Wilbur Joseph "Jack" Cash (May 2, 1900 – July 1, 1941) was an American journalist known for writing The Mind of the South (1941), a controversial and influential interpretation of the character and history of the American South.
A protégé of H. L. Mencken and Alfred A. and Blanche Knopf, Cash suffered throughout his life from depression. He died by hanging himself shortly after the publication of the book.
Life and career Early life and education Cash, known as "Jack" throughout his life, was born Joseph Wilbur Cash — he later reversed the order of his given names, and normally used only the initials — and grew up mostly in the mill village of Gaffney, South Carolina. His parents were Nanette Lutitia Hamrick, the organist at the local Baptist church who had previously taught music in the public school, and John William Cash, who managed the company store at the Limestone Mills. His ancestry was German and Scotch-Irish. He had three brothers and a sister, all younger. He was educated at the local public school up to age 12, until his family moved 14 miles away to his mother's home town, Boiling Springs, North Carolina. There, his father became a partner with Cash's maternal grandfather in a general store. For school, Cash attended Boiling Springs High School, a Baptist academy, where his high school classmates called him "Sleepy", due to his tendency to daydream. When he graduated from high school in April 1917, he gave the commencement address. Cash worked at his grandfather's farm in the summers.Wyatt-Brown, 1991, pp. xxii, xxviiTindall, 1979
Although Cash's mother was a pious Baptist, and he adored her, Cash himself eventually turned away from religion. His relationship with his father was distant and somewhat fraught, as the rigidly conventional man considered his son to be a deviant for not following the religious and social customs of the time. Once when Cash was beaten up in a schoolyard fight, his father sent him back in order to teach him to behave like a man. John William Cash would later say that he did not recognize until much later how bright his son was, although his wife did. "I never did teach [him] that he was smart," he said, "I never did want him to think that he was smarter than most other people."Wyatt-Brown, 1991, p. xxvii
In 1917 and 1918, Cash did odd jobs at shipyards and military camps from Maryland to Florida. He spent most time in Spartanburg, South Carolina at Camp Wadsworth; his father organized a fleet of cars there to help transport soldiers.
For two school years in 1918–19, Cash followed his father's wish and attended Wofford College, a Methodist school. Cash left because he objected to the school's narrow provincialism. He enrolled in Valparaiso University, a Lutheran college in Valparaiso, Indiana, dropping out around Christmas 1919. In 1920, again at his father's urging, he entered the Baptist school Wake Forest College, despite it being what he considered to be a "preacher college".
The president of Wake Forest at the time was the controversial William Louis Poteat, whose liberal theological stance and espousal and teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution was disturbing to many conservative North Carolina Baptists who supported the school. Poteat and others on the college's faculty encouraged Cash to challenge conventional orthodoxies, and under their tutelage, Cash turned away from enthusiasm for Southern writers such as Thomas Dixon Jr. — whose white supremacist novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) was the basis for D. W. Griffith's 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation — and towards the work of more cosmopolitan writers such as Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Henry Adams, and Sigmund Freud.Wyatt-Brown, 1991, p. xii Cash affected the style of a bohemian and became known as the campus iconoclast.Cash, 1941, p. 321
During Cash's final two undergraduate years, he served first as managing editor and then associate editor of the college newspaper, the Old Gold & Black, where he emulated H. L. Mencken's style of writing. In his editorials, he opposed the state's Baptist newspaper The Biblical Recorder on issues such as evolution and social dancing. In the summer, he worked at the hosiery mill at which his father was then the superintendent. Cash graduated in 1922 with an A.B., and then attended law school there for a year, before deciding not to pursue a legal career. Cash later declared that he left law school because it "required too much mendacity."
Immediately following college, Cash served a 1923 summer apprenticeship as a reporter for the Charlotte Observer, during which he covered a quickly-suppressed textile mill strike, a lynching, and other events that caused him to begin to see the South in a more realistic way.Wyatt-Brown, 1991, p. xiii
For two years, Cash taught English at Georgetown College in Georgetown, Kentucky, and at a high school in North Carolina, before experiencing a nervous collapse. Throughout his life, Cash suffered from manic depression or affective disorder, which manifested itself in breakdowns, periods of depression, fear of sexual impotency, and physical ailments such as not being able to swallow or choking when he spoke. He also suffered from a hyperthyroid condition, occasional alcoholism, and excessive smoking. Cash usually referred to his condition as "neurasthenia".Wyatt-Brown, 1991, pp. xii, xxviii-xxix
After his breakdown, at great strain on their finances, Cash's parents paid for him to take a bicycle tour of Western Europe, during which he recovered. When he came back he turned permanently to journalism as his profession.
