Posts Tagged ‘Teddy Roosevelt’
“We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.”*
Through the second half of the 20th century, the mall became more than a fixture of American life; it became a hub. And, as Matthew Christopher explains, while malls remain, the bloom has come off of the “rows”…
I’ve visited hundreds of abandoned places in my life—factories to asylums, schools to churches—but suburban malls might be the most surreal and striking. They captivate the imagination in a way few other types of environments can: with an almost imperceptible layer of fog that forms between the first and second floors of an atrium, endless reflections of vacant storefronts, or a chance encounter with a groundhog in the remains of a food court. Stripped of signage and wares, they are nearly perfectly liminal spaces. Malls have become a part of the modern collective unconscious, through both the haze of half-buried memories of any American over the age of 20 and their ubiquity in popular media. They reflect the American consumer’s identity, and to see a suburban mall in ruins warps nostalgia into something nightmarish and forlorn in a way that abandoned factories, hospitals, or even churches don’t quite do.
We are all, to some extent, intimately familiar with the mall experience. Many of us in America had an indoor shopping center that was “our mall” at some point in our lives. Those memories are shared, because even though we weren’t all going to the same mall, we were: franchise stores—Auntie Anne’s, Sbarro, The Gap—share the same layout and inoffensive color palette and logo lettering across the country. To know one of these malls is to know them all. It’s a powerful magic I’m not sure I can fully explain, even after wandering the deserted storefronts of many vacant shopping hubs.
Much has been written on the phenomenon of the collapse of the American mall and the reasons for it. The most obvious—the rise of online retail—is undeniably a significant factor, but it also masks a rot that had been spreading before Amazon gutted brick-and-mortar. It’s hard to think of any comparable social institution that cost so much and covered so much physical space and then imploded so quickly. As always, the story is far more complex than any tidy summary can encompass…
The indoor suburban shopping center is a special kind of abandoned place; read on for more of the story and more photos: “The Life and Death of the American Mall,” @AbandonedAmerica@mastodon.social in @atlasobscura.
* Bill Bryson
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As we fool around in the food court, we might note that today is Teddy Day, a celebration of Teddy Bears…
The Teddy Bear appeared in a shop window in Brooklyn, New York, on February 15, 1903, but the story of the cuddly toy began a few months before that.
It really started when President Theodore Roosevelt took up an invitation to go bear hunting, in Mississippi with the Governor of the state, Andrew Longino, in November 1902. I can tell you two things about President Teddy Roosevelt – 1. He hated being called Teddy, and 2. he was an avid hunter – he had trophies and hunted for both meat and sport. That first day of his hunting trip, he was really disappointed because he and the governor didn’t find any Bears, but the governor DID NOT want to disappoint the President, so he had the hunting guide go out and find a bear, which he did. He found an old bear and tied it to a tree; they brought the president, but he didn’t want to hunt a trapped bear – it was unsportsmanlike.
Whenever any President does anything, it’s kind of newsworthy, and Clifford Berryman, a cartoonist heard the story, made the old bear a cub, and made a cartoon of Teddy freeing a Bear Cub from a tree. The cartoon made the rounds and inspired Morris Michtom and his wife Rose, to make a little toy bear cub, just to decorate the window of their hand-made toy shop. Most toys were handmade still in the early 1900s. A bunch of people offered to buy it, but he didn’t sell it right away. He actually sent it to the President and asked permission to sell what he called The Teddy Bear. Teddy Roosevelt approved, with no strings attached, so the Mitchums started making them, and put them on sale.
The Teddy Bear really represented the start of more than just the first stuffed non-human toy with arms and legs, it changed the whole toy industry. The earliest toys were usually something with wheels, a ball, a human baby doll, or sports-oriented. In 1892, there was a cat toy, basically the outline of a cat with stuffing, called Ithaca Cat (US patent 483727A). It was more like a shaped pillow, they still make reproductions today. That caused a mini-craze for other stuffed pillow toys like bunnies, kittens, puppies, and the Teddy Bear came out at just about the right time.
