Mr. Cash Writes A Book

...Cash's major thesis is the continuity of the Southern mind, by which he means that Southerners early became fixed in certain ways of thinking and feeling...

...1952), Cortez A. M. Ewing's Primary Elections in the South (1953), and articles by Donald S. Strong...

...In places the writing becomes somewhat tortuous, but for the most part the style is of superior literary quality and occasionally verges on the poetic...

...It has become a classic in the literature on the South and unquestionably is one of the most significant and widelyread attempts to explain America's most enigmatic region...

...But the book was not always given a cordial reception, and it was vehemently condemned in some quarters of the South...

...Allen Tate, among others, has suggested that the "peculiarly historical consciousness" of most of these writers is the real source of inspiration for the Southern literary movement...

...After a brief interlude during which he toyed with the idea of a legal career and tried his hand at teaching English and French, he turned to journalism...

...Still, The Mind of the South reveals such familiarity with the region's history and with social science concepts that one wishes the author had at least made known to the reader the historical rubric or conceptual framework out of which he wrote...

...Since he did not set out to write a formal history or a sociological essay, he should not be criticized for not having produced such works...

...The author's approach is literary and imaginative rather than scholarly...

...One wonders if Wilbur J. Cash would think so either...

...Enormous economic changes, vast population shifts, rapid urbanization, new voting patterns, and revolutionary racial innovations have swept over the Southern part of the United States...

...The colleges and universities have also turned out some important studies in Southern politics and government, including V. O. Key's monumental Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949), Alexander Heard's A Two-Party South...

...He is probably more conscious of history—at least of the peculiar history of his own region—than the average non-Southerner, and he is perhaps more interested in place and locality and community...

...This no doubt does much to explain Cash's general position...

...The enormous influence of The Mind of the South was forecast by its initial impact...

...But they are a part of the Southern heritage that Cash would have wanted perpetuated...

...It is also a powerful assault upon the South's illusions, and the emotional response of many people below the Potomac was exactly the kind of response one would expect from a people in the thrall of the illusions Cash describes...

...No one has offered a more convincing explanation of such imponderables in the Southern past as the paradox of aristocracy and democracy in the Old South, the central role of race in the Southern situation and the relationship of sex to the race complex, the low threshold of violence south of the Mason and Dixon Line, and the nature of Southern demagoguery...

...One may be tempted to believe, when confronted with frequent outbreaks of race hysteria and mob violence in the South, that Cash was right after all...

...The organization is intricate, ingenious, and original...

...Indeed, the violent criticism and the personal abuse Cash encountered almost certainly contributed to his tragic suicide a few months after the appearance of the book...

...In speaking of literary progress in the 1930's, Cash facetiously remarked that the multiplication of Southern writers had proceeded so rapidly "until anybody who fired off a gun in the region was practically certain to kill an author...

...He was employed at different times by several newspapers and in 1937 became associate editor of the Charlotte News, a liberal journal in what George Fort Milton once described as "the unofficial capital of North Carolina's embattled conservatism...

...The first of these terms refers to that complex of Southern white attitudes produced by the "peculiar institution"— to the "vastly ego-warming and egoexpanding distinction between the white man and the black...

...These attributes of Southernism—and there are others—have little to do with Cash's Proto-Dorian Convention or Savage Ideal...

...For it can be argued with greater logic, perhaps, that these developments are evidence of class conflict, of political dissent, and of a society racked by profound internal disagreement...

...There has been, as V. O. Key once observed, a distressingly high rate of self-destruction among those "who ponder about the South and put down their reflections in books...

...It is not likely so...

...It is also apparent that he was influenced by such people as Gerald W. Johnson and H. L. Mencken (Cash was a contributor to the American Mercury) and that he learned a great deal from the regional analyses prepared at the University of North Carolina by such scholars as Howard W. Odum and Rupert B. Vance...

...To read the book is to discover what a marvelously well-informed man Cash was...

...Yet most of them, like Cash, assumed that Southern society possessed an extraordinary degree of unity, and as young critics they were eager to get on with the business of regional self-criticism...

...The result is that a certain unreality attaches itself to his treatment of such historical developments as Populism and to the social and economic implications of industrialism...

...The mind of the section, that is, is continuous with the past...

...Cashes emphasis upon the continuity of the Southern mind is undoubtedly a valuable corrective to the popular stereotype that draws a sharp contrast between the Old and the New South, and to the professional historians' habit of dividing the past into well-defined periods...

...Finally, the ablest Southern historians have taken a leaf from Cash, and have begun to interpret the complex of attitudes that make up the mind and character of the South...

...C. Vann Woodward's The Burden of Southern History (1960) is a brilliant example...

...Whatever the source of his information and inspiration, he embodied in magnificent fashion that spirit of youthful skepticism and incipient liberalism increasingly evident in the South by the 1930's...

...It is often the first volume placed in the hands of the stranger who expresses a desire to learn something about the South...

...Scarcely a year has passed since 1941 without the appearance of at least one serious effort in this vein, as is evidenced in the books of Harry S. Ashmore, Hodding Carter, James M. Dabbs, Virginius Dabney, Jonathan Daniels, Wilma Dykeman, P. D. East, Ralph McGill, Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Henry Savage, Jr., and others...

...Perhaps Cash was unique...

...A fatal frustration seems to come from the struggle to find a way through the unfathomable maze formed by tradition, caste, race, poverty...

...There is much talk in the present South about the ancient ways, and all manner of myths have sprung up to substantiate them...

...During the past two decades change has become the pattern in the region below the Potomac...

...Rather than the mind of the South, one must now speak of the minds of the South...

...The Odum School of regional analysts at the University of North Carolina has continued to be productive, with the publication of important volumes like Vance's All These People: The Nation's Human Resources in the South (1945) and the appearance of significant monographs dealing with rural society, community power structure, organized labor, and the like...

...Is the Savage Ideal still triumphant...

...No self-respecting writer whose subject is the Southern part of the United States would fail to quote Cash—and usually to substantiate his own conclusions...

...But it is history that has made the most prodigious advance in the field of Southern studies...

...Another aspect of his experience in writing The Mind of the South may have done even more to drive Cash to take his own life...

...Part of the trouble would seem to lie in Cash's failure as a historian, or at least in his misreading of Southern history...

...The region has experienced a remarkable development of state and local historical societies and journals, the launching of impressive documentary series, and the establishment of annual lectures on Southern history and literature...

...Although Cash wrote of the South with sympathy and even an occasional hint of nostalgia, it is easy to understand why he was attacked by so many Southerners...

...He was steeped in the history and folklore of the South, and he was an astute observer of the passing scene, especially of developments in the two Carolinas...

...Following Cash has come a host of journalists and regional writers attempting to interpret the South...

...The emphasis is aways upon "the ancient pattern" of the Southern mind continually shaping events and circumstances to its own uses...

...The Basic Southerner, essentially an exceedingly simple man, was molded by the frontier milieu that existed in much of the South until the firing on Fort Sumter and by the aristocratic tradition brought over from the colonial South and made pervasive by the apparent triumph of the Cotton Kingdom...

...A South Carolinian by birth, a Baptist, and a Democrat, he was educated at Wofford and Wake Forest...

...Even in 1941 Cash admitted that the mind of the South, since World War I, held the region less firmly in its grip than was true in earlier years...

...Is the Proto-Dorian Convention as effective as ever...

...And Cash has the great virtue of approaching the mind or character of the South in its totality, rather than examining separate traits in a piecemeal manner...

...The Man in the Center was also affected, and powerfully so, by what Cash speaks of as the Proto-Dorian Convention and the Savage Ideal...

...Their consciousness of the past in the present, to use Vann Woodward's phrase, and their tendency to view Southern society as an organic whole are reminiscent of Cash and suggest a basic similarity in the views of Southern historians and Southern men of letters...

...It would be interesting if Cash could answer these questions himself by adding a chapter to his book covering the past twenty years...

...Thus the Civil War, Reconstruction, the crusade for industrialization, the economic expansiveness of the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, the opportunities and problems of the Twenties, and the New Deal revolution of the Thirties, while transforming the region's economic and social system, failed to destroy the continuity of the Southern mind and, indeed, in Cash's view, even strengthened in some respects the hold of that mind on most Southerners...

...This is particularly true of the antebellum period, where the origins of Southern traits are not adequately explained and the main arguments need to be elaborated...

...Although Cash influenced most of these interpreters, it would be too much to say that he inspired their work...

...neither will one find in Cash a discussion of the outstanding Southern intellectuals...

...Y t, having set out to show that the mind of the South "is continuous with the past," Cash is naturally led to select those facts which will support the thesis that the pattern of the Old South is still operating in the New...

...T h e book has gone through several printings (including a Vintage paperback edition) and is studied in classrooms and book groups throughout the country...

...One will not find here a straightforward account of the South's economic development, of important party battles, or of the sectional conflict...

...For The Mind of the South probes into the deeper recesses of the Southern psyche and dispassionately analyzes the Southern mystique...

...Far from it...

...IT is NOW twenty years since Alfred A. Knopf published Wilbur Joseph Cash's The Mind of the South, perhaps the most brilliant essay ever written on the Southern character...

...There has been no diminution in the output of the Southern poets, playwrights, and novelists during the last two decades, and the work of William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Lillian Smith, and others testifies to the existence of a genuine literary renaissance in Dixie...

...The scholars have also found the South an attractive field of study...

...The average Southerner is unquestionably more closely identified, in his own mind, with his native section than are Americans in other regions...

...Although the agrarians at Vanderbilt University have long since dispersed and, save for an occasional essay by Donald Davidson, have no longer addressed themselves to the theme they made famous thirty years ago, William H. Nicholls and his students at Vanderbilt have carried out a series of valuable economic studies concerned with the transformation of the South from an agrarian to an industrial society...

...In Southern unity before the foe "lay the final bulwark of every established commonplace...

...In trying to identify and describe those elements that made Southerners "of one mind," Cash postulates what he calls the Basic Southerner, or the Man in the Center...

...The Southern Historical Association and its quarterly, the Journal of Southern History, have demonstrated an amazing vitality and influence...

...He is concerned with the intangibles of the Southern past: the region's romanticism, its intense individualism, its relative lack of class feeling, its violence, its fondness for rhetoric, and the curious paradox involved in its hedonism and puritanism, and in its aristocratic tradition and its democratic professions...

...Whatever its limitations as history and whatever its methodological faults from the point of view of the social scientist, The Mind of the South is indubitably a wise and revealing book, filled with brilliant passages that illuminate the nature of the South and its people...

...Wilbur J. Cash was one of those exceptional persons who, as one of his reviewers said, "can view their homeland with calm detachment, analyze its traits, and write about them unemotionally and well...

...But it is rather difficult for the student of Southern history to be persuaded, the current sound and fury notwithstanding, that this "mind" of the South is "continuous with the past...

...In reality, the modern white South is too divided within itself—and along lines quite similar to the rest of the country—to be able to support the ingenious device Cash began with, the Basic Southerner...

...This is not to say that Southerners have lost their regional identity...

...Most of the reviews recognized the volume's importance and characterized it as a courageous and penetrating piece of regional selfcriticism...

...Has the mind of the South reaffirmed its continuity, its indestructibility...

...Again, Cash often fails to distinguish between significant developments that were characteristically Southern and those that were taking place everywhere in the nation...

...A ten-volume history of the South, published by Louisiana State University and the Littlefield Fund of the University of Texas, is nearing completion, and a veritable flood of monographs, state studies, and biographies dealing with the region's past has emanated from the leading Southern graduate schools and university presses...

...The second is a kind of shorthand designation for that ideal, adumbrated in the earliest sectional conflict over slavery, under which dissent and variety were completely suppressed and men "became, in all their attitudes, profes-1 sions, and actions, virtual replicas of one another...

...The Mind of the South is not a general history of the region, nor even, strictly speaking, an intellectual history...