The Mind of the South

Rating:
Summary: The Bedrock For Southern Intellectual History
Review: For Boomer aged Southerners, there was no formal Southern history. At school you got Yankee cant; at home you got Lost Cause and Jim Crow. That doesn't fit the Chamber of Commerce image of cities too busy to hate, but that was the reality for all but the most miniscule minority of white Southerners. Through public school and college in The South, I never had a word from Southern thinkers with the minor exception of Faulkner - not much of a thinker, but a good describer.
Cash was my introduction to Southern intellectual history, and by the time I found him I was far from the South in both space and time. I can feel Cash in my very bones; a dose of Tom Watson populism, a dose of Mencken's cynicism, and a whole bunch of the self-loathing that a defeated and impoverished people wore like tattered old clothes every day. Some neo-Southerners call Cash a South-hater, but they miss the point; Cash wanted desperately to love The South, but could find little to love except myth. You get much the same with Woodward, though in finer clothes. "Strange Career" is nothing but myth, yet it propelled Woodward to the heights of the Academy. The key to both these books is that they are Yankee approved mythology. The publishing houses are not on Peachtree Street, they are on 5th Avenue. For anyone wishing to begin exploration of Southern thought, Cash, the Nashville Agrarians, and Strange Career are the places to start. If you go no further, you won't know anything about The South, but to go further, you must start here.

Rating:
Summary: The Bedrock For Southern Intellectual History
Review: For Boomer aged Southerners, there was no formal Southern history. At school you got Yankee cant; at home you got Lost Cause and Jim Crow. That doesn't fit the Chamber of Commerce image of cities too busy to hate, but that was the reality for all but the most miniscule minority of white Southerners. Through public school and college in The South, I never had a word from Southern thinkers with the minor exception of Faulkner - not much of a thinker, but a good describer.
Cash was my introduction to Southern intellectual history, and by the time I found him I was far from the South in both space and time. I can feel Cash in my very bones; a dose of Tom Watson populism, a dose of Mencken's cynicism, and a whole bunch of the self-loathing that a defeated and impoverished people wore like tattered old clothes every day. Some neo-Southerners call Cash a South-hater, but they miss the point; Cash wanted desperately to love The South, but could find little to love except myth. You get much the same with Woodward, though in finer clothes. "Strange Career" is nothing but myth, yet it propelled Woodward to the heights of the Academy. The key to both these books is that they are Yankee approved mythology. The publishing houses are not on Peachtree Street, they are on 5th Avenue. For anyone wishing to begin exploration of Southern thought, Cash, the Nashville Agrarians, and Strange Career are the places to start. If you go no further, you won't know anything about The South, but to go further, you must start here.

Rating:
Summary: For every Yankee
Review: Have you ever wondered why Southerners are the way they are?Why are they so hospitable sometimes but so refractory at other times?Why did we (Yankees) have to fight that Civil War with them? "The Mind of the South" holds answers to these questions as it paints a loose, but poignant picture of southern attitudes before the Civil War. It was written by a Southerner. However, I'm certain that anyone with an interest in the Civil War, the South, or the psychology of Southerners, would find it interesting. I found that it helped me understand why Southerners don't see things the way I do. Why would a Southerner see a Yankee "as cowardly, avaricious, boorish, half Pantaloon and half Shylock" and himself "as polished, brave, generous, magnificent, wholly the stately aristocrat, fit to cow a dozen Yankees with the power of his eye and a cane? (pg. 67-68)" Read the book to find out why. The effect of reconstruction on the attitudes of Southerners is also explored, as well as the growth of the South up to W.W. II. This was also very insightful. The book did tend to be a little too long. You may find some of it offensive. It is certainly controversial. Nevertheless, I highly reccomend this book. END

Rating:
Summary: a classic-- - in fact THE classic about the South
Review: I am the author of Rising Tide, another book about the South, and the greatest compliment paid to me so far was by someone who compared my book to this brilliant book. Cash's work is certainly one of the most insightful inquiries ever written about any region, any where, by anyone. Some of Samuel Johnson's work about his travels into the Scottish Highlands comes to mind as comparable, but I can't think of any other. In fact, the southerners Cash wrote about are often descended from that same stock.

Then of course there's the personal tragedy of the author's suicide. If you want to understand America, you have to read this book.

A good counterpoint to this is William Alexander Percy's Lantenrs on the Levee, published the same year and also still in print. Cash writes about rednecks; Percy writes about aristocrats, chiefly his own family who considered being called "Anglo-Saxon" an insult. They, after all, were descended from the Norman conquerors nof the Anglo-Saxons.

Rating:
Summary: Psychological history
Review: I looked forward to reading this book because it was presented to me as definitive in its field. Much to my chagrin, what I read sounded as calm and reflective as something that might have been issued from the Union war office in 1863. Cash has nothing good to say for the South, which is why this piece of cheap propaganda is a "classic." After reading about two hundred pages, I looked at the paragraph or two about the author, which stated what I had already suspected. Cash was a Southerner who wrote this book and then hanged himself. If you want to experience page after chapter after page of a man with complete self-loathing, then I recommend The Mind of the South, a book in which we learn much about Mr. Cash's mind in Cloud-Cuckooland, though next to nothing about the real South. That this book is often foisted on unsuspecting students fills me with loathing.

Rating:
Summary: Don't stop reading at page 200.
Review: If you pick up this book, my advice to you is not to quit reading at page 200. Though Cash paints a picture of the South that is mainly unflattering, it is not entirely without reason and maybe not completely because he hates the region; I believe that in the latter half of the book, the reader gets a clear image of "The Mind of WJ Cash."

This book indeed embodies a comprehensive history of the South, beneficial and useful once the reader embraces the flow of Mr. Cash's prose and his myiad tangents. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the South, though some readers have and will indubitably see this "classic" work as self-righteous, hypocritical and incongruent as the author's subject matter.

