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orest February 1991 Wake Forest University Magazine Allen Mandelbaum: The 'Dancing Master' orest Wake Forest University Magazine Volume 37, Number 3 February 1991 Editor Features 2 Jeanne P. Whitman The Minds of the South Symposium 2 • Associate Editor WJ. Cash's Mind 9 • Is the Racist South Cherin C. Poovey Staging a Comeback? 10 • Staff Writer Profile: Allen Bernie Quigley Mandelbaum 12 Classnotes Editor Adele LaBrecque Typography Rachel Lowry Printing Fisher-Harrison Corp. University Departments 17 Photography Women's Studies: A Look Back 17 Front cover: Kenan Professor of Humanities Allen Mandelbaum, • Sociology: Educating the Work by Susan Mullally Clark. Force 18 • Medicine: Fighting for the Charlie Buchanan: 3 (top); 4, Lives of Infants 20 • Law: Marion 5, 6 (top); 7 (top); 8, 29; Benfield Joins 21 Susan Mullally Clark: 3 Faculty (center, bottom); 6 (center, bottom); 7 (bottom); 11, 13, 15 , 16 , 19, 21, 22, 23 , 24, 26 , 28 , 30, 35; Jack Gold, 34; Campus Chronicle 22 Scott Manin, 27; Courtesy of Founders' Day: Grant Announced, Charles Elkins Jr., 9; Bowman Gray School of Medicine, 20. Faculty Honored 22 • Edward Rey nolds Returns 24 • New Trustees 25 • International Executive Program 25 • WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY Preparing for a Semester in Japan 26 MAGAZINE (USPS 664-520, ISSN 0279- 3946) is published five rimes a • A Fourth Rhodes Scholar 27 year in September, November, February, April and July by Wake Forest Universi ty. Second class postage paid ar Winsron-Salem, NC, and additional Alumni Report 29 mailing offices. Please send letters ro Trustees Pledge to Campaign 29 the ecliror and alumni news to WAKE • Pughs FOREST UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE, Name Auditorium 29 • Benson Gift to 7205 Reynolda Station. Winsron-Salem, Divinity School 30 • President's NC 27109. POSTMASTER: Send Associ address changes to the WAKE FOREST ates 31 • Report from the Council Presi MAGAZINE, 7227 Reynolda Station, dent 32 • Homecoming Winston-Salem, C 27109. '91 34 • Clubs 36 • Classnotes 37 The Minds of the South Scholars, journalists Remember Cash's Landmark Text BERNIE QUIGLEY n 1920, when In Cash's depiction of the Southern heartland literary Wilbur]. Cash was a South, among the few in genius unmatched in the student at Wake tt)fest stances of enlightenment American annals, including I College, he read an and courage were those such the work of Thomas Wolfe essay by H.L. Mencken as "... Poteat's teaching of and William Faulkner. To which declared the South to evolution in the face of the Cash's surprise, his book, be "almost as sterile, artisti stake to young Baptists at The Mind of the South, cally, intellectually, culturally, Wake Forest College ... and published in 1941, was as the Sahara Desert." Menck the Commission of Inter greeted with a unanimous en's volatile prose penetrated racial Cooperation, which chorus of critical acclaim in the conscience of the South, aims to foster a more North and South alike. and goaded a new genera reasonable attitude toward In the preface of The tion of Southerners at Wake the Negro." Mind of the South, Cash Forest and at other colleges It was the first of a long asked his readers to disabuse into rethinking the South. series of essays that Cash their minds of two correlat The Agrarians at Vander would write for Mencken; ed legends, those of the old bilt University staunchly essays that bit to the quick and the new Souths. "My defended selected elements of American sensibilities at thesis," Cash told his pub of the old South, while a time when the American lisher, Blanche Knopf, "is others, such as Wake Forest's dream was giving way to that the Southern mind famed editorialist, Gerald cynicism. The Great War represents a very definite W. Johnson ('11) and Clarence had barely passed before culture, or attitude towards Cason, author of 90 Degrees new war clouds appeared. life, a heritage, from the old in the Shade, advanced Cash's 1929 essay was uni South, bur greatly modified Mencken's criticism. Perhaps formly condemned in some and extended by conscious no one was as strongly af 50 newspaper editorials and unconscious efforts over fected by Mencken's essay as throughout the South. At the last hundred years to WJ. Cash. the height of the Depres protect itself from the en Nine years later, Cash sion, when Franklin croachments of three hostile wrote an essay for Mencken's Roosevelt named the South factors: the Yankee Mind, American Mercury in the "Economic Problem Num the Modern Mind, and the Baltimore sage's own mock ber One," the Southern Negro." At its best, the ing tone. He targeted the press reacted with hostility South portrayed in Cash's new South as "a chicken and outrage at criticism by book was "proud, brave, pox of factories on the