Background
Wilbur Joseph Cash was born on May 2, 1900 in Gaffney, South Carolina, United States. He was the eldest of four children (three boys and one girl) of John William and Nannie Lutitia (Hamrick) Cash. He was christened Joseph Wilbur but disliked his given names and used the initials only, reversing the order. His ancestry was Ulster Scotch on the Cash side, a mixture of that plus German on the Hamrick side, both strains American since the eighteenth century. His parents were plain up-country Southerners and devout Baptists. Living next door to his maternal grandfather, who had been the first mayor of Boiling Springs, the boy grew up in an atmosphere of paternalistic white supremacy, but with a lifelong feeling for the country life of the South and its people.
Education
Cash attended public school in Gaffney, where his father operated the company store of a cotton mill, and, beginning in 1912, the Baptist-supported Boiling Springs High School. An avaricious reader, Cash blossomed as a student during his last year in high school and gave the commencement address in April 1917. After a year of drifting between jobs, he entered Wofford College (Methodist) in Spartanburg, and completed the freshman year in 1919. There followed an unhappy semester at Valparaiso University in northern Indiana. Early in 1920 he enrolled at the Baptist-supported Wake Forest College in North Carolina. There, "Sleepy" Cash became a Young Turk, contributing pieces to student publications, indulging a certain bohemianism, admiring the iconoclastic H. L. Mencken, defending Wake Forest against the Fundamentalists, and generally rebelling against the set of values he had inherited from his parents. He graduated in 1922. Uncertain about a career, and already beset by symptoms of endocrine disorders, Cash attended the college's law school for a year.
Career
Then two years of teaching at Georgetown College in Kentucky and at the Hendersonville School for Boys cured him of any love of pedagogy. Turning to journalism, he worked briefly for the Chicago Post and in 1926 joined the staff of the Charlotte News. He spent the summer and fall of 1927 on a bicycle tour abroad, which gave him the consuming interest in Europe later reflected in his editorials. The next summer his health broke down and he had to return to Boiling Springs. To support himself at home, Cash became editor of a short-lived semiweekly, the Cleveland (County) Press in nearby Shelby, in which he pilloried the anti-Catholicism of his neighbors during the fiery Smith-Hoover presidential campaign of 1928. In July 1929 Cash contributed the first of many pieces to H. L. Mencken's American Mercury: "Jehovah of the Tar Heels, " an expose of United States Senator Furnifold M. Simmons, patron of North Carolina's anti-Al Smith Democrats. A second article in October 1929, "The Mind of the South, " was a brilliant piece of analysis that commended Cash to the publishing firm of Alfred A. Knopf, publisher also of the Mercury. The bitter depression years that followed saw Cash trying against odds to make a living as a free-lance writer in Cleveland County, applying unsuccessfully for foundation grants, and fighting uncertain health and poverty while he began the book that was to be his chief achievement. In October 1937, short of funds, he rejoined the Charlotte News as a full-time editorialist. Cash devoted his editorials to the totalitarian evil he discerned overseas, and his Sunday book-page column largely to the South's malaise, but he was unable to bring his manuscript to completion before July 1940. He and his longtime fiancee, Mrs. Mary Ross Northrop of Charlotte, having agreed that they would be married on completion of the manuscript, were wed (he for the first time) on Christmas Day, 1940. The Mind of the South was published in February 1941, to almost unanimous critical acclaim, and the book instantly won him nationwide recognition. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, since Europe was at war, arranged to spend his fellowship year in Mexico writing a novel about the cotton-mill South. Weak with dizziness and dysentery from the time of his arrival in Mexico City, on the night of June 30 he became irrational, suffering from the terrible delusion that Nazis were planning to kill him. He fled the next day while his wife was seeking help and was found dead in the Hotel Reforma hanged by his necktie.
W. J. Cash is remembered as the author of The Mind of the South, a brilliant intellectual tour de force and the product of a lifelong effort to understand his homeland. The book was not a history of the South but an analysis of the "sentiments, prejudices, standards and values" common to "every group of white people in the South" which gave that region its distinctive character. Exposing the falsity of those historic myths, the "aristocratic" Old South and the "progressive" New South, Cash described the emotional crises that had led to their origin and survival. He traced the interrelationships of religion, race, rhetoric, romanticism, leisure, and the cult of Southern womanhood; and the patterns formed by demagoguery, violence, paternalism, and evangelism. He found the Southern mind largely shaped by the agricultural conditions of its past and in 1940 believed it to be moving backward, rather than forward into the present, though he foresaw that the South would soon have to prove a greater "capacity for adjustment" than it had yet shown. He could not foresee that his book would aid in that adjustment, helping prepare the way for the revolutionary turn in Southern race relations that began in the mid-1950's.