The Tales Are Phantasms, But the Victims Are Real: The Trumpian Crucible in Springfield, Ohio
Our guest author is Leo Casey, Special Assistant to the President of the AFT, and Executive Director Emeritus of the Albert Shanker Institute.
In January 1952, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) subpoenaed the well-known American stage and film director Elia Kazan to testify behind closed doors. There he told the Committee about his own participation in the Communist Party, but declined to name others. In April, he was called back for public hearings. Caving in to threats from HUAC and pressure from the Hollywood studios, Kazan named eight individuals who, with him, had been part of a Communist Party cell in the Group Theatre during the1930s.
Lives were shattered by Kazan’s testimony. The eight named individuals were themselves called before HUAC. The actor J. Edward Bromberg defiantly refused the committee’s demand to name names, but the stress of the ordeal took a terrible toll: he would die young of a heart attack in a matter of months. Others of the eight who resisted HUAC, such as Morris Carnovsky and Phoebe Brand, would never work in film again. Only those who would join Kazan in naming names, such as Clifford Odets and Lewis Leverett, would be able to avoid the Hollywood blacklist and save their film careers.
Angered in equal measures by HUAC’s star chamber and by Kazan informing on one-time friends and comrades, the distinguished American playwright Arthur Miller decided that it was time to mount a forceful public critique of the McCarthyism that lay behind the HUAC hearings. But rather than comment directly on the events of his day, Miller would take the unusual approach of using the late 17th century witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts as his subject matter.
The Salem witch trials were an episode of mass hysteria. In a little over a year, from February 1692 and May 1693, more than 200 residents of Salem were accused of practicing witchcraft and tried in its courts; before the trials and sentencing were finally concluded, 25 of the accused would lose their lives, either by hanging or through poor treatment while imprisoned. The victims were disproportionately women, and drawn from the marginalized and vulnerable: the original three targets were an enslaved woman, a destitute woman who was critical of the established Puritan church, and a woman who rarely attended church services and had married an indentured servant.
With the Salem witch trials, Miller believed, he could tell a story of an old witch hunt that would put in focus the elements and dynamics it shared with its modern Red Scare analogue: fears and hatreds of the ‘other’ so beyond reason that they entered into the realm of the fantastical; zealous, self-righteous inquisitors hunting for heretics, dissenters, and non-conformists; wild, fabricated charges, such as claims of Satanic rituals that involved child sacrifice, that spread like a contagion; the use of false accusations for personal profit; the targeting of those least able to defend themselves; and false confessions and false accusations of others by those charged with witchcraft, made in efforts to save themselves and loved ones. If those who read his play or attended performances of it could see contemporary events through the lens of these 260 year old trials, Miller thought, they would grasp what was so wrong with the McCarthyism that had taken hold of the US. Miller would call the allegorical play he wrote about the Salem witch trials The Crucible, a term for a severe test or trial taken from the Bible, and it debuted on Broadway in 1953. Today, it is widely considered a classic of American literature.
The Crucible, Redux
They are other moral panics in American history which can be fruitfully viewed through the lens of a Salem witch trial allegory. Some of the better known instances are: the anti-Catholicism of the Nativist and Know Nothing movements; the antebellum persecution of abolitionists; racist lynchings and violence against African-Americans; paroxysms of anti-Asian, antisemitic, anti-Latino, and anti-Muslim hate and violence; and the Lavender Scare.
One recurring theme is that the target of these ‘moral panics’ was often an immigrant community. By virtue of their outsider origins and newcomer status, immigrants were more vulnerable to misrepresentation and attack. In general, these ‘crucibles’ rendered immigrants as a racialized ‘other’ –- an alien and barbaric presence which posed a mortal danger to the culture, livelihood, and well-being of native-born Americans of white Anglo-Saxon descent. Criminality and contagious disease were attributed to the immigrant community. Its members were portrayed as adherents of false, idolatrous religions, even as the practitioners of Satanic rituals. They were accused of stealing the jobs of the native-born, and of invading and destroying their neighborhoods. They were portrayed as sexual predators and degenerates, and associated with dissolute drinking, illicit drug use, and sex work. Discriminatory laws and policing were directed at them. Unfounded rumors and accusations of child abduction, rape, and murder were triggers for mob violence against them. Over the course of different waves of immigration to the U.S., these various motifs are remarkably consistent, from Irish, Italian, Chinese, and East European Jewish immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries to Latin American, Caribbean, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern immigrants in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
If the anti-immigrant rhetoric of former President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement evokes so many of these negative elements, it is because it is deeply rooted in this dark side of American history, with its long train of anti-immigrant ‘crucibles.’ The now infamous accusation of Trump in his September 10th debate with Vice President Kamala Harris -– that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating the pet dogs and cats of their neighbors -– did not materialize out of thin air; it drew upon this historical body of discourse, which includes more than a decade of Trump’s own virulent anti-immigrant posturing.
From Internet memes to late night comedians, Trump’s claim has been widely ridiculed and mocked. And deservedly so: the accusation was not simply an obvious fabrication that defamed a community of Black immigrants; it was an absurd and surreal calumny, a racist projection of buffoonish dimensions.
