The Mind of the South

by W.J. Cash, Bertram Wyatt-Brown (Introduction)

Ever since its publication in 1941, The Mind of the South has been recognized as a path-breaking work of scholarship and as a literary achievement of enormous eloquence and insight in its own right. From its investigation of the Southern class system to its pioneering assessments of the region's legacies of racism, religiosity, and romanticism, W. J. Cash's book defined the way in which millions of readers -- on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line -- would see the South for decades to come. This new, fiftieth-anniversary edition of The Mind of the South includes an incisive analysis of Cash himself and of his crucial place in the history of modern Southern letters.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Politics, Sociology, Southern, Race

444 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1941

Reviews

[Brett C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall I liked it. This was a unique read because the style of W.J. Cash. He presented the book almost as a long-winded speech or even a manifesto. He detailed the demographic makeup of the South from colonial times which I found interesting. Other aspects he discussed were particulars of religious, societal, agricultural, and much more.

W.J. Cash wrote with ferverence and romanticism in being heavily involved and totally embracing Southern culture and esteem. He made clear distinctions throughout the book by using the terms Southern and Yankee, Northern in reference to people, traits, and ideology.

The book is dated (published in 1941) and I had to adjust myself in reading. I'm sure there was a lot I missed and I will look through this again in the future. I would recommend this to anyone interested in reading about Southern history. Thanks!

[Chlo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I grew up in California, the farthest away that you can get to the South. 4 years ago, I decided to go to college in a small, boondock town in rural Virginia, and found myself in a whole other era. I have a certain "love" for the South that is more like fondness than actual love - because I am not a Southerner, and therefore I can never completely understand. This book, however, is as close as I can get to understanding the real culture and heritage of the South and the way the Southerner (then and now) thinks. It debunks a lot of myths about the South, and it brings out a lot of unspoken nuances about Southern culture (this book was published in the 1950s) and labels them.

I read this book as a part of a course on William Faulkner and his fiction, pertaining to the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction. W.J. Cash is a Southerner himself, and he was, in many ways, considered Benedict Arnold for publishing this book. In my opinion, it doesn't paint the South in a negative light - it just sheds light on it, and helps put a finger on a culture that is often, strangely enough, misunderstood. Now that I am living in the South, and though I still get frustrated sometimes by our differences, I get a better idea about where they're coming from.

[Jill H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a rather slow read as one must pause and think about the author's assumptions after every chapter. Written in 1941, the book is dated but still presents a prescient look at the world today and the problems that have existed which initially divided the country into the "North" and the "South". Cash traces the reasons that he believes have shaped the "Southern attitude" from the early 1800s....many seem right on target while others sometimes stretch the point a bit.

This is considered one of the classic books about the Southern ethos, a reputation it probably deserves but for some reason I couldn't seem to get involved. That does not mean that it shouldn't be read because it should as it presents some interesting ideas and attempts to speak to some commonly accepted misconceptions of the South. But I was somewhat disappointed......just one reader's opinion.

[Bob Mustin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was written some 75 years ago, and it’s amazing to me how closely Southern attitudes, the social structure, the personals and political cants of that time, parallel those of the South today. It’s tempting to make an essay of this review, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll list some of the predominant traits Cash (and I) see in the ongoing South (note - some of these bear explaining, I admit, and some are contradictory):

Romantic
Primitive
Unschooled
Racist
Anti-federalism
Resistant to change
Hedonistic
Apocalyptic
Fearful
Militant
Friendly

The list could go an, but it would also grow more contradictory, a predominant trait of the Southern mind.

And in keeping with these traits, Cash’s tone tends toward Southern political demagoguery, pulling back just before falling into the abyss of rant. His prose is flowery and a bit overblown, and he repeats himself (all to the reader’s advantage) on critical points.

Still, as a Southerner, I find little to fault in this book. It’s most prescient in its depictions of how things were in the South prior to WWII and, as above, it will enlighten the reader in understanding this sub-culture of these United States, and in realizing how difficult it is to arrive at a national consensus on anything today.


