W. J. Cash

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.[1][2]

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."[3]

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.[2]

In 1918 and 1919, at his father's wish, Cash attended Wofford College, a Methodist school, but left because he objected to the school's narrow provincialism. He then 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".[2]

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 more 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 authors such as Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Henry Adams instead, as well as the ideas of Sigmund Freud.[4] Cash affected the style of a bohemian and became known as the campus iconoclast.[2][5]

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.[2] Cash later declared that he left law school because it "required too much mendacity."

After 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 which caused him to begin to see the South in a more critical way.[6]

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".[7]

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.[6][2] When he came back he turned permanently to journalism as his profession.

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.[6]

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.[8] 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,[lower-alpha 1] including one in October 1929 called "The Mind of the South", which would become the basis for the later book.[lower-alpha 2]

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.[9] 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.[10] 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,[11] 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.[11] In his new position, Cash was assigned to cover foreign affairs – perhaps to keep him away from angering the local powers-that-be.[2] 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 cover of Cash's 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,[12] 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.[13][2]

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.[2]

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,[11] 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.[14]

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.[11][2]

On February 10, 1941, The Mind of the South was published by Knopf. The book, an intuitive socio-historical exploration of Southern culture, received wide critical acclaim at the time and garnered for Cash praise from such sources as Time, The New York Times, The Saturday Review of Literature, and most Southern newspapers of note, although criticism came from the Agrarian group out of Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Cash also received the thanks of Walter White, the director of the NAACP, for the book's liberalism in regard to race and its exposure of the bigotry of the South.[15] Time said of The Mind of the South "Anything written about the South henceforth must start where [Cash] leaves off."

In March 1941, largely on the strength of the critical success of the book, Cash was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which included a small stipend which would allow him to spend a year writing a novel about the progress of three generations of a Southern cotton mill family, like his own, from the Old South into the modern era.[16] Cash had always considered himself to be superior at writing fiction to non-fiction, as he stated in his October, 1940 application to the Guggenheim Foundation, and so he embraced with great eagerness the opportunity to try his hand at a novel for a year.

Cash had made, first in 1932, then in 1936, two previous applications for Guggenheim grants: the first to have been a study of Lafcadio Hearn, to have been titled "Anatomy of a Romantic," using Hearn as an exemplar by which to study Southern romantics generally, and the second to have been a study of the Nazi mindset by spending a year in Germany, a contrasting reprise of Cash's bicycle tour of pre-Nazi Europe during the summer of 1927. Likely because of Cash's lack of a published major work at the time, both applications were rejected. The third and successful application was sponsored by the Knopfs and by Raleigh News & Observer editor and Guggenheim recipient, Jonathan W. Daniels, who had befriended Cash in 1938. The Fellowship carried with it great prestige, Cash being placed in the select company of Daniels, Thomas Wolfe, and playwright Paul Green, as the only North Carolinians to have received the grant by 1941.

Cash and his wife chose Mexico to spend their year on the Fellowship because it was cheap to live there, and they would have to watch every penny; they embarked on their trip to Mexico City on May 30 1941.[2] Cash had been invited by University of Texas president Homer Rainey to provide the main commencement address to the 1941 graduating class on June 2 in Austin, Texas. Cash addressed some 1,400 graduates on "The South in a Changing World", focusing on the main developmental socio-psychological themes of the South through history into the modern era.[lower-alpha 3]

While in Mexico City, Cash came under an apparent psychotic delusion. On June 30, he told his wife that he heard Nazi assassins whispering in the next room, plotting to kill him. The next day, when he was calmer, she went to get help. On her return with a correspondent they had met earlier, Cash was not in the room. Hours later, he was located in another hotel, the Hotel Reforma, where he had hung himself with his tie from the bathroom door.[17][lower-alpha 4] An autopsy failed to find evidence of a brain tumor. Cash's remains were cremated, and a funeral service was held in the First Baptist Church in Shelby. The ashes were later envaulted in Sunset Cemetery in Shelby.[2]