100 Objects #8: Billy Possum

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0:59up for the successful financial future you're looking for. A design everyone can get behind. PNC Bank. Brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank. National Association. Member FDIC. Our story begins one day in November of 1902. 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 taking him to a small town in Mississippi called Smeeds. And he's gone down to Smeeds to do a hunt, a bear hunt.

1:37That's journalist John Muellen. 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, whacks the bear on the top of the head with the end of his rifle and then ties it to a tree and starts calling the president back over so that he can do the honors.

2:20When 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 pitiable, dazed, kind of semi-conscious, looks pretty mangy, malnourished, 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.

3:07And the bear is there just watching Roosevelt, wondering, you know, 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.

3:37After this cartoon runs, a toy manufacturer turns the bear from that cartoon into a 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.

4:21Maybe 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 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.

4:59There'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.

5:12From 99 % Invisible and BBC Studios, this is a history of the United States in 100 Objects. I'm Roman Mars. We in America, land of 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 the history, and perhaps the future, of our relationship with the natural world.

6:02Before we meet the Billy Possum in 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. Because back in the early 1900s, we did not see bears as cute. 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.

6:43Yeah, and we didn't just treat it as 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 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.

7:19Ladies Home Journal magazine published a story in 1900 about a boy named Balzer 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, Balzer, 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 Balzer and his dad track down the bear's 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 either out of its territory or just extinct.

8:08The grizzly bear was a huge target of these efforts, and it was about to be extirpated from 95 % of its original range in the continental U.S. The eradication of the grizzly bear coincided with a 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 an extremely famous writer at the time named Ernest Thompson Seton, who was leading a movement in fiction, especially stories that were read by a lot of American children, where he was writing stories with protagonists who were bears and other animals, exactly the same kind of species that the government was busy exterminating.

9:01One of his most famous books was called The Biography of a Grizzly. And it centers on a cub 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 threat. So he's, you know, dodging traps and other people with guns. Even the scent of man is said to, you know, be unsettling to him. So now these grizzlies that were once seen as ferocious competitors on the landscape, you know, things to fear, they're now fearing us.

9:40And what Seton's getting at is something that you see across the culture. People are really starting to feel conflicted about all the killing going on. We hated the bear and we feared the bear, but we also suddenly sort of wanted to give the bear a hug.

9:57So 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 kickstarts this whole craze of teddy bears where within a few years, this German company, Steve is said to be exporting a 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.

10:50So this is the point in our story where people know that Theodore Roosevelt is not going to be president that much longer, and they need to figure out what to do next. Taft gets elected. He's sort of Teddy Roosevelt's handpicked successor, and they want a new cuddly plaything to sort of mark his presidency. So let's talk about the Billy Possum story. How did they come to deciding on a possum as the thing that would represent William Howard Taft? Right. So once again, we're in the South, we're in Atlanta. 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.

11:32And they really, they're pulling out all the stops and they serve him this very particular Southern delicacy, you know, really seen as a authentic piece of the South, and it's called possum and taters. What we have is an opossum roasted whole, head on, tail still hanging off it like a meaty 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? 50 teeth. So jammed in its 50 teeth, which is just a phenomenally disgusting number of teeth, is a small sweet potato.

12:22This thing is rolled out at the middle of the banquet. The one they put on Taft's table weighs 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 those 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, as in William Howard Taft's possum.

13:11I 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 LA Times covering this wrote, 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.

13:53so I actually found an advertisement for a toy store in Brooklyn that had a promotion where kids could come in and see a actual opossum 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. And not just the toys themselves, but there's all kinds of other merchandise associated, right?

14:27Merchandising, merchandise. Yeah, there's like attendant Billy Possum merchandise to help make the craze go even wider. There was postcards. There was pictures for cream for coffee time. Taft supporters wore Billy Possum pins at his inauguration. And then as Taft is 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 sort of an icon of the man. And as you mentioned, this moment is brief. What happens to the Billy Possum? Almost nothing happens with the Billy Possum, to answer your question.

15:11But, 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.

15:38so 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 opossums are really ugly it's a really long stretch i think to make one seem uh snuggly 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 humans' evolutionary history, the bear was this icon.

16:22It was fearsome. It was independent from us, and that's what made it so impressive. It was living a parallel life as a menace to us, as a competitor to us, in some ways are superior, more powerful than us. 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 its 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.

17:00There'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 opossum really had none of that resonance.

17:39It was hard to feel anything for the opossum, good or bad. It was lacking of any kind of emotional import. The story with Taft was someone served him a dead opossum and he ate it. And he really loved it, too. You know, he had a few helpings and then he just kept going. and a doctor at his table actually passed him a note saying maybe you should slow down. And the next day, 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.

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22:05That 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.

22:43In 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 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.

23:26But 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 busyness of people's lives and make them care. An emotional trigger, something people could care about, something like an animal. You had environmental attorneys who were just, you know, in the trenches suing the administration. And one of these groups, the Center for Biological Diversity, hit upon this pretty ingenious idea.

24:08And that was to get a species listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered 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. They could put that science in front of the administration. They would essentially force its hand to do what it 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, the activists feel like they have to really find the perfect animal.

24:46So basically, they start a 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. In fact, hundreds and hundreds of species were sitting in a backlog waiting to be looked at by the government.

25:20species that the public had never even heard of. The Neosho mucket mussel and the slab-side pearly mussel, the band-rumped storm petrel, the spotless crake, the relic leopard frog. We've got a whole list of cave beetles, the icebox cave beetle, fowler's cave beetle, fire cave beetle, the tatum 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. Wow. And essentially no one cared about them. These things could just sort of pass into oblivion unnoticed, even though they had been deemed worthy of protection.