Mira Mesa residents Michael and Victoria Barzilli see discrimination differently than many of us do. They’ve seen it up close.
In World War II, the Nazis sent Victoria’s paternal grandparents to the Auschwitz concentration camp and shot her maternal grandfather’s first wife and their daughter. Half a century later, some of Michael’s teenage baseball teammates spray-painted a swastika on his family’s garage.
Such stories came to mind when the couple learned about the anti-Semitic views of aviator Charles Lindbergh, the namesake of San Diego’s airport.
The discovery propelled them into action, and they launched a campaign in November to change Lindbergh Field’s name. The effort didn’t go very far, but I obtained one of their letters this week as I wrote a column on the fate of the San Diego airport’s well-known Lindbergh mural, which airport officials may destroy but which I and most readers want to keep.
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“I think once you’re a hero, you’re always a hero,” one reader told me about Lindbergh.
But is that so? Shouldn’t we consider both Lindbergh’s aviation accomplishments and his anti-Semitism? And how would we even weigh them?
Maybe the Barzillis are right, I thought. Maybe the mural shouldn’t go back up on the airport’s commuter terminal despite the public’s outpouring of support.
In Lindbergh’s most controversial speech — in 1941 — he said: “Instead of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”
After the speech, a PBS biography on Lindbergh noted, “Civic and corporate organizations cut all ties and affiliations with him. His name was even removed from the water tower in his hometown of Little Falls, Minn.”
The panels making up the San Diego airport’s Lindbergh mural had been taken down for building repairs for several months when the Barzillis learned about the aviator’s past from Victoria’s dad. The state of the mural and a major airport renovation spurred the couple to write a letter to airport officials.
“We kind of thought maybe this is the time to say something because if you don’t say something now, then it’s going to be too late,” Michael told me.
Their letter documents Lindbergh’s belief in eugenics, or the superiority of one race over another, and Lindbergh’s rise and fall as an American hero. He gained fame for making the first solo nonstop flight from New York to Paris in 1927 in a plane built in San Diego. Then he faced heavy criticism for promoting appeasement and isolationism during World War II.
To make their case, the Barzillis cited online research and quoted remarks that Lindbergh made in diaries, articles and speeches, such as this one: “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.”