In yet another example that the United States is on a perilous trajectory toward fascism, certain archived files of the FBI, declassified and made public pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, have been withdrawn from public access. The files in question deal with Fred Trump Sr.’s arrest while attending a Ku Klux Klan protest on May 30, 1927 — Memorial Day — in Jamaica, Queens, New York. Other files removed from online access include those from 1966 and 1991 dealing with Trump Management Company’s racist renting practices and violations of the Fair Housing Act and business dealings during the 1960s with mob-controlled construction unions and contractors in New York.
Donald Trump and his family’s “official historian,” Trump’s first cousin John Walter, have been evasive and dishonest about Fred Trump, Sr.’s white nationalist and pro-fascist and pro-Nazi activities in the interbellum period between 1918 and 1945. While Donald Trump insisted that his father was not charged after the 1927 arrest, it is not true what the president also stated about the incident, namely that his father had never lived at 175-24 Devonshire Road in Jamaica Estates, Queens — he and his family did live there — and that his involvement in a Klan protest “never happened”—a blatant lie as proven by newspaper accounts of Fred Trump’s arrest.
The KKK Memorial Day protest was no small affair. One thousand Klansmen descended on the parade to disrupt it. And out of a thousand Klan rioters, it was 21 year old Fred Trump and a half dozen of his fellow Klansmen who were arrested by the police. Our DoJ sources claim that the NYPD chose to round up the leaders of the violence directed against the cops. Those arrested included Trump, John E. Kapp of Peekskill, NY; John Marcy of Yonkers, NY; Fred Lyons of New Hyde Park, Long Island; Thomas Carroll of Jamaica, Queens; Thomas Erwin of West Philadelphia, PA; and Harry J. Free of Carll Place, Long Island. The police said all those arrested were “avowed Klansmen.” On June 2, 1947, the Long Island Daily Press reported that all seven Klansmen arrested, including Fred Trump, were “berobed marchers” who disrupted the parade and attacked the police. The Queens County Evening News of June 2, 1927, the Richmond Hill Record of June 3, 1927, and the June 1, 1927 edition of the Daily Star of Brooklyn all reported that Fred Trump was detained by the police. Donald Trump has called the accounts about his father from multiple newspapers “fake news,” a pejorative that, as far as Trump is concerned, can span a hundred years of journalism.
Former U.S. Department of Justice sources familiar with the full and unredacted federal investigative files on Fred Trump stated that not only was the president’s father a member of the Ku Klux Klan but was, in fact, a Kleagle of the New York Realm of the Klan. As Kleagle, Trump was in charge of recruitment for his local Klan chapter. Initial Klan dues were ten dollars. Fred Trump would pass five dollars of the dues to the newly-formed Major Emmett D. Smith Klan No. 38 of Jamaica, Queens, which was headed by an Exalted Cyclops of the Jamaica Klavern. As Kleagle, Fred Trump was allowed to pocket the remaining five dollars. Trump and the Exalted Cyclops would have shared access to the Klavern’s post office box of P.O. Lock Box 57, Jamaica, Long Island. Major Emmett D. Smith, for whom the Jamaica Klavern was named, was notably the King Kleagle of New York state. Another New York state Klan official, D. L. Van Ober, also hailed from Jamaica.
Fred Trump was no rank-and-file member of the Klan but regularly rubbed shoulders with the top KKK leadership regionally and nationally. New York was a hotbed of Klan activity after World War I. By 1922, there were 21 separate Klaverns in New York City alone. DoJ sources confirmed that the Jamaica Klavern, like many others in New York, was largely composed of Protestants of Northern Irish descent. The Memorial Day riot against the NYPD in Queens revealed the schism between the majority Northern Irish Protestant New York Klan and the predominantly Irish Catholic NYPD. The Klan included many Prohibitionists who regarded the Catholic Irish police as drunkards.
