In the past, it was extremists, racists and liars who spread the rumour that immigrants ate pets.
What Donald Trump and “he’s not from here” J.D. Vance have done to demonize Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, is not new.
Karen Stewart, a Michigan attorney who formerly worked in social services in Louisville, wrote to remind me of a time about 40 years ago, when people were making similar claims about another immigrant group in the area.
“In the 1970s and ’80s, I was a food stamp caseworker at 6th & Cedar in Louisville. At the time, Vietnamese refugees were being supported by Catholic Charities. Assistance was provided on a temporary basis through the Vietnamese Refugee Assistance Program,” she said in an email.
Like Haitians in Ohio, Vietnamese were not welcome in Louisville.
“Some locals were not welcoming of them,” she said.
Asians, like blacks, often encounter resistance when they arrive in new communities.
“A few months after the program began, rumors spread that a quality control analyst visiting a Vietnamese home had discovered a dog being cooked on a skewer in the backyard,” she wrote.
The only problem was, to my surprise, it wasn’t true.
The rumor did not mention any analysts or Vietnamese family members by name.
“The location was also omitted. There were no identifying details,” Stewart said.
“No, it never happened. It’s just an old urban legend with a modern twist thanks to Louisville. This hoax has been going around since at least 1888, when Grover Cleveland spread a similar rumor when he ran for president,” she wrote.
She was right: That year, Cleveland distributed trading cards featuring a caricature of a Chinese immigrant eating a rat, according to Voice of America News.
Jan Harold Brunband, who has a PhD in folklore from Indiana University and has studied urban legends for more than 50 years, has included the immigrant-eating-pets legend in many of his books.
Brunband wrote that there are similar urban legends in Europe, mainly targeting people in Africa and the Middle East.
But in America, Asians, and now Haitians, are being targeted.
“Two indisputable facts lend credence to the rumor” about Asians, Brunwand writes in Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends.
“Firstly, pets sometimes disappear for no apparent reason. Secondly, in Asian countries dogs are sometimes eaten,” he writes.
The fact that Voodoo, which includes animal sacrifice rituals, is practiced in Haiti and that so few people know about the tiny island nation’s culture likely helped lend credibility to Trump and Vance’s claims among their supporters.
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But the fact is that, like Louisville more than 40 years ago, there is no evidence that anything like this happened in Springfield, and both Ohio’s Republican governor and Springfield’s Republican mayor have said Trump and Vance are not telling the truth.
Trump and Vance repeat lies about Springfield pets despite facts
The Wall Street Journal pressed the Trump-Vance campaign for any evidence they could find that this was actually happening, and they finally provided the paper with a copy of a police report in which a woman told police her cat, Miss Sassy, had gone missing and she believed her Haitian neighbor had taken her.
When the reporter tracked down the woman, the cat appeared in her basement a few days later and apologized to her neighbours.
But Trump and Vance continue to make repeated, serious allegations that include bomb threats against schools and government buildings and further vilification of Haitians in Springfield and elsewhere.
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Last weekend, a group affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan distributed fliers in northern Kentucky.
“Foreigners and Haitians get out,” the flier reads in a font that seems to scream “Third Reich.” “There is no place for this filth in America.”
The charges against Haitians are identical to those made against Vietnamese people in Louisville years ago. Trump and Vance’s claims were simply “designed to intimidate, frighten and denigrate immigrants,” Steward wrote.
Not only are the Trump campaign trying to intimidate and scare immigrants, they are trying to divide America based on claims they know have no evidence.
It used to be that it was fanatics, cranks, racists and liars who spread rumors about immigrants eating pets. Now it’s fanatics, racists, liars and presidential candidates spreading such hateful lies.
Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com.
