W. J. Cash

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.

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 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. 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. 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.

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 Western Europe, during which he recovered. When he came back he turned permanently to journalism as his profession.