Springfield, Trump, and the violent gyrations of the American dream

Springfield, Ohio, burns brightly in my childhood memories. Every summer, starting when I was in grade school in the 1960s, we hopped into our Ford station wagon for the two-day drive on newfangled interstates from Greater New York to Peoria, Ill., where my grandparents lived. Springfield was the midway point, so late on a Saturday night, we’d exit onto the brightest neon strip this side of Vegas, looking for the glow of a “vacancy” sign amid a reddish-green night sky that looked to a half-asleep 9-year-old like a Technicolor dream of America.

I wasn’t alone. In 1983, Newsweek described Springfield — some 45 minutes west of Columbus on Interstate 70 — as a diverse and hardworking city that, for decades, had epitomized the ups and downs of the American dream, even as the rust of factory layoffs and an 11%-plus population drop in the 1970s was starting to dim its luminescence.

My bright-eyed, little-boy fascination with Springfield’s neon strip could not imagine the bleakness of its early 21st-century future, with thousands of jobs shipped out to Mexico or China or vanished into thin air, and surely not the dark secrets of its past that included a dozen racist lynchings and two riots that had burned down a Black neighborhood called the Levee in the maintenance of white supremacy.

And yet, there was also a bright side of the dream, pushing Springfield forward. As I slept on a Holiday Inn mattress, I didn’t know the city was governed in the late 1960s by Ohio’s first Black mayor, one of the first in the nation since Reconstruction. In 2014, at seemingly rock bottom, civic leaders announced a plan to save a community that had lost one-third of its population by appealing to new immigrants — an idea that bore fruit six years later when a surge of legal Haitian migrants and a new breed of factory owner forged a beautiful friendship.

It looked like the dream of Springfield had a happy ending, until the ceaseless currents of a city’s past — and a nation’s — dragged the heart of Ohio back toward its past.

It’s all over the news now: how the low level of grumbling among some longtime white Springfield residents as thousands of refugees from Haiti’s political turmoil were welcomed to town by civic and faith leaders got turned up a notch with a fatal 2023 traffic accident, and went from a whisper to a scream with a power boost from the internet, as locals knowingly or unknowingly dredged up ancient racist tropes about immigrants eating geese, even their neighbors’ cats.

What’s deeply troubling and new is that political leaders who could turn down the volume on these xenophobic, anti-Haitian lies are instead cranking the volume to earsplitting levels. Ohio U.S. Sen. JD Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, posted baseless falsehoods on X/Twitter before his top-of-the-ticket mate, Donald Trump, stunned the nation in a nationally televised debate by blurting out, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs” — and they’ve continued to double down.

“As a person of faith, we’re called on to love our neighbor and welcome our neighbor,” a Lutheran minister in Springfield told me by phone on Saturday, hours before the increasing threats of violence made her ask me not to use her name. “In the Scripture, it speaks that we were all once a stranger in a strange land.” Like many in Springfield, the clergywoman is upset that politicians who should be figuring out how to solve problems, like a need for more translators in schools, are instead whipping up xenophobia.

The truth is that for well over a century, Springfield has captured the stark duality of the American dream — striving again and again to create economic and social opportunity on the eastern edge of the great U.S. flatlands, only to feel threatened and sometimes explode in anger at the notion that anyone other than white families might share in that prosperity.

Ohio had been a magnet for freed African Americans dating back to the Underground Railroad, accelerating as cities like Springfield boomed with factories that made cars and tractors and printed popular magazines. But at the turn of the 20th century, lynchings of Black men spiked with the rise of Jim Crow segregation, and Northern communities like Springfield were not immune. More than a dozen such executions took place in the city in the early 1900s.

In March 1904, a Black man named Richard Dixon was arrested for the murder of a white police officer. A mob of roughly 1,000 white Springfield residents stormed the city jail, seized Dixon, hanged him from a downtown light pole, and shot him numerous times before the angry throng moved on to the predominantly Black, flood-prone neighborhood called the Levee, burning down much of the neighborhood. The negative national press didn’t stop it from happening all over again two years later, as another anti-Black riot drove at least 100 people in the Levee from their homes.

In the wake of these racist outbreaks, Springfield’s better angels took over for a long time, aided by a stable of employers like International Harvester’s 5,000-worker factory, and positive civic leadership. The next race-related headline, in 1966, was the groundbreaking election of Robert Henry as Ohio’s first Black mayor. But much of Springfield’s positivity died alongside the Industrial Revolution. As jobs at the tractor plant shrunk to just a few hundred, Springfield lost not only population but saw its median income plunge 27% from 1999 to 2014, the steepest decline in the nation. A place that teetered on the fulcrum of the American dream in 1983 was — by 2011, according to a Gallup poll — the unhappiest city in America.

Even at rock bottom, what happened in 2014 was a little surprising given the role that anti-immigrant fervor would play in electing Trump president just two years later. City leaders, including the longtime mayor, declared Springfield would aim to attract migrants, creating an infrastructure that included a Welcome Springfield committee to push the idea.

