From Hero to Humbug

What certainly must be considered the most influential book ever published about the Polar Controversy also had its origins in Congressman Macon’s efforts to stop the Peary promotion bill in 1911. General Thomas Hubbard, president of the Peary Arctic Club, got wind of “a mare’s nest” of information, sent to the congressman by a man from Nebraska, that he planned to “spring” just before the bill came up for a vote. When Herbert Bridgman heard of it, he worried, “I’d like to know what this Omaha man has, for it may be that the record will be dangerous.” Hubbard had already sent out inquiries as to just who this Captain Thomas F. Hall was and whether he could be taken seriously.

Thomas Hall

By 1917, when Hall published his book under the title, Has the North Pole Been Discovered?, he had not only more than six years of  his own research behind it, but also had the benefit of reading a series of “extension of remarks” speeches placed in the Appendix to the Congressional Record, that appeared there between 1914-1916. Although their authors were supposedly US representatives from Kentucky, Illinois and North Dakota, they had all been written by Dr. Cook’s personal lobbyist, Ernest C. Rost. Rost had done his work brilliantly, especially the speeches written for Henry Helgesen’s signature. One contained Peary’s devastating, doubt-raising testimony in full, which he had given before Congress concerning his polar journey. The others not only attacked Peary’s polar claim; they systematically assailed his entire career, insinuating that there was plenty of precedent for a false claim to have discovered the North Pole by showing that Peary had made numerous false or dubious claims on all of his previous expeditions as well.

The analysis of Hall’s book, which I published in Cook & Peary, the Polar Controversy, resolved in 1997, needs nothing added to it here: