Friedrich, however, saw no future in the Palatinate village and decided to join the stream of Germans looking for a better life in the United States. Friedrich traveled 350 miles north to Bremen, a port teeming with emigrants, and boarded the SS Eider. The two-funneled German ocean liner was bound for New York City, where Friedrich would find his older sister, Katherine, who had already married a fellow emigrant from Kallstadt. Friedrich arrived in New York on October 19, 1885. Immigration records list his occupation as “farmer” and his name as “Friedrich Trumpf, ” although he would soon be known by Trump. He was sixteen years old.
But Friedrich’s departure ran afoul of German law. A three-year stint of military service was mandatory, and to emigrate, boys of conscription age had to get permission. The young barber didn’t do so, resulting in a questionable status that would undermine any future prospect of return: Friedrich Trump was an illegal emigrant. Luckily, US officials didn’t care about the circumstances under which he left Germany. US immigration law at the time granted Germans preferred status; they were viewed as having the proper white European ethnic stock and an industrious nature. Friedrich was one of about a million Germans who immigrated to the United States in 1885, more than had ever before come in one year.
The SS Eider delivered him to Castle Garden, the main entry point for immigrants before the federal government opened Ellis Island in 1892. Friedrich had left a rural European town of fewer than a thousand residents for the chaos of New York City, which then had a population of more than 1.2 million, about one-third foreign-born. Friedrich moved in with his older sister and her husband, Fred Schuster, joining a community of fellow Palatinates on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He started out as a barber, but that proved unsatisfying.
Friedrich, like many before him, was lured by tales of gold strikes and other riches to be found in the West. By 1891, the ambitious young man—a government document described him as five feet nine, with a high forehead, hazel eyes, straight nose, prominent chin, dark complexion, and a thin face—headed to Seattle. The booming city of fifty thousand was crisscrossed by streetcar lines and visited by vast fleets of ships. Friedrich saw an opportunity to offer food and lodging. He set up shop among the dance halls in a seedy area of town and changed the name of an establishment known as the Poodle Dog to the more salubrious-sounding Dairy Restaurant, operating among the pimps and gamblers who haunted the district.
Trump, granted US citizenship in Seattle in 1892, began investing in land. He headed to the mining community of Monte Cristo, nestled in the nearby Cascade Range. A New York syndicate backed by John D. Rockefeller had allowed a railroad to be built, bringing ore down from the mountains. Just as Friedrich eschewed toiling in Kallstadt’s vineyards, he did not join the grueling and often unrewarding work of digging for gold and silver. Instead, he built a hotel and put placer claims on land in questionable deals that allowed him to claim mineral rights. He won the 1896 election for Monte Cristo justice of the peace by a vote of 32–5.
After returning briefly to Seattle, Friedrich joined the Klondike gold rush in the Yukon, where he and a partner opened an establishment called the Arctic, later renamed the White Horse. A vivid portrait of the Arctic, which offered food and lodging, appeared in a local newspaper, suggesting that the hotel catered to the more questionable mores of the miners. “For single men,” wrote the Yukon Sun in 1900, “the Arctic has excellent accommodations as well as the best restaurant in Bennett, but I would not advise respectable women to go there to sleep as they are liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings and uttered, too, by the depraved of their own sex.”
Friedrich sold his shares in the business just as authorities began cracking down on drinking, gambling, and prostitution. While he now seemed firmly planted in the United States, he hadn’t entirely forgotten Kallstadt or his German roots. And he didn’t yet have a wife. That gap in his life was filled on one of his visits to Kallstadt, during which he saw his mother and attended family weddings. On that trip home in 1901, Friedrich met twenty-year-old Elizabeth Christ, who’d grown up across the street from the Trump family house. The following year, Friedrich returned to marry her and bring her back to New York, where their first child, another Elizabeth, was born in 1904.