My rating: 19 of 20 stars

[Louis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was assigned this book in a Southern history course in college. I expected a volume with this title written in age of Jim Crow to be a ridiculous defense of segregation below the Mason-Dixon Line. To my surprise, the book is something quite different: a study of how the experience of slavery and the loss of the Civil War had caused a rigid, defensive mindset for Southerners. The defense of all things antebellum had united Southerners, allowing no room for dissenting views. Anything that diverged from the traditional view (the one on display in "Gone With the Wind") was just Yankee propaganda. Cash obviously struggled with this view and tried to understand how it came about and remained so powerful. His suffering (he committed suicide not long after this book was published) has produced a fascinating study that explains, even with mass media, American mobility and the Internet, how the South remains an aggressively distinctive part of this country. If you've ever wondered why this is so, Cash's book is an excellent place to find an explanation.

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This still tops my list of "Books that cause fights."

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

In his tome "The Mind of the South," W.J. Cash seeks to holistically interpret the development of the Southern ethos by exploring the evolution of the region from the colonial period through reconstruction. Cash determines that the paramount sensibilities of Southern society were determined through the qualities of simplicity, romanticism, violence, white supremacy, and individualism. This conclusion is demonstrated through admirable use of the English lexicon and convincing, if not convoluted, documentation. Yet ultimately, these pursuits eclipse the principle object of the work. In his introduction, Bertram Wyatt-Brown properly contends that stylistically, the work should be appreciated in a manner similar to those of towering American literary figures such as Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner. Unfortunately, this signifies the text is generally dominated by a disoriented narrative reminiscent of "The Sound and the Fury" at the expense of the precision which is essential to an articulate historical work.

According to Cash, the common conception of the antebellum Southern experience is a fabrication resulting from apocryphal myth that has permeated academic discourse on the subject since the end of the Civil War. Paramount among these fictions is a belief in the existence of a Southern aristocracy. Cash argues that to suggest "nobility" was established in the region ignores one of the principal components of aristocracy, the passage of time. Observing the relatively short duration between the settlement of the southern colonies and the rise of a thriving plantation system, he contends the establishment of nobility, in the European sense of the term, is inconceivable. As he states, "The whole period from the invention of the cotton gin to the outbreak of the Civil War is less than seventy years - the lifetime of a single man...The inference is plain. It is impossible to conceive the great South as being, on the whole, more than a few steps removed from the frontier stage at the beginning of the Civil War." Instead, Cash alleges the aristocratic ideal was borrowed from successful Virginia planters and then merged with the realities of the frontier lifestyle which dominated most of the South.

The entirety of Cash's dissection of the Southern character leads inexorably towards agreement with the notion that the South is inherently and irrevocably different from the North. This judgment is outlined in the first sentence of the text, and one upon which Cash predicates all the arguments which follow. This conviction is critical, for it contains within itself not only the delineation of Southern ideology, but more significantly the impetus for the division culminating in the Civil War. As Cash states, "That conflict...was inevitable. And not only for the reasons known to every reader of American history, but finally and fundamentally for the reason that it is not the nature of the human animal in the mass willingly to suffer difference - that he sees in it always a challenge to his universal illusion of being the chosen son of heaven, and so an intolerable affront to his ego, to be put down at any cost in treasure and blood."

One of the most fascinating aspects of this assertion is the degree to which conflicts did not widely arise within the South itself over the issue of slavery. Such a circumstance seems remarkable given that Chase demonstrates the institution exploited most white laborers in a fashion similar to that of slaves themselves. The plantation system ensured the most productive lands were retained by a few prosperous farmers, while the vast majority of planters were relegated to less profitable areas. Additionally, plantation owners often refused to purchase crops from fellow Southerners, preferring instead to import necessities from the North. Cash describes the situation as, "though the slaveless yeomen might wax fat in the sort of primitive prosperity which consisted in having an abundance of what they themselves could produce, they could not go much further than that - were left more or less to stagnate at a level but a step or two above pioneers."