Newspaper career From 1926 to 1928, Cash held several newspaper jobs: a year in Chicago writing for the now-defunct Chicago Evening Post; several months with The Charlotte News during which he wrote a wistful philosophical column titled "The Moving Row"; and a four-month stint during the fall of 1928 as the chief editor of a small semi-weekly newspaper, the Cleveland (County) Press, in Shelby, North Carolina, which he ran almost by himself. In his editorials for the paper, an increasingly liberal Cash excoriated the Ku Klux Klan, championed Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith, a New Yorker, over Republican Herbert Hoover, and decried the anti-Catholic bias which animated Southern Democrats' loathing of Smith. Following Smith's defeat, Cash had another emotional breakdown, and the newspaper folded.
Afterwards, Cash moved back into his parents' house in Boiling Springs – where he lived with his extended family, including his two brothers and their pregnant wives – and became a free-lance journalist, not easy to do in a busy and noisy household.Wyatt-Brown, 1991, p. xxxi He contributed to H. L. Mencken's The American Mercury magazine, and received encouragement from Mencken. From 1929 to 1935, Cash wrote eight articles about various aspects of the South, including one in October 1929 called "The Mind of the South", which would become the basis for the later book.
During the period of primary writing on The Mind of the South (1929 to 1937), Cash continued to live with his parents in Boiling Springs.W. J. Cash at Earl Scruggs Center When his contributions to The American Mercury ended after Lawrence Spivak took over ownership of the magazine, Cash supported himself with freelance weekly book reviews to The Charlotte News from 1935 to 1939, for each of which he received a payment of $3, equivalent to about $60-$65 in 2023.CPI Inflation calculator The "book reviews" often became fierce analytical diatribes penetrating the mindset of Nazism under Hitler and Fascism under Mussolini. Cash also wrote occasional editorials for the paper focusing primarily on the danger of Hitler and Mussolini to worldwide democracy, a topic on which he regularly expounded from 1935 and by the late 1930s would overtake his interest in the South and further delay completion of the book.
Despite his focus on the European situation, he also continued to explore local subjects such as health conditions in the Black communities of Charlotte, the violence and depravity of lynchings, and the poor quality of policing in the area, much to the dismay of city boosters, who protested the negative publicity. He also reviewed favorably the writing which was emanating from the Harlem Renaissance in New York, as well as the new generation of Southern writers such as Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, and William Faulkner,Wyatt-Brown, 1991, p. xiv as well as James Branch Cabell, Lillian Smith, Ellen Glasgow, and Claude McKay.
In October 1937, the strength of the freelance book reviews earned Cash a job as associate editor of the newspaper, which he held until May 1941, and which enabled him to move out of his parents' house. In his new position, Cash was assigned to cover foreign affairs – perhaps to keep him away from angering the local powers-that-be. He wrote editorials on every conceivable topic and stressed the international situation. The Charlotte News was at the time a lively progressive newspaper enjoying the largest circulation of any afternoon daily in the Carolinas, and its broad readership expanded admiration for Cash's writing and extraordinary prescience on the developing war news out of Europe and the Pacific. His writing was considered so eerily predictive of coming events in the war that fellow staff writers at The News affectionately nicknamed him "Zarathustra." Cash also wrote frequent book reviews.
Cash was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 1941 for his work during 1940 on World War II for the newspaper.
The Mind of the South
Cash's seminal article, "The Mind of the South", was published in The American Mercury in October 1929. The aggressive style of the article was heavily influenced by that of Mencken,Clayton, 1988 as Cash had yet to develop his own distinctive voice, but on the basis of the article, and Mencken's enthusiasm for Cash, Blanche Knopf, the wife and partner of the magazine's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf of New York, invited Cash to submit a plan or manuscript for a book-length expansion of the article. In April 1930, with the help of University of North Carolina sociologist Howard W. Odum, Cash submitted a sketch of the proposed book, on the basis of which the Knopfs offered Cash a contract. Over the next 10 years, as Cash worked on the book, the Knopfs – who were known for their sharp instincts about up-and-coming writers – provided both encouragement and small monetary advances to keep him going.Wyatt-Brown, 1991, pp. xiii-xiv
Shortly after he had submitted the sketch of The Mind of the South to the Knopfs, Cash had a physical collapse which prevented him from writing for two years, under doctors' orders to stop writing and get more outdoor exercise. In 1932, however, he began to write seriously again, using the unheated back room of the Boiling Springs Post Office, where his aunt was the postmistress. A perfectionist, he discarded more pages then he kept, but made progress; he also continued to do free-lance writing, despite his poor health, his lack of money, and his significant writer's blocks.
After Cash had some success at The Charlotte News, he finally had the personal and professional confidence he had previously lacked, and his work there helped him to develop his unique style of writing. He also met and fell in love with Mary Bagley Ross Northrup (later known as Mary Maury), a divorced woman who also wrote for the paper, and who helped him to complete the book through his periods of depression, and his continued focus on events in Europe. During this period, Cash would listen to the news on the radio about the Anschluss with Austria, the invasion of Poland, or the fall of France and would pace around the room, biting his nails, hands, and wrists, leaving marks. He would become so upset that he would leave the house and walk the streets at night.Wyatt-Brown, 1991, p. xxxii