Despite the close-knit community of fellow Kallstadters on the Lower East Side, Elizabeth Christ Trump never felt at home in New York, and in 1904, Friedrich renewed his passport to travel to Germany, listing his profession as “hotelkeeper” and saying he would return to the United States within a year. This time, though, he brought his savings to Germany with him—some eighty thousand marks, the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars in 2016 currency. Kallstadt officials, happy to welcome the wealthy young American back into their village, testified to his good character and ability to support his family members. But regional and national officials asked why Trump hadn’t come back sooner to perform his military service. To them, he looked like a draft dodger, and they pressured him to leave. In early 1905, he received notification that he had to depart by May 1. On April 29, Trump pleaded that his baby daughter was too sick to travel. He won a three-month reprieve. On June 6, Trump made another attempt to stay, this time writing a personal letter to Bavaria’s prince regent, Luitpold of the House of Wittelsbach, describing in increasingly desperate and obsequious terms how he and Elizabeth were paralyzed by horror at the prospect of returning to America.
“My dear wife and I . . . are faithful, loyal subjects, true Palatinates, good Bavarians who are bound with unlimited love and devotion to the magnificent princely house of the illustrious Wittelsbachs,” he wrote. He would readily give up his right to live in the United States, Trump continued, if he could only secure permanent residence in the land of his birth. No luck: on June 28, Trump resigned himself to returning immediately to New York with the now-pregnant Elizabeth and their young daughter. The Trumps arrived in New York in the middle of the summer and settled into an apartment in a largely German neighborhood in the South Bronx, where on October 11, their first son, Frederick Christ Trump, who would become Donald Trump’s father, was born.
On December 20, Friedrich Trump made one last attempt to win the right to return to his homeland. Once again, his plea was rejected. By May of 1907, the case was closed. Friedrich and Elizabeth Trump would remain in America and raise their three children as US citizens.
• • •
RESPONSIBLE FOR RAISING A young family in this new land, Friedrich Trump made his way to Wall Street—not as a broker or financier, but in his old profession of barber. He clipped the hair of countless residents of lower Manhattan in a block that would later be well-known to his grandson. The address was 60 Wall Street. Friedrich could have hardly imagined that, a century later, the family name would grace a seventy-two-story tower nearby at 40 Wall Street, known as the Trump Building. Friedrich eventually became a hotel manager and moved to Jamaica Avenue in Queens in the middle of a building boom—a move that would help shape the family’s future and fortune.
Then, in 1914, World War I broke out, and suddenly Trump and hundreds of thousands of others with German ancestry became targets of their own government. A German-American newspaper, the Fatherland, ran a 1915 cover story titled “Are Hyphenated Citizens Good Americans?”—a question that many unhyphenated citizens were asking at the time. A government-sanctioned volunteer group called the American Protective League, with 250,000 members, spied on German Americans amid growing fear that the immigrant families were working for their fatherland and against their newer homeland.
Soon, use of German was discouraged, and many Germanic names were Americanized. The tone was set from the top. On June 14, 1917, two months after the United States entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson declared, “The military masters of Germany [have] filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people.” It was known as the Flag Day speech, a moment German Americans would long remember. Anti-German view
s would only intensify in later years, as World War II renewed the animus, and Donald’s father, Fred Trump, would for much of his life be defensive about his roots, sometimes insisting his family was Swedish, a claim that his son would repeat. There was never serious discussion about expelling Germans, however, and in the end the Trumps mixed into the melting pot that was America.
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SHORTLY AFTER THE UNITED States entered World War I, Friedrich Trump, then forty-nine, walked down Jamaica Avenue with his twelve-year-old son, Fred. The elder Trump casually mentioned that he felt sick. He went home, took to bed, and soon died, a victim of a worldwide flu epidemic. Friedrich had left the family with a considerable estate, and his widow, Elizabeth, made herself the head of the family real estate business, which she called E. Trump & Son. Her eldest son, Fred, had a passion for the building trades and soon took on a leading role in the company his mother led. Given enormous responsibility at a young age, he grasped it, determined to become a leading builder in booming postwar New York City. Fred constructed his first home at seventeen, then another and another, using the profits from one to finance the next.
