W. J. Cash

American journalist and writer

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.

Cash, known as "Jack" throughout his life, was born as "Joseph Wilbur Cash" – he later reversed the order of his given names, and normally used only the initials – and grew up 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, of whom he was the eldest. He was educated at the local public school until he was 12, when his family moved to Boiling Springs, North Carolina, 14 miles away across the state border – his mother's home town – so that his father could become a partner with Cash's maternal grandfather in a general store there. 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. 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." In 1917 to 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. Cash affected the style of a bohemian and became known as the campus iconoclast. 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. 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". After his breakdown, at great strain on their finances, Cash's parents paid for him to take a bicycle tour of Europe –through England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Belgium – during which he recovered. 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,efn|His first piece published in The American Mercury was"Jehovah of the Tar Heels", an attack on U. S. Senator Furnifold M. Simmons from North Carolina, who led efforts to disenfranchise black voters and return Democrats to power in the state. It appeared in July, 1929. 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. 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, 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. 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. Finally, on July 27, 1940, the last pages of the manuscript were finished and sent to New York. Five months later, on Christmas Eve, Cash and Northrup were married by a justice of the peace in York, South Carolina. Time said of The Mind of the South "Anything written about the South henceforth must start where [Cash] leaves off."

Two biographies of Cash have been published, W. J. Cash: Southern Prophet, by Joseph L. Morrison (Knopf, 1967), and W. J. Cash: A Life, by Bruce Clayton (L. S. U. Press, 1991). In 1991, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Mind of the South, two widely hailed seminars on the South and the impact through time of Cash's book on the South were held at Wake Forest and at the University of Mississippi. Each seminar attracted numerous prominent scholars, journalists and political leaders in multi day sessions, resulting in two published works of essays, W. J. Cash and the Minds of the South (1992, Louisiana University Press), edited by Paul D. Escott, and The Mind of the South Fifty Years Later (1992, University Press of Mississippi), edited by Charles W. Eagles.