Teddy’s Bear Country: Imagining Wild Nature in Theodore Roosevelt’s America

Abstract As an ambivalent symbol of America’s relationship with the natural world of wild things, the bear acquired new importance in the years of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency (1901–1909). This article offers an interpretation of the significance of the bear at this time, looking at outdoor sportswriting and the cultural response to Roosevelt’s own bear-hunting exploits in that context. It finds two contrasting ideas of the bear, which appears both as a ferocious beast and as a bearskin trophy, a symbol of nature’s uncontrollable power and also a consumer object. Bear-hunting stories, it is proposed here, thus bridged two worlds: that of wild nature and that of human modernity. This, it suggests, was also the essential cultural function of Theodore Roosevelt’s public persona. Serving as president while assuming the unofficial role of bear-hunter-in-chief, and then becoming indelibly associated with sentimentalized cartoon or teddy bears, his image blurred the distinctions between the White House and the Rocky Mountains, modern life and the natural world. It is suggested in this way that the symbolism of the bear enabled Americans to navigate a way into the twentieth century, avoiding a hard choice between industrial modernity and wild nature by retaining a cultural space for both.