Customer Reviews

The Mind of the South

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

For Boomer aged Southerners, there was no formal Southern history. At school you got Yankee cant; at home you got Lost Cause and Jim Crow. That doesn't fit the Chamber of Commerce image of cities too busy to hate, but that was the reality for all but the most miniscule minority of white Southerners. Through public school and college in The South, I never had a word from Southern thinkers with the minor exception of Faulkner - not much of a thinker, but a good describer.
Cash was my introduction to Southern intellectual history, and by the time I found him I was far from the South in both space and time. I can feel Cash in my very bones; a dose of Tom Watson populism, a dose of Mencken's cynicism, and a whole bunch of the self-loathing that a defeated and impoverished people wore like tattered old clothes every day. Some neo-Southerners call Cash a South-hater, but they miss the point; Cash wanted desperately to love The South, but could find little to love except myth. You get much the same with Woodward, though in finer clothes. "Strange Career" is nothing but myth, yet it propelled Woodward to the heights of the Academy. The key to both these books is that they are Yankee approved mythology. The publishing houses are not on Peachtree Street, they are on 5th Avenue. For anyone wishing to begin exploration of Southern thought, Cash, the Nashville Agrarians, and Strange Career are the places to start. If you go no further, you won't know anything about The South, but to go further, you must start here.

I am the author of Rising Tide, another book about the South, and the greatest compliment paid to me so far was by someone who compared my book to this brilliant book. Cash's work is certainly one of the most insightful inquiries ever written about any region, any where, by anyone. Some of Samuel Johnson's work about his travels into the Scottish Highlands comes to mind as comparable, but I can't think of any other. In fact, the southerners Cash wrote about are often descended from that same stock.

Then of course there's the personal tragedy of the author's suicide. If you want to understand America, you have to read this book.

A good counterpoint to this is William Alexander Percy's Lantenrs on the Levee, published the same year and also still in print. Cash writes about rednecks; Percy writes about aristocrats, chiefly his own family who considered being called "Anglo-Saxon" an insult. They, after all, were descended from the Norman conquerors nof the Anglo-Saxons.

This book was suggested to me by an American History professor 10 years ago. Just recently did I get around to reading it, however, and I must say that it is an impressive analysis of the white Southern mind-set leading up to the Civil War and through the Depression. I believe that many of the same thought processes hold true to this day particularly with all the controversy surrounding the Confederate flag and its inclusion in state flags (MS, SC, GA etc) in addition to the national shift of power to Southern conservatives in the Congress last decade. The book describes the political, religious, economic and social distinctions of the South in psychological terms and often in Jungian fashion showing opposites in existence together (i.e.- hedonism and refinement, morality and slavery/Jim Crow, etc). I have lived in the South most of my life and was glad to have 'rediscovered' this interesting book. Cash's writing style is difficult to follow at first- somewhat meandering and flowery (and intentionally humorous in some cases), but his insights are very modern and relevant in today's American society. ... Highly recommended.

Since Reconstruction, works of Southern history and, in this case, sociology have usually fallen into two distinct genres. The first tends to reinforce the popular Old South mythology with exaggerated, romantic imagery as inspired by an emotional attachment to the "Lost Cause." The second is a reaction to the first. The revisionists, always irritated by the chauvinism of Southern popular mythology, want to convince you that Southern mythology is exactly that--a myth. The most violent of the revisionists will have you believe that romantic images of the Old South are fundamentally fictional--an image created by the Southern propagandists eager to create only the most flattering cultural portrait. For the record, THE MIND OF THE SOUTH falls more into the second category than the first. In fact, all of the works of Southern history and sociology that we now consider "classic" are more critical and revisionist than romantic. The non-fiction works of Cash, Odum, and C. Vann Woodward, and the fiction of Ellen Glasgow are all appreciated throughout the country for their critical views of what we call the Old South. It has become nearly equivalent in Southern studies to call a work both revisionist and worthy of praise. The ideas are, unfortunately, redundant. One's appreciation for things Southern all but negates one's credibility as a serious scholar. But the problem with extreme revisionism, and with the Cash work in particular, is that it has you believe that Southern mythology is SO fictional that it is nearly arbitrary. It wants you to believe that popular Southern imagery is a product of ignornace rather than careful consideration of the evidence. There is a difference between calling mythology an exaggeration, as the best works of William C. Davis, John Shelton Reed and Edward L. Ayers do, and calling it patently false, as the works of C. Vann Woodward and W. J. Cash do. This is the challenging question for any revisionist: If the popular view you are trying to de- and reconstruct is false, why (and how) was it originally created? And more critically, if all of history is just a social construction, what makes your take on things innately more accurate than mine? It seems to me that popular mythology must have some grain of truth, for it would not have developed as it did from nothing. It must be based on something that really exists. This idea, of course, is violently rejected by most post-modern historians who believe that ALL of history is nothing more than a social construction. For those sympathetic to that view, this book will appeal to you. To those looking for some insights into the factual basis for a Southern creation myth, you'd do better to read Ayers, Davis, or Reed. These fine historians are able to treat the topic with a sensitive balance of critical insight and popular appreciation.

