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Daniel Horowitz, "Bear With Me: A Cultural History of Famous Bears in America" (Duke UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [01:23]
Professor Dan Horowitz
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Dan Horowitz about his book titled Bear with A Cultural History of Famous Bears in America, published by Duke University Press in 2025. Now, obviously as soon as we start talking about bears in America, there's a whole bunch of them that come to mind. And yes, we are going to be talking about, for example, some Smokey Bear and all sorts of other famous teddy bears, etc. Because they're all over popular culture in lots of different kinds of media and over quite a bit of time as well. So we're going to be talking about how, why, when all of these different bears turn up in culture. Dan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:14]
Professor Dan Horowitz
Thanks for inviting me. And bears are indeed here, there and everywhere.
- [02:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Exactly. Well, would you mind starting us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and telling us why you decided to write this book.
- [02:27]
Professor Dan Horowitz
Sure. I taught for almost a quarter of a century, most recently at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, and have been retired for about a dozen years. How I got interested in this book, in some ways it's a product of COVID lockdown. And initially with libraries hard to gain access to, or the books and libraries hard to gain access to, I was more dependent than usual on the web. And once you go on the web and look for bears, you're in a unending stream of interesting bear stories. So what happened in some ways was that Covid forced me to use my imagination more than I usually would. This is a one off book for me. The other ones I've written are much more heavy, so to speak. Indeed, I had just finished writing three quickly in succession on happiness, on entrepreneurship, and on the 08 financial crisis. Heavy books in the sense of great seriousness and not very happy in their conclusions. So this during COVID as my wife and I were drifting off to sleep, we imagined, as we had in other times, through pillow talk, stories about bears, and particularly one bear whom we invented. And if you'll promise not to report me to the Department of Mental Health, I tell you that as we drifted off to sleep, we talked extensively about a bear named Polar, no last name Polar, who had migrated to the United States from Baffin Island, a huge island west of Greenland and east of easternmost Canada. Pohler had come to the United States, come to Massachusetts, and actually to Boston, where he enrolled in Harvard Medical School and got his MD there, trained as a psychiatrist, and still to this day practices psychiatry in the freezer section of a supermarket not far from where we live. And why in the freezer section? Because of course, Polar is paid for his services by fish, and fish would be most commonly seen not just on the shelves, but also in the freezer section. So there we were, so locked down by Covid, library is not easily accessible, and drifting off to sleep with stories of horror.
- [05:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And obviously that gets us right into the topic here, because kind of without really looking for it, bears are really all over the place as soon as one begins to think about it, even while falling asleep. So why do you think that is such a feature, not just today, but as you discuss in the book, over quite a few decades now in US popular culture? And why do you think we see so many representations of bears?
- [05:56]
Professor Dan Horowitz
Well, I think the ordinary explanation, which is somewhat true, is that bears are, well, sort of like us in the sense that they stand up, are tall, and sort of have faces that look like us. And indeed, we are always imputing or projecting onto them all sorts of human characteristics. But I think the real reason is that bears are so emotional or imaginary. Bears are so emotionally labile. That is, they can be dangerous, threatening killers, or they can be Cuddly. And that we project onto them these polar opposites of emotional characteristics so that we can impute to them a whole range of human feelings that provide us with fear, with comfort, with interest. Indeed, as I worked on this book, almost daily I would get an email from a friend. Oh, have you heard about the bear? The grizzly that's in the backyard and has entered the swimming pool in a suburban neighborhood? Or in contrast, do you know about Vermont Teddy Bears, A company that has supposedly a hospital in Vermont in the state of Vermont where you can send your bear and it can be taken care of and then returned to you in its cuddly form. So I think that's an awful lot of it. They're so, so available to and compelling to us in popular culture because they can evoke such a wide range of feelings from terror and fear to love and affection.
- [07:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it means you can use them in all sorts of different ways. And of course, many of the bears that immediately come to mind, or maybe we encount first as small children, are cute, are cuddly. But there's also depictions of bears that are way less cute and cuddly than that. I mean, you mentioned terror just there as one of the emotions. So what can we learn about American society and perhaps how it's changed over time? If we put aside for a moment the cute bears and focus on the violent ones.
