Psychoanalysis of a Nation

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."

Such is Cash's basic Southerner. On this man two influences converged: the South's own aristocrats and the Yankee. From the aristocratic ideal he perfected the famous Southern Manner, which at its best is as genuine a courtesy as the world can show; his rural individualism was sharpened into a violent sense of personal Honor. In some Southern types the result was "a great cleanness and decency . . . one of the most pleasant things that ever grew up on American soil." But under the political and moral pressure of the Yankee this sense of honor became incandescent and ran wild. The passion for rhetoric came to a boil; the Fire-Eater went to Washington (and has never left it); Jehovah became a tribal God and the South His last great bulwark; the Civil War was Armageddon.

In ratio to his own guilt over slavery--and in many it was intense--the Southerner had to justify it to the world and to himself. Thanks to the planter's own angry guilt over wenching, the Southern white woman became the object of "downright gyneolatry." In Georgia in the 1830's this toast was proposed: "Woman!!! The centre and circumference, diameter and periphery, sine tangent and secant of all our affections!" Meanwhile an exacerbated sense of honor was turned in fury against all forms of criticism. Naturally many a newspaper editor was shot. Says Cash: "The South was en route to the savage ideal: to that ideal whereunder dissent and variety are completely suppressed and men become, in all their attitudes, professions and actions, virtual replicas of one another."

This is only the beginning of Cash's analysis, but it is the basis for all that follows. With great pity and firmness, he analyzes how bitterly those traits and patterns were intensified under the hell of Reconstruction; in what anger, hope and innocence the great wave of cotton mills rose up; how the mill hands were exploited in the name of patriotism and progress; how these iron plantations perpetuated the ancient pre-War patterns of the soil.

The Mind of the South is not an "authoritative" book. It is laden rather with personal intelligence than with documented information. It is by no means complete; the whole ugly and fascinating complex of problems surrounding the Negro, for example, is never examined headon. But Cash is honest, temperate, eloquent and kind, and he is definitely in command of his subject. Anything written about the South henceforth must start where he leaves off.

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