As Fred surveyed New York City of the 1920s, he saw a landscape of opportunity. The boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens still held large swaths of undeveloped land, and streetcars and subways were being extended deeper into the outer boroughs, opening new areas to developers. The population of Queens, where Trump did most of his early building, more than doubled from 469,000 in 1920 to 1.1 million in 1930, remaining 99 percent white throughout the decade.
Even with that separation, racial and ethnic tensions were bubbling over. After the Klanbake of the 1924 Democratic convention, the Klan kept up its nativist drumbeat. The tensions climaxed anew on May 30, 1927, at a Memorial Day parade that wound through Fred Trump’s Queens neighborhood. The police had been concerned for weeks that the KKK would try to take over the event, and they had said Klan members could only join the march if they agreed to abandon their white robes and hoods. Trump, a twenty-one-year-old Protestant and now the head of the family business, joined the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who attended the parade. The KKK did not heed the police mandate. Dressed in their robes and hoods, carrying giant American flags, they passed out handbills in Trump’s neighborhood alleging that Catholic members of the police force were harassing “native-born Protestant Americans.” The KKK appealed to “fair-minded citizens of Queens County to take your stand in defense of the fundamental principles of your country.” This typical Klan tactic tried to pit Catholics against Protestants, while stirring up anti-immigrant feelings.
Having sown the seeds for a clash, more than a thousand Klansmen assembled at the intersection of Jamaica Avenue and Eighty-Fifth Street, where the Memorial Day parade was slated to begin. The commander of a small police contingent was outraged that the Klan had defied his order against wearing the robes and hoods. A policeman rushed toward a hooded Klan member with his nightstick, about to hit the marcher on the head, a moment vividly captured in a photograph published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “Women fought women and spectators fought the policemen and the Klansmen, as their desire dictated,” the New York Times reported the next day. “Combatants were knocked down, Klan banners were shredded.” Fred Trump wound up in the thick of the melee, and he was arrested.
The charge against Trump was “refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so.” But a Queens newspaper, the Daily Star, reported that the charge was promptly dismissed. News accounts did not say whether Trump was for or against the Klan, or whether he was at the parade merely to see the spectacle, but the implication of the Star story was that he was unjustly charged. Whatever happened, the parade and arrests underscored that the Klan remained prominent and influential, as demonstrated by the imposition of immigration quotas two years later.
Trump, meanwhile, methodically built his empire, buying vacant land mostly in Queens. Even as the Depression devastated New York City, he looked for opportunities. When housing sales fell off, he invested in what became one of the city’s thriving grocery stores. In March 1931, with the Depression still at its height, Trump announced that he was nearing completion of an upscale project in the Jamaica Estates section of Queens. Trump said he expected to build $500,000 worth of dwellings in just a few months. “The homes are of English Tudor and Georgia Colonial styles,” reported the Times, which was otherwise filled with gloomy news that day.
Trump found opportunity in gloom. When a mortgage firm called Lehrenkrauss & Co. was broken up amid charges of fraud, Trump and a partner scooped up a subsidiary that held title to many distressed properties. Trump used that information to buy houses facing foreclosure, expanding his real estate holdings with properties bought on the cheap from people who had little choice other than to sell.
At a time of financial ruin, with unemployment rising to 25 percent, and the streets lined with the destitute, Trump emerged as one of the city’s most successful young businessmen. As the economy recovered, Trump snatched up more property, building more Tudor-style homes in Queens. In 1935, Trump began to focus on Brooklyn, and he sold seventy-eight homes in twenty days, each for about $3,800. Soon, his home sales reached into the thousands.
One day, Trump, dressed in a fine suit and sporting his trademark mustache, attended a local party. He saw a pair of sisters, and the younger one caught his eye. Her name was Mary Anne MacLeod. In the several years since she had first arrived in the United States, she had gone back and forth to her little village on the Outer Hebrides island of Lewis, unsure what her future held. She was about to go on another return voyage when her sister Catherine took her to the party in Queens. Mary MacLeod, twenty-three, and Fred Trump, thirty, spent the evening together, and something clicked between the maid and the mogul. When Trump returned that night to the home he shared with his mother, he made an announcement. He had met the woman he planned to marry.
