had been invited by University of Texas president Homer Rainey to provide the main commencement address to the 1941 graduating class on June 2 in Austin, Texas. Cash addressed some 1,400 graduates on "The South in a Changing World", focusing on the main developmental socio-psychological themes of the South through history into the modern era. While in Mexico City, Cash came under an apparent psychotic delusion. On June 30, he told his wife that he heard Nazi assassins whispering in the next room, plotting to kill him. The next day, when he was calmer, she went to get help. On her return with a correspondent they had met earlier, Cash was not in the room. Hours later, he was located in another hotel, the Hotel Reforma, where he had hung himself with his tie from the bathroom door. An autopsy failed to find evidence of a brain tumor. Cash's remains were cremated, and a funeral service was held in the First Baptist Church in Shelby. The ashes were later envaulted in Sunset Cemetery in Shelby. Analysis of The Mind of the South Cash's work has been the subject of continuing debate among scholars since publication and the subject of numerous treatises in academic journals. The book has never been out of print: the first paperback edition was published in 1954, and a new edition was published in 1991 under the Vintage Books imprint of Random House. The book has enjoyed a wide and diverse readership through time and has often been assigned reading in course work in colleges and universities, both in and outside the South. The book had its greatest following during the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. It has been praised by many scholars as the virtual bible on the origins of Southern culture and required reading for any serious student on the social history of the South and its conflicts through time. According to the biographer Bruce Clayton, the central themes in The Mind of the South were romanticism, violence, hyperbolic rhetoric, individualism, and white racial solidarity. Class consciousness was of minor importance. Historian George B. Tindall wrote of the book: Two major themes dominate the book: the uniformity of the southern mind and its continuity. Class conflict in Cash's view, was limited by the "proto-Dorian bond" by which the common white (like the Doric knight of Sparta) was elevated to