Fred C. Trump

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Frederick Christ Trump (born October 11, 1905 in the Bronx , New York City , † June 25, 1999 in Queens , New York City), called "Fred", was an American real estate entrepreneur and the father of the entrepreneur and US president Donald Trump . He became a multimillionaire through numerous housing projects, especially in New York .

origin

Fred Trump's parents were Frederick Trump and Elizabeth Christ Trump , b. Christ, the poor winemaking families from Kallstadt in what was then the Bavarian Palatinate and had emigrated to the United States. The father (original name: Friedrich Trump) had gone to New York in 1885 at the age of 16 and made a fortune with restaurants in the Klondike gold rush . After marrying their 11-year-old neighbors from Kallstadt, Elisabeth Christ, in 1902 in Ludwigshafen , the couple initially moved back to New York, but because the young Elizabeth, as she was now officially called, soon became homesick there, they went to Kallstadt in 1904 back, where Frederick reapplied for his Bavarian citizenship, which had been revoked after his earlier emigration. However, this request was denied on suspicion that he had left the country at the time to evade military service, and the Trumps were forced to return to the United States on June 30, 1905. By this point, Elizabeth was five months pregnant, and on October 11, Fred was born the second of three siblings in the Bronx, New York, followed by John in 1907.

childhood and education

Fred Trump grew up in a predominantly German-speaking milieu until he was 10, first in the Bronx and then in the still less urbanized borough of Queens . German was spoken at home, and it wasn't until school that English became important for the children. That changed fundamentally after the British passenger ship Lusitania with 124 US citizens (among a total of 1200 people) on board was sunk off the coast of Ireland by a German submarine in May 1915 . The German language, which until then had been at least as common in Queens as English, quickly largely disappeared from public life as a result of the new political situation, the German-Americans were suspicious and sometimes personally attacked, and neighbors of the Trumps of German origin even changed their surnames. It was a profound experience for Fred Trump. Even in the originally strongly German high school , which he attended from 1918 to 1923, hardly any German was spoken.

His father succumbed to the Spanish flu in 1918 , leaving behind a fortune of around 30,000 (today's value 510,000) US dollars, which, however , lost considerable value during the severe post-war inflation of 1919/20. His mother continued her husband's real estate business by building houses on vacant lots that he had acquired and then selling them.

Fred would have liked to leave school early, like his older sister Elizabeth, but the mother insisted that he get high school. Unlike his brother John, who was an excellent student, Fred concentrated on extracurricular activities: he learned wood construction , bricklaying , plumbing , laying electrical cables and reading construction plans in courses, some of which were nightly and distance learning Jobs such as a caddy on the golf course some capital for later activities.

Building contractor in Queens

After graduating from high school, Fred Trump began working regularly in construction. In his first job he had to haul lumber where the usual horse-drawn carts couldn't get through, but he soon found work as a carpenter. He continued his education with courses in construction at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn , and by 1925, two years after graduating from high school, he had completed his first house. Since he was not yet of legal age, his mother founded the company Elizabeth Trump & Son and officially ran it until he could take over the management. A bigger problem was raising capital. For little people like the Trumps, there were only double-digit loans; therefore Trump chose a different path: he sold the houses under construction as early as possible before completion and used the proceeds to finance the construction of the next one. With great personal commitment, including looking after customers, he had built over 20 residential buildings in Queens in 1926.

His younger brother John began studying architecture and designed some buildings, but working together proved difficult because the brothers had very different goals. While Fred sought to sell the houses as soon as possible, John viewed each house as an aesthetic work that should not be put up for sale until it was completed. Since Fred always prevailed with his ideas, John was increasingly disappointed and dropped out after a year to become an engineer (see John G. Trump ).

1929, when the New York stock market crash ( Black Thursday ), the Great Depression began, Fred Trump had already sold hundreds of homes in Queens. Now he had to put this business on hold for a while, and instead opened one of the first modern supermarkets in Queens , where customers were no longer served, but could choose the food themselves. In doing so, he took over the new business model of the King Kullen supermarket, which had just been built not far away (see history of the supermarket ).