The stuffed Bear was the biggest toy of the last century. Change a few things, and give the bear a personality, and the toy becomes Winnie The Pooh, or Paddington Bear, Teddy Ruxpin, The Care Bears, or Corduroy. Teddy Bears introduced the whole idea of anthropomorphic toys- animals having human features and personalities.
The Mitchums went on to found the IDEAL Toy Company, which up until Barbie & GI Joe, was the largest Toy Company in the World. IDEAL is also the company that gave us The Rubik’s Cube in the 1980s. If the Miitchums didn’t start by giving us the Teddy Bear, we’d probably still be rolling hoops (hooping) with a stick like people did for most of the past 2000 years…
“The Teddy Bear“
We might further note that a recent incarnation of the Teddy was an avatar of late Mall culture: Build-a-Bear Workshop… which, from its founding in 1997) grew to over 500 (largely mall-based) locations around the U.S… but that has now moved aggressively on-line.
“Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up”*…
A supposed “crisis in masculinity” is much in the public discourse these days. But as Jules Evans points out, we’ve been here before…
Last month Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson released a TV series called The End of Men, warning that American men were becoming effete, flabby and sterile. Civilization is descending into chaos, the series suggests, but that’s OK, because ‘hard times produce strong men’. It also featured a man tanning his testicles to the tune of Thus Spake Zarathustra (you can watch the trailer here).
With that Nietzschean image in mind, now seems like a good time to tell the story of President Theodore Roosevelt and his cult of manliness. Teddy Roosevelt preached a life-philosophy of vigour, and embodied this in his own romantic life. His words and deeds made him an icon to the online ‘manosphere’. Indeed, the popular website ‘Art of Manliness’ sells inspirational posters of him, and calls him ‘the patron saint of manliness’.
And yet there is a darker side to his life-philosophy. It included Social Darwinian attitudes that might makes right, only the strong deserve to survive, there are fitter and less fit races, and the white race has a right to conquer other races, while itself needing to be strengthened through eugenics. It’s a story that helps us explore some of the ways that wellness, men’s fitness, the human potential movement and ecological conservation can lead to ‘spiritual eugenics’…
The history– and the dark downside– of the “cult of masculinity,” “Teddy Roosevelt and the End of Men,” from @JulesEvans11.
C.f. also: Benito Mussolini and Vladimir Putin.
* Ronald Wright
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As we parse power, we might recall that it was on this date in 1997 that software running on Deep Blue (an IBM supercomputer) became the first computer program to defeat a world champion in a match under tournament regulations.
The year before, Garry Kasparov had defeated Deep Blue (4-2). In the rematch, Kasparov won the first game but lost the second. The the next three games were draws. And the sixth game lasted only a little over an hour after just 19 moves.
Hardcore History…
Your correspondent and his daughter were recently in Our Nation’s Capital, and visited that collection of museums arrayed around The Mall. We were amazed to have the exhibits more or less to ourselves.
So it was a delight to discover the work of artist Jenny Burrows and copywriter Matt Kappler, who created a wonderful set of fake ads for that famous institution. E.g.,
The originals of the ads above and below, and of the rest of the set, featured the name and logo of “America’s Treasure Chest”; but as our friends at Design Milk report, “unfortunately, that major museum was not a fan. Jenny had to change the text at the bottom to read “Museums” and change the logo. You can read all about that here.”
See the rest of the Jenny’s and Matt’s portfolio at “Historically Hardcore.”
As we wish that our tax dollars could stretch to cover a sense of humor, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that Booker T. Washington became the first African-American to be depicted on a U.S. postage stamp. (The first U.S. coin to feature an African-American was the Booker T. Washington Memorial Half Dollar, minted from 1946 to 1951; he was also depicted on a [“regular”] U.S. Half Dollar from 1951–1954.)
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