- [08:20]
Professor Dan Horowitz
Sure. You know, the book focuses on three stories about violent bears in the 1820s. The story of Hugh Glass, who encountered violent bears in what's now north, the border between north and South Dakota, eventually seen in a Oscar winning film, the Revenant, more recently than the 1820s. Secondly, the story of Grizzly Adams. Adams was a descendant of two American presidents and in the 1860s was in California. 1850s and 60s in California, where he tamed. But it also was wounded, mauled by grizzly bears that wounds that eventually killed him in most recently, in some ways, bizarrely, the story of Timothy Treadwell, a down and out young man living in coastal Southern California. Friends told him that if he wanted to recover from addictions, he had to go live with bears, which he did for 13 summers. I won't tell the full story, but he ended up for 13 summers in Alaska until his life ended tragically. Something again captured in a major documentary. But you know, those stories are terrifying indeed. Yet oddly enough, if you look at the statistics, for instance, of the number of people who are killed, let's say in US national parks are killed by bears, that number is tiny or small as Compared with the number of people who are killed because they fall off cliffs or get involved in automobile accidents. So there's something that makes us compelled, attracted, terrified by stories of dangerous bears that we see so often, Even though the actual danger statistical is small, but in our imagination, that danger is very large.
- [10:45]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It's definitely interesting to think about that gap, as you said, between sort of what the statistical reality is of dangerous bears and yet how much it takes over the imagination. Is it perhaps because there was at least a point, not as much now, but in the early 20th century, for instance, where real bears were more of a thing that people encountered? I mean, you talk about captive bears in the book. Can you tell us about that aspect of mainstream American culture?
- [11:11]
Professor Dan Horowitz
Sure. Let me first talk about the encounter with real bears. You know, as long as Americans were living on farms or in the wild or near the wild areas, they didn't indeed often encounter real bears. There is, however, now a phenomenon called rewilding, which is in many American states, even on the East Coast 20, 30 years ago, there were almost no live bears roaming out in the world. But that's changed dramatically, so that there are now bears in most suburbs in the United States that people see outside their windows, and we hope, not unseparated by their windows. But the other story you're referring to is the. The way in which bears have been put into captivity. And that begins in the 1870s in the United States with two several kinds of institutions. First of all, museums, museum of natural history, that are founded in that in the late 19th century. But of course, a bear, stuffed animal bear in a museum of natural history is not very dynamic or interesting or compelling. And the real captivity of bears in institutions came in zoos inspired in many ways by what was going on in zoos in Germany, where designs were made to display bears more quote, naturally, and also, of course, in circuses. Both zoos and circuses in the United States owe their origins to the late 19th century, 1870s, 1880s. So the only. Actually in my life, the only time I times I ever saw a real bears or ever saw real bears was as a child in zoos or more recently, in my adulthood, maybe. Our kids are now in their mid-40s to early 50s, when we took our children to see zoos, or as a child, when I saw them in circulation. Of course, what happened was over time, especially in the last 30 years, the display of bears in both circuses and zoos came under protest. And actually there are now no bears in any circuses. Ringling Brothers, Barnum And Bailey Circus shut down for a while, in part because they had relied on so heavily on live animals, especially bears, and that was protested against by organizations such as PW People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Eventually, Wriggling Brothers Barman Bailey Circuits was revived without bears. But as many of your listeners know, what happened in the meantime is there developed circuses such as Cirque du Soleil, which relied not at all initially or ever on live animals, but rather on new technologies and dramatic displays of people, not bears. A parallel thing happened in the last 30 or 40 years with zoos, where initially the effort was to make the display of bears and other animals in zoos look more realistic. Places such as outside San Diego, a wild animal farm where the animals were no longer behind bars, but seemingly roaming in the wild. More recently, attempts to liberate bears and other animals from zoos, all kinds of protests against them by environmentalists and others, so that the captivity of bears in zoos and circuses came under fire at the same time that new media or not so new media, such as animal films shown on television and theaters, increasingly captured a wide variety of bears, often highly staged, such as Marlon Perkins in the 1960s and 70s, movies that showed men, usually always men, trapping or seeking bears in the wild, often again in highly, highly staged manners.