outsiders. Bur by the 1940s, honorable by its lights, Watch-Us-Grow maps." a primary change had oc courteous, personally gener The old South was a curred. Mencken's ridicule of ous, loyal, swift to act, often pretense to aristocracy whose "that stupendous region of roo swift, but signally effec lord and baron was "neither fat farms, shoddy cities and tive, sometimes terrible in a plamer nor an aristocrat, paralyzed cerebrums" had its action ...." Its vices in bur a backwoods farmer." contributed to a firestorm of cluded "violence, imoler The mind of the South was literary activity that echoed ance, aversion and suspicion magnificem only for its the intellectual interest in toward new ideas, an inca "incapacity for the real , a the South that had been pacity for analysis, an incli Brobdingnagian talem for seen in the 1920s. It nation to act from feeling the fantastic." brought forth from the rather than from thought, 2 Top: Panelists (left to right) Gerald L. Balzles, former governor of Virginia; Histonan C. Vann Woodward; jour nalist Howell Raines; and Professor Edwin G. Wzlson ('43), moderator. Left: Hodding Carter III, journalist and author, talks with conference guests. Above: Nell Irvin Painter of Pn'nceton University called Cash 's book "racist and sexist. " To Cash, ''Wttke Forest was a lush green pasture waiting to be inhaled." an exaggerated individual few among professional ism and a roo narrow con historians.'' cept of social responsibility, In February, Wake Forest attachment to fictions and University held a symposium false values, and above all celebrating the 50-year too great attachment to ra anniversary of the publica cial values and a tendency tion of Cash's book. "The to justify cruelty and in Minds of the South: W J. justice in the name of those Cash Revisited" brought values, sentimentality and a together the nation's most lack of realism." esteemed historians, jour The book became a mile nalists, public and literary stone in the study of the figures on the subject of South and an integral part the South, to consider the Marilyn Mzlloy (left), bureau chief for Newsday, and Ed of the Southern historian's impact of Cash's book on Wzlliams, editor ofthe editorial pages ofTbe Charlotte Observer perception. "Like William Southern studies since Cash. were panelists. Faulkner and C. Vann Woodward, the dean of Woodward himself," histori Southern historians, called an Bertram Wyatt-Brown has the event "a cultural phe written, "Cash is simply nomenon" as it drew such a part of a Southern scholar's broad range of interest from intellectual frame of refer the public as well as from ence. He can no more be the academic world and the expelled from memory, press. The eight sessions conscious or otherwise, than drew hundreds-over 750 the author of The Sound people attended one event and the Fury or the bi -and the conference was ographer of Tom Watson featured in The 1-Uzshington can be." C. Vann Wood Post, The New York Times, ward, Cash's most promi and on National Public Ra nent critic, said of The dio's "All Things Considered." Mind of the South that "no Bruce Clayton, author of other book on Southern the recently published biog history rivals Cash's influ raphy of Cash, WJ. Cash: A ence among laymen and Lzfe, began the confer- Former Governor Gerald L. Balzles of Virginia 4 "Without blacks, Cash's book is like Lawrence of Arabia without the Arabs.'' journalists (left to nght) Claude Sitton, M ichael Rzley ('81), and Edwin Yoder ence with an overview of that would later develop in Cash's life. Cash. But the Southern Growing up in Gaffney, mind clashed with the South Carolina, where modern mind. In the end, ''even children knew the said Clayton, what Cash name of lynchers," Cash had dubbed the "Savage thrilled to the racist novels Ideal" - the South's bar of Thomas Dixon, said barous sense of frontier in Clayton. But at Wake dividualism - would be Forest, Cash discovered Dr. unyielding and stultifying. William Louis Poteat, who, ''In death as in life he was as president of the College, a· tragic figure," said Clay championed the spirit of ton, "something of a mirror free inquiry at a time when of the South. " the Scopes trial in Tennes Raymond Gavins, associ see was threatening intellec ate professor of history at tual independence in the Duke University, introduced South. the theme that would To Cash, "Wake Forest dominate the conference: was a lush green pasture race and racism. Citing waiting to be inhaled,'' said W.E.B. Dubois' landmark Clayton. Poteat represented work, The Souls of Black the modern mind to Cash, Folks, he invoked Dubois' said Clayton, the mind of image of a veil to represent Darwin, Freud, Dewey and a metaphor for segregation. Spengler. His teaching of "Cash did discern a stir "biology without equivoca ring behind the veil," said tion" represented a new Gavins.