The Right Stuff

Who among America's daring explorers had the right stuff? So asked Tom Wolfe in his epic book The Right Stuff (1979), adapted to film in 1983 by Philip Kaufman. In Wolfe's story, the national heroes of the Mercury space program were not necessarily the truest and best of America's Cold War daredevils, possessed of the right stuff. The title belonged to the unknown test pilots, like Chuck Yeager, the men with the skill and courage to push themselves beyond all known limits, to "push the outside of the envelope." Yeager missed the Mercury astronauts' fame and fortune not because he lacked any essential heroic qualities, but because John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gordon Cooper, and others better fit the media image of the space-age explorer: young, clean-cut, church-going, college-educated, and articulate, with all rough edges carefully rounded for television consumption. As a billion-dollar government plan to secure technological and military superiority over the Soviet Union, the Mercury program required astronauts with unimpeachable credentials and personalities, men who would make no mistakes. But those men were not necessarily the ones with the right stuff.

Chuck Yeager and John Glenn, it seems, were not the first American explorers caught between the challenge of exploration and the unpredictable expectations of a powerful national media and public audience. Michael F. Robinson's The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture tells the story of eight others: Elisha Kent Kane, Isaac Hayes, Charles Hall, Adolphus Greely, Walter Wellman, Robert Peary, and Frederick Cook. From the 1850s through the beginning of the First World War, these men braved the Arctic in search of the North Pole and other symbolic goals. They returned to find that success, fame, and continued funding depended not on their skill, strength, and leadership, but on the whims of a newspaper-reading, scandal-hungry public primed to judge every failure by changing standards of manhood and, most powerfully, "good character." Three generations of explorers thus found themselves lost in the vast wasteland of the American media machine, struggling to maintain national reputations in the face of cultural change.

Their efforts revealed two broader stories. First, national goals for Arctic exploration shifted away from scientific knowledge and commercial gain toward proof of manly character through symbolic feats. Second, Americans moved away from a cultural belief in the march of progress led by civilized men toward an antimodern embrace of primitivism as the antidote to the enervation of the industrialized age. Explorers in the 1850s and 1860s portrayed themselves as men of science and progress, men of the future. By 1900, Arctic adventurers had recast themselves as exemplars of an ideal frontier past, with little use for modern science and technology and little tolerance for the increasingly professionalized methodologies of field research. After the turn of the century, Americans ventured to the Arctic primarily out of belief that human nature dictated the masculine urge to test and conquer worldly limits. They went north out of instinct, because it was there; they went to test their character and prove themselves to have "the right stuff." This, Anderson writes, has been their "most lasting legacy today: the widespread belief that exploration is . . . deeply rooted within the human psyche" (p. 163).

This monograph is clear, detailed, meticulously researched, and elegantly written. As a cultural historian, Anderson privileges culture above class, politics, or economics as the driving force of this history. The meanings that Americans' constructed and expressed through their fascination with explorers and exploration revealed more about middle-class values than about the journeys themselves. Those meanings emerged, dialectically, from interactions between explorers and their audiences at public lectures, and in newspapers, magazines, and cartoons. Explorers shaped their narratives to meet public expectations. Those expectations in turn shaped not only the practice of science, exploration, and imperial expansion, but also American encounters with new lands and peoples, near and far. The emerging mass media economy proved both a tool with which explorers shaped their...