THE MIND OF THE SOUTH—W. J. Cash —Knopf ($3.75).
The most tragic chapter in U. S. history was written around an enigma which neither the North nor the South understood. That enigma was the South itself, and it is still unsolved. Last week a Southerner published a book that casts more light on the ancient riddle than any book before it.
Wilbur Joseph Cash was born in South Carolina in 1901, went to Southern schools and colleges, became a newspaperman, contributed to Mencken's old American Mercury, is now associate editor of the Charlotte, N. C. News. He is a Democrat, a Baptist, an inheritor of the South's tradition. The Mind of the South, his first published book, is in effect a psychoanalysis of his own native land.
For his original Southern type, "the core about which most Southerners of whatever degree were likely to be built," Cash selects not the aristocrat but the "backcountry pioneer farmer," the descendant not of English squires but of "half-wild Scotch and Irish clansmen." This countryman's outstanding trait was his lack of complexity. A direct product of the soil, he was "as simple a type as Western civilization has produced in modern times." To that intense simplicity, Cash assigns several Southern traits: individualism, puerility, a tendency to violence, romanticism, hedonism, piety, a passionate love of rhetoric and of politics.
"The simple man," says Cash, ". . . rarely has any considerable capacity for the real." If the naked struggle for existence is relaxed even a little, he becomes a romantic and a hedonist. He develops a limitless credulity, and begins to "accept what pleases him and reject what does not." In every plantation white these traits were strongly enhanced by the Negro, a champion pleasure man and dreamer. As for the mass of poor whites—locked off on poor land from the plantation world, indifferent to labor—theirs was "a tragic descent into unreality," a "void of pointless leisure."
Despite the Southerner's love of rhetoric and politics, real politics—"the resolution of essential conflict in interest among groups and classes"—were unknown in the South. Thanks to their inability to analyze reality, and to the whole paternalistic structure, Southerners recognized no such conflict; and politics remained "a theatre for the play of the purely personal, the purely romantic, the purely hedonistic." Nor did the Anglican tradition of religious tolerance appeal to that fierce Celt-blooded primitive. He required "a faith as simple and emotional as himself." By Jackson's time the power of the evangelists over the whole Southern mind was so great that "skepticism . . . was anathema, and lack of frenetic zeal was . . . heresy." In such a mind pure hedonism and iron puritanism could lie down together without fighting over the blankets —and without, as Cash repeatedly points out, a trace of conscious hypocrisy. "There was much of Tartarin in this Southerner, but nothing of Tartufe."