What ‘ales’ us

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Columnist

Gayle Benson’s decision to strip the name “Dixie” from her historic brand of beer may prove neither a simple nor inexpensive decision. Regardless of the economic consequences, though, hers was a noble choice worthy of the owner of the only NFL team ever to boast of significant African-American ownership.

Nearly forgotten today, the New Orleans Saints’ founding group of stockholders included Dr. Norman Francis and the Dejoie family — proprietors of this newspaper. Up until then, and mostly true today, the Saints have stood as one of the only NFL teams ever to include Black owners, even at a minority percentage. As such, the Crescent City’s hometeam has sometimes taken brave courses of action—politically challenging paths before which the owners of other institutions in the American South might have hesitated.

Many equate her decision to remove “Dixie” from the ubiquitous aluminum-canned beverage to the vote a week later by the Mississippi legislature to remove the Confederate “Stars and Bars” from the Magnolia State flag, but Mrs. Benson’s relabeling edict constituted the far more difficult choice of the two.

Generations of lawmakers and activists had fought to cut off the flag within a flag. Few Mississippians debated, however, that the Confederate Flag was first added to the state’s standard in 1894 to signify a white supremacist triumph over Reconstruction, or that the secessionist South held slavery as a raison d’être.

Derivations of the word Dixie (and its use on beloved beer bottles for a century) was thought to be a far less provocative term, though, by its Caucasian defenders than outright Confederate iconography. “Dixies” were nicknames for the ten dollar or “Dix” notes which heralded Francophonic New Orleans’ economic predominance in the Antebellum South. A bank on Royal Street literally printed the most common currency in the United States after the Panic of 1837, using the French word for 10 on their notes, and originally the statement to “go down to the land of the Dixies” meant the profit one earned upon selling his goods at the Port of New Orleans after a long voyage.

Eventually, the moniker came to signify the wealth of the entire pre-war South. And then the South itself, especially when a subsequent song equated “Dixieland” with the “land of cotton.” Not surprisingly, the descendants of the involuntary laborers upon those plantations expressed few wishes that those “good times are not forgotten.”

Whites though, even those who supported civil rights early on, rarely made the connection. “Dixie” to them was a geographic term deriving from an amount box on a $10 bill. What better name could there be for a beer? What better statement of the value of Southern pride than to dub their brewskis so!

Generations grew up believing that true New Orleanians drank Dixie Beer. At one point in the mid-20th Century, roughly 30 percent of the city‘s population opted against imbibing virtually any other alcohol but it. Even after the bad batch of 1976, even after Hurricane Katrina chased brewery production to Wisconsin, owners Joseph and Kendra Bruno knew that their fight to restore the historic brand in its hometown would be met with popular acclamation, if they succeeded.

They were right. When Tom Benson bought a majority stake in their company, and underwrote Dixie Beer’s return to a new brewhouse in New Orleans East, legions of fans screamed their appreciation— much as they did at Saints games.

In a city where “ain’t there no more” constitutes a heartfelt lament, changing such a beloved brand could never prove easy. Most Caucasians had just gotten their Dixie Beers back. They wondered why the name couldn’t be left alone? It didn’t START as a symbol of the Confederacy, after all.

Then again, neither did the swastika. For thousands of years, the rune symbolized good luck, until the Nazis bastardized it into a talisman for racial superiority— and genocide. No Jew could ever again dismiss the swastika as just a twisted emblem. It evoked too much pain and hate for any other meaning to predominate.

Such truths parallel the word “Dixie,” and so African-American cheers for the widowed Saints’ owner continue even as long-time beer drinkers in the white community put down their cans for the last time.

This article originally published in the July 6, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.