Springfield, Ohio's Dog-Eating Contest Was a Missed Opportunity
A competitive hot-dog eating bout was the perfect opportunity for the city to laugh off Trump's absurdity. Instead, fear took over.
Viles Dorsainvil (left) and Miguelito Jerome (right) are Haitian immigrants making a difference in their home city of Springfield.
Photograph: Frank Barry
In this series, Frank Barry is retracing his 2020 Winnebago trip across America on the Lincoln Highway, the nation’s oldest transcontinental route. That adventure, which eventually became a book , focused on finding a way forward for a divided country. This time around, he’ll be revisiting some of the issues he examined, and some of the people he met, to learn what’s changed — and whether there is now more or less hope about the future.
I rolled into Springfield, Ohio, on the day of the city’s — I couldn’t make this up — dog eating contest.
The Lincoln Highway runs north of Springfield, but I had decided a detour was necessary. How could a trip exploring the nation’s polarization skip a city that has come to exemplify one of its chief causes — misinformation — and one of its most dangerous consequences — violence? Only two weeks before my visit, Springfield had been thrust into the national spotlight by Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, after both accused the city’s Haitian immigrants of eating cats and dogs. And now the people of Springfield, in full public view on a downtown square, were about to put on a massive dog-eating display!