jobs at shipyards and military camps from Maryland to Florida. He spent most time in Spartanburg, South Carolina at Camp Wadsworth; his father organized a fleet of cars there to help transport soldiers. In 1918 and 1919, at his father's wish, Cash attended Wofford College, a Methodist school, but left because he objected to the school's narrow provincialism. He then enrolled in Valparaiso University, a Lutheran college in Valparaiso, Indiana, dropping out around Christmas 1919. In 1920, again at his father's urging, he entered the Baptist school Wake Forest College, despite it being what he considered to be a "preacher college". The president of Wake Forest at the time was the controversial William Louis Poteat, whose liberal theological stance and espousal and teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution was disturbing to more conservative North Carolina Baptists who supported the school. Poteat and others on the college's faculty encouraged Cash to challenge conventional orthodoxies, and under their tutelage, Cash turned away from enthusiasm for Southern writers such as Thomas Dixon Jr. – whose white supremacist novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) was the basis for D. W. Griffith's 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation – and towards the work of authors such as Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Henry Adams instead, as well as the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Cash affected the style of a bohemian and became known as the campus iconoclast. During Cash's final two undergraduate years, he served first as Managing Editor and then Associate Editor of the college newspaper, the Old Gold & Black, where he emulated H. L. Mencken's style of writing. In his editorials, he opposed the state's Baptist newspaper The Biblical Recorder on issues such as evolution and social dancing. In the summer, he worked at the hosiery mill at which his father was then the superintendent. Cash graduated in 1922 with an A.B., and then attended law school there for a year, before deciding not to pursue a legal career. Cash later declared that he left law school because it "required too much mendacity." After college, Cash served a 1923 summer apprenticeship as a reporter for the Charlotte Observer, during which he covered a quickly-suppressed textile mill strike, a lynching, and other events which caused him to begin the see the South in a more critical way. For two years, Cash taught English at Georgetown