Trump’s Visit to Howell, MI Turned a Dog Whistle Into a Bullhorn

When former U.S. President Donald Trump announced he would speak in Howell, Michigan on Tuesday, August 20, the dog whistles could be heard loud and clear. It was a signal to the president’s white nationalist supporters that he was still on their side. Howell accrued a reputation for open racism and white supremacism when Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Robert E. Miles set up shop just north of the city. Although Miles died in 1992, cross burnings continued, and the house of a farmer who had spoken up for a proposed Drag Bingo event was vandalized with pro-Klan graffiti as recently as 2021.

During Trump’s speech, which was recorded although not open to the public, he fantasized about sending Livingston County police to Detroit to intimidate voters. “I’d love to have them working there [in Detroit] during the election.” Trump defended his appearance in Howell with a rhetorical question: “Who was here in 2021?” The answer was President Joe Biden. Be that as it may, Biden did not decide to campaign in the city a month after neo-Nazis had demonstrated their love for him in the same city.

One month to the day before Trump’s speech, on July 20, neo-Nazis and Klansmen marched through the city of Howell. Neo-Nazis sieg heiled and shouted “We love Hitler! We love Trump!” in a rally that coincided with the former president’s visit to Grand Rapids. On August 17, the day Trump announced his stop in Howell, a similar rally occurred in Brighton. Many Michiganders who saw pictures or videos of the rallies probably naively shook their heads at what they imagine is a purely Howell or Livingston County phenomenon.

The history of white supremacism and neo-Nazism in Michigan is not just Howell’s history, but all of our history.

Yet, those who say that neo-Nazis and Klansmen aren’t who “we” (here meaning Michiganders outside of Howell) are, could not be more incorrect, in fact, dangerously so. The Ku Klux Klan flexed its political muscles across the state throughout the 1920s. In 1925, the Klan-backed candidate Charles Bowles almost won the mayoralty of Detroit. The Michigan KKK pushed a statewide ballot issue that would have banned parochial schools in a fit of bigotry against Catholics. Prominent Michiganders such as Dan F. Gerber, founder of Gerber Baby Foods, were Klan members.

Although the 1920s Klan declined amidst sexual and financial scandal, its torch was picked up in Michigan by the Black Legion. The Legion, immortalized in a 1937 Humphrey Bogart film, launched violent attacks against Catholics, immigrants, Blacks, and labor unions. In his autobiography, Malcolm X states that his father was murdered by the Legion. The group was blamed for a total of around 50 murders. Prominent political figures were counted as members, including the mayor and chief of police of Highland Park. It was only a federal investigation brought about by the Legion’s murder of federal employee Charles Poole that ended the group’s reign of terror.

The German American Bund, founded in 1936, was dedicated to spreading the ideas of Nazism in the United States. Like the Legion, the Bund was memorialized in film: 1939’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy. In 2017, the Oscar-nominated documentary A Night at the Gardenrecounted the 20,000 strong rally the Bund held in Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. The Bund has multiple Michigan connections. Bund fuhrer Fritz Kuhn worked in a Detroit Ford plant before founding the group. The group also built summer camps for young American Nazis across the United States, including Camp Will and Might in New Jersey, Camp Siegfried in New York, Camp Hindenburg in Wisconsin—and Camp Eichenfeld, about 12 miles north of Pontiac, near US-10.

Camp Eichenfeld bustled during the summer months. The leader of the Detroit Bund John H.B. Schreiber said that the camp, which flew a flag with a Nazi swastika alongside the Stars and Stripes, hosted between 500 and 700 people every weekend. Bundists also packed into the German-American Restaurant on the northeast corner of E. Jefferson and E. Grand Boulevard in Detroit for monthly outings. Today, the story of Detroit’s Nazis is nearly entirely forgotten, buried in old issues of The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. It was only with assistance from employees at the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library that I learned about it. The national Bund reeled under investigations from federal officials before finally closing up shop for good after the U.S. entered World War II.

This was not the end of fascist activities in Michigan, though. Demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin and Christian nationalist Gerald L.K. Smith preached the fascist doctrine in print and over the airwaves. Smith made an unsuccessful run for Senate that garnered over 100,000 votes. A new group, the National Workers League, continued where the Bund had left off. The League was one of the groups that incited a riot against the Sojourner Truth Housing Project, because most of the families living in the project were Black. Parker Sage, the head of the League, and Garland Alderman, the secretary, were arraigned after the riots. Those charges were dropped so that Sage, Alderman, and William Robert Lyman, also of the League, could be indicted in Washington D.C. for sedition. After a 1944 mistrial caused by the death of the presiding judge, the charges against the League members and their co-defendants on the far-right were dropped.

Even members of Congress from Michigan echoed pro-fascist sentiments. Congressman Roy O. Woodruff inserted a letter into the Congressional Record that included the alarming phrase: “We do not need to fear Hitler.” Another Congressman, Clare E. Hoffman, saw a beneficial side to Nazism. The U.S. “might now profit…” he advised, “from what Hitler has done by adopting at least some of his decent methods of production…” Hoffman’s speech was given as France was falling to the Nazis. Two months before Pearl Harbor, Congressman George A. Dondero said in Congress “The greatest danger menacing the United States today is not invasion or attack by the Axis Powers but the trend of socialism and communism.”

Running the license plates of the far-right demonstrators, Livingston police determined that several were not residents of Howell or Livingston County. That should give pause to those living outside of Howell who think they and their neighbors are paragons of tolerance. The history of white supremacism and neo-Nazism in Michigan is not just Howell’s history, but all of our history. We must now decide if it will be our future as well.