How has the South changed Cash’s ‘Mind’?

Q. What would [W.J.] Cash find most surprising about today’s South?
A. The first would be the widespread acceptance of interracial marriage, which in 1941 would have been totally taboo to white Southerners — at least in the social sense, though of course in practical terms, interracial relationships have always been a fact of life in the South.
“The other is immigration. For a bunch of reasons, the South never knew any significant immigration until the 1980s, when the Mexican migration began. Cash spent much of his newspaper career working for papers in North Carolina, where today nearly 10 percent of the population is Hispanic, and where you can see flyers advertising Mexican bands stuck in the windows of the local Curves franchise. I think that would astonish him.
“And universal air conditioning!
— From “Everything Familiar Is About to Disappear: Tracy Thompson Talks About the South” by John Williams in the New York Times (April 3)
Thompson’s recent book, “The New Mind of the South,” devotes most of a chapter to Hispanic teenagers in Randolph County.
.

New Yorker rediscovers South according to W. J. Cash

“For a century after losing the Civil War, the South was America’s own colonial backwater — ‘not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it,’ W.J. Cash wrote in his classic 1941 study, ‘The Mind of the South’….

“Cash has this description of ‘the South at its best’: ‘proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal.’ These remain qualities that the rest of the country needs and often  calls on. The South’s vices — ‘violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas’ — grow particularly acute during periods when it it is marginalized and left behind. An estrangement between the South and the rest of the country would bring out the worst in both — dangerous insularity in the first, smug self-deception in the second.”

— From “Southern Discomfort” by George Packer in The New Yorker (Jan. 21, 2013)

 

W. J. Cash apologizes to Margaret Mitchell

On this day in 1941:  W.J. Cash writes Margaret Mitchell to explain a reference to her “Gone With the Wind” in his “The Mind of the South”:

“About that ‘sentimental’ crack: thinking it over, I have an idea that what inspired that carelessly thrown-off judgment was the feeling that your ‘good’ characters were shadowy.

“On reflection, I think the feeling may have proceeded less from themselves than from the fact that they were set beside that flamboyant wench, Scarlett. There were good women all over the place in the South, of course. But Scarlett is a female to go along with Becky Sharp [in “Vanity Fair”], wholly vivid and convincing. Beside her everybody else in the book, including even Butler, seems almost an abstraction.

“I hope you don’t mind my saying it; I know how stupid the judgments of others on his creation sometimes seem to a writer. Indeed, I am often madder at the critics who are trying to be kind than at those obviously out to do me dirt.”

Link dump survives another week on ‘Idol’

— “Like no-one else’s, Mr. Taylor’s music distills a primal American yearning that can never be completely satisfied….”

Descendant adds color to “Arrangement in Black and White.”

— “He will not be hanged until the mail train comes through tomorrow.”

Lost Cause was lost on W. J. Cash.

— “We left Wilmington… to witness and, if allowed, to participate in the bombardment of Fort Sumter”….  Road trip!

The making of ‘The Mind of the South’

“At Wake Forest [W. J. Cash] became… a fan of H. L. Mencken, the acerbic Baltimore journalist who’d derided the South as ‘the Sahara of the Bozart’….  He wanted to write for Mencken’s magazine, American Mercury.  In 1929 [it] published his Menckenesque dismantling of U.S. Sen. Furnifold Simmons…. ‘the stateliest Neanderthaler who ever cooled his heels on a Capitol Hill desk’….

“Other articles in the Mercury would follow, including an indignant portrayal of Charlotte as a citadel of bigotry and Babbitry, besotted by Presbyterianism and in love with Duke Power Co., a city where life for many consisted of ‘a dreary ritual of the office, golf and the church’ that is ‘unbearably dull even for Presbyterians.’

“Cash’s 1929 article ‘The Mind of the South’ attracted the interest of  the Knopf publishing house. Cash told Blanche Knopf of his plans to expand it into a book [not published until 1941] with the thesis that ‘the Southern mind represents a very definite culture, or attitude towards life, a heritage, from the Old South, but greatly modified and extended by conscious and unconscious efforts over the last hundred years to protect itself from the encroachments of three hostile factors: the Yankee Mind, the Modern Mind, and the Negro.’
“The salient characteristic of the Southern mind, Cash argued, ‘is a magnificent incapacity for the real, a Brobdingnagian talent for the fantastic’ — a mind, in short, that is wholly unadjusted to the demands of the modern world.”
— From remarks Sunday by Ed Williams, retired editor of the editorial pages of the Charlotte Observer, at the induction of W. J. Cash into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame
Also inducted: Walter Hines Page, Allan Gurganus, Robert Morgan and Samm-Art Williams.