- [16:28]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [17:54]
Professor Dan Horowitz
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- [17:58]
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- [18:03]
Professor Dan Horowitz
So I thought it would be fun.
- [18:05]
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- [18:13]
Professor Dan Horowitz
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- [18:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to 15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy taxes and fees extra. Cmintmobile.com yeah, the range of things that is happening there is really interesting. So thank you for giving us a sense of the different ways in which people might have encountered real bears in captivity and with that foundation now about the reasons which we see bears a lot in popular culture, kind of some of the more fearful ideas of why it's been in people's popular perception and the captive bears, I think that gives us a good kind of discussion point then to talk about a specific bear. And of course one of the most famous bears in the world is the Teddy bear named after we think Teddy Roosevelt. Obviously I have to ask you for some myth busting. What actually is the real link between Teddy Roosevelt and Behrs?
- [19:09]
Professor Dan Horowitz
Good, a wonderful question. Yes, indeed, Teddy bears. So Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, the first of two Roosevelt presidents assumed the presidency upon the assassination he was Vice President and the assassination of McKinley in 1901. The next year he went on a bear hunt. Now in the 1880s, Roosevelt, as part of a project to enhance his masculinity, he by the way, spoke in a very high pitched voice. Roosevelt had hunted for bears, really real bears, grizzly, giant grizzly bears in the American west and had killed them. And then some of their, some of them ended up in on the walls or at least their heads ended up on the walls of the carts that were that the Reap men patronized. But in 1902 he goes on a real bear hunt in Mississippi and he's assisted there by a formerly enslaved American African American, Haute Collier, who had killed hundreds if not thousands of bears in his life. So Roosevelt is out hunting bears. Teddy Roosevelt or Theodore Roosevelt is out hunting bears in Mississippi. And he couldn't. There was no chance for Ben to encounter an actual live free bear. But Collier did capture one and tied him up to a tree. Not a huge bear, a relatively young one, about 300 pounds more than any of us weighs, but not a huge thousand pound bear. And, and Collier had tied him to a tree and Teddy Roosevelt or Theodore Roosevelt was called to the scene. And in a dramatic moment he says, I'm not going to kill this bear because to do so would have violated a pledge he made much earlier as a member of a club called the Boone and Crockett Club, only to kill animals where it was a fair fight. And killing an a bear that was tied up was not fair killing. So he said, no, I'm not going to kill the bear. Well, this he and his part members of his party did actually eat the bear meat that evening. But the story that emerged very quickly was that Roosevelt was heroic and kind because he refused to kill the bear. Initially, for a very brief moment, the story was one of failure. Poor Teddy Roosevelt had not had the opportunity to kill a bear. But there quickly, within days, emerged the story of how wonderful the manly president of the United States refused to kill a bear. Now that's November 1902, the story of how teddy bears, that is the link between Theodore Roosevelt and stuffed animal bears. That story, how it emerged is long and complicated. The usual version, or widely accepted version, involves a Russian Jewish immigrant couple living in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn who had a candy store where on the first floor they sold candy during the day and on the second floor in their private quarters at night, Rose Mitch Tom sewed stuffed animals. And hearing about In November of 1902, the story goes, hearing about the story of Roosevelt refusing to kill the innocent bear she sewed together that night or early that in that period a stuffed animal bear and put it in the window of her store labeled Teddy bear. And that in the wonderful mythology is how teddy and bear became linked. Well, the story is more complicated and we don't know for sure. There is indeed a claim of a letter that the Michitons wrote Roosevelt saying, is it okay with you if we call our bear Teddy bear? And Roosevelt supposedly wrote back, that's fine, but I Don't think it'll sell many bears. Well, those letters have never been found. And indeed the story of the link between Teddy Roosevelt and Teddy bears is more complicated. And it probably took somewhere between 1902, when he had been on that bear hunt, and 1906 or seven, when the linkage between Teddy Roosevelt and Teddy bears emerges, probably through the writings of a Canadian American author named Seymour Eaton, who wrote a series of books of stories first and then books about Teddy be about two bears that he labeled Teddy that are fully anthropomorphized and not the small ones, but rather full standing, 6ft, 7ft standing ones. Anyway, eventually, by 1978, bear mania takes over Ziegfeld Follies in all sorts of tchotchkes like ashtrays and other things that have emerged that then emerged representing or connecting Teddy Roosevelt and Teddy bears. I assume that my memory is faulty. I assume that my parents read to me stories of Teddy bear and that indeed I fell asleep with one or more in my next to me cuddling up to it as I drifted off to sleep. That's true of millions and millions of Americans. Teddy bear as a soft, cuddly animal essential to American childhood is, I don't want to say universal. That's too broad a claim, but is widely, widely true in America and so.
