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A worthy man is compassionate, decent, and gentlemanly toward others out of a sense of pride. He will not stoop to behave viciously, and he will not demean himself by acting cruelly ...A man does not seek out a fight, but he will fight to protect himself, his family, and his country. A gentleman is silent unless he has something worthwhile to say. He is reserved, dignified, and mannerly ...If "family values" is to mean anything more than a pleasing slogan, we must draw upon the wellsprings of the deepest ethical and religious traditions of American and Western civilization, both to hone our diagnosis of the current agony of manliness and, more important, to provide the healing balm of insight, compassion, rectitude, and guidance.-- from The Code of Man"In many ways," Waller R. Newell writes, "young men today are in deep spiritual trouble. But they are also yearning for a way back to the noblest ideals of American manhood." The Code of Man represents a deep and thought-provoking effort to help guide contemporary men back to those ideals, as embodied in what Newell calls the five paths to manliness: love, courage, pride, family, and country.At the dawn of the twenty-first century, he argues, we have grown so concerned about the roles of sex and violence in our society that we have forgotten the older virtues: romance and eros, courage and patriotism, the blend of love and bravery it takes to raise a family. In The Code of Man, he exhorts us to look to the traditional virtues of the past for inspiration. Contrasting the time-honored lessons of traditional voices -- Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln, Jane Austen and Teddy Roosevelt -- with the chaotic signals emanating from sources like Eminem, video games like Thrill Kill, and Goth culture, Newell illustrates how we have come to associate courage with violence, "transgression" with wisdom. Most disturbing, he argues, the essential triumph of Western culture may have left us with a building reserve of untapped aggressive energy, and no consensus about how to channel it -- a situation that threatens to weaken us at the core.Seamlessly weaving together literary references from a diverse body of sources, Waller Newell offers an open-eyed look at what it means to be a man in America today, and a clarion call to recapture our traditions if we are to preserve our character as a society ... and avoid catastrophe.
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LOVE
THE CODE
COURAGE
OF
PRIDE
FAMILY
COUNTRY
MAN
WALLER R. NEWELL
It is character that counts in a nation as in a man. It is a good thing to have a keen, fine intellectual development in a nation, to produce orators, artists, successful business men; but it is an infinitely greater thing to have those solid qualities which we group together under the name of character—sobriety, steadfastness, the sense of obligation toward one’s neighbor and one’s God, hard common sense, and, combined with it, the lift of generous enthusiasm toward whatever is right. These are the qualities which go to make up true national greatness. —theodore roosevelt
Contents epigraph ii
acknowledgments i v
introduction v
i. Love 1
ii. Courage 47
iii. Pride 99
iv. Family 145
v. Country 191
conclusion 233
index 259
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
other books by waller R. Newell
C REDITS C OVER COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Acknowledgments Once again it is my pleasure to thank Judith Regan for her continuing strong support for this book and her keen interest in the debates and is sues that inform it. I am also grateful to my editor, Cal Morgan, for his usual impeccable edit and sound instincts about the shape of the manuscript. Special thanks are due to the Earhart Foundation for its generous support during the