“If they are legal, hardworking citizens following the law, we want to welcome them to Springfield,” said then-Mayor Warren Copeland, who died in 2023. It took time, but around 2020, a perfect storm of thousands of Haitian migrants granted protected status in the U.S. with worsening unrest in their homeland and new employers seeking eager laborers began to change Springfield — for good. Downtown revitalization and demand for housing surged.

Change was not welcomed by everyone. In August 2023, a Haitian immigrant who was improperly licensed slammed his minivan into a school bus on the first day of classes, killing an 11-year-old boy and launching nativist resentments into a new orbit. The next 12 months brought unfounded rumors about Haitian newcomers eating geese from the local park, as well as an invented charge of stealing and eating a pet cat that flourished on Springfield’s web pages, then spread to the outside world.

The ugly undertow that lynched Dixon exactly 120 years earlier began to resurface under the 21st-century gleam of Springfield’s spruced-up downtown. Some exploitation was predictable, as when a national fringe neo-Nazi group called Blood Tribe came to the city on Aug. 10 and marched, some carrying swastika flags and some open-carrying rifles. These events stirred up right-wing extremists both around Clark County, which includes Springfield, and across the country.

But here’s what’s different from the racial unrest that rocked southwestern Ohio more than a century ago: Today, the leaders of one political party are not working to quell rumors and calm Springfield, but rather to promote the falsehoods and stir up anger, in a demagogic scheme to divide America and retake the White House.

Even before the first swastika came to town, no one did more to whip up racial paranoia than Ohio’s junior senator, Vance. Newly minted as Trump’s vice presidential running mate, Vance blew up legitimate issues in Springfield like increased demand for housing into a crusade against “illegals” — remember, almost every Haitian in town is there lawfully — who’d “overwhelmed” the city. In recent days, Vance amplified the worst social media rumors about pet stealing, refused to apologize when local officials debunked them, and then blasted anyone who’d called out the racist lies about Haitian Americans as “broken elites” who “scorn” the everyday white folks of Middle America.

Suddenly, the past that burned down the Levee in 1904 doesn’t seem so past.

Even worse, Vance then echoed Hitlerian propaganda tactics with a claim that Haitians are spreading communicable diseases — also debunked by Clark County health officials. But the reality is that this racist fish stinks from the head. It was Trump who turned Springfield into a code-red emergency when, while getting whupped in his debate with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, he blurted out to 67 million viewers that “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs!” — a claim so brazenly false that no one even in Springfield had made it before.

It’s called stochastic terrorism when high-profile figures like Trump and Vance make outlandish claims certain to trigger specific threats or acts of violence on the ground. To the utter surprise of no one, Trump’s dog-eating slur was followed in rapid succession by angry, violent, and anonymous threats against Haitians in Springfield that closed down City Hall and two public schools, canceled a public discussion around Haitian issues, and locked down two hospitals. On Saturday night, Springfield’s small liberal arts college, Wittenberg University, announced it was shutting down because someone had called the school and threatened to shoot Haitians. Parents of immigrant families are telling their kids to stay indoors — stunned by the hatred whipped up not just by fringe extremists, but by two men in blue suits who see xenophobia as the pathway to political power in America.

Trump’s double down, postdebate promise to deport Haitians, who are in this country legally, to a place they are not from, Venezuela, shows that his central campaign plank of “mass deportation” has nothing to do with upholding immigration law and everything to do with the skin color or the accent of the targeted groups — a mindset no different from the 20th-century mob that burned down Springfield’s only Black neighborhood.

Trump and Vance are desperate to exploit the darkness I couldn’t see behind Springfield’s neon gateway, the contradictions of the nation that crafted a beautiful vision of freedom only to backslide again and again into violence to reserve those freedoms for ancient hierarchies around race, religion, or gender. It’s a Jekyll-and-Hyde American dream that led scores of Ohio men from towns like Springfield to die in a war to end slavery, only to lynch a dozen Black men little more than a generation later. In 2024, this classically Middle American city has become the crucible for which version of the dream might finally prevail after this 250-year cycle of violent give-and-take.

Even as a GOP presidential ticket mimics the 20th century’s worst despots, you can see the bright lights of Springfield still burning through the void — in the father of the killed 11-year-old boy lashing out at Trump’s and Vance’s endorsements of anti-Haitian racist tropes as “morally bankrupt”; in Springfield’s Republican mayor stating, “We’ve been punched in a way we should not have been punched”; in the dozens of Springfield natives who packed Haitian restaurants to show their support; and in the local political and faith leaders who’ve pleaded for tolerance.

“There are certainly people trying to do what’s right, like the mayor speaking out and condemning what’s going on,” the Springfield minister told me on Saturday. “It’s bringing attention and a spotlight to this community, but it could be any other community and that’s my concern … What community is next? Because there’ll be another Springfield.”

There can no longer be any confusion over what this election is all about. On the night of Nov. 5, will America be illuminated by flashing neon bulbs of hope or the riotous arson fires of rage?