San Diego Media Need to Stop Calling Our Airport ‘Lindbergh Field’ After White Supremacist and Anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh

The leaders of the Orange County Democratic Party are pressuring to drop actor John Wayne’s name, statue and other likenesses from the county’s airport because of his racist and bigoted comments.

It’s part of a national movement to remove white supremacist symbols and names from American institutions, monuments, businesses, nonprofits, sports leagues and teams. And now airports.

Orange County officials passed an emergency resolution condemning Wayne’s “racist and bigoted statements” made in a 1971 interview. They are also calling on the Orange County Board of Supervisors to drop his name, statue and other likenesses from the international airport, whose name is simply John Wayne Airport. They want to restore the airport to its original name, Orange County Airport.

Now seems like an excellent moment to do the same here in San Diego and stop calling our airport after Charles Lindbergh – a known anti-Semite and white supremacist, and Nazi- Hitler acolyte. But wait. Hasn’t our airport already changed its name to the San Diego International Airport? The quick and easy answer is – “yes”. But certain voices of influence still use the “Lindbergh” name. Particularly San Diego Union-Tribune writers and other media wizards.

Case in point: just this year, 2020, SDU-T writers, reporters and columnists have used the old, racist term, “Lindbergh Field” numerous times.

Mainstay business writer Lori Weisberg used the term on January 9, 2020 in an article about the $3 billion plan to replace San Diego airport’s aging Terminal 1. Here’s the quote:

Among the many steps the airport will take to try to soften the impact of more flights out of Lindbergh Field is an expansion of its residential sound insulation program.

Weisberg used the term again in an article on February 28 this year: “Of the 17 airlines operating out of Lindbergh Field, 13 saw an increase in passenger traffic.”

Then again on April 15, Weisberg wrote about “Lindbergh Field.” She used it in a July 2019 article as well. Now, it’s true that Weisberg is the business writer and reporter and is usually the one who writes about the San Diego Airport. But she definitely is not the only U-T writer to use it.

Reporter David Garrick, in a February 7, 2020 article used it:

County rules limiting residential and commercial development near the Lindbergh Field flight path are jeopardizing a six-story apartment building proposed for Bankers Hill.

Weisberg and Garrick – and other U-T writers – need to halt this slimy practice of using the anti-Semite’s name. Other media and press in our fair city need to do the same.

Careful readers of the OB Rag know about our campaign to rid the airport of Charles’ name and have documented his ties to Nazis, the America First movement prior to America’s entry into World War II, and his racist, anti-Semitic and white supremacist statements. In September 2019, we asked, “Can’t We All Just – Stop Calling the San Diego Airport After an Anti-Semite and Nazi-Lover?”

To be fair, the OB Rag has used the term either unconsciously or unintentionally as in reprinting other news articles. But we are consciously trying not to use his name.

Here’s some of what we wrote last year:

For, there’s no doubt that Lindbergh had a dark side.

Just over a year ago, Kinsee Morlan at the Voice of San Diego, examined how “over the last several years, the Airport Authority dropped the Lindbergh Field name and removed a large mural of Charles Lindbergh, suggesting it was moving away from the aviation hero, who had a history of anti-Semitic and racist views.” Morlan wrote:

Charles Lindbergh was an aviation hero – and an anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer. … The airport removed a large outdoor mural of Lindbergh a few years ago, suggesting the public agency that runs the facility was moving away from him. … In 1927, Lindbergh became a national hero when he made the first-ever solo nonstop transatlantic flight … Over the years, he also made anti-Semitic statements and, in his own speeches, diaries and letters, has discussed his support of eugenics and the superiority of the white race.

From KPBS on Anti-Semitism:

By 1939, the anti-Semites had two causes: keeping America out of the European war, and keeping European Jews out of America. And they had two famous men in their ranks.

Henry Ford was a true rags-to-riches hero. He was also an anti-Semite, who railed incessantly against “the Jewish plan to control the world” in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent …

The other famous American was Charles Lindbergh, who may have been an anti-Semite, but most certainly claimed publicly that Jews were trying, partly through their ownership of the media, to draw America into the war. Lindbergh represented America First, the powerful isolationist organization that, in fact, ejected Henry Ford for his anti-Semitic views.

Here’s a sample of Lindbergh’s beliefs regarding the white race in a 1939 article in Reader’s Digest:

We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.

