Otto English’s In Absurdia

Age-Old Panic

On a Sunday morning in July 1907, Father Michael Esper stood before his congregation at St Joseph’s Church, Michigan, and delivered a sermon that kickstarted one of the weirdest moral panics in history.

The Catholic priest was concerned that a modern innovation was poisoning the minds of America’s youth. Not the telephone or cars, sex, drugs, or ragtime music rolls – but teddy bears. He believed they posed an existential threat to the very soul of the nation’s children.

Since their introduction just five years earlier, these bears had displaced dolls in the affections of little girls. That, at least according to Father Michael, was a bad thing because dolls were wholesome ‘educational toys’ that served a useful societal function. By caring for them, America’s daughters learned how to be mothers and find their place in the great patriarchal order of things. Stuffed bears, by bestial contrast, played no role in nurturing motherly instincts and taught them nothing at all. For children to be cuddling them was nothing short of a perversion, he thought.

“The fad for supplanting the good old dolls of our childhood with the horrible monstrosity known as the teddy bear” would lead to declining birth rates among white families, he warned, and that would result in race suicide (such thinking can be found in today’s ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory).