W.J. Cash and the Minds of the South

When W.J. Cash hanged himself in a Mexico City hotel room in 1941, he could not have imagined the huge and lasting impact that his recently published book, The Mind of the South, would have on the study of his native region. In time the book became nothing less than a classic. In the half-century since its appearance, it has never been out of print. In February, 1991, Wake Forest University sponsored a major conference to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the book's publication. The conference assessed, from the perspectives of a variety of scholarly disciplines, the evolving perceptions of Cash and his book and compared Cash's South with today's. Edited by Paul D. Escott, W.J. Cash and the Minds of the South is the collection that grew out of that gathering. Written by some of the most noted authorities in the field, these essays add up to an informed, thoughtful, and provocative assessment of the current state of southern studies.

The first section examines important aspects of Cash's life and the South he lived in. Bruce Clayton analyzes Cash's personal circumstances to help explain why he felt compelled to criticize so harshly the region he dearly loved. Raymond Gavins looks at the racial context of Cash's world, especially the situation of North Carolina blacks in the Age of Jim Crow. Using information from medical studies on depression and creativity, Bertram Wyatt-Brown explores the relationship between Cash's mental instability and his success as a writer. The second section focuses on The Mind of the South itself. Richard King investigates Cash's attitude toward political modernity and compares southern intolerance with the dark forces of Nazism and fascism, and Nell Irvin Painter assesses Cash's views on race and gender and finds much to criticize in them.

Elizabeth Jacoway looks closely at Cash's interpretation of the white South's cult of southern womanhood, and David Hackett Fischer compares Cash's work with that of Cash's contemporary James McBride Dabbs, author of Who Speaks for the South? In the third section, scholars from four different disciplines - political science, economics, history, and religion - look at The Mind of the South in the light of the scholarship produced in the fifty years since Cash's death. Merle Black compares today's southern political system with the one that provided the context for Cash's writing. Gavin Wright relates Cash's ideas about the southern economy to recent scholarship on the economic history of the region. Jack Temple Kirby traces Cash's large influence on the unprecedentedly rich vein of historical works on the South written since 1941, and C.

Eric Lincoln draws on his own personal history to evoke the black "countermind" of the South whose existence Cash overlooked as he strove to fathom what was alter all only the white "mind of the South." Escott concludes the volume with an Afterword focusing on ideas and issues brought up in panel discussions by some of the other participants in the conference, including C. Vann Woodward, George Brown Tindall, Dan T. Carter, Howell Raines, Hodding Carter, Edwin Yoder, Claude Sitton, Ed Williams, Frye Galliard, Marilyn Milloy, and former governor Gerald Baliles of Virginia. W.J. Cash and the Minds of the South demonstrates that the quest to understand Cash and his unique region continues relentlessly.