W.J. Cash

W.J. Cash (born May 2, 1900, Gaffney, S.C., U.S.—died July 1, 1941, Mexico City, Mex.) was an American author, editor, and journalist, best known for his single book, The Mind of the South (1941), a classic analysis of white Southern temperament and culture.

The son of Carolina Piedmont Baptists, Cash graduated in 1922 from Wake Forest College (North Carolina), attended a year of law school, and then taught in college and a boys’ school for two years. He then turned to journalism, working over the years mainly for the Charlotte News (North Carolina) as an editor and contributing articles to H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury. Turning against his inherited values and becoming staunchly liberal, he scorned religious fundamentalism and Prohibition, regretted what he considered a Southern malaise, and attacked fascism overseas. The manuscript of The Mind of the South was completed in July 1940, he married in December, and the book was published in February 1941. The critical acclaim won him, among other things, a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to go to Mexico to work on a novel about the South. There, however, he became physically and mentally ill and hanged himself in a Mexico City hotel room.

In The Mind of the South, Cash tried to debunk the idea of an “aristocratic” Old South and a “progressive” New South and sought to describe the romanticism, antiintellectualism, and prejudice that he believed arose from a peculiar Southern climate, landscape, frontier violence, clannishness, and Calvinism.