ABSTRACT
On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South, the annual Chancellor's Symposium at the University of Mississippi was devoted to that influential book and its author. The Mind of the South is packed with propositions that could be subjected to empirical test, generalizations that are by their nature at least mostly true or mostly false. Much of that attention has been biographical in nature, and rightly so: Cash's circumstances unquestionably shaped and limited his view of the South. Anti-institutionalism may be reflected in Southern localism and familism, a preference for the known, tried, and true, as opposed to the distant and formal. In 1940 roughly one Southern worker in six was in a white-collar, professional, or managerial job; half were farmers, the rest industrial workers. The South's per capita income has risen from half of that elsewhere in the country almost to parity.
