From "The Race to Give Every Child a Toy/For most of history, parents couldn’t buy their kids dolls, action figures, or the like. Then playtime became big business" (The New Yorker).
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...
Here's the book under discussion: "Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America" (commission earned).
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33 comments:
I still have my two childhood bear friends on my dresser to tell me "good morning" every day!
This sounds like a Just-so story. We've all noticed the explosion of books titles something like "Flake: How Flint discovery brought Democracy to the US, and changed all of Human History"
Right.
Right around 10 years old I got a 20 gauge shotgun from dad. More than one teddy bear mysteriously disappeared that year. A cold case to this day.
I shaved off my winter beard and left the moustache thinking I'd look like Teddy Roosevelt (or at least tubby Grover Cleveland). But at my age TR was already dead. With all the gray I look like Wilford Brimley -- or, if I let my hair grow out, like Albert Einstein.
As to the demographic collapse of British people in the UK, Paddington Bear has a lot to answer for.
“Most children had marbles, hoops, balls, and little else.”
Whatever happened to hoops? We had marbles and balls, and those are still around, but I’ve never seen a real live hoop.
"Whatever happened to hoops?"
Driven from the market by kids' natural preference for Log from Blammo.
“The Teddy [bear] craze was followed by a moral panic, as crazes involving kids inevitably are."
Teddy bears, the 19th century cell phone.
Found this out this last September. We were touring W CO, kinda just because my partner was going stir crazy in our small apartment by Golden. Supposedly, it was an Aspen tour, but I think a week or two too early.
In any case, we spent 3-4 nights in the Hotel Colorado, in Glenwood Springs, CO. It’s a stately old hotel, built in the 1880s, with silver money from Aspen. It’s built Next door to the massive Glenwood Hot Springs pool.
More important, the hotel was Teddy Roosevelt’s Western White House. He stayed there frequently. Taft also stayed there, but embarrassment over his girth kept him from visiting the hot springs pool next door. Roosevelt had no such inhibitions.
What Roosevelt apparently most loved in life was hunting. And he wanted to get a black bear while based there in Glenwood. The hunt wasn’t going well, and his daughter Alice (Alyce?) decided to cheer him up with a small stuffed bear, to represent the real black bear that he wasn’t catching. It was the first Teddy Bear, and it quickly became popular. He later did get his real black bear in that trip. And we picked up a Teddy Bear From the hotel gift shop, for our just born first great grandchild, complete with stove top hat and glasses.
Last year when I was in Chicago I went to an exhibition on the Titanic. In the gift shop they had Teddy bears of Edward Smith, the captain who went down with the ship. It was just such a bizarre thing I had to get one.
Sebastian Flyte, in Brideshead Revisited, carried a teddy bear around as an adult.
I still have my teddy bear that fell in the washing machine circa 1953. My parent patched it up and put buttons on it for eyeballs. That made it more endearing for some reason.
I didn't like regular fancy dolls but I think I might have liked rag dolls because they were more humble. But that wasn't her thing.
German bisque dolls were always made to be played with. French bisque fashion dolls were very expensive, so were given to wealthy children to display or play with carefully. The average girl didn't have a doll until German manufacturers became efficient at producing porcelain heads and parts at scale during the 1800s. By the 1900s to 1920s in the United States, having at least one doll had become a near-universal expectation for girls in most economic classes, and the Sears catalog had a lot to do with that. Doll collecting didn't become a thing until the middle of the 20th century.
The first Steiff teddy bear was introduced at the Leipzig Toy Fair in 1903, about the same time that teddy bears were becoming popular in the U.S. Steiff collecting became serious business in the 1970s and 1980s when a broader antique toy collecting movement was growing.
Can you imagine the freak-out if every little boy and girl was playing with a Trump doll?
"I"m yuge!"
"We need a wall."
"Rosie is fat."
Donald Trump in Space Force.
Donald Trump is Professional Wrestler
Donald Trump is Rich White Man
(Al Sharpton sold separately).
