100 Objects #8: Billy Possum

Just a few months prior, President Theodore Roosevelt had become the first president to make

a public appearance in a car. And now, he was off on a new adventure.

“This one taken him to a small town in Mississippi called Smeeds.”

And he's gone down to Smeeds to do a hunt, a bear hunt. That's journalist John Welm, and he's there for a few days without seeing a single bear. And then his hunting party happens to spot one, and it runs into a kind of a weedy thicket. It's a good move.

The hunters can't really get to the bear.

But Roosevelt's guide says, hang on. You just stay right here, and I'll flush it out, and you can kill it. Roosevelt gets a little bored, though, and he goes back to have lunch.

“So when the hunting guide finally flushes the bear out, Roosevelt is nowhere to be seen.”

So his guide, jumps off his horse, waxed the bear on the top of the head with the end of his rifle, and then ties it to a tree, and then starts calling the president backovers so that he can do the honors. When the president arrives and sees the bear, let's just say he was far from impressed. He takes a look at this thing, and it just looks pitiful, dazed, kind of semi-conscious,

looks pretty mangy, mal-marish, and about half of its normal weight. And so he takes pity on it, and he says, you know, it's against my code as a sportsman to shoot this pathetic thing, and he refuses. This moment in which he refuses to shoot the bear, it's memorialized a few days later

“in a cartoon in a newspaper in Washington, D.C.”

The cartoon is captioned, drawing the line in Mississippi. And when you look at this cartoon, you see the president there with his arm out, kind of sparing the bear's life, and he's holding his rifle, and the bear is there just watching Roosevelt wondering what's going to happen to it, he's got its fate in his hands. This bear looks really vulnerable and cute, its eyes are huge, it's got a big round head,

and it wouldn't necessarily be familiar to you at the time in 1902, but now we understand what this thing is right away, it's a teddy bear. After this cartoon runs, a toy manufacturer turns the bear from that cartoon into his stuffed animal and starts selling Teddy's bear all over the United States, and it becomes a huge hit.

Teddy's bear for Theodore Roosevelt, an object that would become so ubiquitous, it would take on a life of its own outside of its namesake president. In fact, I bet you or your kid have one somewhere in your house right now, but before we get ahead of ourselves, the teddy bear is not our object for this episode. Now our object comes out of what happens next, because what is funny about this story is

that the lesson that the toy manufacturers take from this is that maybe this model can be repeated, maybe every president from here on out will have a viral stuffed animal named after them. Yeah, so they're thinking, well, Roosevelt's going to leave office in 1909, we need the next president's version of the teddy bear. Now the next president was William Howard Taft, not nearly as charismatic of a fellow as Teddy Roosevelt, but, you know, the profit motive is strong. We've got to find something to to be a mascot for his presidency. And they land on something a little suspect in retrospect. It's not a bear, it's a possum. And they market it as the Billy

Possum. There's a reason why you have not heard of the Billy Possum, and there's a reason why there's no Billy Possum next to your sleeping child in the other room. From 99% invisible and BBC studios, this is a history of the United States in a hundred objects. I'm Roman Mars.

We in America, land with the bald eagle, have always turned animals into symbols. They represent what we're afraid of, what we love, what we think deserves to survive.

Those stories are some of the most powerful tools we have for protecting the natural world. Today, the story of the Billy Possum, and how our fickle feelings about animals have shaped history and perhaps the future of our relationship with the natural world. Before we meet the Billy Possum and full, let's go back to the moment his infinitely more successful cousin, the Teddy bear, was first introduced. When that cartoon showing Roosevelt refusing to shoot the cute little bear was published, it was not how people were used to seeing bears, or how most people thought about them.

You know, bears were monsters. Bears were a shorthand for everything that was dangerous and unruly about nature, about the western frontier.

“This was part of a outlook in the United States that anything big and wild was basically a threat to us and a threat to our ability to take over the landscape.”

And we didn't just treat us a threat, like this was an active response to the federal government that we were going to eradicate bears so that people could live in the West. Yes, we were absolutely at war with bears. There was a department of the federal government called the Bureau for Biological Survey. One of its primary jobs was just shooting and trapping and killing animals. We had sorted nature into sort of the desirable and undesirable ones, and we were letting the all the undesirable ones really have it.

