Rediscovering America's heroes: a decades-long war on masculinity is reducing the American man to a sniveling shadow of his former greatness. Real Men by R. Cort Kirkwood recovers man's glorious heroic past.

Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire, by R. Cort Kirkwood, Nashville, Tennessee: Cumberland House Publishing, 2006, 182 pages, paperback. (For ordering information, see the ad on page 6.)

Quite unexpectedly, a television series has illustrated just how far out of favor masculinity has fallen among the cultural elite. The show is Battlestar Galactica and in its current iteration has garnered its fair share of praise. Peter Suderman's laudatory essay in National Review is similar to the praise heaped on the show by others. Galactica, Suderman says, is "a show about spaceships and killer robots that is also arguably the most potent, dramatically vibrant series on television. An unflinching examination of how the military, government, family, and religion interact in the fragile ecosystem of society, it is as morally and intellectually serious as it is thrilling."

The current Galactica is derived from the original Battlestar Galactica series starring Lorne Greene that first aired in 1978. Both shows feature the character "Starbuck," a cocky and brash Viper pilot who has unsurpassed skill in the cockpit and unsurpassed bravery under fire. Not only that, but in the original series Starbuck, as played by actor Dirk Benedict, smoked cigars and chased women. According to Benedict, the Starbuck character he played "was all charm and humour and flirting without an angry bone in his womanizing body."

Naturally, there was no room in the current series for this kind of character. So Starbuck became Kara Thrace (played by actress Katee Sackhoff), a cigar smoking female Viper pilot. Still brash, still brave, but in the new Galactica, Sackhoff's Starbuck represents the realization of the radical feminist dream to remake men into women and women into men. That doesn't sit well with Benedict. "The war against masculinity has been won," he wrote in a recent essay. "Everything has turned into its opposite, so that what was once flirting and smoking is now sexual harassment and criminal." The new Starbuck was part of the "re-imagining" of the series to bring it into accord with the present culture, according to Benedict. "To take what once was and twist it into what never was intended. So that a television show based on hope, spiritual faith, and family is unimagined and regurgitated as a show of despair, sexual violence and family dysfunction. To better reflect the times of ambiguous morality in which we live, one would assume," Benedict concluded.

Much as the new Galactica has reimagined Starbuck, the prevailing culture has re-imagined men in general. Taking a cue from feminists like Gloria Steinem, who once said "we badly need to raise boys more like we raise girls," our culture has done its best to destroy masculinity. According to Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War on Boys, there is "a movement to reconstruct boyhood, to produce boys who will be less competitive, more emotionally expressive, more nurturing--simply put, more like girls."

The list of social ills caused by this feminization of masculinity is long and sordid. The problems are unlikely to be reversed any time soon unless an effort is begun to restore to men some degree of understanding of those manly virtues--including bravery, integrity, loyalty, honor, and faith--that marked the heroes of bygone ages. The best way to do that is to examine the lives of some of those exemplary men of the past. This is just what author R. Cort Kirkwood proposes to do in Real Men, a book that extols the virtues of 10 men who embody the masculine ideal.

The Fires of War

War has long been the proving ground for masculine heroism. The conspicuous example is Thermopylae where a handful of Spartans under the leadership of Leonidas held off vast hordes of Persian invaders, succumbing only when they were betrayed. But such heroism predates the great conflict of the Persian War. Homer's Iliad records the Trojan hero Hector's speech before battle:

   The gallant man, though slain
      in fight he be,
   Yet leaves his nation safe,
      his children free;
   Entails a debt on all the grateful
      state;
   His own brave friends shall glory in
      his fate;
   His wife live honour'd, all his race
      succeed,
   And late posterity enjoy the deed!

In posterity, through the work of Kirkwood, present-day readers can "enjoy the deeds" of several men whose bravery was tempered in the fires of war. No fewer than eight of the 10 profiles in Real Men are of warriors whose martial valor on the field of battle and personal conduct in civilian life remain exemplars. Among these is the "Swamp Fox," Francis Marion.

The Swamp Fox was an exemplary member of the founding generation who pledged--and then committed--their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause of liberty. It is difficult to perceive, several hundred years hence, the degree of courage such a course of action required. The British were merciless in persecuting those who fought for the young nation. "Bloody" Banastre Tarleton, the feared British cavalry officer, thought nothing of terrorizing colonial Americans.

In one case Kirkwood recounts, a widow named Mary Richardson, who had sent her son to warn Marion about a Tarleton plan, was mercilessly flogged by the British, her cattle destroyed, and her barn razed. Marion himself lost everything. His "house was pillaged and burned, and his cattle and horses scattered or seized," Kirkwood notes. "At war's end, the Swamp Fox had to rebuild from nothing."

Despite the dangers, Marion fought on, rendering invaluable service to the cause for independence. According to Lighthorse Harry Lee, a contemporary, Marion "was virtuous all over.... Beloved by his friends, and respected by his enemies, he exhibited a luminous example of the beneficial effects to be produced by an individual who, with only small means at his command, possesses a virtuous heart, a strong head, and a mind directed to the common good."

The same could be said for Davy Crockett, another hero of the early American republic. Crockett's life and deeds have been the stuff of legend for years and only recently has this exemplar of the American spirit been neglected. Crockett came from an abysmally poor family. The conditions of his early life boggle the mind, and one can scarcely imagine a modern man surviving the rigors that Crockett endured as a child. As Kirkwood points out, Crockett persevered despite setback after setback, eventually reaching Congress, where he steadfastly and famously refused to approve of a bill that would have given the federal government the power to take money from taxpayers and give it to another person.

The issue was whether to give $10,000 to naval hero Stephen Decatur's widow. Against this measure, Crockett argued: "We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living.... Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. ... We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but ... we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money." If only today's congressional socialists would exhibit a touch of this wisdom.

An honorable man, Crockett pledged his own money to the relief of the widow Decatur. But this alone didn't make Crockett a legend. That would come at the Alamo, where, facing certain death, Crockett participated in the defense of Texas from Mexican General Santa Anna.

Catalogue of Heroes

It takes more than bravery to make a hero. It could be said that only those who embody the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude can truly reach the level of the heroic. Most of those highlighted by Kirkwood embody these virtues to some degree, but among them, one--the incomparable Robert E. Lee--stands supreme. Kirkwood hits the nail on the head when he writes, "Robert E. Lee was so grand a figure, so dissimilar to any American considered a hero today, or even when he lived and before, that measuring a man against him is almost unfair." In American history, perhaps only George Washington can compare. And it is in Washington that Lee himself found a hero. According to Lee biographer Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee "had come to view duty as Washington did, to act as he thought Washington would, even perhaps, to emulate the grave self-contained courtesy of the great American rebel."

And in Washington may be found the sole failing of Kirkwood's Real Heroes, for Washington is conspicuous in his absence. If Lee, the greatest of the heroes chronicled by Kirkwood, looked to Washington as a hero, it seems beyond doubt that any book on great American heroes should contain a robust discussion of the republic's first president. Still, this is a minor complaint. In a nation in which boys and men are in desperate need of role models, Kirkwood's Real Men serves as a treasure trove of noble exemplars.