Rating:
Summary: A reaction to Gone with the Wind.
Review: Since Reconstruction, works of Southern history and, in this case, sociology have usually fallen into two distinct genres. The first tends to reinforce the popular Old South mythology with exaggerated, romantic imagery as inspired by an emotional attachment to the "Lost Cause." The second is a reaction to the first. The revisionists, always irritated by the chauvinism of Southern popular mythology, want to convince you that Southern mythology is exactly that--a myth. The most violent of the revisionists will have you believe that romantic images of the Old South are fundamentally fictional--an image created by the Southern propagandists eager to create only the most flattering cultural portrait. For the record, THE MIND OF THE SOUTH falls more into the second category than the first. In fact, all of the works of Southern history and sociology that we now consider "classic" are more critical and revisionist than romantic. The non-fiction works of Cash, Odum, and C. Vann Woodward, and the fiction of Ellen Glasgow are all appreciated throughout the country for their critical views of what we call the Old South. It has become nearly equivalent in Southern studies to call a work both revisionist and worthy of praise. The ideas are, unfortunately, redundant. One's appreciation for things Southern all but negates one's credibility as a serious scholar. But the problem with extreme revisionism, and with the Cash work in particular, is that it has you believe that Southern mythology is SO fictional that it is nearly arbitrary. It wants you to believe that popular Southern imagery is a product of ignornace rather than careful consideration of the evidence. There is a difference between calling mythology an exaggeration, as the best works of William C. Davis, John Shelton Reed and Edward L. Ayers do, and calling it patently false, as the works of C. Vann Woodward and W. J. Cash do. This is the challenging question for any revisionist: If the popular view you are trying to de- and reconstruct is false, why (and how) was it originally created? And more critically, if all of history is just a social construction, what makes your take on things innately more accurate than mine? It seems to me that popular mythology must have some grain of truth, for it would not have developed as it did from nothing. It must be based on something that really exists. This idea, of course, is violently rejected by most post-modern historians who believe that ALL of history is nothing more than a social construction. For those sympathetic to that view, this book will appeal to you. To those looking for some insights into the factual basis for a Southern creation myth, you'd do better to read Ayers, Davis, or Reed. These fine historians are able to treat the topic with a sensitive balance of critical insight and popular appreciation.

Published in 1941, one can't help but think that THE MIND OF THE SOUTH is an iconoclastic reaction to the immense popularity of GONE WITH THE WIND, released in 1939.

Rating:
Summary: A reaction to Gone with the Wind.
Review: Since Reconstruction, works of Southern history and, in this case, sociology have usually fallen into two distinct genres. The first tends to reinforce the popular Old South mythology with exaggerated, romantic imagery as inspired by an emotional attachment to the "Lost Cause." The second is a reaction to the first. The revisionists, always irritated by the chauvinism of Southern popular mythology, want to convince you that Southern mythology is exactly that--a myth. The most violent of the revisionists will have you believe that romantic images of the Old South are fundamentally fictional--an image created by the Southern propagandists eager to create only the most flattering cultural portrait. For the record, THE MIND OF THE SOUTH falls more into the second category than the first. In fact, all of the works of Southern history and sociology that we now consider "classic" are more critical and revisionist than romantic. The non-fiction works of Cash, Odum, and C. Vann Woodward, and the fiction of Ellen Glasgow are all appreciated throughout the country for their critical views of what we call the Old South. It has become nearly equivalent in Southern studies to call a work both revisionist and worthy of praise. The ideas are, unfortunately, redundant. One's appreciation for things Southern all but negates one's credibility as a serious scholar. But the problem with extreme revisionism, and with the Cash work in particular, is that it has you believe that Southern mythology is SO fictional that it is nearly arbitrary. It wants you to believe that popular Southern imagery is a product of ignornace rather than careful consideration of the evidence. There is a difference between calling mythology an exaggeration, as the best works of William C. Davis, John Shelton Reed and Edward L. Ayers do, and calling it patently false, as the works of C. Vann Woodward and W. J. Cash do. This is the challenging question for any revisionist: If the popular view you are trying to de- and reconstruct is false, why (and how) was it originally created? And more critically, if all of history is just a social construction, what makes your take on things innately more accurate than mine? It seems to me that popular mythology must have some grain of truth, for it would not have developed as it did from nothing. It must be based on something that really exists. This idea, of course, is violently rejected by most post-modern historians who believe that ALL of history is nothing more than a social construction. For those sympathetic to that view, this book will appeal to you. To those looking for some insights into the factual basis for a Southern creation myth, you'd do better to read Ayers, Davis, or Reed. These fine historians are able to treat the topic with a sensitive balance of critical insight and popular appreciation.

Published in 1941, one can't help but think that THE MIND OF THE SOUTH is an iconoclastic reaction to the immense popularity of GONE WITH THE WIND, released in 1939.

Rating:
Summary: A classic 1940s study of causes and conditions
Review: What makes the South unique as a region has virtually disappeared since this book was researched and written. What Cash describes is what made the South unique to begin with -- its blend of agrarian culture, 18th century British cavalier society, and Scottish individualism. As Cash writes, "the Southern world, you will remember, was basically an extremely uncomplex, unvaried and unchanging one." How the South approached the complexities of the modern era, and dealt with the ideas of industrialization and multiculturalism, is not his focus. Certainly the book should be read in the context of its times (America had yet to enter World War II) and with the realization that much has changed since then. His book is not an apology, but he is not blind to the problems that existed then, either. The fact that Cash's work has been villified and reevaluated over many years is an indication that the concepts and issues he described more than sixty years ago are still debated today -- and that is a true picture of the mind of the South in the 21st century.