Want to understand the United States? Not those out-of-touch coastal cities, but the “real” America? Listen to politicians, journalists and talking heads (from anywhere on the political spectrum) and they’ll say: “Let me tell you about Ohio.” They won’t mention the cities you may know – Cleveland or Columbus, maybe even Cincinnati – but will begin to describe the beat-up, lesser-known corners of Ohio, the places usually safe from any potential prior knowledge. There, whatever story they want to tell about the country can flourish unchecked by truth – and the people who live there have little opportunity to contradict it.
Over the last week, one such place was a victim to one such narrative: Springfield, a town with a population of fewer than 60,000 people and roughly 20 miles north-east of Dayton. After a child was killed in a road traffic collision last summer, hit by a Haitian driver, a baseless conspiracy theory began to spread two weeks ago claiming Haitians in Springfield were kidnapping and eating their neighbours’ cats and dogs. Prominent figures in the Republican Party – from senator Ted Cruz to vice-presidential nominee JD Vance – amplified this theory. The conspiracy culminated with Donald Trump declaring, in the presidential debate against Kamala Harris on Tuesday 10 September, “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs! The people that came in, they are eating the cats! They’re eating the pets!” Although the debate moderators quickly contradicted the claim, the Springfield city manager insisted there hasn’t been a single report of this kind, and almost every major English-speaking news outlet in the Western world debunked the theory. Still, it has become an international news topic.
It’s easy to see how a story like this has emerged from Springfield – it plays on the general public’s mindless assumption that this is a place where things such as this happen. I grew up 20 miles south of Springfield and 15 miles north of Vance’s Middletown, the setting for his Hillbilly Elegy (which equally constructs a politically and personally convenient story about what people from Ohio are like). Both are effectively suburbs of Dayton, a city of about 140,000 that boomed in the early 20th century, busted less than a century later and is now on the up again. My childhood saw split communities, where rich families were insulated from the financial crisis while their poorer neighbours lost their jobs and homes; where deprived neighbourhoods downtown rubbed up against ones that continue to be gentrified. Many people were xenophobic and racist, and many others fought hard for left-wing causes. It is a region that can illustrate what has gone wrong in the Rust Belt just as much as it can illustrate what might now be going right. Republicans peddling the dog-eating conspiracy will claim they are trying to help Springfield and similar areas. But what is Springfield really like? And what other places do they really mean?
Despite the importance of Ohio as a swing state in elections, this political pattern is familiar. Ohio is usefully anonymous; few outside of the state have any real curiosity to understand it. And so it is treated as a blank slate across the political spectrum, a place no one really knows anything about, a convenient place for politicians to project their skewed assumptions and narratives on to, for reasons cooked-up by political advisers.
This isn’t just Trump problem, or a politician problem. It’s deeper than that. Why is it so easy to cast these places in an absurd, ridiculous light? Such narratives only succeed in a culture happy to pigeonhole communities in places like Ohio into dull, cheap, stereotypes of uneducated hicks living in a “drive-through” place, in dire need of saving. This happens with or without racism and xenophobia being added into the mix, but it certainly makes it easier if you can play on racist tropes and fearmongering at the same time too.
The consequences are real, most acutely now for the people of Springfield. The parents of the boy killed last year gave a press conference the day after the presidential debate asking Trump and Vance to stop using their child’s death as a “political tool”. “I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man,” his father said through tears. “If that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone.” County buildings shut at the end of last week after a bomb threat at Springfield City Hall.
But the effects will reverberate around the Dayton area, Ohio, and the entire Midwest. (Already, over the weekend, Vance went on to share a new conspiracy theory that African migrants were grilling cats in Dayton, sharing a year-old video of someone grilling what is visibly chicken.) In mythologising about one state, every other Midwest state will also be seen in this way. Tens of millions of people are then shoehorned into a narrow caricature of a helpless place with risible, bumpkinish quirks which, in the name of standing up for them, distracts from the real, individual problems they are battling.
Where I grew up was different to Springfield, was different to Middletown, was different to the other places dotted around Dayton. They have their own identities, strengths and challenges. An influx of Haitian residents in Springfield has significantly boosted its economy but, inevitably, has put a strain on municipal services. The local government asked for extra funding to fix this solvable issue over the summer. What help are they instead getting as the rest of the country fixates on a story about an imaginary place masquerading as their home?
The takeaway from what happened in Springfield isn’t just that we must take a more nuanced view of those places which are falsely characterised for political gain, or that we should be outraged by the disservice done to the real people who live there. It’s that we should also be wary of the ease with which anywhere – and anyone – can be defined by those who don’t understand it, who don’t know it at all, until, seen through the eyes of the rest of the world, it becomes completely unrecognisable.