• • •
THE WEDDING WAS HELD on January 11, 1936, at a Presbyterian church on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and a reception followed at the Carlyle Hotel, an elegant thirty-five-story art deco confection that had opened six years earlier. Then it was off on a brief honeymoon and quickly back to work. Fred, now described in the newspapers as president of the Trump Holding Corp., of Jamaica, soon announced that he was building thirty-two homes in Flatbush in an “exclusive development.” As World War II approached, Trump boasted that the threat of combat had helped business. “In the event of war, I believe that the profit will be quicker and larger,” Trump said, trying to gin up sales. The remark might have seemed impolitic, but it proved correct, at least for his company. He showed a flair for salesmanship and showmanship, hoisting fifty-foot-long banners that were seen by “millions of bathers” at city beaches. He promoted his homes from a sixty-five-foot yacht that broadcast music and advertisements while filling the air with “thousands of huge toy balloon fish,” which resulted in “a series of near riots” as people tried to catch the souvenirs. Those who caught the balloons found coupons giving them a discount on a house purchase. The Trump Boat Show, as the marketing extravaganza was called, ensured that the family name was known throughout the metropolis.
Mary Trump focused on her new role as wife and mother to a family that would eventually include five children. On June 14, 1946, the fourth member of that brood was born. Fred and Mary named him Donald John Trump, and he would ensure that the family name would endure long after the immigrant stories of his ancestors had passed from memory.
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Stink Bombs, Switchblades, and a Three-Piece Suit
In 1958, when they were twelve years old and hungry for adventure, two boys from the quiet, low-slung edges of Queens liked to board an E train bound for Manhattan, the island of soaring, exotic promise they knew as “the City.” Donald Trump and Peter Brant never asked their parents for permission for their Saturday-afternoon expeditions. The answer would have been an emphatic no. Manhattan was too far, too risky, an unse
ttling cacophony of comic-book superheroes and millionaires, con men, movie stars, gangsters, and worse.
For the boys, that blend of glamour and danger was only part of the allure. Times Square hadn’t yet become the nation’s most prominent back alley, the open market of sex, drugs, and sleaze that it descended into in the late 1960s. But in 1958, it was already a neighborhood in steep decline, its sidewalks dotted with streetwalkers, its shops cluttered with novelties. Donald and Peter were fascinated by Times Square shops where they could buy stink bombs and hand buzzers and fake vomit—perfect accessories for pranking their pals back at school. Exiting the train a few blocks away, at Fifty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue, the boys climbed the station stairs to a thrilling swirl of honking horns and police sirens, hot dog vendors, and a dizzying blur of humanity. Manhattan, the boys knew, would be their testing ground, a new frontier for them to conquer. A lanky blond boy on the cusp of adolescence, Donald Trump came from a neighborhood where the tallest buildings were only a few stories. On the city’s border with suburban Long Island, Jamaica Estates was populated mainly by middle- and upper-income Jews and Catholics. The streets were defined by neat front lawns, massive oak trees, and handsome homes, among the largest of which was built by Fred C. Trump.
After a long slog through the Depression and World War II, much of New York was booming, with the world’s most vibrant ports, factories, and financial center. More than a quarter of the country’s top five hundred corporations, a roster that included IBM, RCA, and US Steel, had their headquarters in a city that was now recognized as a world capital. The prosperity extended beyond Manhattan. As veterans returned to neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn, Fred Trump saw a burgeoning market for modestly priced, easy-to-build homes that some New Yorkers called “Trump’s dumps on stumps.” In Bath Beach, a neighborhood just off Gravesend Bay in Brooklyn, Fred Trump planned his most ambitious project to date, a complex of thirty-two six-story apartment buildings—a total of 1,344 units—renting for as little as $60 a month.
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