The Trump family
fortune began, not with himself, as Don the Con would have you believe, but
with his grandfather, Frederick Drumpf, who immigrated to the United States from
Bavaria at the age of 16 in 1885, then Americanized his name. After kicking
around for several years, Frederick made a small fortune running a hotel/brothel
in the Klondike at the peak of the Alaskan gold rush. He later returned to
Bavaria, found himself a bride, Elizabeth Christ, and brought her back to the
United States before settling down. But after the birth of their first child, a homesick Elizabeth asked
Frederick to return his family to the homeland, which he did, depositing the
equivalent of $500,000 in a German bank shortly after his arrival.
Frederick and
his family meant to remain permanently in their homeland, but fate intervened
in the form of a German court. Trump, the court decided, had left Prussia to avoid
the draft. Summarily deported, he was told
never to darken Germany’s collective doorstep again.
Back in the U.S.A., Frederick invested his
savings in New York City real estate, specifically in the outer borough of Queens.
Nobody knows how far he might have gone if the Spanish Flu hadn’t killed him
1918, but his net worth at the time of his passing is estimated to be about
$500,000. It included a seven-room house, five vacant lots and fourteen
mortgages, all inherited by Elizabeth.
Fred Trump,
Donald’s father, was in high school when his father passed, and it was his mother,
Elizabeth, who guided the family’s investments, and who continued to be active
in the business throughout her long life. Nevertheless, Elizabeth brought her
son into the business early on, a basic strategy the family again employed when
Fred mentored an adolescent Donald. Donald, of course, has transformed nepotism
into an art form.
Sounds great,
right? Family to family to family to family, a true saga with the accumulation
of wealth never out of mind. But there did occur at least one deviation, one
point in Fred Trump’s life when he sought another avenue of expression.
The Ku Klux Klan
march on Memorial Day, 1927, was no joke. Two Klansmen were killed in the Bronx
on the way to the protest in Queens and the march ended in a brawl with the
police. The cops arrested seven men on that day, including Fred Trump, Donald’s
father. The address listed on the arrest report, and noted in the New York Times, was 1724 Devonshire Road
in Jamaica, Queens. At the time, Fred Trump, just 21 and not yet married, lived
on Devonshire Road with his mother. Fred was charged with “failure to disperse”,
but unlike the other six men arrested that day, wasn’t prosecuted. He was,
however, represented by the same two lawyers who represented the other Klansmen.
In addition, a story in the now-defunct Daily
Star reported that all the arrestees wore Klan robes. A second story, in
the Richmond Hill Record describes
the arrestees as “berobed”.
The march that
day was not about race. The marchers were protesting the brutality of Irish-Catholic
cops in their encounters with white Protestants. But the Klan in the north,
like their southern brothers, embraced a doctrine of white, Anglo-Saxon
supremacy that excluded all black and brown people, along with all Catholics
and all Jews.
I’ll leave it
there for now, Fred Trump in his snow-white Klan robes and his pointy, white
cap marching down Queens Boulevard, the jeering crowds on either side of the
road, the battle with the cops that ended the first-ever Klan march in New York
City. Is Fred proud? Determined? So committed to the Klan line that he’d
jeopardize the sizable fortune already accumulated by his family? And what did his
mother think, the matriarch with an eye for the bottom line? Most
importantly, 21 years later, after Donald Trump’s birth, did Fred bring those
values to the dinner table?
More to come.
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