I note that I opposed the renaming of this airport terminal two (2) years ago or so. I wish to change my vote.
I had a stepdad from 7th grade through my senior year in High School. (My Dad died when I was 10.) He was an aircraft engineer, a native Long Islander, and his boyhood hero was Charles Lindbergh, whose famous flight commenced from Floyd Bennett Field, withing driving distance of where he grew up.
I remember him telling me this when I asked him who his hero was. His eyes lit up initially when he talked about Lindbergh's flight. (My stepdad was born in 1917.) Everyone thought it was the greatest thing. But his mood shifted somewhat when he began to mention Lindbergh's "America First" activities, and, especially his trip to Germany, where he inspected the Luftwaffe with Adolf Hitler and later made a statement that he considered the German Air Force "invincible". This, and the fact that he opposed entry into WWII cost him the support of many of the "Greatest Generation". (My stepdad was a lifelong Republican, while my Mom and Grandma were lifelong Democrats who voted for McGovern, loss of status for Lindbergh was something that occurred across the political spectrum.)
It's easy to find awful statements made by Lindbergh:
In his book The American Axis, Holocaust researcher and investigative journalist Max Wallace agreed with Franklin Roosevelt's assessment that Lindbergh was "pro-Nazi". However, he found that the Roosevelt Administration's accusations of dual loyalty or treason were unsubstantiated. Wallace considered Lindbergh to be a well-intentioned but bigoted and misguided Nazi sympathizer whose career as the leader of the isolationist movement had a destructive impact on Jewish people.[181]
Lindbergh's Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, A. Scott Berg, contended that Lindbergh was not so much a supporter of the Nazi regime as someone so stubborn in his convictions and relatively inexperienced in political maneuvering that he easily allowed rivals to portray him as one. Lindbergh's receipt of the German medal was approved without objection by the American embassy; the war had not yet begun in Europe. The award did not cause controversy until the war began and Lindbergh returned to the United States in 1939 to spread his message of nonintervention. Berg contended Lindbergh's views were commonplace in the United States in the pre–World War II era. Lindbergh's support for the America First Committee was representative of the sentiments of a number of American people.[182]
Yet Berg also noted, "As late as April 1939—after Germany overtook Czechoslovakia—Lindbergh was willing to make excuses for Hitler. 'Much as I disapprove of many things Hitler had done,' he wrote in his diary on April 2, 1939, 'I believe she [Germany] has pursued the only consistent policy in Europe in recent years. I cannot support her broken promises, but she has only moved a little faster than other nations ... in breaking promises. The question of right and wrong is one thing by law and another thing by history.'" Berg also explained that leading up to the war, in Lindbergh's mind, the great battle would be between the Soviet Union and Germany, not fascism and democracy.
Wallace noted that it was difficult to find social scientists among Lindbergh's contemporaries in the 1930s who found validity in racial explanations for human behavior. Wallace went on to observe, "throughout his life, eugenics would remain one of Lindbergh's enduring passions."[183]
Indeed, Lindbergh was a racist in the truest sense of the word. He wished that America maintain its European heritage and ancestry, and made his share of statements decrying the mixing of the races. One reason he preferred Germany to the USSR was that he viewed the USSR as a "semi-Asiatic" country. He viewed Jews as a separate race, and used that term on many occasions, and he considered Jews as people who were pushing for WWII.
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.
I could post more about this. Honestly, I was shocked as to how much awful stuff I found about Lindbergh in about 10 minutes of searching. Stuff for which there is really no defense. His aviation feats are remarkable, and they should be remembered. And there is some defense for his anti-interventionist views. 50 million people died during WWII, and the Holocaust, an unquestioned mega-atrocity, was a product of the War, and something that may not have happened had WWII been averted (although there was Jewish persecution in Germany and in much of Europe throughout the 1930s). That's a lot of dead people and the end of the "Good War" produced was, for many, was, in the words of JFK, "a hard and bitter peace". But if Lindbergh was right in his isolationism, he was right for the wrong reasons, and that verdict is pretty clear.
I don't wish to erase Lindbergh's name from every terminal and monument all at once, but I do believe that we can rename things named for him quietly and systematically. There is much in his life that is not admirable. He does not need to become an American Villain, but his monuments don't need to last forever. We can read about Lindbergh in the history books. Perhaps we ought to keep it at that.
Poll
