Clarence Cason

As a native Alabamian, I was attracted to this book after reading about it in the introduction to Carl Carmer's Stars Fell on Alabama (a far superior book and a much better read, though hardly a classic.) 90 Degrees in the Shade can be recommended as a period piece only, and even then only if you are really really interested in Southern history. Wayne Flynt's excellent introduction tells you most of what you need to know. The author committed suicide shortly before the book's publication, so afraid was he of the reaction of his Southern friends. That, perhaps as much as anything else, tells you the nature of the Southern mind the book tries to portray. Still, I'm not sure why this was ever published in the state it is in. It is completely scattershot, mixing interesting biographies of Southern demagogues like Tom Heflin and J.R. Bilbo with long passages of statistics, interesting but muddled stories of strikes, endless ruminations about the effect of the machine (i.e., mechanization) on Southern agriculture and industry, and other long passages that are written in such an elevated level of gibberish that I'm not sure at the end of the paragraph what point the author was trying to make. The author's opinions are pretty hard to swallow in lots of cases, as well. While opposing lynching, he still manages to find some sort of justification for why it happens. He condemns Reconstruction as a crime against the South and seems to be a strong supporter of the original Ku Klux Klan--back when, as he tells it, it was made up of the best men in society and was fighting against the corrupt carpetbaggers and scalawags who were trying to destroy the South--whereas the Ku Klux Klan in the author's time was apparently a bunch of rabble. He also makes wild, off-the-mark statements about the South never accepting air conditioning and stuff like that. So, as I said, read this as a period piece. Cason will send you to Wikipedia to look up more about Heflin and Bilbo and the strikes he mentions. It is very interesting reading. But your overall impression will probably be the same as mine--if Cason represented the type of man who was expected to bring the South into the modern age, well, it's no wonder parts of the South still haven't gotten there.… (plus d'informations)