First major projects in Brooklyn

In 1934 he managed to get back into the real estate business by taking over the bankrupt J. Lehrenkrauss Corporation in Brooklyn with a partner from Queens , which had fraudulently traded in mortgages for many years. For his bid, Trump used stationery from a fictional FC Trump Construction Corporation , and he claimed to have been successful in the real estate and mortgage business for 10 years and to have an experienced team to save the Lehrenkrauss Corporation. He also managed to win his competitor William A. Demm, who had similarly dubious references, as a partner. With a good deal of luck, the two were awarded the contract.

With this takeover, Trump had capital available for the first time and did not have to sell the houses still under construction as quickly as possible in order to finance the ongoing construction costs, as in previous years. However, the demand for real estate remained low in the ongoing economic crisis. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which President Franklin D. Roosevelt founded in the same year (1934) as part of his New Deal , should now counteract this. The FHA offered government-guaranteed insurance for long-term, low-interest loans that were used to buy homes. This released - after initial hesitation on the part of the banks - a considerable amount of money for house building, and interested borrowers again got favorable terms. After a short time, the ailing construction industry began to recover, and Fred Trump specialized in building such government-sponsored real estate. From 1935 to 1942 he built 2,000 single-family homes in Brooklyn. This made him one of New York's most successful contractors, and the Trump name established itself as the epitome of business acumen and quality.

In the meantime, Trump had met the young Scot Mary Anne MacLeod , who had worked as a housemaid , but had lived with the Trumps in Queens from 1935 at the latest and whom he married in 1936.

Thanks to the reputation of Charles O'Malley, whom he was able to win as a new partner (instead of Demm) and who was also the official real estate appraiser in New York, Trump no longer had to build one house after another as in previous years, but him was able to tackle major projects with his Trump Holding Company based on FHA-secured loans. For the first such project, he identified the many owners of a large vacant lot in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, which was very costly at the time, and acquired the entire area with the help of an experienced lawyer. Then he hired an architect to work out plans for 450 townhouses based on FHA guidelines. This then approved insurance for mortgages in the amount of $ 750,000 - at an estimated sales price of $ 3,000 to $ 6,250 per house.

The “Trump Houses” that were soon to be built in other places in Brooklyn were modern and in some cases quite luxurious. They were all similar and easily identifiable as Trump houses, but each was special in some way. The garage that was always there was a coveted status symbol, although most buyers neither had a driver's license nor could afford a car. The floors were not made of linoleum , as usual , but parquet , and shower stalls were also offered as the latest luxury equipment .

Trump had 400 workers to dig the excavation pits in East Flatbush in 1936. These were all white and were mainly used according to their origin, for example Sweden as woodworkers. Trump did without the usual foreman. Instead, he himself came to the construction site at half past seven every morning and inspected every house. Wherever he was not satisfied, he would lend a hand and show how it should be done. He later visited his previous clients regularly and inquired about the condition of the houses.

Second World War

After Germany occupied large parts of France during World War II , US President Roosevelt ordered a large-scale expansion of the defenses on the American east coast in 1941, and building materials were confiscated all over the United States. This led to a drastic decline in private house construction. Brooklyn, where Trump worked, was given a special status because it had a military shipyard ( New York Naval Shipyard ). So Trump was initially able to continue his projects undisturbed. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the USA entered the war, this special status was revoked.

But Trump had already found a new field of activity. He had been asked by the government, along with other New York area entrepreneurs, to build much-needed housing in Norfolk , Virginia , the center of the Navy on the east coast. Since Congress had just launched a subsidy program that provided generous mortgage insurance for apartment buildings for workers near military facilities, Trump now built apartment buildings instead of single-family homes and did not sell them, but rented them out. The demand was immense, and Trump could charge correspondingly high rents.

The family, which now had three young children, moved to Virginia Beach , which at the time was still a vacation spot near Norfolk. During this time, Fred Trump began to keep quiet about his German origins and he did not teach the children his mother tongue. Instead, he said he was of Swedish origin. In view of the increasing importance of Jews in real estate and politics, he was also very involved in Jewish philanthropic contexts.

