W. J. Cash (1900–1941)

I guess technically it’s a social history or sociology of the South, but more broadly it’s a great study on the American race problem and race relations. Considering it’s written by a white Southerner during the Jim Crow years it’s very broad-minded. The part that presses on me most was how he said that black went into white as surely as white went into black; that and his treatment of the class problem, with the aristocrats giving the crackers the race issue as consolation prize. The result is that the crackers are a lot like blacks, but they have the delusion that blacks and whites are like chalk and cheese. This reminds me of a story from a business book. These stories are meant to be a little hard to place in certain ways, but I was curious and I wanted to know if the guy who, coming in the book after several who were obviously rich white guys, was Black in addition to being formerly poor, formerly a jail bird, and with a colloquial nickname. It turns out that Wikipedia says he was a white guy who had been caught using the n-word.

…. (second review) It is also true that the planters weren’t always as close with the crackers as they pretended to be, sharing their second-best beer, etc., even if the crackers usually responded by trying to differentiate themselves from the dem blacks by attacking them, this having some ‘hope’ of getting the planters to cosy up to them in their mind, even if, really, you know…. I mean, I don’t know how to put this, but it can be hard to like someone like that, at least if you have delicate airs to maintain, right. Intellectual ambitions, social graces. The crackers would have done better to ally with the dem blacks, but then, they wouldn’t have been crackers.

Of course, even though I heard about this book in I think some WEB DuBois book (and what happened to //that// book? 🙀), and race has basically formed the borders and much of the character of the South, the South isn’t //just// racism and various forms of phobia, and since Wilbur was only half modern and didn’t use the word “white” in the title, it might not be an Anglo-African American/whiteness book, but more of the more common sort of general American social history: local and regional history…. Albeit kinda a weird, if a very proud one, right…. I don’t know. I do feel like general history/sociology should edge out diversities histories/sociologies, so I don’t become angry/despairing, so it’s convenient to re-label this book…. And maybe someday I’ll be able to pick up Southern Living magazine, read Sarah Addison Allen even after my young years delusion that she’s a good-and-loving non-deluded writer are gone, or even listen to some country music voluntarily…. God knows I don’t see myself reading Confederate mythology anytime soon, at least until they give up presenting fighting for the extremist white man system (albeit against the moderate white man system) was //even more romantic// than deposing Hitler, you know…. But I try not to meditate too often upon the intellectual and moral failings of the crackers, anymore, you know, not because they deserve it, or don’t deserve it, but just because that works better for me, you know….

Maybe even, along the intellectual failings front, we ride them too hard, you know. You don’t have to have very complicated ideas, even if it helps if you don’t have too many deluded ones. And, as unbearable as they can be to pretend to be the real man of religion, completely de-sexed, and the real man of country music, down and dirty all night long, maybe fervently-held religious—unapologetically supernatural—beliefs and sexuality held together in the same person don’t //have to// be the marks of failure and hypocrisy. After all, they’re both deeply human, deeply emotional feels. And maybe Jesus would sometimes prefer to drink //a beer or two//—if not, you know—with a man of Dixie, than to try to bend and weave through the rather strange and unfelt world of a Boston scholar, you know.

…. Incidentally maybe it is general history—that was the first label that came to me, to change it to—than general sociology, since although it’s not terribly top-down, it’s probably I think a lot more narrative than abstract. Even though it’s kinda bottom-up and social, it goes era by era, not topic by topic, right.… (meer)

This is a great study of the Southern Mindset from the end of the Civil War (War Between the States) until 1940. After the "South" kicked out the Yankees and scalawags, how did they bring about "progress" in The South? How did they put the dark-skinned people in a place that they thought was adequately demeaning? How did they keep the poor whites from an unacceptable competition with black people for their lifestyle and food acquisition? It's all here, along with critiques of the effects of the Southern literary tradition, Unionism in The South, Southern religious traditions and how they affect Southern Middle Class and the Southern Poor People. I notice that "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" by James Agee and Walker Evans is not noted. But this does not detract from the usefulness of this book in the study of the South. I give it --… (meer)