Mind of the South Dust JacketA Review of W.J. CASH'S MIND OF THE SOUTH

© 1990-2003 Gene Brooks  Home  

W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South is a "somewhat romantic yet insightful [work which] made a major contribution to the intellectual and cultural re-evaluation of the South."(1) The 1940 work which has been termed "a masterpiece of impressionistic writing"(2) is a sociological study of the mind set of the people of the South. Cash demonstrates that the mind of the South is the mind of the frontier refined by the plantation and Yankee attack in the form of word and saber. This mind, beginning with half truths, formed its values, because of refinement and attack, into ultimate truth.(3) Some have questioned the existence of a Mind of the South including Henry Adams who said that "strictly, the Southerner has no mind; he has temperament."(4) However, one reviewer of Cash's work wrote: "What makes the mind of the South different is that it thinks it is."(5) Possibly there is truth in both summations, but the uncanny feeling remains that "the native Southerner feels quite naked reading it. The book was obviously written, as one Southern reviewer put it, 'in bitter truthfulness and love.'"(6) Cash's work has "narrative power"(7) that causes the native Southron to read with the strange feeling of being carried along down a white water river, leveling off at the century change to a more leisurely(8) stroll through the mind.

THE MAN AT THE CENTER

Cash begins his work with a fast start, describing what he terms as the Man at the Center, the consummately ordinary white Southron. Briefly, the man at the center has several characteristics.(9) With an intense individualism which the frontier atmosphere put into the man of the South also comes violence and an idealistic, hedonistic romanticism. This romanticism is also fueled by the Southron's conflict with the Yankee. Violence manifests itself in mob action, such as lynching, and private dealings.(10)

Romanticism shows itself in three areas: religion, sentimentality, and social responsibility. Religion sanctions slavery because it is God's doing that certain people are placed at certain social levels. Religion was conservative, going back to the old ways, the safer, surer ways of their fathers. In this way the Southerner saw himself as the last champion of the unadulterated faith. Religion, in Cash's view, caused illiteracy of mind. Critical thinking and analysis was frowned upon in the fear of change.

Cash places sentimentality, politics, and rhetoric together. Though they are fired by one another, it seems to me that sentimentalism is of romanticism and propels politics and rhetoric in facing the Yankee conflict. Sentimentality was seen in the cult of Southern Womanhood, partially from a fear of rape by a black man and partially because of miscegenation guilt. Wilbur Cash in his Mind of the South has argued that the Southern people had a guilt complex because of the immoral relations of Southern men with slave women, and Mrs. Chestnut has lent support to this idea in her Diary from Dixie. Some modern liberals have attributed the emotional fundamentalism of the Old South to a guilt complex over the wrongs of slavery, but many Northern people had a similar feeling of sin. The more probable explanation for the great consciousness of sin in antebellum America was the resurgence of Calvinism with its great emphasis on the depravity of human nature.(11) The belief in the good Negro who willingly accepted slavery and sang his happy songs and was docile and loving of his white master was a segment of sentimentality.

Because of the Yankee attack and Southern defense, a sentimental politics and rhetoric took the election-year stumps by showy storm and created a solidly Democratic South, preaching the Machiavellian idea that the ends justify the means.

Responsibility was a romantic ideal showing itself in that abstract honor and more visible manner, an important manifestation of which was military grandeur and the love of the uniform. Genealogy was important, for once one realized he was a descendant of Robert the Bruce, he would take the responsibility he should as an aristocrat. In his paternalistic outlook he should look after everyone under his care. With the aristocratic ideal and the deeply ingrained sentimentality, the legend of the Old South came about. And with the Yankee attack, the only thing a good Southerner could do was conform his belief to all these areas and fight off the intruder. It was treason not to conform; to question or even stand back and observe was considered questioning. The South and its ideals had become a part of the ego of the man at the center, and to question the South was to question his own person. To cut the South was to cut the very man. That, of course, caused a gun to go off at Fort Sumter.(12)

Now the man at the center marched through Yankee-contrived second frontier of the War and the Dunning Reconstruction(13) into the third frontier of the New South,(14) and Cash settles in to writing on the poor white looking for a better way.