The Klan network in Queens facilitated the establishment of the Astoria branch of the Bund, which maintained the Astoria Turnhalle at 44th Street and Broadway in Queens.
German-American Bund parade at East 86th St. in Manhattan on Oct. 30, 1937
The importance of the Jamaica Klavern is highlighted by the interest in its activities by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Jamaica branch. NAACP Jamaica officers Al Whitsu and Charles Reid addressed letters to Klavern No. 38, dated July 1, 1927 and July 15, 1927, respectively, following the Memorial Day riot.
The New York Herald had been warning New Yorkers about the Klan in the years before the Queens riot. On September 5, 1921, the paper ran the following advertisement for a series on the Klan in the New York World.
Many KKK documents, membership rolls, and files from the 1920s and 30s have been lost or destroyed. One of Klan No. 38’s officers in 1927 may have been Thomas Evans. Many of the Klavern’s members attended Evans’s funeral in Jamaica in 1927.
According to former DoJ sources who examined the much more extensive file on Fred Trump than that which now exists, Fred Trump was able to handsomely supplement his income from his rental properties with initiation dues from Klan members.
The FBI files on Fred Trump would have likely been more voluminous had it not been for the passivity of J. Edgar Hoover, the then-Assistant Director of the Bureau of Investigation (the prior name of the FBI). Following the First World War, Hoover busied himself with tracking left-wing anarchists, Communists, and labor union organizers rather than the influx into the United States of veterans of the German, Austrian, and Italian armies, many of whom would later serve the interests of Nazi and Italian fascist organizations in the United States.
The FBI files on Nazi activities in the 1930s and 40s took a major hit when FBI deputy director Mark Felt, who was placed in charge of all the bureau’s Nazi archives following Hoover’s death in 1972, destroyed many of the files on American Nazis, including those dealing with Fred Trump, Sr.’s German-American Bund activities. Some of the original information on Fred Trump’s Klan and Bund activities came from NYPD Red Squad — officially known as the Bureau of Special Services (BOSS) of the Intelligence Division — members who later joined the FBI as agents. Felt became more well-known as the alleged “Deep Throat” of Watergate fame.
NYPD Red Squad members had gladly shared the files they collected on the Klan and Bund. These files contained intelligence reports on meetings, membership, and public protests, including the Memorial Day 1927 Klan riot. Much of the intelligence came from confidential informants and surveillance. After the formation of the Bund in 1936, the NYPD’s surveillance of it and the Klan focused on neighborhoods where both were heavily active. These included Jamaica, Richmond Hill, and Glendale in Queens.
Fred Trump, as the Jamaica Klavern Kleagle, maintained the membership rolls of his local Klan. Given the importance of the Jamaica Klan to the New York state Klan, Fred Trump also likely had access to the membership files of neighboring Klaverns. After the Nazis began organizing the Bund and other pro-Nazi groups in New York, it would not have been difficult for Fred and his colleagues to recruit pro-Hitler loyalists from the Klan. By 1936, the year the Bund was formed, there were active Klaverns in Williamsburg, New York City (Nos. 1 [Albert Pike Klan] and 51), Ridgewood, Maspeth, Flushing, Richmond Hill, another Klavern (No. 41) in Jamaica, Bayshore, New Rochelle, Yonkers, Mount Vernon, Haverstraw, Selkirk, Newburgh, Middletown, Beacon (Nos. 69 and 202), Wawarsing, Orange County, Delmar, Albany, Monroe, Pawling, Pearl River, Peekskill. Port Chester, Poughkeepsie (Nos. 237 and 48), Chatham, Westchester, Springfield Gardens, South Ozone Park, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Midland, Long Island City, Far Rockaway, Valley Stream, Lynbrook, Hempstead, Roosevelt, Freeport, Amityville, Oyster Bay, Huntington, Northport, Smithtown (Nos. 33 and 76), Port Jefferson, and Patchogue. There were also large and active Klaverns in Geneva, Ithaca, Buffalo, Elmira, and Seneca County.
