What’s in a Name?
I didn’t grow up in St. George, Utah — but I consider it my home.
I was raised in Northern Utah, but then spent a few years away on my own in South America. When the time came to return home to live with my family, they had relocated to St. George. I quickly fell in love with the area. It’s a Geological Wonderland — and many (not just a few) of the most beautiful places in the world are within a day’s drive.
The area has a rich faithful heritage, consistent with much of Utah. The modern settlers of the area were Mormon Pioneers; all of whom endured tremendous hardship — not the least of which were the sweltering summers with no modern conveniences to give them respite from the 100+ degree heat (which can last for months).
At the behest of the Mormon leaders, the settlers of the area were tasked with growing Cotton in an effort to create a self-sufficient Great Basin State which would not need to import any of it’s goods from outside.
Because of the “Cotton Mission” the settlers were tasked with, the area began to be referred to as “Dixie” — which is, of course, a sort of homage to the Southern United States, where lots of cotton was, and is, produced. The Mason-Dixon line being the name from which that “Dixie” was derived.
Many of the settlers of Utah’s Dixie were, originally, from southern states themselves. While some of them were, in times past, Slave owners or sympathizers — there is no evidence (that I’m aware of) that any actual Slaves were used to produce cotton in Southern Utah.
The first settlers arrived in 1857 — and by 1897 the Cotton Mission officially ended; never having really produced much cotton successfully.
The nickname “Dixie”, however, stuck around.
The descendants of those original pioneer settlers felt a great kinship to the Dixie name. It served as a reminder of the struggle, and the sacrifice of their ancestors to not only survive in such a harsh environment — but to turn it into something vibrant and beautiful. As with all of us — the sacrifices of our ancestors paved the way not only for our existence, but the comfortable nature of our existence. We owe a debt of gratitude to them for the mere fact of our existence, and that alone is sufficient to honor them; but most of us are born with greatly improved circumstances than those our grandparents were born into.
And so — the Dixie name remained a part of the culture, and vernacular. The word’s obvious association with the Southern United States, and as such, the Confederacy, would prove problematic however. The State College in St. George adopted as it’s mascot “Rodney Rebel” — who flew the confederate flag at sporting events. Southern-style minstrel shows, and even, a mock “Slave Auction”, with participants in blackface, were held as part of the college’s events as conducted by the student body.
There is a list, published in the local Southern Utah newspaper The Spectrum which details, at length, many such insensitive, distasteful, and downright reprehensible things done at the College from the early 1900’s through the 1990's. Despite, what could be construed as a loose association with the Southern States and as a result of the attempted production of Cotton; became more tightly connected with the Confederacy, and slave ownership in the 1900’s.
Regardless of that, however, it’s hard to argue that the continued use of the term “Dixie” was only meant to convey an affinity with Confederacy and Racism; even during those times, when certainly there was a fair amount of overt racism.
You see, there is, what seems to me, a pervasive trend in our current society to characterize previous generations in a monolithic way that highlights the worst of who they were. In other words, there seems to be a tendency to generalize, and say that the legacy of previous generations, institutions, and societies are best characterized as prejudicial, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and a whole slew of other unfavorable adjectives. Which, paradoxically, they often were. But that’s not all they were, and in fact, that’s not even most of who they were. Alas, the wise observer will understand as well that we too will be viewed as morally repugnant, for a variety of reasons, 200 years hence.
Reality is complicated. It is only the ideologically possessed that is prone to distill causal mechanisms down to only one single cause. Racism has been a part of this country, and was certainly a part of the use of “Dixie” in Southern Utah — if not for overtly racist reasons, than by ignorant and naïve participants. The latter of which, I suspect, were the majority. That matters — because intent matters. It matters if someone burns down your house on accident, or if they burn it down on purpose.
That being said, intent only matters to a certain point — as it isn’t ultimately exculpatory of the behavior. After all, if your house has burned down, the importance of whether the act was deliberate or accidental doesn’t change the fact that your abode has become a heaping pile of ashes.