Somewhat perplexingly, the mass of Southern planters never recognized the inequity of the system which they endeavored to preserve. Some did maintain views, such as the farmer who declared "'The stupid and sequacious masses, the white victims of slavery...believe whatever the slaveholders tell them; and thus are cajoled into the notion that they are the freest, happiest, and most intelligent people in the world'." However, most laborers did not perceive injustice in their situation, or even regard themselves as inferior to the agricultural "aristocracy." Partly, this is because familial ties remained between farmers of varying economic stature as a legacy of a frontier society. More importantly, poor whites simply embraced different priorities than those of the more affluent planters. As Cash affirms, "In the South, if your neighbor overshadowed you in the number of slaves, you could outshoot or outfiddle him, and in your own eyes, and in those of many of your fellows, remain essentially as good a man as he."

While most of Cash's sociological judgments are convincing, some suffer from a simplification of cultural identities that borders on stereotype. For instance, in his discussion of the Southern affinity for religion, he affirms "As I have said, his chief blood-strain was likely to be the Celtic - of all Western strains the most susceptible to suggestions of the supernatural." This abridgment of religious idiosyncrasies is without context, and seems based solely on personal sentimentalities. Undoubtedly, Celtic Druids would say the opposite of Italian papists, and Irish Catholics would label German Calvinists equally "superstitious."

Yet the primary failing of Cash's account is the exercise of allusions that obscure rather than clarify his larger thesis. To fully comprehend many of the text's more exhaustive analyses, the reader is expected to posses an expertise in disciplines as diverse as literature, art, history, and foreign language. Prominent among the esoteric devices utilized include essays belonging to Arnold and Emerson, drama by playwrights Aristophanes and Moliere, paintings of Watteau, the Napoleonic and Peloponnesian wars, and a commanding proficiency of French and Latin vocabulary. It is unclear whether Cash is so accomplished that he is oblivious to the immense breadth of his inclusions, or whether he simply means to flaunt his intelligence to readers through the presentation of a muddled amalgamation of unrelated conceits.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in 1940, The Mind of the South is a book-length essay by W.J. Cash, a "loyal son of the South," that examines and attempts to explain Southern history, values, and attitudes. The book contains numerous valuable insights and much thought-provoking analysis of what made (and in many respects, still makes) the Southern section of the United States unique.

I have several substantive criticisms of the book, primarily relating to Cash's treatment of the racial issue. And Cash's writing style sometimes makes the book difficult to wade through. But I still highly recommend the book to students of American history, and Southern history especially.

See my full review on my website brianlokker.com.

[John R · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've just begun a re-read of this book after a 50 year hiatus. As a college student, I was too brash and too green to appreciate Cash's fresh and vivid prose. Wonderful reading.

[Mommalibrarian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written in 1940, before the mechanical cotton picker and the second World War, as the Depression drug on for most people. The writer of the foreword warns quite explicitely that the book only considers the point of view of white men. If you are interested in that point of view and can wall off your concerns about what women or people of color (euphemism) thought and felt, then you may find this an interesting read. There are traits that most people associate with the South and Southerners (other than racism which I think is fairly widespread across most of the world and not a attribute restricted to that region). The author starts with the pioneer farmers in the area and carries his theory through until 1940. He finds reasons for things which he does not condone but reasons none the less. There is some good and much to censure. He obviously cares about his subject matter and would wish the keep the good and remove the bad. Instead he just tries to tie it all toghether. This is the closing and gives a fair summary of the traits he followed.

"Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terribly, in its action - such was the South at its best" .... "Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values and a tendency to cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism - these have been the characteristic vices in the past. And despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today."

[Kurt Cobb · Rating 5 out of 5]

W. J. Cash's "The Mind of the South" is without a doubt the Rosetta stone of the Southern American mentality, a mentality that has proven remarkably durable against the vast changes experienced by the American South from the Civil War to today.

This long essay is part social and intellectual history, part psychology, part confession from a Southerner who is trying make the general mindset of his fellow Southerners accessible to non-residents. Cash explains the Southerner's worst attributes without being defensive and his/her best attributes without being boastful. He shows why the "mind of the south" is so durable against the tides of change. And, he holds out hope that its worst aspects will finally be overcome by Southerners of conscience and visitors and new residents from other places bringing new ideas.

Among other things he explains why the broad expansion of the slaveholding cotton plantation was entirely implausible until the invention of the cotton gin. He shows how the invention of a Southern aristocracy from whole cloth and the enduring Romanticism of Southern thought solidified into a Southern mind. He shows how racial identity continued to trump class interests among the poor except for brief moments in Southern history. He discusses how the coming of Southern cotton mills both lifted up the South and hardened its racial politics.

Completed before World War II, "The Mind of South" continues to be a guide to the durable Southern mentality that showed itself most recently when the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated part of the Voting Rights Act which had forced most Southern states to seek permission from the U.S. Justice Department before changing their voting laws. Within days many states had moved bills that would re-establish the same exclusionary voting laws that had prompted the Voting Rights Act--exclusionary laws that are a re-assertion of a racial politics which people believed had faded and was vanishing in recent decades under pressure from federal civil rights laws and changing Southern demographics and attitudes.

Alas, the Southern mind lives on, and Cash's eloquently written account of that mind is as relevant today as ever.

In Cash's final paragraphs appears perhaps the best summary of his portrait of the American Southerner:

"Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible, in its actions--such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism--these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today."

[Reed Peeples · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm annoyed at myself for not reading The Mind of the South when I first heard of it eight years ago. I'm more annoyed at my professors for letting a me graduate from a college in the deep south without understanding the ideas Cash outlines. I was familiar with many of the broad ideas - the myth of the Lost Cause, a southern aristocracy, and so forth - but what I did not grasp was how these notions actually affected and shaped the psyche of individual Southerners. Many of the Southerners I've known make a lot more sense to me now that I understand the origins of their cultural assumptions.

Cash's narrative of southern labor/economic history is the most airtight of his various lines of thought, and there are quotes and passages on this topic that could quite easily be copy/pasted into modern newspaper editorials on the topic. I have deep, angular exclamation points in the margins of my copy of The Mind where Cash explains the origins of the southern habit of courting factory construction with tax cuts and accommodations so extreme as to more than negate any economic benefit of the jobs or associated social "progress". Anyone familiar with the process that resulted in BMW building a plant in upstate South Carolina will understand my newfound indignation.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its intellect and historical importance deserve the highest rating, but as a modern reader, the outdated thinking related to African Americans and women is a little difficult. It's so incongruent with the profound understanding he exhibits about the South, as a whole.

[Jeff Garrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the introduction to the 50th Anniversary reprint of this book, Bertram Wyatt-Brown compares Cash’s writing to that of a southern lawyer addressing the jury. If that’s the case, I’m sure most of the jury would vote to hang his defendant on sheer principle. This is a long and wordy book. It often repeats itself. Furthermore, it doesn’t come to any great conclusion. At the end, I found myself wondering if the author just ran out of steam. It appears he’s still in the middle of the story, which is true, for the changes in the South that Cash described in 1940 would continued at even a more rapid rate during the Second World War and throughout the Civil Rights movement. Although I am critical of Cash’s tendency to wax on and on, he is an engaging writer and I’m glad to have plowed through his work.

