Frederick Trump

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Frederick Trump (1902)

Frederick Trump (born March 14, 1869 in Kallstadt as Friedrich Trump ; † May 30, 1918 in New York ) was a German-American entrepreneur who made his fortune with the operation of restaurants in the northwestern United States and in the Canadian Yukon Territory , in particular during the Klondike gold rush . He is - alongside the Scottish fisherman Malcolm MacLeod - one of the grandfathers of the entrepreneur and US President Donald Trump . He emigrated to the USA at the age of 16.

origin

The name Trump can be traced back in Friedrich Trump's ancestry to Johann Sebastian Trump, who was born in Bobenheim am Berg in 1699 . A connection to Kallstadt can only be established with Friedrich Trump's grandfather Johannes Trump (1789–1836). He was born in Bobenheim am Berg and married in Kallstadt, where he also died. Friedrich Trump's mother came from a family of winemakers in Wachenheim .

Friedrich Trump was a second cousin of the ketchup entrepreneur Henry John Heinz , whose grandmother was born Trump. After the Second World War, Trump's son Fred invented an origin from Sweden with the alleged hometown of Karlstad in order to be able to trade real estate without any problems, which he did not consider possible with a German descent. His son Donald clung to this fiction until the 1980s.

Childhood and youth in the Palatinate

Friedrich Trump was born in Kallstadt, at that time part of the Kingdom of Bavaria like the entire Palatinate on the left bank of the Rhine , in 1869 as the son of Johannes Trump and Katharina Trump, née. Kober, born. He had four sisters and one brother. The family owned a small winery , but the father was already suffering from a lung disease when Friedrich was born, and when he died in 1877 he was in debt because of the medical expenses. Therefore, the older siblings had to work in the winery. Friedrich seemed to his mother to be unsuitable for this hard work, and so at the age of 14 she sent him to nearby Frankenthal , where he trained as a hairdresser .

Emigration to New York

Friedrich Trump (1887, before his first name was Anglicized)

Trump would not have made a living as a hairdresser in the small town of Kallstadt (then almost 1,000 inhabitants). Since his eldest sister Katharina had emigrated to New York the year before and married her fiancé Friedrich Schuster, who was also from Kallstadt, he decided after completing his apprenticeship in 1885 - at the age of 16 - to follow her there. Germans were very welcome in the United States at the time and made up the largest group of immigrants for decades . In particular, they were in demand as good workers, and American states and large companies such as the Northern Pacific Railroad advertised in Germany, and especially in the Palatinate, from which a large proportion of German-Americans came, for people willing to emigrate. In the 1880s alone, over a million Germans followed this call. One of the reasons, which was also of importance for Friedrich Trump, was the principle of real division applicable in the Palatinate , whereby he would inherit only a fraction of the mother's already not large property, while in the USA everyone up to 160 acres (about 65 Hectares ) of land by cultivating it for five years ( Homestead Act ).

Trump moved into the shoemaker's small apartment in Manhattan and found a job as a hairdresser upon arrival at the port. In the following year his second oldest sister Luise also came to the now very overcrowded apartment, and together they supported the mother financially in Kallstadt.

Seattle and Monte Cristo

Friedrich Trump was not satisfied with his modest existence as a hairdresser . He wanted to get rich. In November 1891, with the help of grants from relatives, he took over a small restaurant in the red light district of Seattle , whose downtown area had been destroyed by fire two years earlier and is now being rebuilt. While he had lived among Palatinate immigrants in Manhattan, spoke the Palatinate dialect, and dressed and fed himself as he was in his home country, he was now American in every respect, including changing his first name to "Fred". In October 1892, he became a citizen of the United States by signing up for the first presidential election to be held in the recently admitted Washington state .

The restaurant, which Trump operated alone with great dedication, opened up no further prospects. But when his older brother Jakob married in Kallstadt in August 1892, the mother took this as an opportunity to distribute her property among her five children according to the inheritance law of the real division, and Friedrich was paid off like the two sisters who had also emigrated. For the first time he had a little capital for further ventures. In the spring of 1893 he gave up his restaurant, sold the inventory and made the arduous journey into the rugged and snow-covered cascade range northeast of Seattle, where rich deposits of gold and silver had recently been discovered and now a new settlement called Monte Cristo , in which legendary oil magnate John D. Rockefeller , America's richest man, allegedly wanted to invest millions. Acquiring a property in Monte Cristo was way beyond Trump's financial means. Instead, he registered a claim at a location near the planned train station, where he had allegedly found gold , and built a boarding house on it . In doing so, he violated the ban on using claims as building land, and he also ignored the fact that the claim was already registered in a different name, but such a procedure was quite common in Monte Cristo at the time and only involved a very low risk.