In Norfolk, Trump built 1,360 apartment buildings with up to 20 apartments in three years. When the government grants he benefited from ended in the summer of 1944, the family moved back to one of their homes in the Jamaica Estates in Queens, and Trump, who in Norfolk put all his time and energy into his work and the family in the process had neglected, wanted to resume his previous projects and plans in New York. But that turned out to be very difficult.

Later years

After the end of the war, over 6 million soldiers returned to the US and faced an unprecedented housing shortage. At the same time, there was an extreme shortage of building materials, so that contractors like Trump, who wanted to build inexpensive apartments for the returnees, could hardly get material at acceptable prices. President Harry S. Truman had an emergency program drawn up that went into effect in May 1946, but - to Trump's surprise - made the situation even worse. During this period of uncertainty, the fourth child, Donald , was born in June 1946 .

After his Democratic Party lost its majority in Congress in the November 1946 elections because of the prevailing dissatisfaction , Truman immediately ended the failed program based on price controls , and on the same day Trump made a statement to the press in which He predicted inevitable price increases in residential construction over the next few years because materials would continue to be scarce due to the high demand. He turned out to be right, and a few months later there was great demand for his newly built homes in Brooklyn.

To stimulate housing construction, Truman had the conditions for FHA subsidies improved to create stronger incentives for entrepreneurs and bankers. One of the first to take advantage of this was Fred Trump, who designed the largest private apartment building project to date in Brooklyn, Shore Haven , and received FHA approval for it in June 1947. It was a complex of 32 six-storey buildings with elevators, heated underground parking spaces and a view of the bay and the sea, with extensive green spaces in between and, as a novelty, its own shopping center. Together with the 600 one- and two-family houses nearby that it had previously built and sold, it now offered around 7,000 people living space, and the Brooklyn Eagle called it "Trump City". When it turned out that the incentives for building owners created by the FHA were not enough to resolve the housing shortage, conditions were improved again in 1950, and Trump started a second, similarly conceived project called Beach Haven alongside the first, which was still under construction.

The program was ultimately a success. For several years, housing in the United States was largely FTA-based, with nearly half a million homes completed, and construction and subcontracting jobs each adding about three million. But in 1954 the FHA and especially the contractors involved fell into disrepute. High-ranking politicians, including the new Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, accused the previously acclaimed entrepreneurs of enrichment at state expense. One of the most successful of these, Trump found himself on a prime suspect list in the New York Times in June 1954 , and the Brooklyn Eagle put the amount allegedly diverted at over $ 4 million. On July 12, 1954, Trump had to justify himself at a public hearing before a Senate committee in Washington . He was able to refute all accusations. For example, the four million dollars in question were in an account for the Beach Haven project and served there as a reserve. But he noted that because of the baseless accusation, his reputation was now badly damaged.

Trump Village (2016)

As a result of this scandal, in which the leadership of the FHA was partially replaced, the authority put Trump on a blacklist, and he had to limit himself to smaller, purely privately financed construction projects for a few years. But after Nelson Rockefeller was elected Governor of New York State in 1958 , the tide turned. Rockefeller wanted to boost construction on a large scale and hired lawyer John N. Mitchell to find a way to circumvent the existing restrictions on government housing subsidies. Mitchell found a solution, and on that foundation came the New York State Housing Finance Agency (HFA), which provided housing finance, much like the FHA, which Trump had previously benefited from promoting. Again, Trump was one of the first to take advantage of the new financing options. In 1962 he was able to begin the largest construction project to date in Brooklyn: 3800 apartments in seven buildings, each with 23 floors, which were also higher than any previous one. This was his first and only project that he gave his name: Trump Village . And for the first time, much to his displeasure, he was confronted with the fact that he had to give up his previous construction method - bricks and wooden floors, whereby he mastered every move himself. Such high houses could only be built with reinforced concrete and with construction cranes , and he had to hire an architect and a construction company who specialized in this.