- [26:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Fascinating to understand the better history behind it. Can I ask you to continue the myth busting theme but for a different bear? Is that okay? So let's move on then to Smokey Bear and the links with World War II. Is it over simplistic to say that without World War II we wouldn't have Smokey Bear?
- [26:37]
Professor Dan Horowitz
Probably not. So on the west coast at the outset of World War II, there was great fear that Japanese bombs would destroy forests, Los Pablos forests especially would destroy the trees in the forest force trees that were absolutely essential to the provision of lumber needed to create ships, military ships that would fight the Japanese. Indeed, the Japanese had sent over the American skies as far east as the Midwest, hundreds and hundreds of high levels, I.e. high altitude balloons with bombs in them that they hoped would set off fires in American forests and thus impede the American military effort. Very few of those, many of them were launched, many of them arrived, but almost none of them impeded the building of the war effort. Well, very quickly what happens is as often and true in the United States history, a public private partnership between, in this case an advertising agency and the National Advertising Council and the US Government to launch a program that we now know as only you can prevent A forest fire. Best represented by a picture of Smokey Bear dressed often in overalls, with a shovel in one hand and a cap on his head. Well, Smokey Bear was a real bear. A bear discovered a tiny bear, a baby bear discovered high up in a tree that had almost been burned down by a forest fire in New Mexico. That small bear was rescued by the National Forest Service, sent to a veterinarian's home in Santa Fe, recovered and then flown on a flight that was much advertised to Washington D.C. greeted at the at a Washington area hotel, excuse me, Washington area airport by American officials and moved to the National Zoo. Smokey the Bear resided there for a long time. They tried to mate Smokey with Mrs. Smokey. That didn't work. So they adopted Smokey Jr. Smokey the bear became immensely popular. A zip code of postal zip code dedicated exclusively to him. In years Smokey the Bear received almost as much email as the President of the United States. And when he died and was buried back in New Mexico where he had come from, a Smokey Bear second is placed in the zoo. Smokey that Bear is immensely, immensely popular. The National Agricultural Library has tens of thousands of pieces of ashtrays, of dresses, of advertising material honoring Smokey the Bear. And he became a symbol of the effort to prevent forest fires, but also eventually a controversial symbol in the war in Vietnam. Some anti war pilots and an anti war citizens used Smokey the Bear as only you can prevent napalming of forests in Vietnam or Laos. And in the area south and east of Santa Fe, Latinos and mixed race people protested the use of Smokey the Bear as, as a way in which the Forest Service had displaced or compromised the lives of native residents. So Smokey the Bear is almost universal in Americans experience. We spend, my wife and I spend the winters in Pasadena, California and we walk every year a couple blocks up to see the Rose bowl parade and where I two years ago snapped a picture of Smokey the Bear. There he was on top of a huge float, smiling at everyone as he passed by.
- [32:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Those are some very evocative images indeed. Thank you for telling us about Smokey Bear. And obviously that takes us into the post World War II period. Do we see an increase in stories featuring bears? I mean we've been talking about lots of bears before we get to that point, but is there an uptick in the second half of the 20th century?