1st Wife
2nd WIfe
3rd Wife
The Baron
The Big White House
Optional accessories for the Trump Action Figure, from MAGA, oops MEGO:
- Tearaway orange jumpsuit
- Breakaway cuffs and leg irons
- 7 identical ill fitting blue suits and extra long red ties - one for each day of the week!
- 3 bibles: one to swear him in for each term!
- Code of Federal Regulations, printed on flash paper so you can make each reg go poof!
- Tiny toilet paper printed with “NORMS” that he can wipe his ass with
- Obama’s Super 8 birth movie from Kenya
- Red Button to push for a tiny Diet Coke or to blow up a drug runner boat (sold separately)
- Giant Ballroom that converts into a missile silo to bomb Tehran
- and a fabulous feather boa so you can make him gay!
CC, JSM
The Teddy Kennedy bear:
- waterproof, of course
- No, the nose is supposed to look like that
- complete with boxer shorts to run around the compound while your relatives have complicated sex with random women
- Submersible Oldsmobile sold separately
- Aborted fetus for one hand, communion wafer for the other
CC, JSM
There are a lot of people who believe "how enlightened we are, today; look how backwards they were".
Trust the Jewish entrepreneurs to set us straight. oh the irony.
In Kubrick’s films, the Teddy Bear symbolizes sexual exploitation of kids
Interesting story. Are there any social critiques from the Left labeled a "moral panic" like this was?
There have been plenty of Leftist freakouts, even in the last few years, but "moral panic" seems exclusively used against Right/traditional thinking.
There are two bears in our family, neither the classic Teddy style. "Soft Bear", and "Parrish". Both middle age, and well-travelled.
Dolls for girls were seen as training aides for mothers to be. Teddy Bears in the 1900s were seen as weird and unnatural. Funny how to modern libtards the greatest sin is to care about white people and their replacement. No doubt because they want them replaced.
And good God, the ethnic pandering. Oh those wonderful Jews, giving us Teddy Bears. Of course, if some terrible Jew gave us something bad in 1900s, better not mention that. Otherwise you're "Full of hate". Why toss Jew in the mix at all? Does anyone care that a Jewish person came up with Teddy bears?
BTW this whole article seems to be based on a couple of people complaining about Teddy Bears in the 1900s. IOW, the vast majority of people either didnt care or liked them.
"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...."
This sounded fake to me, but I looked it up and apparently he really did say that in a sermon. It went viral, but most newspapers (and their readers) seemed to take the story tongue-in-cheek.
The priest did not use the word "white" in his sermon, and talked about little girls in general. It's clear he was talking about the human race and not "race" as we use the term today.
A newspaper in Niles, IL printed a story about a lot of people in Chicago taking the issue very seriously and coming down on both sides. But Chicago papers seemed to indicate that most people got a good laugh out of the story (although one "prominent citizen" was mocked for taking the threat seriously.)
The priest's obituary from 1931 did not mention the sermon.
Drinkwater: “ "Soft Bear", and "Parrish". Both middle age, and well-travelled.”
On those travels, can they be found at the DC Eagle? Or the Ram in Chicago? CC, JSM
Thanks Rocco. That's what I thought. TR - Mr. Teddy Bear himself - constantly talked of "Race Suicide" and the need for women to have kids. Nothing about "White".
Alice satirically formed the "Race Suicide Club" to mock her fathers beliefs. She only had one kid, Eleanor had 5. Too bad it wasn't the other way round.
One other thing I forgot to note about the priest’s sermon: he mentioned teddy bears in a sermon just once. The sentence I quoted from The New Yorker article made it sound like teddy bears were a regular target of his, and that was not the case.
TR was, like most men of his time and class, a thorough racist.
He not only believed that whites were superior to other peoples, he saw his own day as a competition for dominance between Anglo-Saxons and Teutons, with Latins and Slavs in the wings if the Germanics fumbled.
He had no fear of Africans and Asians dying out.
Teddy racist compared to who woodrow wilson?
Not being as racist as Wilson =/= not being racist. We have his own words--what I posted was practically a paraphrase from a letter.
He believed in a human hierarchy, and thought he and his kind should be on top.
Xi and the rest of the Han Chinese think they are the superior race. This shit is as old as time. Always will be.
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