Theodore Roosevelt's Bear Hunting Holidays
Many presidential vacations have been longer and others more historically notable, but no presidential getaway has had a bigger impact on popular culture than Theodore Roosevelt's 1902 hunting trip to Mississippi. Roosevelt, an avid naturalist and an ardent hunter — he believed the two went together perfectly — traveled to Smedes Station, Mississippi hoping to shoot a bear. When most of the hunting party other than Roosevelt had killed an animal, the president's attendants cornered an exhausted black bear and tied it to a tree. Roosevelt refused to shoot the animal, saying it was unsportsmanlike. Satirizing the president's decision, on November 16, 1902, a political cartoon in the Washington Post showed Roosevelt refusing to shoot a frightened bear cub. As legend has it, the cartoon inspired a New York couple to make a stuffed animal they dubbed the "Teddy Bear." Driven in part by Roosevelt's popularity, the Teddy Bear craze of the early 1900s was said to rival the Cabbage Patch Kid frenzy of the 1980s.