12 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
LOCALHEROES
TRUMPANDSON
C
hristopher Columbus was tossed
into a lake in Richmond, Virginia.
King Leopold II, of Belgium, was burned
and hauled off by a crane. When activ-
ists came for Fred Trump, the late fa-
ther of the sitting U.S. President, they
brought a five-gallon can of paint, a
paint roller, and a blowtorch. The mon-
ument that they were targeting—before
officers responding to a 911 call foiled
their operation—did not include a plinth.
It was a modest metal plaque on a pole,
rising over a pen of shopping carts in
the parking lot of a small grocery on Ja-
maica Avenue, in Woodhaven, Queens.
What stands out about the incident
is, as a police report notes, the location’s
“historical connection with the current
President of the United States of Amer-
ica.” Also, one of the alleged vandals
is associated with Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, the representative for parts of
Queens and the Bronx.
The four perpetrators entered the
parking lot, under the elevated tracks of
the J train, at around 1:20 A.M. on June
20th. According to the police report,
they tried to tamper with surveillance
cameras on the store’s awning before
getting down to business. The square of
metal that they came to do battle with,
painted in the blue-and-yellow color
scheme of a New York State license
plate, read,
FRED CHRIST TRUMP
BORN IN WOODHAVEN OCT. 11, 1905
BEGAN BUILDING AT AGE 15, BUILT
THIS STORE FOUNDED E. TRUMP
& SON NOW TRUMP ORGANIZATION
FATHER OF “THE DONALD”
When police arrived at the scene,
Officer Bryan Hagmaier arrested Justine
Medina, a former chair of the Queens
Democratic Socialists of America; her
three accomplices, described as two men
wearing black clothing and a mysterious
third person, presumably got away.
The next morning, the historical
marker was gone, and for local residents
there were many unanswered questions:
Had the plaque been defaced? Would it
be returned to its spot over the shopping
carts? Did people in Woodhaven even
want a commemoration of Fred Trump?
Why hadn’t the vandals used spray paint?
Edward Wendell is the president of
the Woodhaven Cultural and Histori-
cal Society, which the police report lists
as one of two victims. (The other is the
grocery store.) Wendell’s organization
erected the plaque in 1999, when Fred
Trump died. (Seven blocks away, on
Eighty-eighth Street, a similar marker
notes the birthplace of Mae West.) Wen-
dell, a gregarious, bearded man of im-
posing size who works as an I.T. direc-
tor, did not want to discuss the state
of the plaque; he was dealing with a
wasp problem in his front yard. “The
only thing I will publicly say is that the
sign is down, and that we will discuss it
at the next Historical Society meeting,”
he said. He later added, “We have no
plans to put the sign back in place.”
Fred Trump built the grocery store
during the Depression, when the real-
estate market was sagging. The Wood-
haven that he lived in, a century ago,
was a remote byway. (An ad from the
period, for a Trump development in
nearby Hollis, boasted such amenities
as “sewers, concrete street and side-
walks.”) It also was overwhelmingly
white. Joel Kuszai, a professor of En-
glish at Queensborough Community
College, is writing a book about the Ku
Klux Klan’s influence in Queens during
the nineteen-twenties. It includes a
chapter that describes the President’s
father, who attended a Klan rally that
workers do. But essential workers have
every right to insist that sensible mea-
sures be taken for their safety. Teachers,
because their unions are organized and
politically influential, can stand up for
themselves in a way that immigrant meat-
packing workers cannot; in a sense, that
power confers an obligation to speak out
and set standards for what any worker
in this long pandemic deserves.
Where does all this leave children,
parents, and employers? Some families
are forming at-home “pod schools” with
friends; others are turning to private
schools. The public-policy challenge is
what will happen to students whose fam-
ilies do not have such resources. Califor-
nia is exploring a kind of triage, in which
some elementary schools open, and older
students stay home; there are inventive
proposals, such as holding classes out-
doors, but that still requires space, staffing,
and funding. As grim as it is to say,
though, the most practical thing that dis-
tricts can do may be to improve remote
learning, which will be part of the equa-
tion in all scenarios.
This spring, “remote instruction” was
often a euphemism for “no instruction.”
For some children, it involved little more
than intermittently watching a screen.
Others didn’t even have a screen to watch;
in Los Angeles alone, a quarter of a mil-
lion households with school-age chil-
dren lacked a computer with broadband.
Even if a home has a digital device, it
may be shared by more than one stu-
dent and by parents working remotely.
Attempts to insure that students have
what they need to learn have been patchy;
as with so many things related to the
pandemic, the money isn’t there. Many
school systems, including New York
City’s, have had their budgets cut. Dem-
ocrats in Congress have proposed more
than four hundred billion dollars in aid
to public schools as part of the second
pandemic relief bill, while Republicans
have sought only a fraction of that.
If there is to be any hope for in-per-
son schooling not only in the fall but in
the spring—when a safe vaccine, even if
one exists, might not be fully available—a
rapid change in course is necessary. This
might include targeted lockdowns, or
trading closed restaurants and shops for
open schools. It certainly demands a
greater financial, political, and commu-
nity commitment. Several countries, such
as Germany and South Korea, have done
the work both to beat back the virus and
to allow schools to reopen in a reason-
ably safe manner, with measures such as
mandatory masks, small classes, broad
testing, and strict distancing.
The United States accomplished
neither; as a nation, we wasted the sum-
mer, while Trump sowed distrust and
promoted heedlessness. What’s left
now is to see what can be salvaged.
We’re already late for school.
—Amy Davidson Sorkin