The fact that both images [Old and New South] of the South exist together is for Cash proof that paradox is the essence of popular thinking, and here we can agree with him since both images, the simple order of an agrarian life and the progress of industrialism, are essential elements of the American Dream. The true picture, for Cash, is that there was an Old South, though very different from the one he debunks, and that this Old South has determined the newer South to a far greater extent than it itself has been changed.(15) There is a continuity with the burden of the past which pervades and obstructs the Southerner's cultural response to the present."(16)

When Cash wrote that Gone With the Wind became "a sort of new confession of the Southern faith," he told only the partial truth. In reality, Mitchell's work was a confession of American faith in an entire way of life rooted in all Americans which was going as fast as the breeze.(17) Roosevelt's declaration that the nation's number one economic problem was the South's ailing economy showed that he was including the South in the country with its "neglected natural resources, absentee-ownership, industrialism, child labor, farm tenancy, housing, education, taxation, and health."(18) The South, though a distinctive region, was becoming a part of the larger unit. Cash even concedes the point at the end of the book(19) when he "recreates a myth of Southern uniqueness which ironically denies the uniqueness which the South actually possesses." The virtues he lists are American virtues; the vices are American vices.(20)

WJ Cash in 1935THE PROBLEMS WITH CASH

Besides the one problem just mentioned, Cash presents a few others. For me, a problem is his lack of treatment for the black man and woman and the white woman who make up a majority of the South. Cash never mentions the white woman's views except to show how she helped prevent lynchings, and the black woman is present only for miscegenation. The black male does receive finally in the post World War I era, nine pages of the Negro as a people group.

Cash's history is funnel-shaped also, spending a great deal of time on the economic and labor situation of the 1920's and 1930's. He seems to not know when to cut his work off. He even admits at one point that "the book is already too long."(21) No doubt, if he had been writing in 1860 he would have spent a great amount of ink on the events of the 1850's which in the actual work receives barely notice.

There is also the problem of Cash's stout Irish immigrant of 1800 and his rise to wealth.(22) He keeps the myth's romantic simplicity and leisure, saying, "the process of their rise to power was simplicity itself."(23) His Irishman never gets involved in politics or the moral issue of slavery even though he lives until 1854. He contradicts himself saying that in the Southerner's secret heart he is uneasy about slavery.(24) Cash could not reconcile the easy, innocent simplicity of the Irishman's life with the burden of Southern history: the tensions of guilt and violence.(25)

Cash also talks of aristocracy while he concedes that there was no real one in existence.(26) He "talks as if he is interested in a social class but in fact he is merely interested in the idea of aristocracy as the embodiment of a gentlemanly ideal."(27) The Yankees forced the yeomen to allow the influence of the pseudo-aristocracy to accelerate. Attacks on slavery mobilized romanticism, "separated it from reality, and caused it to look to its old gentlemen to provide a standard. The Yankee created the romantic South."(28) However, Cash betrays himself into "a pathetic fascination with the romance of aristocracy."(29)

In other areas, Frank Owsley disagrees with Cash and says that the yeomen "occupied much of the best land of the South."(30) The Cash-Woodward debate is so complicated and long that its characteristics are not appropriately put here. Only in the following will the debate be discussed: Cash's attention was on the cultural psychology of the South while Woodward tends to turn toward "observable forces, movements, and institutions."(31) Woodward also maintains that there was, contrary to Cash's scathing criticism, a degree of intellectual activity going on in the antebellum South, but the intellectuals were "defenders of slavery and aristocratic hegemony."(32) Another critic of Cash is the Agrarian Donald Davidson, who, in his rare hostile review of Cash, attacked Mind's lack of documentation, limited validity, hostility to religion, and "comparisons of the Southern mind to Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism."(33)

One literary analyst states sorrowfully, "today Cash's thinking is not very influential. Its willingness to emphasize the relevance of history, daily customs, even climate to the life of the mind causes it to be branded by many as quaint or superficial."(34)