Yet since that debate moment, both Trump and his Vice Presidential candidate J. D. Vance –- who had brought the rumor to Trump’s attention from social media, where it had been initially spread by neo-Nazis –- have doubled down on their prevarication. In so doing, they have ignored a mountain of evidence that their allegations are false. On multiple occasions, the Springfield police, Springfield city manager Bryan Heck, Republican Springfield mayor Rob Rue, and Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine have gone on the record that there is no credibility to these fantastic charges. They have tirelessly explained that the Haitians in Springfield are in the United States legally, on temporary protected status, and that their presence had done much to restore the economic vitality of Springfield, a ‘rust belt’ city that had been steadily losing population over the last thirty years –- until the recent arrival of Haitian immigrants. The conservative, Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal did a thorough investigation of Trump’s and Vance’s claims, and found them to be entirely without foundation. They interviewed the one individual the Trump-Vance campaign had identified as support for their tales of abducted pets, a woman who was a Trump and MAGA supporter. She told the Journal that she had been mistaken –- her missing cat was discovered alive and well in her cellar soon after she had filed a police report –- and that she had apologized to her Haitian neighbors for falsely accusing them of stealing it. Moreover, the Journal found that the Trump-Vance campaign had reached out to the city of Springfield before Vance had tweeted the claim that pets were being stolen and eaten and Trump had repeated them up in the Presidential debate, and had been told by city officials that the rumors on social media were entirely unsubstantiated. Even with this knowledge, Trump and Vance repeated those false rumors as if they were gospel: their lies were willful.
This sordid episode has made painfully clear that Trump and Vance know no shame. The day of the Presidential debate Vance would tweet that Aiden Clark, a young Springfield boy accidently killed in August 2023 when his school bus collided with a mini-van driven by a Haitian driver, had been “murdered by a Haitian migrant.” Aiden’s grieving father would be forced to publicly correct the misinformation in Vance’s tweet. Demanding that “hate spewing people” leave his family alone, Nathan Clark specifically called upon Trump, Vance, and Ohio Republican Senatorial candidate Bernie Moreno to stop using his son’s name in their duplicitous campaigns of anti-immigrant hate. “Did you know that one of the worst feelings in the world,” he declared, “is to not be able to protect your child? Even worse, we can’t protect his memory when he’s gone. Please stop the hate.” Unfazed by Clark’s plea, Vance’s campaign office would issue a statement in response that blamed Vice President Kamala Harris for the child’s death. In the Vice Presidential debate, Vance would repeat his lie that Haitians were in Springfield because of “illegal immigration.” When CBS News debate moderator Margaret Brennan noted that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield had “legal status,” Vance expressed outrage that his misrepresentation had been contradicted by a “fact check.”
The Victims of Propaganda
There is a political purpose to the promulgation of this ‘big lie.’ Trump and Vance calculate that they can use these racist myths about immigrants of color to polarize the electorate along racial lines and win the election. In pursuit of that goal, the truth is nothing more than collateral damage. "The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes," Vance told CNN's Dana Bash. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."
There is a word for Vance’s and Trump’s ‘created stories’: propaganda. Propaganda is a powerful word, invoking images of authoritarian governments and movements that use deliberate political lies to further bloody, repressive objectives. For this reason, it should not be used lightly or carelessly. Yet what other term better describes not only these lies about Haitian immigrants, but Trump’s descriptions of his political foes as “vermin” and his repeated characterizations of immigrants as “not people” but “animals” who “poison the blood” of the country and have “murder” in “their genes?” Even before we consider that Trump’s words are part of a discourse that is demanding the mass round up and expulsion of millions of people of color from the US, is it not clear that the immanent logic of the words alone is one of racial and ethnic cleansing? These are tropes, after all, that figured prominently in Nazi propaganda. It would be irresponsible to not describe as propaganda discourse that relies on the dehumanizing language and rhetoric of classical fascism.
What is the most effective response to such propaganda? There is a place for seeking to diminish its power by treating it as laughable. Lampooning Trump’s debate performance and cartoonish campaign speeches highlights just how inadequate and unprepared he is for the office he seeks. A president’s words carry weight; Trump’s wild and reckless words, with a perpetual stream of lies embedded in ever more rambling, incoherent, and endless monologues, demonstrate how unfit he is to be the President, entrusted with the lives and well-being of Americans.
But we must not mistake the lies of a fool for foolish lies that have no effect. Donald Trump’s fables may be “tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,” but they do not “signify nothing.” There are real victims of Trumpian propaganda, of Trump’s ‘crucible.’
Chief among them are the people of Springfield, Ohio, and especially the Haitian community of that city. In the wake of Trump’s and Vance’s lies about Springfield’s Haitians, the city has been the target of over thirty bomb threats against its schools, colleges, hospitals, and city offices, and death threats against its public officials and businessmen. Schools and colleges were evacuated and then closed; hospitals were placed on lockdown. Ohio Governor DeWine sent state troopers into the city to assist it in dealing with the sheer volume of threats to schools. Not surprisingly, fearful parents –- especially Haitian parents –- began keeping their children home from school. Various far right and neo-Nazi groups have descended upon the beleaguered city, with the Proud Boys marching through its streets. Most cruelly, the Clark family has been forced to relive the worst days in the life of a parent –- the death of a child –- because promoting lies about what had happened to Aiden Clark served the political purposes of J. D. Vance and Donald Trump.
But all of that pales next to what would be visited upon our nation if Trump and Vance are elected in November, and execute their plan to round up and deport millions of our fellow Americans, overwhelmingly people of color. It is up to us to make sure that this ‘big lie,’ this ‘crucible,’ fails.