In the introduction to her 1939 collection of journalism, Let the Record Speak, most of which discusses the rise of fascism and Nazism during the 1930s and the responses – or not – by non-fascist countries, Dorothy Thompson writes that “the only good that can accrue to us from Fascism is its challenge to us to reconsider, point by point, all that we are supposed to live by. It forces us to admit that Democracy is very sick for had it been healthy, courageous, and strong Fascism would have died in the bud” (Thompson, Let the Record Speak 11). Besides an apt description of her own response to fascism, Thompson's words here also speak tellingly about the response by one of her regular and avid readers, W.J. Cash, as seen not only in his editorials and reviews in the Charlotte News, but also in his masterwork, The Mind of the South. To argue that Cash's interpretation of Southern culture in The Mind of the South was crucially shaped by international politics is one that I have made already in The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Writers, 1930-1950, and one that Richard King, one of Cash's most important critics, has put forth in his excellent essay “Cash and the Crisis of Political Modernity.” Any reader of The Mind of the South would do well to keep in mind the questions that King suggests Cash was exploring in the text in his interpretation of Southern history:

In this essay, I want to extend my own argument by looking specifically at how Cash's obsession with Adolph Hitler may have influenced his overall conception of Southern culture and history. To do that, I want first to compare Cash's cultural analysis in his two works of the same name: his 1929 essay “The Mind of the South” and his 1941 book.