Cash divides the south into three “frontiers” (pre-Civil War, reconstruction and its aftermath, and the era of industrialization). Wyatt-Brown suggests in his introduction that Cash draws upon Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier hypothesis for the American West. Although Turner is best known for the thesis, Cash applies economic theory to the thesis (much like another disciple of Turner, Walter Prescott Webb, does in his classic, The Great Frontier). Like Webb, Cash sees the frontier as an opportunity for economic expansion. In seeing three distinct frontiers in the South, Cash see’s three opportunities for economic improvements. However, through each of these stages, certain “distinctive” Southern features remain and are reinforced.

In the first part of the book, where Cash reviews the pre-Civil War south, he goes to great extend to debunk the southern plantation myths that the planters of the old south were English Cavaliers, often linked to royalty. That may have been the case for a handful of plantations in Virginia, but most planters were ordinary men who took risk, got lucky and rose up through the ranks. Cash shows distain for the antebellum south, pointing out that despite all the mythology about how good it was; the South was backwards. The South did not produce any significant literary or philosophical giants during this way. Set in its ways, the South was reluctant to give up slavery, which economically was a failure.

Cash interpretation of the Civil War would probably anger both northern and southern apologists.

“The Civil War and Reconstruction represents in their aspect an attempt on the part of the Yankee to achieve by force what it had failed to achieve by political means: first, a free hand in the thievish aims of the tariff gang, and secondly, and far more fundamentally, the satisfaction of the instinctive urge of men in the mass to put down whatever differs from themselves—the will to make over the South in the prevailing American image and to sweep it into the main current of the nation.”
He continues by pointing out that it appears the North was successful at Appomattox, but their victory was illusory. Although the South was defeated, the will and mind of the South was not only still intact, it had been fortified. In fact, the South was even more unified after the war than during the war, when individual states overshadowed national unity. Reconstruction ended during the 1876 election, according to Cash, because Florida was willing to put the Republican “tariff gang” into the White House, trading high tariffs for the removal of Northern soldiers. After Reconstruction, the old order in the South returned. Although slavery had ended, African-Americans found they were not really free. With tariffs in place, guaranteeing low prices for southern cotton for the northern mills, Cash noted that moral issues such as civil rights were less a concern and the North. Of course, the years following the Civil War were difficult in the South due to the lack of capital. During this time, when no one had money, the leadership in the South was solidified with the former planters who had also been the officers in the Confederate Army.

As the 19th Century came to a close, textile mills began to be built across the south. Again, new opportunities were available, but they were limited as the mills became the plantations of the early 20th Century. As with the Planters and the Confederate Captains of previous decades, the mill owners developed a paternal outlook for their workers, even though they also worked hard to maintain the low wages that allowed them to lure more business away from the New England mills. In time, as one generation of leaders gave way to the next, the paternalistic outlooks of the bosses waned, leading to the textile strikes in the late 1920s. Unionism, however, failed in the South.

Much of Cash’s interpretation of the southern mind has to do with holding contradictory or paradoxical views. The South both embraced progressive movements yet it was reluctant to change. A tendency toward both hedonism and Puritanism is found throughout the South. Religiously, even the Methodists in the South were steeped in a stern Calvinism, yet there was also an undercut of free-will theology. The southern conservative mythology focuses on the individual, yet at the same time demands conformity from everyone. Throughout the era of Cash’s study, a caste system existed in the South. It changed, from planter, to confederate officer, to mill boss, but it structurally remained the same. This system also prevented the rise of an egalitarian populist movement in the late 19th century that brought together poor whites and blacks. Instead, poorer whites continued to seek the leadership of more well-to-do whites.

This is not a book to understand the South today. DON’T PICK IT UP THINKING YOU CAN GET INSIDE SAGE’S MIND!!! Cash interprets the South at the end of the “cotton era,” which ended before my birth. There are many problems with the book. Although critical of romanticism, he tends to have a romantic view of the south. He also has a problem with religion in general. He sees fundamentalism rising from southern primitivism (George Mardsen in Fundamentalism and American Culture, along with others have shown that fundamentalism as a movement developed first within Northern evangelicalism). There are more up to date books for understanding the South. For Southern religion, check out Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt and Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920. For the develop of business and industry in the South, see Allen Tullos, Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book was a struggle due to the unnecessarily verbose writing style of Cash . He traced the origin of what we usually think of as the South, cotton plantations, to the most ambitious frontier men and those willing to carve farmland from the vast wooded areas. He casts doubt on the usual notion that these plantation owners were”aristocratic” when compared to aristocratic Virginians.

