This study will provide a comparative critique of W.J. Cash's 1941 book The Mind of the South. The study will use five essays on Cash's seminal and controversial work, focusing on whether or not Cash's portrayal of the South is accurate and what impact his work has had on subsequent research on the same subject.
One of the major assumptions of Cash's work is that for all their superficial differences, Southerners are similar in their thinking. It should be noted, as the Introduction to Cash's book makes clear, that Cash's audience is primarily the white male Southerner. With this in mind, we find Michael O'Brien, in Rethinking the South, rejecting Cash's work: "W.J. Cash made much of the idea that one Southerner is much like another. It is a misguided notion, and pernicious when translated to studying the life of the mind."
In other words, like many critics of Cash's work, O'Brien dismisses Cash's ideas because they are both incorrect and dangerous in the effect they have on subsequent readers and researchers. Cash is highly critical of the provincialism of the Southern mind, and it is obviously a simpler task to judge that mind if one argues, as Cash does, that there is a continuity in that mind through the decades, that there is not really such a thing as the "Old South" or the "New South." In fact, a number of critics judge Cash's work negatively based on that same charge of provincialism on his part. One of O'Brien's major complaints about Cash is that his work is based on a study of a very small part of the South, which Cash then extrapolates to cover the mind of the entire South: "Cash based his thesis solidly upon knowledge of Piedmont, North Carolina, even as he grotesquely overgeneralized from that experience to the rest of the South." O'Brien's criticism of Cash's book is extensive:
. . . The Mind of the South ignores the colonial history of the South, scants the Old South, and misunderstands the New South. It...