Klan member with his family at a 1925 rally in Ithaca, NY
Our former DoJ sources have also revealed that Fred Trump had a much higher responsibility than recruiting members for the Jamaica KKK. He was also tasked with forging an alliance between the Protestant Klan and the Roman Catholic pro-Benito Mussolini fascisti chapters in New York, including the influential Fascist League of North America led by the New York-based Count Ignazio Thaon di Revel. This was a perilous assignment considering the strongly anti-Catholic stance of the Klan. In fact, after the arrest of Trump and his Klan colleagues on Memorial Day, his Jamaica Klavern distributed pamphlets condemning the actions of the Irish Catholic officers of the New York Police Department. The pamphlet read:
“Americans assaulted by the Roman Catholic police of New York City
Native born Protestant Americans clubbed and beaten when they exercise their rights in the country of their birth.
We charge that the Roman Catholic police force did deliberately precipitate a riot and did tear down American flags and did unmercifully beat and club defenseless Americans who conducted themselves as gentlemen under trying conditions.
We hold the proof. What will you do? Write P.O. Lock Box 57, Jamaica, L.I.”
Our DoJ sources, who had total access to all of the department’s files on Fred Trump and his Klavern, suspect criminal charges were not brought against the Jamaica Kleagle in hopes that he might have agreed to become a police informant for the Klan’s activities. In any event, there is no indication that Trump had ever agreed to become an informant. Considering his activities in trying to forge links between the anti-Catholic KKK and the Fascist League of North America (FNLA), it is more likely that Fred Trump had been tasked by Adolf Hitler’s growing Nazi Party in Germany to curry the same links in the United States that Hitler’s Nazis were establishing with Mussolini’s fascist government in Italy. In such a circumstance, Fred Trump was a much more influential player in far-right politics in America in the 1920s and 30s than Trump biographers have previously revealed.
There is evidence that one Jamaica Klavern member, Paul M. Winter, was in correspondence with New York Governor Al Smith. A Roman Catholic, Smith later joined the America First Committee led by the pro-Hitler aviator Charles Lindbergh. It is noteworthy that nine days prior to the Klan riot in Queens, Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis had landed in Paris following his transatlantic flight from the United States. If Winter was acting with the knowledge and approval of Fred Trump, the outreach to Smith may serve as evidence of Trump’s interest in forging closer links between the Klan and the Catholic members of the fascisti organizations and pro-Hitler Irish Catholics like Smith. Governor Smith was an aberration among Irish Catholic politicians. New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, who was in office during the 1927 Klan riot in Queens, was a vocal opponents of the Klan, as was his predecessor, John Hylan.
Women of the Klan rally on Long Island in 1923
Contemporary newspaper articles suggest that Trump’s Jamaica Klavern was heavily involved in political policy making. For example, the Amsterdam News, New York’s oldest African-American newspaper, reported on June 8, 1927, a little over a week after the Klan riot in Queens, that an unidentified Jamaica No. 38 Klan leader was reported to have said that “Negroes must not marry white people.”
Eerily, the verbiage of the pamphlet reads like the false propaganda Donald Trump and his supporters transmitted following the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
New York Times, May 31, 1927. Fred Trump is listed as one of the detained Klansmen
Donald Trump and his family have done their best to cover-up Fred Trump’s involvement with the Klan and Italian fascists and, later, with the German-American Bund. Donald Trump’s first cousin, John Walter, who was given an executive position — family historian — within the Trump Organization to muddy the waters when it came to Fred Trump and his pro-German father, Frederick (Friedrich) Trump,
saw success with the corporate media, book publishers, and websites. Walter, who died in 2018, was successful in convincing two “fact check” websites, Snopes and Politifact, both having dubious motives in their own right, to absolve old man Trump of any connections to the Klan.