So, regardless of intent, behavior must change. As it relates to “Dixie”, and it’s association with the Confederacy — it looks like it did stop. In fact, the list of grievances detailed in The Spectrum ends in 1994. The School dropped the “Rebels” nickname in 2007, and “Rodney Rebel” in 2005.
These were good and necessary changes in my estimation — and there may be still many changes yet to make. You see, our social institutions are amalgamations of our collective conscious. Sometimes the collective conscious is possessed by bad ideas — and they become a part of our institutions; until such time they are rooted out. Such is the case here. Through ignorance, naivety, malevolence, unintelligence, or a combination of all of those — Utah’s Dixie became allied with the Confederacy. But again, that’s not all it was.
People from St. George nowadays describe the “Dixie Spirit” as being more about fortitude, ruggedness, hard work, charity, kindness, honor, commitment, and Faith. For them, and for the generations in the past, “Dixie” also means those things.
So — as the intellectually and morally honest seeker could (and should) reasonably conclude — the term “Dixie” is complicated.
It’s continued use, both institutionally as well as colloquially, has been in question for many years. In recent months, however, there has been action taken to officially change the name of Dixie State University — to Utah Polytechnic State University. The removal of the “Dixie” name has caused an uproar.
As a graduate of DSU (it was Dixie State College when I attended) — and as a self-adopted citizen of St. George, I felt drawn into the issue.
I’m 35 years old — but I’ve already suffered at least 1 mid-life crisis (the substance of which is fodder for another time). However, this existential struggle led me to delve deeply into psychology, religion, and philosophy as a means to understand the source of meaning in life, and to help me understand just what the hell was going on in the world. At length, I’ve come to believe that a pragmatic conceptualization of the truth is much more useful than an objective one. That isn’t to say that objective truth isn’t useful. To the contrary, it’s discovery has caused our species to dominate this planet, perhaps, like no other species ever has. But it’s use is limited; particularly as it relates to the realm of Meaning.
Objective truth, taken to it’s natural conclusions, can imbue a sort of nihilism. After all, we’re on a flying rock careening through space, for no particular reason, subject to complete obliteration at any given moment. And if our species manages to survive long enough (which it likely won’t) than the Sun will swell to a red giant billions of years from now, and whatever’s left of this pitiful planet will be engulfed and burned. That’s objectively true. That will happen. But it’s not useful to base your behavior on that fact. It doesn’t make you feel like you should get up and make the world a better place; despite it’s veracity.
The fact is, despite our ultimately certain demise, there’s a reason to get up, and get going, and try to make the world a better place. It’s because life is not merely (or even mostly) comprised of Matter (in the atomic sense) but, rather, of what matters.
What does this have to do with Dixie? Well, everything I think.
There has been a groundswell of such thinking in modernity. People have left Religions, for example, in unprecedented numbers. Presumably, because they’re not objectively true. 2 + 2 does not equal 4, so to speak. That being said, despite having left religion, they are not any less religious. Religious thinking is, arguably, evolutionarily programmed into Homo Sapiens (as ironic as that is). We are Religious by nature.
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote a book in 2018 entitled “The Codling of the American Mind”. In it, they explore the troubling trends on American collegiate campuses, which they dub “The Three Great Untruths” being spread on campus:
- The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
- The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings
- The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
I would argue that we have seen a proliferation of these untruths, well beyond the college campus, into society at-large, and is a large part of why the name “Dixie” is being erased from Southern Utah.
Haidt and Lukianoff argue that these Untruths contradict ancient wisdom, contradict modern psychology, and harm the individuals and communities who embrace them.
Such is the case, I believe, for removing the Dixie name from the institutions and vernacular of Southern Utah.
