Origins of the Iconic American Toy, the Teddy Bear 🧸
Meet Clifford Kennedy Berryman (1869-1949), founder Megan Berryman Coffey's ancestor and Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist whose career spanned 53 years.
Clifford began work in the late nineteenth century with the Washington Post and continued as a cartoonist for the Evening Star from 1907 through his death in 1949. His pen and ink depictions of political figures and settings were distinct and changed little over his career.
It was in 1902 that Berryman contributed to American toy culture when his cartoon titled “Drawing the Line in Mississippi” showed President Teddy Roosevelt and a bear cub.
On a hunting trip with Mississippi Governor Andrew H. Longino, Roosevelt was determined to capture a bear but failed to do so after three days of hunting. The guides tracked down an old black bear that the dogs had worn down and tied it to a willow tree for the President to shoot, but Roosevelt refused, calling it unsportsmanlike.
Berryman’s cartoon featuring the teddy bear first ran in the Washington Post on November 16, 1902. He continued to use the teddy bear to symbolize President Roosevelt. Sometimes the teddy bear was a sidekick to Roosevelt, backing him up during contemporary challenges. His cartoons so popularized the teddy bear that children’s authors promoted it in their stories. New York candy shop owner Morris Michtom asked permission from Roosevelt to call toy bears that his wife made “Teddy Bears.” The stuffed toy’s rapid popularity led Michtom and other companies to mass-produce them, and it helped to diminish some of the negative publicity Roosevelt received from that controversial hunt.
During his lifetime, Clifford was recognized as a keen but kind satirist who pilloried policies but not people and doled out equal criticism to Democrats and Republicans. In 1944, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartoons. By 1949, the year of his death, Berryman had become so well known, especially in Washington circles, that then-President Harry Truman was quoted as having said,
“You (Berryman) are a Washington Institution comparable to the Monument.”
— President Harry Truman
Born in Kentucky, Clifford had three children, one of whom followed in his father's footsteps to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist.
Sources: American History SI EDU Blog, Bears and Buds, Amazon; Theodore Roosevelt Center
