W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South

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 bas

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th . . . was a society beset by the specters of defeat, of shame, of guilt---a society driven by the need to bolster its morale, to nerve its arm against waxing odds, to justify in its own eyes and in those of the world. A major contradiction arises in Cash's work with respect to blacks and slavery. What Cash has to say about blacks reveals his own personal prejudices, but at the same time he is critical of slavery as an institution. In any case, with respect to the foregoing passage, Genovese concludes that "There is more than enough substance and genuine insight here; it is the partiality and one-sidedness of the viewpoint that creates distortions." Specifically, Genovese points out that Cash is too willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Southerners who were supposedly feeling guilty about slavery and yet continued to promote that racist and inhumane institution. Fred Hobson, in Tell About the South, is far more appreciative of Cash's book than either Genovese or O'Brien, primarily because he assesses the book on its own terms. Hobson sees the contradictions in the book as expressions of the contradictions which mark the South and the mind of the South itself: Cash stressed the individualism and romanticism of the Ol

Category: History - W