earlier, newspapers had published reports of a hunting trip that President Theodore Roosevelt took in Mississippi. Roosevelt had wanted to shoot a bear. A tracker caught one for him, bopped it on the head with his rifle, and tied it to a tree. The President was not pleased. Where was the honor in killing a subdued and wounded animal? The cartoonist Clifford Berryman sketched a humorous version of the scene: Roosevelt magnanimously turning away from the roped bear, which looks more like a startled puppy with two pompoms stuck to its head than it does a creature capable of mauling a grown man to death.
Michtom was born Moshe Charmatz, in a shtetl in what is now Belarus. To help him dodge conscription by the Russian Army, his family announced that he had died of typhoid and pretended to bury him while he sneaked out of the village to start a new life. He trained as a rabbi and, more practically, as a machinist before coming to the United States, in 1888, at the age of eighteen. Berryman’s cartoon struck a chord with him. Apparently, the President of his adopted country treated wild beasts better than the tsar treated the Jews. It seems to have been patriotic, not commercial, instinct that led him to ask his wife, Rose, to sew a version of what he called Teddy’s Bear, which she did using scraps of mohair and wood shavings from the candy shop’s basement.
Michtom’s Teddy bear—the apostrophe soon disappeared—ignited a craze. He hadn’t intended to sell the stuffed animal, but everyone seemed to want one. At first, he got some neighborhood-yeshiva bochurs to help him sew more of them. When they couldn’t keep up with demand, he took a prototype to a textile factory. Michtom didn’t bother to patent his invention; the imitators merely spurred interest. Children loved the Teddies. So did fashionable women, who toted them around town as a chic accessory, Labubus avant la lettre. The Teddy craze was followed by a moral panic, as crazes involving kids inevitably are. Students in a New York University sewing class were forbidden to make Teddy bears, lest they “breed idleness among children.” A Catholic priest in Michigan went further, preaching that if little white girls were allowed to play with “the horrible monstrosity” instead of dolls, they would fail to develop their maternal instincts and doom the race to suicide.
In fact, as Michael Kimmel describes in his new book, “Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America” (Norton), the Teddy bear was good for dolls. It was good for toys of all kinds. Before the Teddy bear, the toy market did not exist in the sense that it does now. For much of the nineteenth century, dolls were made at home from corn husks, clothing scraps, and the like, or produced from expensive, fragile bisque porcelain and kept high up on shelves to be admired by grownup collectors, not pawed by clumsy kids. Most children had marbles, hoops, balls, and little else. Few people bought toys from stores. The success of the Teddy bear changed that, accelerating off a race to supply kids with the accoutrements of their leisure. Today, parents will not be surprised to learn, the American toy business is valued at roughly forty-two billion dollars.