He puts forth the Proto-Dorian bond between upper class and lower classes of whites based on their white race, which makes even the poorest white superior to a member of the African American race. As he nears 1940 when the book was published, he still sees only small changes in this view of Southern whites towards Blacks.

Although the history of unions, cotton mills, and industrialization of the South is interesting and informative, I find modern books on race much more readable and informative.

In short, this 400 page book could be more concise , and the information condensed to 200 pages. It reads more like an op-Ed essay than a researched nonfiction study of the South.

I can’t really find anything this book offers the modern reader other than a probably shocking view of the South in 1940!

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a Yankee born and bred who has forebears who fought on the Union side of the Civil War. I've lived in Atlanta for the past 18 years, and was spurred to read this in part because of the demonstrably wrong things that people have been saying about the Civil War, particularly in light of the removal of the Battle flag from the South Carolina capital building. The same Lost Cause arguments were probably being made at the point that the Georgia flag was changed, but they didn't make the same impact on me.

This version of the book has an excellent introduction that puts the book into historical context and examines some of its limitations. The book examines Southern identity from the 18th through mid-20th centuries, and in spite of its limitations, there is a reason that this is a classic still in print. I felt that it explained a lot, and a good bit of it is still applicable today. As I've gone on to more recent Southern history and analysis, it has a clear influence on those works, and parts of it are well borne out. An excellent and readable analysis, although I would have appreciated a more thorough job of citing sources.

[Alex Poston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult to review. Always eloquent, but hamstrung, I think, by regressive attitude re race. Read for a socio-economic interpretation of white Southerners only in relation to themselves. I don’t trust Cash to responsibly interpret whites interaction with their black fellows. Biggest draw is his reinterpretation of the old south as a pioneer society with aristocratic pretensions.

[Sean Chick · Rating 3 out of 5]

While intriguing, the books seems more like an extended rant on how the South has no mind at all. He also ignores the Civil War. Still, this is a book worth knowing if you enjoy Southern history.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Takes some time and is worth it. It has always haunted me that W.J.Cash committed suicide after writing this book.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Longer sentences than even Kendrick Curtis himself. Very valuable book and strangely, provided me with insight into my relationship with my Mom.

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A little exaggeration here, a little blurring there, a little sagging in one place and a little upthrusting in another -- and voila! ... Catch Calhoun or Jeff Davis or Abe Lincoln (whose blood stemmed from the Carolina foothill country, remember) young enough, nurse him on 'bust-head,' feed him hog and pone, give him twenty years of lolling -- expose him to all the conditions to which the cracker was exposed -- and you have it exactly." (26)

"And what is true of the planter is true also, mutatis mutandis, for the poorer whites under this plantation order. The farmers and the crackers were in their own way self-sufficient too -- as fiercely careful of their prerogatives of ownership, as jealous of their sway over their puny domains, as the grandest lord." (33)

"But already, by implication, I have been taking you deep into the territory of a second great Southern characteristic which deserves to be examined throughly in its own right. I mean the tendency toward unreality, toward romanticism, and, in intimate relation with that, toward hedonism." (44)

"The New South meant and boasted of was mainly a South which would be new in this: it would be so rich and powerful that it might rest serene in its ancient positions, forever impregnable." (183-4)

"But the general history of such machines suggests that the cotton-picker will eventually be perfected, for use in relatively flat country at least -- and the greater part of the richer cotton lands of the South are located in just such country. The Rust brothers announce the establishment of a foundation which will turn back a large portion of the profits from the invention for the purpose of retraining and reestablishing the people dispossessed by it." (411)

