The Race to Give Every Child a Toy

"If you were an immigrant kid in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, the candy store was the center of your world. You went there to kibbitz and schmooze, to get away from the crush of tenement life and the glare of the beat cop, and, of course, to eat sweets-Tootsie Rolls and Chicken Feeds and as many chocolate pennies as a copper one could buy."

"A few days earlier, newspapers had published reports of a hunting trip that President Theodore Roosevelt took in Mississippi. Roosevelt had wanted to shoot a bear. A tracker caught one for him, bopped it on the head with his rifle, and tied it to a tree. The President was not pleased. Where was the honor in killing a subdued and wounded animal?"

"Michtom was born Moshe Charmatz, in a shtetl in what is now Belarus. To help him dodge conscription by the Russian Army, his family announced that he had died of typhoid and pretended to bury him while he sneaked out of the village to start a new life. He trained as a rabbi and, more practically, as a machinist before coming to the United States, in 1888, at the age of eighteen."

For most of history parents could not buy dolls or action figures, but play became commercialized and profitable. Immigrant children in early twentieth-century New York centered social life on candy stores, which offered sweets and respite from tenement conditions. In 1902 a small stuffed bear appeared in a Brooklyn candy-store window and captured public attention. Morris Michtom, an immigrant machinist who fled conscription in Belarus, created the toy after seeing reports of President Theodore Roosevelt sparing a captured bear. The presidential act and its cartooned depiction inspired the toy’s name and appeal, linking politics, immigrant entrepreneurship, and mass play.

Read at The New Yorker