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Peary was as demanding and iron-willed as the rich businessmen who supported him. He was cozy with the National Geographic Society and the American Museum of Natural History, twin bastions of plutocrat-funded Gilded Age philanthropy, and bankrolled by The Peary Arctic Club, a coterie of mostly Republican New York City millionaires. Navy engineer based in Washington, was popular among the East Coast establishment.

To an uncanny degree, each explorer represented different sides of an ongoing partisan divide. The media loved a controversy back then as much as it does now, but the stark contrasts between Cook and Peary also made it easy for their interpersonal feud to tap into long-simmering national tensions.

Predictably, the press made a meal of the contretemps. Locating it using early 20th century technology was far more challenging than most people realized, and planting a flag to prove you’d been there was pointless, because anything left on the ice would simply float away. Unlike the South Pole, which occupies a fixed point on land-and was indisputably discovered two years later by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen-the North Pole is a notional destination situated atop drifting sea ice. The trouble began with the slippery nature of the goal itself. It also tells us more about Trump-era partisanship than you might expect underlying the debate over sextant readings and sled dogs, scientific credibility and unsporting conduct, lay a hidden landscape of political and cultural divisions that is very much still with us.

It is an early example of America’s ongoing obsession with personality and publicity, and the extent to which these media-fueled distractions obstruct the search for truth. Though largely forgotten today, the Cook-Peary feud is worth revisiting for several reasons.