Back in high school, I bore witness to the events of Snyderville, the unbelievable saga of a small-town fascist power grab that briefly turned a half square mile in northern Indiana into a two-person autocracy.
(A disclaimer: There aren't a lot of primary sources about this that are easy to access anymore. Many of the specific details in this article, including all the images, come from a student documentary that's still on YouTube. The rest are drawn from local news reports and my own memories of what went down. I may get some details wrong or I may have embellished some things in memory, but otherwise, the story you are about to hear is true.)
I grew up in the extended community of South Bend, IN, home to the University of Notre Dame. Right through the middle of the region is State Road 933, the main road that connects South Bend, Notre Dame, and the suburbs. It's lined with dozens of hotels, bars, fast food joints, gas stations, and anything else to capture a little money flowing in and out of the city (including a healthy mix of bible gift stores and sex shops).
For one mile, 933 passes through Roseland, population roughly 1000. It's a tiny but busy area, perhaps best known as the home of beloved local institution Pizza King, known for their big undercooked thin-crust pizzas with diced toppings.
If you weren't from the area, you probably wouldn't even know Roseland was a distinct city, if not for the giant "Welcome to Roseland" sign by the overpass marking the town's entrance. But whether you know it or not, if you wanted in or out of South Bend, you were going through Roseland.
As a small town, Roseland doesn't need too much in the way of local government. They have a three-person town council, which has gotten the job done since the early 1900s. I'm not sure what a town like Roseland even needed to vote on, but I never remember anything controversial. You needed two-thirds majority to get anything done. It worked fine, and quietly.
Enter the Snyders.
David Snyder and Dorothy Paul both served on the town council. In 2004, they got married. That meant two-thirds of the council was married. If you think that sounds like a conflict of interest, you're right! Supposedly, Indiana state law has prohibitions against this, and the local paper, the South Bend Tribune, called for one of them to step down.
They did not step down. Not only did they not step down, but they realized that their conflict of interest meant they had uncheckable power. So they ran with it.
With de facto control of the council and no election on the horizon, the Snyders embarked on a two-year reign of terror, reshaping Roseland to their own vision. What followed was a bizarre period of extreme broken windows-style laws, meant to right the ship on what they believed to be a town in need of their salvation. The people of Roseland called it... Snyderville.
It was the pettiest fascism you can imagine. The hallmark of the Snyder Age was their draconian enforcement of fines for violating minor local laws. Trash can in the wrong place? $100 a day. Unauthorized sign on your property? $500 a day. From what I can tell from context from the documentary, one business owner tried to repaint their building and was fined for not getting a demolition permit (??) and for littering (for leaving paint chips on the ground). The number of annual violations in Roseland went up something like 7000%.
Here's David Snyder personally going on a mission to write up disobedient citizens, looking like Dennis Hopper from the Super Mario Bros. movie.
So... why do this? According to the David Snyder, "These are the things that you have to keep up that you have to keep people doing. [...] I think it's a learning curve for people to understand you live in a town. They think they live in a place where there's no laws and no responsibilities, and they're finding it's different."
Their most hated reform targeted people who weren't even from Roseland. Remember that the main road into South Bend went through the town. Of course that was a positive thing, because it meant people stopping at Arby's or Speedway. Apparently, the Snyders saw it differently. They were determined to stop those ungrateful outsiders from taking advantage of their beautiful town by turning their mile of highway into a speed trap. For their two years in power, the Snyders ruled that territory like Mad Max-style warlords, diverting disproportionate government resources to handing out speeding tickets.
Among locals, Roseland quickly went from "the gateway to South Bend" to "mile-long red flag." I remember friends and family slamming the fucking brakes as soon as they entered Roseland and driving through that mile of US 933 like it was a funeral procession. Sometimes we would avoid going through Roseland entirely if it could be helped.
The poor state of affairs in Roseland became a local running joke. The town was up in arms. Town council meetings, previously low-profile events, started to foment protests. A group of about 200 people filed a lawsuit to have the Snyders removed from office.
Signs started popping up around Roseland that said "GIVE BACK ROSELAND! TAKE BACK OUR TOWN! SNYDERS RESIGN!" Anyone who put one of those up received a ticket for an unauthorized sign. The locals decided to test the gall of the Snyders by putting up unauthorized "Support Our Troops" signs to see what happened. They were fined again.
Somehow this town, previously most notable for a Howard Johnson and a trademark-infringing bar called Cheers, had become politically active. Did the Snyders back down? Absolutely not. What did they have to lose? You can see their thought process. How long would it take that lawsuit to go through the Indiana court system? Would these citizens actually go to the state or county? This is small-government America that defers a ton of authority to local officials. Actual laws be damned, they had effective carte blanche to do whatever they wanted.
This is where our story goes off the fucking rails, because the Snyders passed a new law that, if I am remembering this correctly, banned protest at town hall meetings! Effectively, free speech was banned in Roseland.
Their new law did not work. In fact, it made things worse, with town hall meetings now erupting into full-on fistfights. Any veneer of governance, order, or reason was gone. All that remained was the will of the Snyders. They had lost the people. And most importantly, they had lost Pizza King.
Pizza King... welcome to the resistance.
