From our Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree desk

As the world wonders whether the president of the United Staes is a racist, the hardworking staff was reminded of Adam Hochschild’s piece in the New York Review of Books last month, which analyzed The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition by Linda Gordon and Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s by Felix Harcourt.

In particular, this last paragraph.

[Gordon] ends her book by writing, “The Klannish spirit—fearful, angry, gullible to sensationalist falsehoods, in thrall to demagogic leaders and abusive language, hostile to science and intellectuals, committed to the dream that everyone can be a success in business if they only try—lives on.” One intriguing episode links the Klan of ninety years ago to us now. On Memorial Day 1927, a march of some one thousand Klansmen through the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, New York, turned into a brawl with the police. Several people wearing Klan hoods, either marching in the parade or sympathizers cheering from the sidelines, were charged with disorderly conduct, and one with “refusing to disperse.” Although the charge against the latter was later dropped, his name was mentioned in several newspaper accounts of the fracas. Beneath the hood was Fred Trump, the father of Donald.*

About that asterisk:

Mike Pearl’s Vice piece stated that “Newspaper clips obtained by VICE suggest the Republican frontrunner’s father may have worn the robe and hood of a Klansman in 1927.”

But Snopes.com is less certain, saying “A 1927 New York Times article about KKK arrests mentioned Donald Trump’s father Fred, but the reporting was vague and inconclusive.”

That fifth graf below looks pretty conclusive to us.

The Snopes piece has Trump the Younger denying that the family ever lived on Devonshire Road, but that denial – wait for it – is not true.

(To be sure graf goes here)

To be sure, most of this was chewed over during the 2016 presidential campaign, although it never seemed to get very far up on the radar screen.

So we thought now was a good time to remind everyone.