W.J. Cash, born in 1900 in Gaffney, South Carolina, was a journalist and author, well-known for his treatise on the problems of Southern culture, identity, and history, called The Mind of The South.
A respected intellectual, he suffered profoundly from a number of emotional problems, chiefly neurasthenia and psychosomatic impotence, as well as alcoholism. In 1941, the year The Mind of the South was published, he committed suicide in Mexico, after having confided in his wife that he “heard Nazis” discussing plans to assassinate him.