The figure of Donald Trump looms over Sarah Churchwell’s new history of American national identity, which highlights the ugliest features of the country’s ingrained traditions of intolerance and bigotry. But it is the current president’s father, Fred, who first leaps off the page in a startling cameo appearance.
On Memorial Day 1927, as Churchwell recounts, the white supremacist, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan organised a march in New York City’s borough of Queens, home to the German-American Trump family, whose patriarch, Friedrich Trump, had emigrated to the United States in 1885. About 1,000 demonstrators, many dressed in the KKK’s signature hooded white robes and ‘accompanied by 400 women from the so-called “Klavana”’, had gathered to promote their version of ‘America First’, a slogan that Churchwell strives to rescue from oversimplification. Not everyone watching along the parade route was enthusiastic about the Klan’s exercise of its First Amendment rights, and a riot ensued.
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