Monte Cristo (1895)

The weather conditions in Monte Cristo turned out to be very unfavorable. In autumn it rained heavily, the newly completed railway line to Everett , which had been relocated along the river for cost reasons, was flooded, and due to the expected supply bottlenecks, most of the residents left the town over the winter. Trump was one of the few who stayed. In the following year (1894) the infrastructure in Monte Cristo was so far completed that the transport of ore and wood to Everett could be started. Everything seemed to be going well, the saloons were open around the clock, and by the end of the year Trump was able to legally purchase his property. In 1895, too, progress continued. Monte Cristo received electric light and a school was opened. In December, however, the boardinghouse roof collapsed under the snow during a heavy snow storm, and Trump had to repair it. In the spring he rented the establishment and traveled to Kallstadt for the wedding of his younger sister Elisabeth. After his return he ran in Monte Cristo as a justice of the peace and was elected to this office with 32: 5 votes.

At the time, stories were circulating about gold discoveries in the Yukon region of northwest Canada , on the border with Alaska . Many miners left Monte Cristo to try their luck there. Trump considered joining them but decided to stay in Monte Cristo and continue his business for now. He made an agreement with two workers that they would stake claims on the Yukon in his name in return for a contribution towards their travel expenses. It is not known whether he ever benefited from it.

Steamships in Seattle Harbor (1891)

On July 17, 1897, the Portland docked in Seattle. With her came 68 prospectors who had become rich in a very short time on the Klondike River , a tributary of the Yukon River , and brought with them nuggets valued at over USD 700,000 (now more than USD 20 million). This opened up a completely new perspective: While a great deal of effort was required to extract the precious metal in Monte Cristo, and ultimately only the wealthy who had the necessary capital could benefit from it, on the Klondike the gold was apparently in large quantities on the surface and only had to be picked up or fished out of the river sand. It quickly became clear that the gold rush that was now beginning would surpass any previous one, and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce launched a nationwide advertising campaign of unprecedented proportions to establish Seattle as the starting point for expeditions to the Klondike. Trump opened another - this time very profitable - restaurant in Seattle.

Klondike gold rush

In the months that followed, he prepared his trip to the Yukon by gathering the equipment and supplies he needed. In the spring of 1898 he sold the restaurant, transferred his ownership in Monte Cristo to his sister Louise, and set off. Monte Cristo had meanwhile become a victim of the forces of nature: Severe floods and landslides had destroyed considerable parts of the railway line built by Rockefeller in November 1897, and Rockefeller decided not to have them restored. Without the railroad, mining in this inaccessible mountain region was no longer profitable. Trump was one of the few who made a profit in Monte Cristo.

Bennett (1898)

In May 1898 he reached the newly established town of Bennett on Lake Bennett . He came on foot in the extreme cold from the west coast over the very impassable Coast Mountains , along with thousands of prospectors who built boats in Bennett to get down the Yukon River (north) to the gold fields as soon as the icy river became navigable would. With his partner Ernest Levin, Trump built the New Arctic Restaurant and Hotel , which was soon considered to be the best hotel in town. In addition to a rich selection of dishes, it mainly offered alcoholic drinks and rooms for prostitutes . After two years, Trump and Levin and the Arctic Restaurant moved down the river to the just a few months old White Horse settlement . Trump quickly realized, however, that the boom there would only last a very short time, and since there were also problems with Levin, he went out of business as early as 1901. He had achieved the prosperity he wanted, and now he wanted to look for a wife in Germany.