"Proud, brave, honorable by it lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible, in its action -- such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion towards new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism -- these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today." (428-9)

[v · Rating 2 out of 5]

W.J. Cash writes within divides: obviously that between the geographical North and South but also that bridging a century of social thought.
Three of the more striking notions that he advances in this book are that: the Antebellum South is merely a myth which throughout time has performed specific functions; that a shared feeling and enforcement of white supremacy served, among other purposes, to prevent any significant class conflict between planters and poor whites in the Antebellum and post-Reconstruction periods; and that the average white Southerner is uneducated, intolerant, and easily swayed by populist demagogues. Tweak the language and shift the emphasis a little bit, and I think that you won't find these ideas too dissimilar to the those found in the polemics glutting the 2020s' New York Times bestseller rosters.
On the other hand, Cash, like many writers from earlier in his century, is invested in a view of race (at least in some chapters -- not all) that is incommensurable to those popular today; he also writes in a chirpy, allusive, contradicting, and systematically snobbish mode that hardly could've survived his mentor, H.L. Mencken.
What I couldn't stomach was the book's basic methodological assumption -- not that the North and South are distinct from one another, which I believe -- but that a region, people, or class (really, anything other than an individual person) has a "mind" or consciousness. Categorically, they do not; there is no Southern "mind" or manner of thinking, and Cash's "native Southern tendencies," which he wields to explain every single thing a Southern person could ever do or say, do not exist. Indeed, this "mind" is merely a pretext for the frustrated unloading of schematic stereotypes and the sanctimonious gloating of those who buy into them. It is a sad state of affairs when the only extended discussion of an individual Southern person's life in a book entirely devoted to Southern society is that of a fictional character entirely fabricated by the author for the sake of argument. Simplifying, abstracting, and levelling as they are when they depart from simple sociological or historical description, Cash's ideas then can be occasionally fascinating (I'm partial to the one about Southern guilt -- it's like some kind of Oedipal epic on a provincial scale) but never compelling.
The Mind of the South is a fairly intriguing and ultimately disappointing book -- and a troubled book, written by a troubled man. I'm curious enough about Cash to track down a biography. Also, the damn thing is twice as long as it need be.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most interesting thing about WJ Cash's The Mind of the South is how well it ages and how profitably it can be read 80 years after it was first published. To be sure, Cash's lengthy discourse on cotton prices and textile spindles may not hold as much direct interest for us today. His laser-like focus, however, on the development and manifestation of the defining characteristic of the Southern Mind - the narrow conformity, hyper-individualist, violent compact that is White Supremacy - Cash's Savage Ideal, is as illuminating today as it was 80 or 180 years ago. Reading Cash is like going through a diamond mine - dark and cavernous at times, but especially gleaming with brilliance when the light of the events of today are shined on his central argument. There are important omissions, his relative inattention to African American agency throughout the period being the most significant. He also fails to adequately address the realities and effects of the Great Migration, as well as the significance of the presidency of Woodrow Wilson on nationalizing the Southern Mind and White Supremacy. No doubt, this is because Wilson is of a slightly different sort - the 'modern intellectual' did not fit Cash's depictions of either Southern demagogues or enlightened reformers and so is left unmentioned. What Cash does mention, however, on so many fronts, from the compact between various classes of Whites (for example, he shows how average and even poor Whites benefit from White Supremacy – not just the White elites), to the connections between religious fundamentalism and the maintenance of the Savage Ideal work to shine great light on today's world and our present circumstances. I don’t think Cash would be too surprised by the upheavals of the past year – like few others, he documented and understood their origins.

[Bart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although somewhat dated by now (2019) this is an interesting reflection the economic, cultural and political history of the Southern (confederate) states in the USA. A history that can be summed up as in the final section of the book: "Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion towards new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism, and a too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values".

