Cook's wire that he had reached the Pole was sent on 1 September 1909: Peary's announcement followed five days later. The great controversy that began then is still simmering today.

Cook disappeared from public view after a bitter media campaign that did little for the reputation of either antagonist and even less for historical geography. Until he died in 1940, still maintaining his achievements, Cook was championed more in Europe than in North America. Since 1960, a revival of literature on the question has favored Cook. Such arctic experts as Jean Malaurie , Silvio Zavatti, and A. F. Treshekenov have elevated Cook's claims to "probable and possible" attainment. Many of the international presenters at a symposium on Cook at the Byrd Polar Research Centre in 1993 agreed that he was a serious claimant.

Frederick A. Cook's unquestioned prior physical description of conditions at the Pole and his apparent descriptions of then-unknown ice islands weigh in his favor, and his non-discovery of Meighen Island (Stefansson found this "impossible to explain") gives credence to his reporting a westward drift of the polar ice. A troubled later life (imprisonment for promoting Texas oil lands which subsequently produced the largest pool of oil in the United States) did not contribute to any public vindication for the explorer, termed "the American Dreyfus of the North." Ultimate rehabilitation may yet come as the claims of the once-discredited Cook are given a more dispassionate examination.

Next, the only witness to Cook’s McKinley climb, Edward Barrill, swore out an affidavit saying that the doctor’s claimed 1906 ascent of McKinley was merely a hoax arranged by Cook with his complicity.  The New York Globe, a paper controlled by one of Peary’s major backers, broke the news.   The next day it printed Barrill’s entire Alaskan diary, the crucial parts of which Barrill said had been dictated to him by Cook. Cook maintained that Barrill had been induced to make his statement through a large sum of money provided by Peary’s backers.  In this he was right.  Barrill and four others had been paid a total of $5,000 for affidavits against Cook, though this was denied at the time.

Hampton hoped by this to recoup his immense losses resulting from his publication of the serialized version of “Peary’s Own Story” that had placed him on the brink of bankruptcy.  
    Hampton hoped to get Cook to tell the inside story of his faked claim to the North Pole, but when Cook still insisted he had been reasonably close to his goal, Hampton took advantage of the terms of Cook’s contract, which stipulated “no editorial guarantees, whatsoever,” and had statements inserted into the first article that implied that Cook’s polar claim was the result of temporary insanity brought on by the incredible hardships he had suffered in the Arctic. Hampton’s Magazine billed the article “Dr. Cook’s Confession,”   but the balance of Cook’s series, in which Cook more or less reasserted his claim, was left untouched.  This inconsistency was taken for insincerity and brought hoots of derision from the press and worse than indifference from the public, thus insuring another costly publishing fiasco for Hampton’s, which drove it into receivership within two years.
    Cook renounced his Hampton's articles as fabrications: “I had made no confession,” he insisted.  “I had made the admission that I was uncertain as to having reached the exact mathematical pole.”

In late December, when the University of Copenhagen’s committee examined Cook's polar “proofs,” it found no trace of the allegedly forged Dunkle-Loose observations among them.  But it also could not find in them “any proof whatsoever of Dr. Cook having reached the Northpole.”   It then withheld placing Cook’s name on the official recipient list of the Gold Medal of the Royal Danish Geographical Society, although it had already presented him the actual medal in September.  
    The negative verdict of the judges Cook had chosen for himself instantaneously branded him in the press as “the American Munchausen,” and “a monster of duplicity.”  This, coupled with the fact that Dr. Cook had apparently fled the country, which was taken as an admission of guilt, convinced many that their recent hero was nothing more than a contemptible cheat.  The editorial cartoonists had a field day at Cook’s expense.    At the same time it allowed Peary to step forward unopposed and claim the prize he had sought for so long: the everlasting fame that belonged to the Discoverer of the North Pole.

Shortly after his return, Cook launched a shrewd campaign designed to reestablish his claim and throw the blame for his discredit on a moneyed conspiracy by what he called “The Arctic Trust” that backed Peary.  To this end he went to Chicago and cast himself in the lead of a self-financed melodramatic film intended to dramatize Peary’s maltreatment of him.    He appeared with it on the vaudeville stage and made shocking allegations implying that Peary had sired children with an Eskimo mistress while on his expeditions. 

For six years, Cook made his living as an attraction on the Chautauqua, lyceum, and vaudeville circuits with illustrated talks on his polar attainment and his subsequent persecution at the hands of Peary’s Arctic Trust.  His modest, open manner of speaking made him a popular success and won the sympathy of many people, particularly in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest.

.  This was the result of a brilliant counter-stroke by Peary’s lobbyist in the form of a broadside casting doubt on Cook’s methods and warning Congressmen that they were risking ridicule if they backed Cook’s “cheap vaudeville act.”

onetheless, Cook always maintained that the proof of his claim lay in the narrative content of My Attainment of the Pole.  In 1917, an early analyst, Thomas Hall, found Cook's narrative consistent and pronounced it "unimpeachable."   But much of it has since been impeached by the knowledge of the central Arctic Ocean basin accumulated since Cook wrote his book, and by some of the inconsistencies pointed out in the Helgesen-Rost analysis that have been shown to be very significant with the opening of Cook’s papers in 1990.  For instance, Rost’s theory that Cook set back his departure date one week from the date he actually started toward the Pole (probably to improve the plausibility of his narrative’s timetable) is strongly supported by the content of his original notebooks.
    But unlike Peary's, most of the defenses of Cook's claim do center on his polar narrative. Its defenders contend that it describes physical features that only a person who had actually made the journey could have known about, since no one had ever been there before. Therefore, they argue that Cook had observed these things first hand and must have at least reached the near vicinity of the Pole.

As for conditions at the Pole itself, though not definitely known in 1908, there was general agreement after the discoveries of Nansen aboard the drifting Fram in the mid-1890s that there was no land in the immediate vicinity of the Pole. Dr. Cook held this view himself. "The north pole is in the center of an imprisoned sea of ice," he wrote in 1904.  In fact, nearly every observation contained in his narrative is firmly grounded in the scientific theory of his time, whether correct or incorrect. 

Cook also places the temperature at the Pole ten degrees higher than south of it, in line with a long-held but incorrect contemporary scientific theory that the temperature would rise as the Pole was approached because of the constancy of sunlight.

As early as 1914, the Scottish Geographical Magazine summed up all the observations of Cook's polar narrative and found in them nothing startlingly original:  “With a knowledge of Peary's Crocker Land, found in 1906, Peary's land ice near 86 degrees N., found the same year, and the experience in polar travel, which Dr. Cook certainly had, both in the Arctic and Antarctic, we submit that an imaginative man, taking into account probabilities, had an easy task in writing the story, and surely any man of even average education could write of the pole as ‘an endless field of purple snows. No life. No land.’
    The more plausible hypothesis is that Cook never traveled as far north as the alleged Crocker Land, but turned back at or about the Big Lead and unwilling to admit defeat in the project which he asserts was his life's ambition, proceeded to write his story from the data previously outlined by Peary.”

he original photo, recovered from the Library of Congress, strongly indicates that it has been intentionally overexposed in developing.  This is shown by the light appearance of the pure black frame line.  There is also evidence of selective dodging and burning to bring out some details, such as the igloo, and to obscure others.

The Truth About The North Pole, a film made by Dr. Cook to substantiate his claim as discoverer of the pole and his treatment by opponents. The first part of the film is a crudely made photoplay starring Dr. Cook and the last part deals with his reception in Europe.