Coyotes, wolves, mountain lions. It's also a cultural outlook. You see this reflected in a lot of fiction of the time, especially fiction for kids. Ladies, home journal magazine published a story in 1900 about a boy named Bowser who was described as quote the happiest boy in Indiana. Because he owned a rifle and enough ammunition to kill every creature within five miles. And in this story, Bowser, he kills a bear, but he gets bitten by the bear in the process.

And so it all culminates in this kind of feel good ending when Bowser and his dad track down the bears' mate and then shoot her in revenge. And how successful were we at this time period of taking out the bears? Very successful.

“If you want to call that success, yeah, this is an era in which a lot of what we call, you know,”

megafauna of the United States is being driven, you know, either out of its territory or just extinct. The Grizzly Bear was a huge target of these efforts, and it was about to be extrapaded from 95% of its original range in the continental U.S. The eradication of the Grizzly Bear coincided with the big shift in America.

For the first time in our history, a majority of Americans were living in cities far from nature, far from the threat of bears.

And so, as more and more bears disappeared from the landscape, they started showing up differently in our imaginations and in the pages of children's books. There was extremely famous writer at the time named Ernest Thompson Seaton, who was leading a movement in fiction, especially stories that were read by a lot of American children, where he was writing stories with protagonist who were bears and other animals, exactly the same kind of species that the government was busy exterminating. One of his most famous books was called The Biography of a Grizzly.

And it centers on a cub, a named Wob, who at the beginning of the book has to watch his mother and his siblings be shot dead by a rancher. And the rest of the book is just this poor cub wandering through a wilderness where every threat to him is not a wild threat, but a man made threats. So he's dodging traps and other people with guns, even the scent of man is said to be unsettling to him. So now these Grizzlies that were once seen as ferocious competitors on the landscape, things to fear, they're now fearing us.

And what scenes getting out is something that you see across the culture. People are really starting to feel conflicted about all the killing going on, and we hated the bear, and we feared the bear, but we also suddenly sort of wanted to give the bear a hug. So this is the ideological war that is going on as the teddy bear arrives at our shores.

“What happens after that political cartoon and the teddy bear takes off the way it does? What happens when the teddy bear hits the market?”

It kick starts this whole craze of teddy bears, where within a few years this German company's thief is said to be exporting million bears a year.

Suddenly, it's to the extent that there are newspaper editorials worrying about children playing with bears instead of dolls. They're displacing human dolls, and what could this mean? You can buy clothing for your bear, you can buy winter coats for your bear, which is astonishing. Because I sort of think of this as the moment that the evolutionary trajectory of teddy bears and regular bear splits that your teddy bear now won't be warm unless it has a winter coat. So this is the point in our story where people know that Theodore Roosevelt is not going to be present at that much longer, and they need to figure out what to do next.

Taf gets elected, he sort of Teddy Roosevelt's hand-picked successor, and they want a new cuddly play thing to sort of mark his presidency. So let's talk about the boy posthum story. How did they come to deciding on a possum as the thing that would represent William Howard Taft?

So Taft is going to be inaugurated, he's doing a tour of the south, and he's the guest of honor at a banquet in Atlanta for the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.

And they're pulling out all the stops, and they serve him this very particular southern delicacy, you know, really seen as an authentic piece of the south, and it's called possum and taters. So what we have is an opossum roasted hole head on, tail still hanging off it, like a meeting noodle, and it's on a platter surrounded by sweet potatoes, and in many cases it would be served with a small sweet potato crammed into the opossum's mouth.

“And how many teeth does an opossum have Roman? Do you remember? I have no 50 teeth. So jammed in its 50 teeth, which is just a phenomenally disgusting number of teeth is a small sweet potato.”

This thing is rolled out at the middle of the banquet, the one they put on Taft's table was 18 pounds. He eats it. After he's done, the band starts playing, and a group of Taft supporters makes a big ceremony of giving him a surprise gift, and it's a small stuffed opossum toy.

Very realistic with this kind of creepy beady eyes, the naked ears, the tail, they hand this thing over with great pomp.