Written in a style that sounds a bit clumsy for modern readers, the book provides a very interesting analysis by a mind that was raised and embedded in the South itself. The tone is at times clearly racist to my current interpretation, but also sometimes bordering on a Marxist argument of equality (for the white man). It is clearly written from a white perspective, reducing the role of African Americans to little more than a class of sub-humans. But it also provides an interesting picture of pre-WWII Trumpism, clearly showing that "populism" in American politics did not emerge with Trump's Republican party, but rather out of the Democratic Party that ruled the South after the end of the Civil War.

[Jennifer Triplett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leans on the long-winded side, with some historical references that most people are not going to know unless they were alive in 1920 in the South, but his breakdown of the issues that have plagued the South for what seems like forever, and the reasons those issues exist, make this book pretty incredible. Some of the lines could have been written today. His summary especially:

"Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to action, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible, in its action - such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than form thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism - these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today."

[Jim Gulley · Rating 4 out of 5]

An examination of (white, male) Southern culture and ideology, the book is divided into three periods: antebellum, Reconstruction to WWI, and the Great Depression. Cash argues that the “mind of the South” was formed during the heyday of King Cotton, 1820-1860, and shaped by major historical events thereafter. He dispels the myth of the Old South’s cavalier romanticism, and focuses on the “man in the center,” the undereducated, common white man who is manipulated by aristocrats and demagogues. After Reconstruction, the South chose to pursue the race path rather than class, Cash’s explanation is the “Proto-Dorian complex” (solidarity of white males) combined with the “Savage Ideal” – the social pressure to adhere to the ancient patterns.

The New South was consumed by “Progress.” Though the South could not escape King Cotton, its economy did experience a transition into industrial development. Cash uses the cotton mills of South Carolina as his case study. The archetype of the New South was the “hell-of-a-fellow,” the rugged, hedonistic individual hewn out of the frontier.

[fake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very angry look at the South of the US, it's problematic past and present from the year 1939.
Book's perspective is a bit narrow and white-male-dominated. Yes, there is some problematic phrasing for 2k20. But it's still great analysis. Emotional (yes, author is southerner himself and hanged himself right after book publication), insightful and exciting. It is not that much of history book, but more of kinda Marxist-ish analysis - daily conditions and customs of common Southerner of the times. You will not find detailed descriptions of events or historical figures of the time. Lack of class consciousness amongst the poor population, violence against worker's strikes, slavery as a key to keeping the whole oppressive system intact are major themes in the book.
Similarities with today's USA are fascinating. South and confederacy are clearly readable roots of Trump-era politics, it's xenophobia, paternalism and extreme individualism.

[Matthew Tessnear · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cash says it well at the end of his final section: The book is too long. However, this book maintains an incredible relevance 80 years after its first publishing. It explores, analyzes and explains the history of the American South so well—the good all the way to the bad, and everything in between. It’s haunting reading how much the issues of the past in the South continue to exist and grow today. As a native of the South, this is a book I will keep at arm’s length as I continue to read and write about the American South in the future. I imagine I will read this book again years from now to see how it holds up at 100 years old.

[Eldon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1941, this book is an honest attempt, for the time, to try and come to terms with what the South means for America. While knowing that such evil and ignorant world views permeate our country, there can be no denying where and why they came to be.

The South is smug and full of denial with a profound unwillingness to look critically at how powerful and racist forces have harmed us all. This book is an early effort to come to terms with how these forces have used and manipulated against the best interests of the entire country. Cash did a remarkable job for when he was writing.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating counterbalance to Lanterns on the Levee. I don't know how much I buy some of his armchair psychology (albeit from the arm of a chair that appears to have been firmly placed on southern porches for most of his life, so it's not like he doesn't know his people), but by the alternatingly gratified and outraged marginalia left by a previous southern reader, I figure he must have been doing something right. As an aside, his violent death was something of a mystery, which is just so, well, southern.