Trump Village , completed in 1964, was Fred Trump's last successful major project. In 1968 his son Donald finished his studies and went fully into the company, in which he had already worked alongside his studies, and in 1971 he took over as president, while Fred took the position of chairman . He retained this title until his death in 1999, although he fell ill with Alzheimer's in 1993 and spent the last years of his life in a sanatorium.

children

Trump had five children with his wife, Mary Anne. The eldest daughter, Maryanne Trump Barry (* 1937), was a judge for the third district of the United States Court of Appeals until her retirement in 2011 . The eldest son, Freddy (1938–1981), worked for the company for a few years, but did not meet the father's high standards and eventually left the company to pursue a career as a pilot. Because of his heavy alcohol consumption, he gave up this job. He died of heart failure at the age of 43 . His two children, Frederick Trump III and Mary Lea Trump , from a divorced marriage in the meantime, were the only descendants of Fred C. Trump whom the latter excluded from his inheritance. The third child of Fred Trump is Elizabeth Trump Grau (* 1942). She married the film producer James Grau. The second son, Donald (* 1946) (the fourth child), continued the real estate business, built it into a world-famous brand and has been President of the United States since 2017. The fifth child was Robert S. Trump (1948-2020). He worked for the Trump real estate company.

reception

The folk musician Woody Guthrie dedicated the title Old Man Trump to Fred Trump in the early 1950s , in which he denounced the racism of his tenant. The handwritten text was not discovered and published until over six decades later by literary scholar Will Kaufman, a professor at the University of Central Lancashire . It was set to music for the first time in 2016 by Ryan Harvey with Ani DiFranco and Tom Morello and went through the media as part of Donald Trump's presidential candidacy, where it was certified to be a certain topicality.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 30f, 78-102 and 110.
  2. ↑ Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 110–114.
  3. ↑ Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 115.
  4. ↑ Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 117.
  5. ↑ Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 116–119.
  6. ↑ Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 119f.
  7. ↑ Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 120–122.
  8. ↑ Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 122.
  9. ↑ Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 122–124.
  10. ↑ Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 125-134.
  11. ↑ Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 135–146.
  12. ↑ Martin Hannan: The mysterious Mary Trump: The full untold story of how a young Scotswoman escaped to New York and raised a US presidential candidate . The National , May 21, 2016.
  13. ↑ Martin Hannan: An inconvenient truth? Donald Trump's Scottish mother was a low-earning migrant . The National, May 21, 2016.
  14. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 147–151.
  15. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 151f.
  16. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 150 and 152f.
  17. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 155f.
  18. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 156f.
  19. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 158f.
  20. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 161f.
  21. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 162–164.
  22. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 165f.
  23. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 167–170.
  24. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 176–178.
  25. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 175f.
  26. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 175–193.
  27. ↑ Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster , New York 2015. pp. 176 and 198f.
  28. ↑ Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 204–208.
  29. ↑ Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 210–220.
  30. ↑ Michael Kranish, Marc Fisher: Trump Revealed . Simon & Schuster 2017, pp. 50–52.
  31. ^ Fred C. Trump, Postwar Master Builder of Housing for Middle Class, Dies at 93 , New York Times , June 26, 1999
  32. ↑ Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015, pp. 242–245.
  33. ↑ Jason Horowitz: For Donald Trump, Lessons From a Brother's Suffering. In: The New York Times . January 2, 2016; Michael Kranish, Marc Fisher: Trump Revealed . Simon & Schuster, London 2017, p. 93 f.
  34. ↑ Will Kaufman: Woody Guthrie, 'Old Man Trump' and a real estate empire's racist foundations. The Conversation, January 21, 2016, accessed August 15, 2020 .
  35. ↑ Clara McCarthy: Old Man Trump: Tom Morello gives new life to Woody Guthrie's protest song. The Guardian , June 30, 2016, accessed August 15, 2020 .
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on July 2, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Trump, Fred C.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Trump, Frederick Christ (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American real estate entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH October 11, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Bronx , New York City
DATE OF DEATH June 25, 1999
Place of death Queens , New York City