This is the icon of his presidency. This is it. This is the Billy possum. Billy possum has an William Howard Taft possum. I mean, they had this whole manufacturing apparatus and marketing machine ready for this moment to make this work. Yeah, this is the launch. This is the activation. This is the Billy possum activation, but all the groundwork has been laid. I read news reports about how within 24 hours this company called the Georgia Billy possum company, which was already set up and ready to go.

Within 24 hours of the banquet, they're already brokering deals to distribute the toys all over the country. The L.A. Times covering this book, the teddy bear has been relegated to a seat in the rear, and for four years, possibly eight, the children of the United States will play with Billy possums. So I actually found an advertisement for a toy store in Brooklyn that had a promotion where kids could come in and see a actual possum in a cage, so that they would just get more familiar with this thing that was going to be their cuddly pal for the next four years, possibly eight.

And the ad read, "Do not let it be said that any man, woman or child in Brooklyn, has not seen the cute little animal whose name is mentioned more in all parts of the world today than any other." So yeah, very bullish on Billy possums. There's the toys themselves, but there's all kinds of other merchandise associated, right? Merchandising Merchandising Merchandising Merchandising Merchandising Merchandising. Yeah, there's like a tendon Billy possum merchandise to help make the craze go even wider. There was postcards, there was pictures for cream for coffee time.

The supporters were Billy possum pins at his inauguration, and then as tapped his touring around the country, people are actually meeting him at railroad stations and appearances and handing over actual possums like bouquets of flowers.

There's a moment, a brief moment when it's serving icon of the man.

And as you mentioned, this moment is brief. What happens to the Billy possum? Almost nothing happens to the Billy possum. To answer your question. You know, from what I could tell, it's really just only a matter of months before there's no mention of it anywhere.

“Everyone stops caring about it, sales, tank, and remember that this all started in January of 1909, so that means the Billy possum didn't even make it to Christmas.”

It didn't even get to see a Christmas season, which is sort of a special tragedy for a toy. So I mean, there might be some obvious answers to this, but there I think there might be some non-obvious answers as to why the teddy bears took off and the Billy possums didn't. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, well, the obvious answer is that, you know, possums are really ugly.

“It's a really long stretch, I think, to make one seem snugly and adorable or like something you want to take care of.”

I just don't think there's any getting around that fact. More interestingly though, I also think that the possum lacked a story that had any resonance with Americans, even just subconsciously. I mean, when you think about it for all of human's evolutionary history, the bear was this icon, you know, it was fearsome.

And now, at the time of the teddy bear, we've beaten that creature back to such a degree that it is at our mercy, that it's survival is going to be dependent on us.

And I think that stirs up some really complicated emotions, you know, both worries about the future of nature, but also worries about our place in it. This new place where we really have a kind of brutal dominion over everything. I think that's really unsettling for a lot of people. There's this oscillation that happens between demonizing an animal and then eradicating it and then suddenly empathizing with that animal as a kind of helpless underdog and rewriting its reputation in our minds as something innocent and sweet that needs our help.

This, you could say, is John's teddy bear versus Billy Possum Theory, that the reason we love the bear is because of this compelling complex relationship we have with it. We feared the bear, we vilified the bear, we killed the bear, and then we felt so bad about killing the bear that now we wanted to save it. Whereas the Possum really had none of that resonance. It was hard to feel anything for the Apossum, good or bad. It was lacking of any kind of emotional import to story with Taft was someone serving him a dead Apossum, and he really loved it too.

“You know, he had a few helpings and then he just kept going in a doctor at his table actually passed him a note saying maybe you should slow down.”

And the next day he was Taft was bragging to reporters about it. He said, "Well, I like Possum. I ate very heartily of it last night, and it did not disturb in the slightest my digestion or my sleep." Yeah, he just obliterated it. So we laid out this pattern of oscillation between exterminating animals and then empathizing with them. That pattern repeats throughout the 20th century, and during that time, animals start to become useful symbols for fights about the environment. Take the bald eagle. It was nearly wiped out from overhunting and the use of the pesticide DDT, and then people clocked that it was going extinct and turned it into the face of a big campaign against DDT.

A big successful campaign.

“The same thing happened with the spotted owl and the logging industry.”