Marriage and attempted return to the Palatinate

Frederick and Elizabeth Christ Trump in the year of their marriage (1902)

In Kallstadt, where Trump returned as a rich man, his choice fell on the eleven years younger former neighbor daughter Elisabeth Christ . Since the Christs were poor and little respected in the village, his mother was appalled and tried to persuade him to make a more appropriate choice, but Frederick and Elisabeth finally married in 1902 in Ludwigshafen , whose registry office was responsible for marriages with foreigners. Then they moved to New York and lived there again with the shoemakers, who now lived in a modern, quite luxuriously furnished apartment block in a German-speaking district of the Bronx . But despite the strongly German-influenced environment and the friends and relatives from Kallstadt who lived nearby, including Trump's sister Louise, Elizabeth, as she was now officially called, soon began to suffer from homesickness. After the birth of their daughter of the same name, Elizabeth, Frederick therefore kept his promise to his father-in-law in 1904, and the family moved back to Kallstadt.

In Kallstadt, Trump was welcome as a wealthy citizen with good repute, especially since he deposited his assets of 80,000 marks (today's value around € 320,000) with the local bank. In order to be able to settle permanently, he reapplied for Bavarian citizenship , which he had since lost. The municipal council supported this application and the authorities of the canton of Dürkheim followed suit, with the cantonal police advising him among other things. a. attested that he refused to drink alcohol. The responsible interior authority in the Palatinate capital Speyer rejected Trump's reintroduction because he had left the country before he was called up for military service and only wanted to return after he had passed the military age. There is therefore a suspicion that he emigrated in order to avoid military service and it should be examined whether he should be expelled from the country for this reason.

Trump was stunned by this unexpected turn of events and, with the support of the mayor and the cantonal administration, set everything in motion to achieve his goal. Much had changed in Germany since his emigration (cf. Wilhelmine era ). In the Prussian- dominated German Empire , especially after Wilhelm II had ascended the imperial throne in 1888, the military had become of central importance, and young men were no longer called up as required, but three years of military service was now compulsory and a prerequisite for recognition as a Citizen. From this point of view, Trump was just a slacker. This was particularly difficult because the first Moroccan Crisis (1904–1906) , which was just worsening, reinforced the view of the Emperor and Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow that Germany was encircled by hostile powers and that military readiness must therefore be given top priority. In addition, Trump was viewed with suspicion as a Palatinate, because the Bavarian authorities considered these people, who had only become subjects of the king in 1816 through an exchange of territory with Austria as a result of the Congress of Vienna , as uncultivated, rebellious and subversive.

The concrete basis for the rejection of his application was a decision by the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior in 1886, according to which emigrants to the USA who were subject to military service were deprived of their citizenship and residence permit. Trump asserted that he had emigrated before this order came into force and that he did not want to avoid military service, but wanted to find a livelihood that would enable him to support his mother in Kallstadt. He also never thought of returning to Germany, and therefore commissioned his mother to arrange for his release from his Bavarian citizenship. As it now turned out, the responsible official in Kallstadt had not done anything, despite repeated inquiries from Katharina Trump, and finally Friedrich was stripped of his citizenship in 1889 due to the decision of 1886.

Later years and death

All appeals and appeals were unsuccessful, and in 1905 the Trumps were finally expelled . They settled in the Bronx , New York , and three months later the first son, Frederick Jr. , called Fred, was born. The third child, John, followed in 1907 . Trump resumed his hairdressing profession, initially in his apartment. He later opened a multi-employee hair salon in a large office building on Wall Street in Manhattan, where he used the new, little-used safety razor . Daily shaving in a salon was a common practice for successful business people at the time.

In December 1906, Trump turned to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior one last time and made his position clear again. The Ministry responded promptly and officially declared him an undesirable person on January 10, 1907. The following year, 1908, Trump entered the real estate business by buying and renting a modest two-story building on Jamaica Avenue in the still very rural borough of Queens . The time and place were chosen with care. A bridge over the East River to Manhattan, previously only connected by ferry or via Brooklyn to Queens, was nearing completion, and Jamaica Avenue, with its electric tram, would develop into a booming commercial street.

In 1909, Gustav Zimmermann, an immigrant from Baden who had taken over and renovated the Medallion Hotel on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan and lived near the Trumps in the Bronx, hired Trump as the manager of the restaurant and bar area, which he helped wanted to expand the newly acquired serving license. The family now moved to Queens, where Trump bought another, quiet house a bit off the noisy Jamaica Avenue. As in the Bronx, they lived here in a strongly German-influenced environment. They spoke German at home, and Frederick preferred to conduct his business with German-speaking partners and also wrote his will in this language. The children hardly spoke any English until they started school. At the beginning of the 20th century, with a quarter of German or German-born residents, New York was the city with the most Germans (in this sense) in the world after Berlin , and the proportion of German speakers was particularly high in Queens.