Published in 1941, one can't help but think that THE MIND OF THE SOUTH is an iconoclastic reaction to the immense popularity of GONE WITH THE WIND, released in 1939.

W. J. Cash is hard to pin down. Liberals, from C. Vann Woodward to Nell Painter, seem to have little use for him. Conservatives, like Donald Davidson and the other Southern agrarians, also had little use for Cash. Yet Cash's book is still in print and being read sixty five years after his suicide. There are reasons for this. First there is the unique Cash style. In his excellent introduction, Bertram Wyatt-Brown advises the reader to imagine Cash as a country lawyer presenting a case in court or perhaps sitting in the town square swapping stories with friends. There is much merit to this advice. Cash's style is often folksy, sometimes sarcastic and, at other times, completely his own as he summons unique and usually spot on phrases to describe aspects of Southern culture. Cash is a product of his time though he does not spend that much time on the Old South and rather focuses his energy on "The Frontier the Yankee Made." But do not think Cash is an old South apologist. He has little use for the hagiographic tradition of the Dunning school or the Nashville circle of Agrarians and his book clearly reflects it.

But Cash is no traditional liberal either. He was a man of his time and place as is shown in his comments on race on gender. Cash clearly feels that continuity was the chief hallmark of the Southern past and shows it again and again, from the planters leading the "man at the center" in the Old South to the lack of success of the labor movement in the 20's and 30's.

Cash's interests as a newspaperman are also reflected in his book. Cash handled book reviews and foreign affairs editorials during his tenure at The Charlotte News. His comments on authors and books remain some of the more interesting and lively parts of his magnum opus. The threat of tyranny, which Cash wrote about in great length in his columns, was on Cash's mind as he wrote the book as can clearly be seen in the last pages.

If somewhat dated, Cash's book remains one of the most interesting and controversial looks at the South. While often critical of his home region, Cash remains very attached to it and its virtues. Above all, Cash believed in the South as a unique and interesting region. In this age of mass communications and moving around the country, Southerners looking to understand their region before its completely submerged into a common culture should look at Cash. For if the South is to survive, it will not be a sense of place, it will be a sense of mind. In an era when we can order the same food, listen to the same music, watch the same television in Asheville, Oak Park, Denver and Trenton, Cash may be more important than ever to Southern survival.

What makes the South unique as a region has virtually disappeared since this book was researched and written. What Cash describes is what made the South unique to begin with -- its blend of agrarian culture, 18th century British cavalier society, and Scottish individualism. As Cash writes, "the Southern world, you will remember, was basically an extremely uncomplex, unvaried and unchanging one." How the South approached the complexities of the modern era, and dealt with the ideas of industrialization and multiculturalism, is not his focus. Certainly the book should be read in the context of its times (America had yet to enter World War II) and with the realization that much has changed since then. His book is not an apology, nor is he blind to the clash of racial and social issues that the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction left unresolved, either. The fact that Cash's work has been vilified and re-evaluated over many years, even by the reviews here, is an indication that the concepts and issues he described more than sixty years ago are still debated today -- a true picture of the mind of the South in the 21st century.

The nature of a people is seldom easy to describe because the attempt is often sabotaged by either the Outsider's incorrect perceptions or the Insider's preconceptions, depending on which is constructing the definition. What we find with W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South is no different, although it is a pleasant journey. Sparkling with some of the most fluid prose ever found in historical writing, Cash's work deserves recognition for this reason alone; yet there is value in the exposition itself, even if it forgets a full two-thirds of the South's population in its description (blacks and women). What the modern reader is left with, then, is not so much a description of the "the southern mind" as it is "the white southern male mind." And while Cash's work does not quite apologize for the many neuroses of that mind, it does attempt to explain the effects it has had on our perception of the American South, with a small dash of glory added for good measure.