- [32:24]
Professor Dan Horowitz
Yeah, I think there are really three moments where commercial culture elevates bears into the stratosphere. If that's the correct. Oh, I suppose we could say, into the heavens where Ursa Major and Ursa Minor live. And those three periods are 1860s, when Grizzly Adams, or 1860, precisely, when Grizzly Adams moves from California to Manhattan and teams up with P.T. barnum, the great entrepreneur of American popular culture, to display bears in a way that commercialized them greatly. The second turning point which we've talked about was Teddy Bear 1902 and soon after. And the third one, of course, is after the Second World War. Disney. The Disney empire is part of a larger empire of commercial culture. The profusion of cable television, for example, meant that there was a need to fill up an almost unending amount of empty space with stories, including those of bears. So Disney, starting with Bambi in the Second World War, which is connected, by the way to smoking the bear, Disney, cable television, all sorts of engines of popular culture after the Second World War amplified, exaggerated, proliferated the importance of Bayers in American society. I should talk for a minute about what happened with Bambi. So the initial advertisements calling on Americans to protect the forest relied upon Bambi. I don't know how many in your audience remember, as I do as a child, the terrifying scene of a forest fire that threatened Bambi's like Bambi, a deer. Disney had lent to the Forest Service the use of Bambi for a brief period. And when Disney tried to renegotiate and extend the contract, Disney asked for too much money. So they had to find a different animal. And that's how Smokey the Bear. Originally it was going to be a squirrel, but people said in the Forest Service, squirrels, they're nuisances. And that's when the Forest Service and the advertising agency of Patron and Building turn to the bear. Yes, the post war period is extraordinary. Building on earlier efforts, but extraordinary in the creation of bears here, there and everywhere through all sorts of media.
- [35:44]
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- [37:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Can we talk about one specific area of bears in post war popular culture that we haven't discussed yet, which is bears in gay culture? Of course, we see gay culture increasing in visibility in the second half of the 20th century. To what extent is the use of bears in gay bear culture sort of taking on similar ideas to what we've been discussing so far in, like, the range of emotions that humans have and projecting that onto bears? Is that what's going on here, or are we looking at something a bit different?
- [37:47]
Professor Dan Horowitz
Well, there is something distinctive, but let me give the background. In the 1980s in San Francisco principally, or the Bay Area generally, there emerged what we now know as gay bear culture. Bear culture among gay men involves normally hefty men, maybe in their 40s and 50s, hefty in the sense of opposition to the image of gay men as thin and bronze surfers, gay men who are hefty and hairy. And it starts fairly small, mimeographed publications, gay men's parties where they act as bears, but eventually becomes a phenomenon probably now involving in the United States, 100,000, maybe 200,000 gay men. And that has spread, of course, around the world. But in the United States, it's a very prevalent expression. Every year in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the northernmost point of Cape Cod, there's a gay men bear festival. Tens of thousands of gay men come. What's unusual about gay bear culture is this. What happens is the human beings impute or project upon bears human characteristics. That is, we see them as funny, as cuddly, as threatening, but in ways that are very human. What happens in gay male culture is very different, which is they impute not in that direction, but in the other direction. That is, they impute bear characteristics to human beings. That is to make them, in various ways make men. Gay men, like bears, virile, hairy, masculine again, has A reaction initially in the 1980s as a reaction to two things. One is the more common image of gay men as thin and blonde and traditionally handsome. But also as a reaction to the Image in the 1980s of emaciated gay men who had been tragically infected by aids. Hiv.
- [40:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. That is distinctive from what we've been talking about so far. So thank you for going towards that section of the book. I think perhaps one of the final things I'd like to ask you about again goes back to a very specific story which bears feature heavily. And of course that's Goldilocks. And I was fascinated to read in the book just how many variations there are of this story that honestly I thought was pretty standard. So can you give us a sense of just how much this story can change and maybe help us understand why there's such a range?