But all those environmental fights were nothing compared to the existential threat that the planet was facing in the early 2000s. You know, it's interesting. In 2005, I remember being in graduate school at Berkeley and watching with a class, the aftermath of Katrina, American Katrina,

and seeing New Orleans flooded and realizing for the first time that there was a sort of general understanding that like, "Oh, you know, this is, this has to do with climate change."

As the evidence for climate change started to stack up, climate activists and attorneys were trying to get the government to do something about it. And so what happens in the early 2000s is you have a group of environmental attorneys who have been struggling for years to try to get the George W. Bush administration to act on climate change or even just to acknowledge the science around greenhouse gases.

“But so far, all of their attempts had largely failed. What could they do to make the issue urgent enough to get the public outraged and the government to act?”

They needed some kind of emotional trigger, something that was going to not just make climate change feel real and urgent in an intellectual way, but that would cut through the kind of business of people's lives and make them care. An emotional trigger, something people could care about, something like an animal. You had the environmental attorneys who were just, you know, in the trenches suing the administration, and one of these groups of Center for Biological Diversity hit upon this pretty ingenious idea,

and that was to get a species listed as endangered under the U.S. and Daniel Species Act, specifically because of the threat of climate change to its survival. Here's why the plan is ingenious, because by law, if a species is listed as endangered, then the government is legally bound to look at what is threatening its survival. And they could put that science in front of the administration, they would essentially force its hand to do what they had not wanted to do in other contexts, which was to affirm the validity of climate change.

No more dodging or dismissing. But to make this work, they actually feel like they have to really find the perfect animal.

So basically, they started casting process.

And a good candidate on that front is going to be two things. It's going to have a lot of solid science backing it up to say that, yes, this thing will go extinct because of climate change. And it's going to be something that ordinary people care about, because if there isn't the public interest, no matter how good the science is, the administration did have ways of kind of shunting that animal off into a kind of bureaucratic abyss and not having to deal with it.

The Nio Show Mucket muscle and the slab side pearly muscle, the band rumped storm petrol, the spotless creek, the relic leopard frog.

We've got a whole list of cave beetles, icebox cave beetle, valors cave beetle, fire cave beetle, a datum cave beetle. And at the time, in 2013 when I was looking into this, at least 24 different species had actually gone extinct while they were waiting around on the candidate list. And essentially no one cared about them. These things could just sort of pass into a living unnoticed, even though they had been deemed worthy of protection.

“And that's what the Center for Biological Diversity was trying to avoid.”

That's why they needed the public behind them so that whatever they petitioned the government for wouldn't just slip away silently.

So they needed a good candidate, but they also needed one who survival was really linked to climate change. And this was harder than you might think, because remember, this is the early 2000s and we're just starting to get a grasp on climate change. And there are very few actual studies that have been done about its impact on specific species. So they went looking for species and a lot of the candidates they came up with were way more billy-possum than teddy bear. The first animal that the Center for Biological Diversity looked at was called the Glacier Bay Wolf Spider.

Okay, so it's a spider, it's disgusting. Second of all, it turns out there was someone certain about whether it was even its own species. So that one gets tossed up. Next they have this kind of small speckled seabird in Alaska called the Kitletz's Muralet, which is, you know, I guess it could be so this cute, but you know, you were working an uphill battle there. You had to first introduce people to it. It's hard to say there was exactly one expert in the bird as far as I could tell. So these two species, even if you could make a strong scientific case, they're missing that wild factor. It wasn't going to inspire the public interest and the public concern that was going to make this petition go forward.

“So a spider wasn't going to do, a muralet wasn't going to do, no cave feels going to get the public upset. Where did they end up landing as they're sort of animal that was going to help combat climate change?”

Oh, the bear. Right there in front of you the whole time. They got the polar bear. They got the, I mean, fortunately in 2004, I believe it was luckily enough, you had a really definitive first paper by a researcher named Andrew Durosher, linking climate change to the near future extinction of polar bears. The polar bear survived on sea ice for most of the year. That's where they live and they hunt seals out on the sea ice. And as the sea ice broke up earlier and earlier in certain parts of the Arctic or subarctic were just disappeared entirely from other places, you know, the entire platform where they walk around making their living was just going to be gone.

