Richard Byrd, Technological Explorer: Polar Exploration, the Machine, and Heroic Masculinity in Interwar America

In May 1926, U.S. newspapers were full of the story that Richard Byrd, an American aviator, had become the first person to reach the North Pole by air. The announcement triggered patriotic outpourings across the country and Byrd was widely hailed as a national hero. The young aviator’s flight was part of a burgeoning interwar expeditionary practice that placed machines at the heart of new modes of exploration. This development, however, challenged preexisting notions of masculine heroism and threatened to undercut the explorer’s heroic status. How then, could Byrd become a national hero? This article analyzes his depiction in the press as a means of exploring interwar Americans’ efforts to renegotiate their notions of heroic masculinity in a way that could accommodate the machine without threatening the hero’s status. In the process, it argues, these narratives and images defined a new sort of popular hero: the technological explorer.