Books: Warm South

90° IN THE SHADE—Clarence Cason—University of North Carolina Press ($2.50).

Did stars fall on Alabama? Are the Southern States under some maleficent planetary influence? Is the South a backward, or perhaps even a degenerating, province of the U.S.? Such questions a Southerner does not like a Northerner to raise, even rhetorically. Such a book as Stars Fell on Alabama, though very mildly critical of the South, seemed to many an Alabamian a poor return for Southern hospitality. But last month Alabama and the whole South had a much more bitter pill to swallow, this time coated with no Yankee sugar. Clarence Cason was a native son, able head of the department of journalism at the University of Alabama, and respectfully regarded by his fellow-Tuscaloosans. In 90° in the Shade he drew a biting “psychograph” of the South. Even unreconstructed Southerners admitted that its lines paralleled the facts but called it a graphic misrepresentation.

But if Author Cason was right about his countrymen’s taste in reading, most of them would never even see his “psychograph.” Said he: “The Southerner reads the morning newspaper because he wants to know about the Society events and the election campaigns, which he regards in somewhat the same light; but he thinks books are suitable only for invalids.” With roundabout irony which sometimes straightens into indignation Author Cason casts his dissatisfied eye over the Southern scene, finds it on the whole down-at-heel, lazy, complacent, resigned, ignorant, cynical, exasperating. Southern sensitiveness to criticism he calls “dangerously suggestive of what the psychologists used to call an inferiority complex. … I cannot escape the conviction that Southerners would have a better chance to find the philosopher’s stone by opening their eyes than they would by keeping them tightly closed.” Southern politics, says he, with its Tom-Tom Heflin, Huey Long and The Man Bilbo should be reported on the sport pages where it belongs. The Southern conscience has never honestly faced the Negro question: the Civil War amendments (13th, 14th, 15th) should either be legally repudiated or enforced. “On the whole,” Author Cason concludes, “the South would profit from a nice, quiet revolution . . . not a Communistic revolt . . . a revision of the region’s implanted ideas, a clarification of issues, a realistic and direct recognition of existing social problems, a redirection of the South’s courage and audacity, and a determination that the Southern conscience shall be accorded the reverence due a sacred thing.”

Few days before his book was scheduled to appear in Tuscaloosa bookstores Critic Cason sat in his office after hours, thinking over what he had written. Had he been too extreme? Would his neighbors consider him a renegade? Had he jeopardized a pleasant life for the doubtful fame of writing a controversial book? Finally Critic Cason found the answer. He put a revolver muzzle to his mouth, pulled the trigger.