Like if you're trying to decide if you are a Billy possum or if you're a teddy bear, let's run the polar bear through the teddy bear test. Okay, so like what are the things that it checks that make it appropriate to be the type of thing that we would rally around and love and want to make dolls of and hold. I think it's operating on two levels, you know, the surface level cute, brown face, you know, you can imagine it as a plush toy. It's no glacier bay wolf spider. And then on a deeper level, you have identical forces that were operating with the teddy bear story where you have a creature that was, you know, regarded as this really powerful independent Lord of the Arctic.

“And now it's being shown in a completely new light as helpless, as dependent on us for help, as living in this world that is literally trickling out from underneath it because of things that we've done.”

Yeah, we have killed the whole bear off and now we need to save the polar bear. Yeah, I mean, you know, I would read accounts of polar bears from back in history and you would see, you know, a few hundred years ago, like Arctic explorers, and they'd be writing about this thing like it was a demon, you know, stories about it's like a polar bear. I don't know if this is true, but it says something just that these stories would be recited, you know, a polar bear jumps into a guy's boat and tries to eat them all even when he lights the bear on fire.

And you've gone from that into something on the cover of time where it's this, you know, sad, thin polar bear walking on a strip of ice surrounded by water with the headline, "Be worried, be very worried." The polar bear had the science and it had the potential to capture the public and if the climate activists won their petition, it would be a landmark case.

The first species to be protected explicitly because of climate change. And right away, the public seemed to respond.

It really got a kind of coverage that you had not seen endangered species and climate change getting in a while. One TV broadcast called a shining white symbol of the green movement. And one of my favorites from this time is the Vanity Fair cover. Yeah, so at this time there was a famous polar bear cub at a German zoo named Nuit. He was a durable flashy charismatic creature and he was paired with another flashy charismatic creature Leonardo DiCaprio and photographed by Annie Lieblitz for Vanity Fair.

But the public didn't just care about Leonardo DiCaprio. They cared about the petition that was now on the Bush administration's desk.

This set of record at the time for the most public comments ever sent to the government for endangered species petition. They got a half a million letters and postcards and messages.

A lot of them were from kids. You had drawings of like a polar bear. I found one of a polar bear that's drowning and then it's also being eaten simultaneously by a lobster and a shark.

“I had letters saying this fourth grader in Oakland wrote, "I really think it is not fair to the polar bears. Also they could drown and die off and what if they were you?"”

I liked another one from a kid named Fritz, who he's actually proposes a solution to climate change. She's like allian on an ethanol based solution. He says, "I feel bad about the polar bears. I like polar bears. Everyone can use corn juice for cars from Fritz." Good point, Fritz. Yeah, Fritz is ahead of his time. You know, it's like I grew up in the 80s. To the extent that I thought about polar bears, I did not think about polar bears. The way Fritz does, you know, the one who wrote about the polar bears drowning.

It's just a completely different creature at that point. The plan was working and the hope was that if this many people cared about the polar bear, politicians would have to care too. One of the attorneys for the Center for Biological Diversity, she was talking about the cultural power of the polar bear and said something like, "You know, no politician wants to tell their constituency. Yes, I voted to kill the polar bear." And how did the politicians respond to all this public pressure?

“They were really actually able to wiggle out of it. So the Bush administration, they were able to find another kind of procedural loophole.”

Basically, they were able to list the polar bear as a threat in the species rather than endangered species, and then they could apply something called a 4D exception to it.

And basically, that was just a legalistic way of saying that these arms of the federal government that responsible for endangered species just didn't have the power or the ability to regulate greenhouse gases. And so we can't really, we can't really welcome the polar bear in the ranks of creatures that we're going to save right now. Meaning, sure, the polar bear's existence might be threatened by climate change, but the endangered species act to can't force the government to do what it would take to save the polar bear.

Which would be regulating greenhouse gases? The Secretary of the Interior at the time, Derek Kempthor and that's who oversees the indigenous species program said in a press conference that he wasn't going to let a law about animals be, quote, abused to make global warming policies. So this set off like a slew of other lawsuits and arguing about even the difference between endangered and threatened and back and forth and back and forth for three years between the Center for Biological Diversity and the Bush administration and then the Obama administration.