Because Cash was so obviously bone of the bone with the generality of Southerners, they listened thoughtfully while he lashed them with his truths: that the Old South with its vaunted aristocracy was a fairy tale; that the New South and its ideal of Progress was all too often a pretext for exploitation, that the "savage ideal" continued in effect because public opinion and the "best people" gave tacit approval to what the lynchers and Kluxers were doing; that the "proto-Dorian convention" was perpetuating racial injustice of a kind to provoke the wrath to come.(35) Cash demolished the myths of the Old South and New South by which twentieth century Southerners were fooling themselves.(36) No other part of America lives so intimately with its past, or struggles so hard to survive its ruinous contradictions. As a result, I submit, there is a "mind of the South," and it is as powerful and devious as any other "force" people must face on this planet."(37)

Cash's Mind of the South is a significant building block necessary to the more complete study of the South as a region, and is necessary for anyone interested in any facet of the South including dwelling in the region.

CASH'S MAN AT THE CENTER

INDIVIDUALISM CONFLICT WITH YANKEE

VIOLENCE ROMANTICISM/HEDONISM/IDEALISM

MOB PRIVATE RELIGION SENTIMENTALITY RESPONSIBILITY

SLAVERY CONSERVATISM WOMAN CULT HONOR/MANNERS

military grandeur

ILLITERACY GOOD NEGRO GENEALOGY aristocratism

POLITICS/RHETORIC -paternalism

Machiavellianism Solid South
 
 

CONFORMITY OF BELIEF LEGEND OF THE OLD SOUTH
 
 
 
 
 
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY
 

Bertelson, David. The Lazy South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Cash, W.J. The Mind of the South. New York: Vintage Books, 1941, 1969.

Clayton, Bruce. The Savage Ideal: Intolerance and Intellectual Leadership in the South, 1890-1914. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.

Coles, Robert. Farewell to the South. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1972.

Davenport, F. Garvin, Jr. The Myth of Southern History. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1970.

Eaton, Clement. The Mind of the Old South. Kingsport: Louisiana State University Press, 1964.

Genovese, Eugene D. The World the Slaveholders Made. New York: Pantheon Books, 1969.

Gray, Richard. Writing the South. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

King, Richard H. A Southern Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Morrison, Joseph L. W.J. Cash: Southern Prophet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967.
 
 

ENDNOTES

1. F. Garvin Davenport, Jr., The Myth of Southern History, (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1970), p. 110.

2. Bruce Clayton, The Savage Ideal, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 1.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., quoting The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918), p. 57.

5. Richard Gray, Writing the South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 230.

6. Joseph L. Morrison, W. J. Cash: Southern Prophet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 5.

7. Robert Coles, Farewell to the South, (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1972), p. 131.

8. Important word to Southrons.

9. A chart of these characteristics is located at the end.

10. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books, 1941, 1969), p. 115.

11. Clement Eaton, The Mind of the Old South, (Kingsport: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), p. 176.

12. Cash, p. 122.

13. The revisionists tend to play down the Reconstruction era poverty and waste and then talk of the terrible problems of the New South. Since these eras mingle together so closely, it is my opinion that one cannot be fully a revisionist and be aware of the New South agricultural and labor problems.

14. David Bertelson, The Lazy South, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 239-240. Bertelson says: "To Cash, the history of the South had been a series of failures to emerge from its frontier condition."

15. See Cash, p. x.

16. Davenport, p. 111.

17. Ibid., p. 92.

18. Ibid.

19. See Cash, p. 439, on the South's virtues and vices.

20. Davenport, p. 112. Davenport continues: "If George Wallace is the current spokesman for these ideas and responses, all too many of his followers are from New York, Ohio, and Wyoming."

21. Cash, p. 439.

22. Davenport, p. 113-114.

23. Cash, p. 14-15.

24. Ibid., p. 63.

25. Davenport, p. 114.

26. Cash, p. 66.

27. Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), p. 141.

28. Ibid., p. 140.

29. Ibid.

30. Richard H. King, A Southern Renaissance, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 245.

31. Ibid., p. 267.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., p. 152.

34. Coles, p. 47.

35. Morrison, p. 6.

36. Ibid., p. 5.

37. Coles, p. 49.


Copyright 1997-2003 Gene Brooks.
Updated November 12, 2003.
 

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