I believe Haidt and Lukianoff when they said:
“By shielding children from every possible risk, we may lead them to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren’t risky at all and isolate them from the adult skills that they will one day have to master. (…) If we protect children from various classes of potentially upsetting experiences, we make it far more likely that those children will be unable to cope with such events when they leave our protective umbrella. The modern obsession with protecting young people from “feeling unsafe” is, we believe, one of the (several) causes of the rapid rise in rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide. (…) A culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.”
Victor Frankl, the former Prisoner of Auschwitz and famed Austrian Psychologist, profoundly said of his experience:
“I ask you not to expect a single word of hatred from me. Who should I hate? I knew only the victims. But I do not know the perpetrators, at least, I do not know them personally, and to blame somebody not personally but collectively is something I strictly reject.
Collective guilt does not Exist!”
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, former Soviet Gulag Prisoner turned Author was right, when he said:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
Our incessant focus on institutional wrong-doing, or the wrong-doing of our ancestors is not where the focus should be. We are wretched, pitiful creatures ourselves and we would do well to focus on how we can make the world a better place now. We need to clean-up the skeletons in our closet . The institutionalized bad ideas that have become a part of the fabric of society should be carefully and deliberately rooted out. But, we need to be careful. We have to be sure we aren’t throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We need to question our ability, very seriously, to properly discern baby from bathwater.
Such is the case with Dixie. It seems to me as though the term, particularly in Southern Utah, has come to mean something more than mere affiliation with racism. And we should let it be that. In fact, it’s good that it becomes that alone, and we can put to bed the affiliations of old. Retaining the Dixie name not only ensures we remember our mistakes, but it helps us understand that overcame those mistakes to create something Mighty and Good.
Purging our current reality of it’s existence is to concede defeat. It is to concede that we do not possess the fortitude to deal with our past, and to move beyond it to better and brighter days — but that we need to erase it. Worse even, it is to say that those affected by it are incapable of overcoming it.
Abandoning the Dixie identity is to concede that our ancestors, indeed, our families, are best defined by their faults, and their flaws — and that they are ultimately irredeemable.
If we don’t allow our institutions, societies, words, and names to become something other than what they were — than that is the definition of damnation. You don’t have to go very far back in your gene pool to be irreconcilably damned, guilty of biological association.
It is charitable, and indeed, it is Faith to choose to move forward under the presupposition that, no matter how bad we have messed things up (and will mess things up) we can also make things better.
Though it is objectively true to say that the word “Dixie” is associated with Racism; it is not merely, or even mostly, that alone. Such a shallow definition is akin to explaining that, in order to play the flute, one must simply blow through one end while moving their fingers up-and-down across the holes on top. That is, after all, a completely accurate description of how to play the flute. However, it lacks the necessary detail and nuance to be useful at all. Someone who undertakes to play the flute, with that instruction alone, will not garner much of an audience.
Such is the argument to define “Dixie” as being, above all, Racist. It’s one-dimensional, low resolution, nonsense.
Though my experience is anecdotal — I’ve worked for a few of the largest, most prominent companies in the world with a degree in Accounting from Dixie State University. When questioned about the name of the school (which happened only once), I happily explained it’s origins as stemming from the cotton mission of the early settlers, and that was that.
The so-called harm that “Dixie” causes is a boogeyman. There are lots of such boogeymen in today’s society. That’s because we haven’t had many real problems to deal with, and we are a generation of weaklings — both in body and spirit.
I suppose, given the current climate, the name change will proceed and Dixie will be erased from the School’s name at least. We shall see to what extent it disappears entirely (I suspect it won’t).
But, for me, I will always remember it as a brief, but poignant, victory over some of the worst aspects of our modern society. We took a terrible thing, and we made it better. We made it something beautiful. I’ll yet sing:
“Are you from Dixie?
I said from Dixie!
Where the fields of cotton beckon to me.
We’re glad to see ya
To say ‘How be ya?’
And the friends we’re longin’ to see.
If you’re from Santa Clara, Washington
Or St. George, fine,
Anywhere below the Iron County line,
Then you’re from Dixie,
Hurray for Dixie,
’Cause I’m from Dixie, too!”
