Bloomberg View (Opinion)
By Leonid Bershidsky
February 24, 2016
Now
that Donald Trump has a path to the Republican nomination, there's a
story I really want to hear from him at one of his raucous rallies,
maybe at all of them. It might
actually help him get crossover voters from Bernie Sanders -- a group
of angry voters that could help him as much as the Republican party's
traditionalist base.
The
story is laid out in Gwenda Blair's 2001 book "The Trumps," which is
better known in Germany than in the U.S. I learned about the
painstakingly researched family history
from the Suddeutsche Zeitung and Deutsche Welle. The book tells how the
presidential candidate's grandfather, Friedrich Trump, immigrated to
the U.S. from the Palatinate winemaking town of Kallstadt -- and of why
his son, Frederick Trump, started telling people
he was Swedish, a misrepresentation Donald Trump repeated in his
bestseller, "The Art of the Deal."
Other
candidates happily share their families' immigration histories. Marco
Rubio's message about the American dream is based on his Cuban parents'
story of arriving penniless
in Florida and working menial jobs to help him move forward in "the
best country in the world." Like Rubio's parents, Sanders's father
didn't speak English when he came to the U.S. His birthplace was the
village of Slopnice in southern Poland.
Rubio
and Sanders talk about this to show that they understand the hardship
of integration. Most people in the U.S. -- well, not Native Americans
and the descendants of
early settlers or slaves -- could tell similar stories about their
families, stories of courage and strife. Trump could, too.
According
to Blair's book, Friedrich Trump, the fourth of six children in a wine
grower's family, couldn't count on enough of an inheritance to be
anything but poor. So
he trained as a barber and, at 16, made his way to New York, where some
Kallstadt relatives had already settled. He plied his trade in
Manhattan, then moved to Seattle to open a restaurant, then followed the
gold rush to a boomtown in Washington state and
finally to the Yukon. He saved up some money running a restaurant (and
brothel) in Canada; the Trump family fortune originated there, too. (Now
the grandson hounds Ted Cruz about his Canadian birth.)
Friedrich
-- whose ancestors' name was Drumpf until they changed it to Trump in
the 17th century during the 30 Years' War -- was very much a German.
With his nest egg,
he went back to Kallstadt to seek a wife. After marrying a neighbor of
his mother's, he took her to the U.S. But Elizabeth Trump didn't like it
there, so the family returned to Germany, intending to settle there for
good.
With
his American money, Friedrich Trump was a gift to his German community,
but the German bureaucracy under Kaiser Wilhelm II kicked him out.
Despite repeated appeals
for German citizenship (Trump had become an American so he could vote
in the presidential election after Washington became a state in 1889),
he was suspected of having fled Germany to dodge the draft and returning
only when he was no longer eligible.
So,
Wilhelmian bureaucrats bear the ultimate responsibility for the
emergence of presidential candidate Trump. That, however, is not the
part of the family story I really
want to hear from him.
During
World War I, when hamburgers were called Wilsonburgers and sauerkraut
became "liberty cabbage," President Woodrow Wilson banned German men
from planes and boats
and ordered 600,000 German aliens to register with the police. Many
German immigrants changed their names because they felt -- and often
were -- threatened. The Trumps didn't, according to Blair: They
"hunkered down to avoid suspicion," but remained a German-speaking
household. Their children, second-generation Americans, grew up
speaking German, too, "but the bitter experience of having been tarred
by their German ancestry had left scars on the Trump children."
What
German immigrants endured during World War I was just a warning to
Frederick Trump, the candidate's father and the man who made the family
rich. World War II taught
him he had to forget his heritage. Blair wrote:
As
the children searched the skies for Messerschmidt planes, Fred Trump
was silent about his own German background. Although he had spoken
German when he had visited Kallstadt
just before the Depression, in America only his parents' generation
spoke the language in public. He began to deny that he knew German and
didn't teach it to his children. Eventually, he started telling people
that he was of Swedish ancestry. Mindful of the
growing prominence of Jews in the real estate industry and local
politics, he became so active in Jewish philanthropies that people often
assumed he belonged to that faith.
Donald
Trump picked up the Swedish lie and stressed his mother's Scottish
heritage, especially as he promoted his golf courses in Scotland. More
recently, he has had to
acknowledge his German roots, but the people of Kallstadt don't root
for him the way Slopnice roots for Sanders, who has visited the town. I
suspect it's not only because Trump defies fact-checking, and
truthfulness is an important virtue in Germany.
The
similarity between the way the U.S. treated Germans during the world
wars and the way Trump wants it to treat Muslims is striking. And if, in
the late 19th and early
20th centuries, the U.S. had as restrictive an immigration policy as
Trump proposes, his grandfather couldn't have come in the first place --
or returned when Germany rejected him.
I
have been getting many e-mails from Trump supporters who tell me they
are not xenophobes and that Trump's potential for shaking up a moribund
system is more important
to them than his anti-immigrant message. If that's true, Trump would
lose nothing by acknowledging that attitudes like the ones he has
propagated once forced his father to give up his heritage and forget his
first language. That wouldn't be his first turnaround,
and he'd certainly gain my respect. As someone who lives outside my
native country, I want my children to speak the language I grew up with
and be proud of their ancestry.
I
doubt that Trump will do it, though. It is the xenophobic
pronouncements that get him the loudest cheers at rallies. Those who
applaud him ought to know, though, that
he's something like a Jewish anti-Semite: Someone whose family was
scarred by the kind of hatred he's trying to ignite.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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