- [41:21]
Professor Dan Horowitz
Well, Goldilocks begins. The story of Goldilocks and the three bears begins not in the United States and well before the 19th century, more in folklore than in written down stories. And Goldilocks initially is not the attractive young woman who comes into the bears home, but rather a crone, an ugly older woman, threatening, who enters the home in a hostile way and eventually is thrown out of the house from the second floor and disappears into the forest. That's the initial story, but of course that's not the story we know. The story we know is of Goldilocks young woman who's disobeyed her mother and walked into the forest and she enters the home of three bears. We know the Mama Bear, Papa Bear and Baby Bear. By the way, the other day I was visiting friends and sitting in a chair known as the Papa Bear chair. A chair designed by a very important furniture maker. It is big and comfortable, just like a chair that Papa Bear may have sat in. Well, we all know the story, I assume we all do, of Goldilocks coming into the house while Mama Bear, Papa Bear and Baby Bear are out and going through a series of things, starting with tasting the porridge of all three, sitting in the chairs of all three and going up to the stairs to the bedrooms and trying out the three beds, ending up falling asleep in the bed of a baby bear. Well, that's the story and the story we all have come to know. But it has been expressed in so many other stories, often didactic in manner, that is, warning children not to go out of the house and into the woods, to be careful about who they let in the house. And there are in, in the last 30 or 40 years a whole series of stories. And one of my favorite is the story of, excuse me, the story of a bears, the story of a bears developing locks and keys in order to prevent Goldilocks from coming into the house. Or there's the wonderful rendition in African American terms about Viola and the honey bears developed by an African American author named Melody. And that tells the story infused with African American culture of redone, about Goldilocks and the three bears. Here the locks are not golden, but dark and African American in style. But again, the story is told in didactic manner, I.e. children's books that are designed to teach children how to behave. Or among my favorites, an early movie, 1934, I think, only nine minutes long, developed by Terry Toons that presented a zany cartoon of Goldilocks and the three bears involving bears dancing along with Goldilocks and firecrackers going off. And then my favorite perhaps are Kermit the Frog, some of your audience will remember, involving funny series on television, involving plays upon words, not where Kermit is trying to get a production right, and it's not Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but Goldilocks and the three shares. And Kermit struggles to get the producer on Sesame street to understand what the variation on the plays on the word bears, chairs, heirs, etc.
- [46:15]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a lot of variation indeed. Please keep going.
- [46:18]
Professor Dan Horowitz
Well, yeah, let me say why. The question is why this story has such a range. Well, in some ways it's not unusual. Many of the stories we've been talking about, Teddy bears, Smokey Bear, have an immense range of expressions that change, change over time in part as those who are interested in media develop alternative expressions in novels, in games, in cartoons and in movies. So that in some ways the variation we see with Goldilocks tales follows a tradition we see elsewhere, where entrepreneurs, writers, producers develop a whole range of expressions. Why? Because I think again, to return to an earlier point, bears are so compelling, they're lovable, they're threatening, they're embracing, they're human. All of those things makes them both attractive and, and amenable to multiple emotional and a genre expanding expressions in many ways.
- [47:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That takes us really right back to where we started our conversation about why bears show up so much in popular culture within Goldilocks, as you've just explained, and beyond too. So that's a nice full circle moment, I think, to end our conversation on the book, leaving me just to ask questions whether there's anything you're currently up to, whether or not it's book related, whether or not it's bears related that you want to give audiences a brief sneak preview of?
- [48:07]
Professor Dan Horowitz
Sure. It's not bear related. It turns out it's retirement related. I'm 87, and my wife and I are about to move in November into a retirement community in Charlottesville, Virginia, near our daughter. And that's one of the factors that got me interested in the history of retirement. How is retirement portrayed in movies? How is retirement ensconced and enhanced by organizations aarp, American association for Retired People included? So In March of 2026, I hope around my 88 birthday, NYU Press will publish a book on retirement. And then having earned so much money by the sales of the book, bear with me, I will finally be able to retire.
- [49:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, best of luck with that project and of course, with the move as well. And listeners who want to learn more about bears can read the book again, titled Bear with Me, A Cultural History of Famous Bears in America, published by Duke University Press in 2025. Dan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [49:26]
Professor Dan Horowitz
My great pleasure. Thank.
- [49:39]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
You.