Here’s one of his diary entries:

We must limit to a reasonable amount the Jewish influence … Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur. It is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country.

He believed the survival of the white race was more important than the survival of democracy in Europe:

“Our bond with Europe is one of race and not of political ideology.”

“Racial strength is vital; politics, a luxury”.

At the time in the run-up to World War II and during, Lindbergh was suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer. His speeches and writings on race and religion similar to those of the Nazis; his many trips to Nazi Germany; his belief in eugenics. Apparently, Lindbergh loved Nazi Germany so much, he had planned to move to Berlin for the winter of 1938–39. But the first house he had found, he decided not to move in as it had been formerly owned by Jews. His Nazi friends encouraged him to call up ol’ Albert Speer, and Speer promised to build the Lindberghs a house anywhere they wanted.

As Europe was already at war in 1940, Lindbergh became the national spokesman of the non-interventionist America First Committee, which sought to keep America out of the war. In his speeches in public and on the radio, he argued that America had no business attacking Germany. Later, he wrote:

I was deeply concerned that the potentially gigantic power of America, guided by uninformed and impractical idealism, might crusade into Europe to destroy Hitler without realizing that Hitler’s destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot and barbarism of Soviet Russia’s forces, causing possibly the fatal wounding of western civilization.

In 1941, before Congress as he opposed the the Lend-Lease bill, Lindbergh proposed that the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with Germany. This was publicly condemned and described as views as those of a “defeatist and appeaser” by President Franklin Roosevelt. Lindbergh – who had conducted some information-gathering for the US military prior to the war – promptly resigned his commission as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

At an America First rally in September, Lindbergh accused three groups of “pressing this country toward war; the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration”.

Their [Jewish people] greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

San Diego hasn’t been the only city in the country with an airport named after ‘what’s his name.’

Ten years ago, people in Minneapolis wanted to get rid of the airport’s Lindbergh name. The airport management decided to install new signage and many felt that it was “an ideal opportunity to eliminate the Lindbergh name from all prominently displayed signs. … For many people, seeing the name ‘Lindbergh’ on public signs makes them cringe.”

Citizens of the city believed that, “Despite his contributions to aviation and land conservation, many Americans can’t forget what he didn’t do: recant the anti-Semitic language he spewed prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”

His cold, isolationist views led President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, to suggest he have a heart transplant, and earned him the nicknames Lone Eagle and Lone Ostrich.

Besides a disclosure decades later that Lindbergh had had two mistresses in Germany and had fathered three children with one – all the while being married to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a famous writer in her own right (their marriage drove her to seek psychiatric care), Lindbergh was fascinated with eugenics.

Briefly, eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population by excluding certain genetic groups judged to be inferior, and promoting other genetic groups judged to be superior. The superior genetic groups are white, European – and you can guess the rest.

In a 1966 letter to his daughter, Lindbergh wrote:

“If I had to choose but one thing I could impress on my children from whatever wisdom I have gained in life it would be the importance of genetics in mating.”

Because of all this history, public agencies e are being asked to erase Lindbergh’s name and likeness from public view.

Okay, so the mural of the aviator was removed and the airport has a new, different and official name. Yet the Airport Authority has just installed a bronze statue of Lindbergh – “Charles A. Lindbergh: The Boy and the Man”. As their website says:

“The Man” depicts a handsome, 25-year-old Lindbergh: tall, confident, introspective. Wearing his leather aviator’s jacket, sturdy shoes and a calf-length pants, he carries his aviator’s cap in one hand; the other hand is extended: this is the young Charles Lindbergh the world welcomed as a hero in 1927

No mention – or even hint, of course, that ol’ Charles baby had a deep, anti-Semetic past.

So, officialdom San Diego no longer refers to the airport as Lindbergh. It’s time for the rest of us to do the same. Stop calling the San Diego International Airport after an anti-Semite and Nazi-lover. As the folks in Minneapolis understand:

Naming public spaces after human beings is always a risky endeavor, but remaining silent after learning the truth is perpetuating false hero worship. It’s time to take the halo off Charles Lindbergh and tell our children that a lying, polygamist hypocrite and Nazi sympathizer is not someone they should aspire to emulate.

A source: Wikipedia

Also see this: Dr. Seuss Knew a Thing or Two About Lindbergh