First, it is important for us to take into account the wonderful introduction to the work by Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Wyatt-Brown shows that Cash's battle with depression was a salient part in understanding his interpretation of the South, as was his upbringing. Wyatt-Brown seems to agree with my assessment on the Insider/Outsider effect:

"The origins of Cash's interpretation of his culture and region lay not only in the objective fact of Southern intransigence about issues of race and change, but in the very makeup of his mind. Like so many creative depressives, he stood apart from the society around him. Such a position of detachment can provide a special angle of vision that those immersed in society cannot obtain (Cash xxvii)."

Wyatt-Brown, with this statement, makes Cash an outside-Insider, by virtue of his being a manic depressive. He is a southerner, and therefore capable of the same preconceptions of his own people as any southerner; however, according to Wyatt-Brown, by reason of his mental condition, he is elevated away from this status and into a new status altogether, a presumably better one. I would agree with this, if the work itself is to be taken as proof. Cash is capable of wonderful insights into his own culture and society. However - and this is crucial! - we must not gloss over the fact that by omitting women and blacks from his work, Cash loses some credibility. It is here, it seems, that Cash could not escape the Insider mentality.

This work is characterized by one over-arching theme: southern culture, though as elusive in most respects as any other, is penetrated throughout with one defining and collective temperament. In essence, this work is interpretative rather than linear, as it attempts to analyze rather than delineate. This elevates Cash from the traditional historian (in the mold of Clement Eaton) to sociologist or social commentator (in the mold of David Halberstam). That is not to say that Cash does not know his history or pilfers it from others; it seems impossible after reading The Mind of the South for one to imagine Cash using such smooth language while pulling facts from anywhere outside his own mind. The disjointed quality usually apparent in any attempt to fuse sources without an overall voice is thankfully absent. Cash is who we hear while we read, and it is his elucidative brush-strokes that paint the image of the Southerner.

Much is left out of this short review of Cash's work, as brevity is a consideration. A more complex examination of the work would require many more words than I have time for at the moment. But I do feel obligated to at least sum up the trajectory of Cash's masterpiece. The first few chapters lay the groundwork for Cash's southern temperament - individualistic, violent, quasi-aristocratic, provincial, just to name a few - while the remainder of the work displays the evolution of that temperament while it is worked upon by forces both outside it and from within, and its own natural need to adapt. The Yankee plays his part, as does Uncle Tom and the fugitive slave, the southern belle and the Garrison abolitionist, the carpet-bagger and the scalawag, the confederate soldier and the lynch mob, the fire-eater and the bible-thumping revivalist. It is impossible for any society to exist in a vacuum, or as a prehistoric insect preserved in amber. That being said, it is still remarkable that the American south came as close as it did.

As a native Southerner, I was bowled over by the profound truths contained in this book. It strips away the legend of the South and shows the reality behind it. One of Cash's main tenets is that the South never changes, it just adapts to new times. This makes the book somewhat repetitive, as each era of history is essentially just a variation of the past. Also, this book was written before the Civil Rights Movement. I would have loved to know how Cash would have changed his opinion of the South after desegregation. Even though it is somewhat dated, this is still a book that every American should read. The South matters, and this book provides a key to understanding it.

Fascinating and comprehensive analysis of the southern states, our culture and thinking up to World War II. Anyone wanting to understand what is unique about the South, and even to understand why the southern states have switched in recent years to voting Republican instead of Democratic since the conservative attitudes of the South have changed little since WWII, should read this book.

Have you ever wondered why Southerners are the way they are?Why are they so hospitable sometimes but so refractory at other times?Why did we (Yankees) have to fight that Civil War with them? "The Mind of the South" holds answers to these questions as it paints a loose, but poignant picture of southern attitudes before the Civil War. It was written by a Southerner. However, I'm certain that anyone with an interest in the Civil War, the South, or the psychology of Southerners, would find it interesting. I found that it helped me understand why Southerners don't see things the way I do. Why would a Southerner see a Yankee "as cowardly, avaricious, boorish, half Pantaloon and half Shylock" and himself "as polished, brave, generous, magnificent, wholly the stately aristocrat, fit to cow a dozen Yankees with the power of his eye and a cane? (pg. 67-68)" Read the book to find out why. The effect of reconstruction on the attitudes of Southerners is also explored, as well as the growth of the South up to W.W. II. This was also very insightful. The book did tend to be a little too long. You may find some of it offensive. It is certainly controversial. Nevertheless, I highly reccomend this book. END