This couldn't last. There's no way it could last. Inevitably, it ended when Dorothy Snyder was up for reelection in 2006. Rather than embark on the doomed mission to try to win another term from a town that wanted her dead, she took an out and decided to run for the Indiana state House of Representatives.
The results:
| Candidate | % of vote |
|---|---|
| Ryan M. Dvorak ✅ | 92.3% |
| Dorothy Snyder ❌ | 7.7% |
8% of the vote. Eight. In a district where about 4500 people voted in the election. Snyder received only 356 votes.
With Dorothy off the council, David Snyder lost his power almost immediately. He also quietly chose not to seek reelection and departed the following year. But not before one final, cataclysmic incident.
With the departure of Dorothy Snyder, normalcy returned to Roseland. At least for everyone except David Snyder, who still had a seat on the council. From what I remember, the two other councilors, one of whom had to sit idly on the council for two years while the Snyders destroyed Roseland, relished the opportunity to return to favor and make sure David could never again interfere with the city's affairs. Snyder reacted poorly to losing his grip on the town and retaliated. Physically. When Ted Penn was elected to Dorothy's vacant seat, David Snyder attacked him and was convicted for misdemeanor battery.
Everything came to a head at a town council meeting in 2007. The new majority power, not willing to take any more of David Snyder's shit as he ran out the clock on his expiring term and ready to make a public mockery of him, give him only a single minute to speak. He refused to yield his time and, powerless, was promptly escorted out of the building.
What happened next is complicated. Some context.
In the months after Dorothy Snyder vacated her seat, it became clear that in the process of making their small-town dystopia, the Snyders had seriously mismanaged the town's resources. This hit particularly hard for law enforcement. You know, the people who actually had to enforce all those endless nuisance violations and speeding tickets that the Snyders were seemingly blowing their budget on, and had to deal with the fights that were breaking out at council meetings. The town marshal's pay had been cut to $6/hr; later he would step down because the town couldn't pay him. So tensions were high, particularly with the police.
Which brings us back to the meeting in 2007. After being ejected, David Snyder was escorted out by the town marshal. As he was being jeered out the front door, he turned to the approaching marshal and said, "Oh look, the bully's back."
Snyder chose the wrong words. The town marshal SLAMMED him into the glass door, took him outside, and proceeded to pummel him onto the ground. It was totally disproportionate, and in hindsight it feels like years of aggression being taken out against him all at once.
It was many bad things. A failure of democracy. A shocking moment of police brutality against a public official. A bizarre stain on the rule of law in a small town that had been on the path to recovering its civic stability.
But it was, also, pretty cathartic to see David Snyder get the shit beaten out of him, as if the spirit of The People of Roseland had their revenge.
There was no comeback. So thoroughly despised were the Snyders that they were driven out of public life. Five years later, they moved out of the state and retired in obscurity. David died in 2017, supposedly never recovering from his assault in 2007. Dorothy died in 2018. Her obituary refers to her as "quite the politician" and "always the debater."
Per the South Bend Tribune's obit for David Snyder:
The Snyders were central figures in Roseland leadership during a time marked by tensions, disputes and lawsuits in the early 2000s that has been referred to as the “Snyderville era.”
[...]
During their time in office, the council and the town dealt with several hot-button issues, including town finances, police pay, signage displays by residents, code enforcement, zoning and a hotel development plan. Public meetings often turned contentious, and more than one ended in a fracas and an arrest.
[...]
Dorothy Snyder said all her husband wanted to do was help others.
It's impossible for me to think about the Snyders without thinking about how deeply fucked local politics can be in America. There's so much interest in what's happening in high-level races like the presidency that we don't pay attention to the bizarre things happening below our nose, and increasingly there's no newspapers or local media to cover it. The Tea Party movement, aka the root of the far-right insurrectionist strain we're still dealing with, started at a local level. Shit like the anti-library movement started with school boards and local officials. It's like standing in a pot of water that's slowly boiling, and you don't realize until it's too late that norms and principles are slowly being eroded from the ground up.
The moral of this story is to give a shit about your local elections! Vote every year you can. Read up on who's running for every seat. Read through the voter issue guide the send you and make sure you're not giving power to a David or Dorothy Snyder.
There was no place to put this but
David Snyder was also a deadbeat dad who owed $90,000 in child support. Fuck that guy.
Ryan Dvorak, who beat Dorothy Snyder for the local house seat, proposed a bill that would remove any official in Indiana who owed more than $15,000 in child support. It's hard not to read that as an attempt to pass an anti-David Snyder law.
Additional sources in no particular order
https://www.masson.us/blog/roseland-indiana/
https://advanceindiana.blogspot.com/2007/09/roseland-council-wars.html
https://paperlined.org/external/20070924_Snyder_Tiller_RoselandIN.html
https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/Document/I220c3c46bdbd11df8228ac372eb82649/View/FullText.html This was from a lawsuit Snyder filed against the marshal, which elaborates on what each side claims happened in the 2007 meeting. Initial reports were unclear about who provoked whom, and the marshal claimed that Snyder shoved or kicked him, though it doesn't seem like there were verifiable eyewitness accounts of this.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x31tqv This is the only surviving (albeit heavily edited) footage of David Snyder being assaulted. You can clearly hear him say "Oh look, the bully's back." It also does not appear that Snyder shoved the marshal.
