Springfield, Ohio In Three Acts

Who we once were, and who we are today

Have you seen that classic Preston Sturgis film, Springfield, Ohio? It’s about a typical American town convulsed by xenophobia. A declining Midwestern city agrees to accept several hundred Jewish displaced persons after the war. The downtown is revived, the classrooms are full, the postmistress learns to love pastrami on rye. Then disaster strikes–a car driven by one of the newcomers strikes and kills eleven-year-old Billy Jackson. Many of the older townspeople, it turns out, blame the immigrants for driving up housing costs and can’t stand to hear Yiddish spoken on the streets. Now they have a target for their resentment; and soon they’re joined by local branches of the American Legion and even by Rutherford Dingle, a candidate for governor (Broderick Crawford). Soon tranquil Springfield is wracked by torchlight demonstrations demanding the expulsion of the Jews. The head of the Jewish community, Sigmund Goldblum (Morris Carnovsky), receives a death threat wrapped around a bullet.

The world according to Preston Sturgis

At a town meeting held in the high school gym, supporters of the candidate (party unspecified) loudly blame “the Jews” for Billy’s death and Springfield’s “Communist” city council for accepting the outsiders. One claims that the Jews are making their unleavened bread with the blood of Christians. Then a couple stands up in their midst–Billy’s parents Luther and Irene (Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert). Luther says, “Nobody murdered our son; he was killed in a terrible accident. We don’t hate these newcomers; they’re our friends and neighbors and dentists. Shame on you for trying to turn the people of Springfield against each other!” Those who had been loudest in denunciation look at each other sheepishly; the spell has been broken. In the final scene, the rival candidate for governor (a Jimmy Stewart cameo) celebrates his victory. By his side we see, just for a moment, a man in spectacles and a homburg–Sigmund Goldblum.

In 2024 The Bad Guys Win

You haven’t seen Springfield, Ohio because I made it up–as a reminder of what the parable of Springfield would have meant in a more charitable and self-confident time than the one we are now living through. Our own Rutherford Dingle is, of course, vastly more malevolent and more dangerous than anything Preston Sturgis could have imagined. Everything Donald Trump and his acolytes said last week about Springfield turned out to be completely fabricated, but the story was, after all, not a news item but an allegory–about a typical American place where God-fearing citizens are helpless before an invasion of savage outsiders. And it wasn’t just a story: in the aftermath of Trump’s rant about Springfield, bomb threats forced the evacuation of schools and government offices and Haitian immigrants live in fear. In our contemporary version of the Springfield parable, the bad guys win.

Of course my imagined Springfield, Ohio of 1950 would have been a fable too: that vanished Norman Rockwell consensus excluded non-white people from the harmonious tableau. But it does tell us something about how we thought, not about our politics but about ourselves. In  the national mythos, at least until recently, tolerance won out over bigotry, truth over falsehood. That’s who we were. Now we don’t think that way; and Donald Trump has not only persuaded half the country of his nightmare vision, he has done everything he can to make that nightmare our collective reality. He has changed the balance between the forces of tolerance and of hatred in an ordinary American town. 

I would try to convey today’s parable of Springfield as an opera, a medium suited to the grotesque, the outsize, the mythic. In my version, the curtain opens on the terrible van accident that killed eleven-year-old Aiden Clark. While the boy’s parents weep and onlookers grieve, a group of Haitians pray that the boy’s soul passes swiftly to Heaven; the prayer and the keening braid around one another to form a single melody. Then the scene switches to a basement in Springfield where a solitary figure typing into a phone sings "My Neighbor's Daughter's Friend”--the third-hand source of the story about a cat carved up and hanging from a tree in a Haitian neighborhood. Then figures in dark rooms scattered across the stage, turning the post into a viral meme, type into their phones while singing, “It’s Not Racist, It’s Just Fact,” as Donald Trump Jr. said in explaining that Haitians have low IQs. In the Sturgis movie, a local tragedy is judged by local people and local standards. In 2024, all symbolically laden events are instantly elevated to national status, where they are stripped of nuance–including the fact that they may not have happened–in order to enhance their “meaning.”

We End In Darkness

Act II begins with a delegation of Haitians who have come to the home of the Clark family to join their mourning and ask forgiveness on behalf of the community. (I have no idea if that happened; I’m taking operatic license.) Again their voices join together in a dirge. In the ensuing scene, Nathan Clark addresses the town council, singing, “They Are Not Allowed To Mention My Son.” A grave silence ensues–and then he is hooted down. The meeting dissolves in turmoil as a group of men goes off “to find the Haitians.” A spotlight then picks out a man wearing a clerical collar. It is J. D. Vance, who sings solemnly about the decline of traditional values in  the face of secular liberalism that has led him to convert to Catholicism. Then he tears off the collar and his dark suit as he bellows, “Keep The Cat Memes Flowing (Even If We Know It’s Not True).” As he sings the final note, Vance primly reattaches his collar and takes his Hindu wife by the hand.

The final act opens in a hotel suite in Philadelphia, where a chorus of Donald Trump’s advisors sing “Stick To The Issues” while rhythmically opening and closing their briefing books. Trump, paying no attention, scrolls idly through his phone murmuring, “Why Can’t She Be Joe Biden?” In another suite, six Right-Wing Social Media Influencers sit together before a giant Wurlitzer organ and together sing the bravura aria, “Kamblabla Is A Lazy, Ignorant Tramp.” Light flicker on and off all over the stage as their 10 million followers view the latest post. The action then switches to the debate stage, where we hear the sound of Kamala Harris laughing, followed by the great mad scene in which an enraged Trump sings, “They’re Eating The Pets of The People That Live there.” Finally, we return to the streets of Springfield, where the mob that formed at the town meeting has now begun to burn down the Haitian quarter. On a screen above the action we see images of the race riots of 1919 that engulfed Washington, Norfolk, Chicago and other great cities. Then darkness.Springfield, Ohio