In 1950, Fred Trump, Sr. continued to sport a Hitler-style mustache
There was some resistance within the Justice Department and FBI to Fred Trump receiving U.S. Navy contracts in 1940 to build barracks, apartments, and garden apartments for Navy and other military personnel and civilian defense workers for the Brooklyn Navy Yard and other East Coast naval installations. Trump’s leadership positions in the Klan and Bund worried some Justice and FBI personnel. Hoover was not concerned about Trump’s Nazi and fascist links because Fred did not qualify as “prematurely anti-fascist.” Hoover saw Communists, who were labeled prematurely anti-fascist, as the greater threat. Our DoJ sources revealed that Fred Trump was successful in being awarded Navy construction contracts because of the large number of pro-German officials in the Department of the Navy.
Although the Trump family was largely successful in covering up Fred Trump Sr.’s role in the Klan and Bund, they had no control over the details of Fred Trump’s far-right politics ending up in the dossiers maintained by Soviet intelligence. Our DoJ sources confirmed that there were two highly-placed Soviet agents in the FBI’s New York City office. Everything the FBI knew about Fred Trump and the Klan and the Nazis was also known to Soviet intelligence in Moscow. There is an assumption that the Russian government continues to use the disparaging information on the Trump family as blackmail (Kompromat) to this day.
The New York Klan never disappeared after World War II. In 1949, the Klan led a riot in Peekskill, NY that targeted a folk concert scheduled for August 27 in support of African-American singer and actor Paul Robeson. Klan leaders vowed the following threats against those Robeson supporters who were attacked in their vehicle [above]: “Every nigger bastard dies here tonight!” and “Every Jew bastard dies here tonight!” These were the types of people Fred Trump Sr. was trying to recruit into the NY Klan before the war. Republican Governor Thomas E. Dewey, a local grand jury, and the Jewish magazine Commentary blamed the violence not on the Klan and its allies but on “Communist” provocateurs and propaganda.
Donald Trump’s statement that Fred Trump was not only his father but also his mentor matters tremendously as the second Trump administration places the United States in the totalitarian camp. Fred Trump was not just a father — he was Donald Trump’s primary political tutor, and Fred’s worldview was shaped by far‑right, exclusionary, and ethno-nationalist politics that left a deep imprint on how Donald Trump later understood power, race, loyalty, and conflict. This isn’t about guilt‑by‑association; it’s about political inheritance.
Based on new information about Fred Trump, Sr. that was gleaned from suppressed or now missing DoJ and FBI files a more expansive view of Fred’s far-right politics with the Klan and Bund have come to light. It was previously known that Fred Trump was arrested at the huge Klan rally in Queens in 1927, was federally sued for documented anti‑Black housing discrimination in the 1960s and 70s, that he was politically aligned with New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s far‑right opponents in the interbellum years, that he supported for reactionary policing and anti‑communist politics, and that he was extremely hostile toward immigrants and “outsiders” in Queens politics.
These affectations can now be seen in the statements and policies of the dementia-ridden Donald Trump, who has surfaced many of the biases and extremist views of his father. Donald Trump’s growing feud with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani echoes Fred’s disdain of La Guardia. The echoes of Fred’s condemnation of “Communists” is also increasingly found in Donald’s rhetoric and, more dangerously, in that of his followers and sycophants. Long after his involvement in violently protesting the NYPD in 1927 (an uprising similar to Donald’s attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021), Fred later championed the police cracking heads of anti-Vietnam War protesters. Donald has created a virtual Gestapo in his ICE force that revels in arresting and brutalizing undocumented migrants, citizenship applicants, permanent residents, temporary residents, tourists, and U.S. citizens.
Those who maintain that one cannot blame Donald Trump for the actions of his father are willfully uninformed, pollyannaish, and hopelessly devoid of the current political stakes facing America. As seen with the DoJ and FBI FOIA files, the Trump administration is erasing the history of our nation. The time for action has long passed. It is time for every loyal American to save what remains of our history for future generations to learn from our mistakes.
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