Until, essentially, despite the public outcry, despite the public sympathy for the polar bear, the entire issue just kind of got lost in this rabbit worn of lawsuits and counter lawsuits and semantic rebutting.

It is striking to me that, you know, we have this really powerful symbol of climate change.

Like the perfect teddy bear candidate, you know, forgetting Americans to care about the relationship with nature, declare about climate change in particular. And it still gets out maneuver. It fails. I mean, do you think that the polar bear was not for the task here or were we asking the polar bear to do too much?

“I think it's important to go back to the original intent of that endangered species petition.”

You know, the original intent wasn't necessarily to birth a mascot for the climate change movement that would lead the federal government and some of the most entrenched and powerful corporate interests to suddenly change their way of doing business. The intent was simply to find a kind of legal backdoor with that first endangered species petition. You know, it wasn't part of the plan to have it on the cover of vanity fair, right, with Leonardo DiCaprio. But it was like the bear was just so damn charismatic that everyone just kind of lost their minds about it.

People carried on with their sort of exploitation of the West and hunting, you know, maybe it wasn't done with quite such complete eradication agenda, but like the teddy bear didn't ask much of us.

That cartoon of Roosevelt in 1902, it takes 71 years from that moment to get the endangered species act, which actually proposes a way to help that animal. So, you know, I'd like action on climate change to have a lot faster, but I do think it's we're letting a lot of power for people off the hook if we start to wonder, you know, what was wrong with the polar bear.

“I mean, dealing with climate change, I mean, we see it much more clearly now than I think we did in the early 2000s, right, there was this feeling back then that, you know, if we just got people to accept it and care, we would just solve this thing.”

And I think that that's proven to be pretty naive. It's not just the environmental issue, it's, you know, housing issue, it's a migration issue, it's an economic issue, it's a social justice issue.

It's hard to just undo that just because enough people want to.

So, I think it's naive to think that the polar bear could have, you know, solved climate change. And therefore, I think it's naive to say that it was a failure because it didn't. One thing you can say for sure is that the polar bear got a lot of people that care about climate change who didn't before. It successfully became a symbol for an entire movement, but the problem with making any animal a symbol is that you can lose control of it.

“Climate change deniers started focusing on the polar bear too, using it to debunk the claims that it was in danger.”

Because there was a sense that if you could prove that polar bears were going to be okay, you were also just proving climate change. I talked to one researcher who was researching snow geese and he made an argument in the scientific paper that, you know, there's one population of polar bears. If there was no ice for them to live on for a longer and longer periods of time of the year, they could probably subsist by eating snow goose eggs. And, you know, this poor guy suddenly was embraced by climate deniers, which he wasn't.

And other polar bear scientists were upset with him, not as far as I could tell because his science was bad, but because he was sort of giving ammunition to the other side. So at the symbol, in some sense, you know, became the issue. And we kind of lost sight of what it was all about.

“It's very dangerous, I think, when we start to mistake symbols for the whole reality.”

In a way, they're like these psychic pack animals. You know, we just heap a lot of our feelings onto their backs.

And whatever we say about them, they just always have no comment.

Do you think there's any hope for the possum to be something that we love, the way that they wanted us to love it, back in the play possum days? It's not too late, I guess, you know, maybe as we, as, you know, more and more creatures disappear, there will be a time in the future when people will think nostalgicly about all the possums that rated their trash cans. And, you know, think of them as just, well, they were just trying to get by and now we owe it to them. And that's our show, our expert of all things Billy Possum and the polar bear was journalist John Moelle.

He's the author of many books, including Wild ones, but sometimes this main, weirdly reassuring story about looking at people looking at animals in America. A history of the United States in a hundred objects is a production of 99% invisible and BBC studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Brenna Daldorf. Our other producers are Priscilla, Alibi, and Ellie Lightfoot.

Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell, mixing by Charlie Brandon Kang, fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. From 99% invisible, our executive producer is Kathy, too. From BBC studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Palet.

And the production manager is a Mabel Phenagon Wright, artwork by Stefan Lawrence. 99% invisible is part of the serious XM podcast family, headquartered in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California.

If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at 100 objects at 99PI.org. [Music]