Within a few years, Queens changed radically. Almost all farms disappeared, land prices skyrocketed, and Jamaica Avenue was transformed from an avenue where horse-drawn farmers brought their produce to Manhattan into a canyon with an elevated train . An even more drastic change for the Trumps, however, was political: Once in May 1915, the British passenger liner Lusitania by a German submarine was sunk while 124 US citizens were killed, the US gave its previous neutrality in World War I on , and this had a massive impact on all German-Americans . The fellow citizens, so valued up to now, were now suspicious of them and were subjected to many restrictions, and everything German that had been so influential in Queens in particular disappeared from the public eye to a large extent.

In May 1918, while out for a walk with his son Fred, Trump suddenly felt very uncomfortable and went to bed. The next day, Memorial Day (May 30th), he was dead. The doctor diagnosed pneumonia . Five days later, Trump's brother-in-law Fred Schuster also died of a lung disease. It seemed like a tragic coincidence at first, but it soon emerged that the two were among the early victims of the Spanish flu , which claimed more lives in 1918 than the entire previous war.

As Frederick Trump died, his estate included the two-story family home with seven rooms in Queens, five undeveloped land, savings and life insurance policies worth 4,000  US dollars , shares worth 3,600 USD and fourteen mortgages. The net worth was estimated at $ 31,359 (today's value of $ 530,000). His widow and underage son Fred continued his real estate projects under the Elizabeth Trump & Son company , which Fred then built into a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars and now owned by grandson Donald Trump as The Trump Organization .

literature

  • Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a President. Simon & Schuster, New York 2017, Section The Founder: Friedrich Trump. Pp. 21–102 (preview) .

Web links

Commons : Frederick Trump  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. 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 und An inconvenient truth? Donald Trump's Scottish mother was a low-earning migrant . The National , May 21, 2016.
  2. a b Ancestors of Friedrich TRUMP (ancestors of Donald J. Trump's grandfather) ( Memento from August 6, 2019 in the Internet Archive )
  3. Ancestors of Christian Johannes TRUMP (ancestors of Donald J. Trump's great-grandfather) ( Memento from August 6, 2019 in the Internet Archive )
  4. Johannes TRUMP (grandfather (great-great-grandfather) of Donald J. Trump) ( Memento from July 30, 2019 in the Internet Archive )
  5. Gwenda Blair : The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 29.
  6. Charlotta Louisa Christine TRUMP. ( Memento from November 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) gedbas.genealogy.net; for first name cf. Joshua Kendall: America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation. Grand Central Publishing, New York, Boston 2013, p. 64.
  7. ^ Hannelore Crolly: Donald Trump, King of Kallstadt. In: Die Welt , August 24, 2015.
  8. Donald Trump's drive to surpass his father's success , Matt Viser, The Boston Globe, July 16, 2016
  9. ^ Donald J. Trump, Tony Schwartz: Trump. The Art of the Deal. Ballantine, New York 1987, ISBN 0-345-47917-3 , p. 66
  10. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 28–30.
  11. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 30f.
  12. a b c Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 31.
  13. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 25–27.
  14. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 25 and 33f.
  15. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 37.
  16. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 40.
  17. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 41f. and 47.
  18. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 46.
  19. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 50–52.
  20. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 49f. and 52.
  21. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 58f.
  22. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 53–60.
  23. a b Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 60f.
  24. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 64f.
  25. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 68.
  26. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 69–71.
  27. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 72.
  28. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. P. 72f.
  29. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 73.
  30. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 73f.
  31. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 75f.
  32. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 77.
  33. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 78f.
  34. a b Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 79f.
  35. a b Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 85.
  36. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 85f.
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  38. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 90–93.
  39. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 94f.
  40. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 95f.
  41. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 97.
  42. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 97f.
  43. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 98f.
  44. a b Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 99.
  45. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 99-102.
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  52. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. p. 111.
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  55. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 111f.
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  57. Gwenda Blair: The Trumps. Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate . Simon & Schuster, New York 2015. pp. 113f.
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  61. ^ Gwenda Blair: Friedrich Trump Establishes a Dynasty. In: The Gotham Center for New York City History. February 7, 2018, accessed April 1, 2020 .
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on July 2, 2019 .