The Petal paper. [volume] (Petal, Miss.) 1953-19??, 1960-05-12
PAGE THREH

ing. AS the regional mores came
under judiciary and legislative
assault from Washington tn e
South reacted, and why it re-
acts as it did is better understood
after reading The Mind Of the
South.
But Cash sensed that time OF
trial was coming, as he wrote OF
the South in his final paragraph:
''In the coming days, and prob
ably soon, it is likely to have to
prove it's capacity for adjustment
far beyond what has been true in
the past. And in that time shall
hope, as its loyal son, that its
virtues will tower over and con-
quer its faults and have the max
ing of the Southern world to
come. But of the future | shall
venture no definite prophecies.
1t would be brave man w no
would venture them in any case"
No one, reading the book, can
escape the impression that Cash
was motivated by a consuming
love for his section. True, he as
sailed the Cavalier aristocracy
legend as none other before him,
describing the "Proto-Dorian
pride" it helped produce, and
pointing to Savage ideaT'
which gripped the area after the
Civil War. The hedonistic "hell OF
fellow" was a dominant per-
sonality, he said, in sector
where the frontier lasted longer
than anywhere else, and there
was depreciation of authority and
processes of law. He told of racist
demagogues with their continued
appeals to such vague shibbo-
leths as states rights, and heroic
gasconade of every sort" He said
that there was a "core of trag-
edy' in the fact that intellectual
leaderships are by themselves al
ways helpless"
But the better nature of tn e
South is there, too, the sweep
ingly splendid fellows :. kind
ly courtesy, a level-eyed pride,
an easy quietness, barely per-
ceptible flourish" Some, in the
early days, went even beyond
the kindness of the old back coun-
try to set IAN impeccable ex-
ample of conduct and sentiment"
1t was s'the conflict with the
Yankee" he concludes, which
really moulded the mind of the
South in the way he pictures it,
and he said: ''The mind of the
section is continuous with
the past" He calls the South "a
tree with many age rings, with
its limbs and trunk bent and
twisted by all the winds of the
years, but with its tap root in
the Old South"
So it was in 1910. Who can say
how nearly the Southland APP
proximates that description twen-
ty years later, when the winds of
a new storm are Whistling
through it?
His summary is full of feeling:
proud, brave, honorable by it's
lights, courteous, personally gem
erous, loyal, swift to act, often
too swift, but signally effective,
sometimes terrible, in its action
such was the South at its best.
And such at its best it remains
today, despite the great falling
away in some of its virtues. Vio-
lence, intolerance, aversion and
suspicion toward new ideas, an
incapacity for analysis, an inclin-
alton to act from feeling rather
than from thought, an exaggerat-
ed individualism and too mar
row concept of social RESPONSE
bility, attachment to fictions and
false values, above all to great
attachment to racial values and
tendency to Justify cruelty and
injustice in the name of those
values, sentimentality and lack
of realism-these have been its
characteristic vices in the past.
And, despite changes for the bet
ter, they remain its characteristic
vices tOday.o