John McCain: Another Silent Sam

Nicky Steidel
Sep 4, 2018 · 12 min read

During the evening of August 20, 2018, a group of University of North Carolina students and local activists toppled the so-called “Silent Sam” statue located on UNC’s campus. Erected in 1907 by the Daughters of the Confederacy, the bronze figure of a rebel soldier grasping a rifle was erected in order to commemorate those “students and faculty… who f[ought] and die[d] for the South” during the American Civil War. The statue’s removal, although still contested by the university’s administration, was good riddance.

Silent Sam was not a real person, but rather a fictional idol, a metonym; he represented the idea that the Confederacy fought for abstract ideals of “honor” and “homeland,” the idea that white supremacy could be noble. Silent Sam was erected in the decades after the defeat of Reconstruction in the South, fomented not only by the cravenness of the federal government, which prematurely ended its military occupation, but also by white armed insurrection. The statue not only memorialized the cause of slavery of the Civil War era; it also reified the resurgent white supremacist politics of the early 20th century during which it was built. Silent Sam told a lie about the past in order to lionize the present.

Concomitantly, the protesters who took down the statue meant not just to topple a physical monument to white supremacy but also to counter the historical revision that spurred its creation. They didn’t just want to destroy a statue — they also wanted to correct the lies.

In a way, the monument’s symbolic reference to an anonymous Confederate soldier did more work to cloud historical truth than similar monuments to actual, real-life persons like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate leaders. Because Silent Sam was entirely fictional, we couldn’t read about his deeds on Wikipedia. The single narrative the statue conveyed was a hagiography about the “noble” cause of the South in the Civil War.

We do not get the sense from Silent Sam that the South fought to preserve an incredibly profitable system of human bondage, one that supplied the raw materials necessary to industrialize the United States and Europe. We do not get the sense that by the Confederacy’s own admission, it was a coalition not simply of “the South” but rather a rebellion of its slaveholding states” (emphasis mine).

In the place of actual history, Silent Sam communicated to us vague, abstract ideas like sacrifice, courage, commitment, honor, humility, and patriotism. Via the omission of anything else but nostalgic appeals to emotion, these “ideals” valorized the cause of the enslavers.

Fashionable Forgetting

Despite being toppled, Silent Sam was part of an ongoing American ritual of historical forgetting and calculated, sanitized re-remembering. Today, with respect to the Civil War, this practice is largely unfashionable, though far from gone. But the quintessentially American practice of forgetting remains in other contexts. Just as England has Queen Victoria and Winston Churchill, and the U.S. has Andrew Jackson on its dollars and living legends like Henry Kissinger.

Upon his death, we’ve also received a similarly sanitized portrait of John McCain (not least from Kissinger, who spoke at McCain’s funeral). McCain’s corpse has already been fully embalmed in several layers of historical revision. As with the one-note revisionism surrounding the figure of Silent Sam, after ruminating on McCain’s life American elites — and, disturbingly, many run-of-the-mill liberals — have emerged in lockstep with a single narrative about one man’s principled suffering and the irrefutable nobility of his cause.

Let’s start with what elites have been saying about him. There are, in general, two genres of McCain hagiography. The first type mentions little of what he said or did as a politician, instead dwelling on the etiquette he displayed while saying and doing. The other lingers on parts of what he said, but very little of what he did.

A liberal with whom I went to college waxed poetic on Facebook about how McCain “honorably served people,” how “he wasn’t a politician; he was a public servant,” and how he “serve[d] with a certain dignity and humility that is rare in politicians, particularly conservatives and particularly those from Arizona.” The New York Times remembered him as a “War Hero” in the headline of their obituary. The Economist called him the same thing and also insisted that “[t]ruth and principles” were “his watchwords.” USA Today, not fearing redundancy, also called him a “war hero,” lauding him especially for his willingness to “take on the White House” — in other words, President Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board wrote that “McCain’s calling card was honor and character.” Jennifer Rubin wrote in the Washington Post that “[w]ith the possible exception of the military … no group was more indebted to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) than the human rights community.”

Thus we have the Silent Sam version of John McCain: a war hero, a political “maverick,” and a man of honor and principle who stood up to the buffoonish Trump, an almost Christ-like servant of the American people and of the cause of international human rights.

Unfortunately, as nice as all of these labels sound, they don’t ultimately mean much. The essential strangeness of this situation, in which (and perhaps especially) liberals are sanctifying their supposed political rival, surprises me even as I write this piece. What has unfolded before our eyes is as if antislavery Republicans decided to erect Silent Sam — immediately after the war, in 1865, rather than in 1907 — in order to acknowledge the “nobility” of the Southern cause, because they could not bear to acknowledge that their former opponents would fight a war to maintain human bondage.

After all, the creation of the zombified, Silent-Sam-McCain has very little to do with mourning the end of a life; it has everything to do with memorialization, which could be defined as the intensely politicized act of remembering. This memorialization is not about celebrating a life well-lived, but rather about liberals’ anxiety-ridden absolution of their own guilt and, most importantly of all, a reaffirmation of the idea that we, the United States, are fundamentally Good. In other words, this narrative creation is the symptom of an utter refusal to reckon with reality. This narrative is not only ideological but also abstract, even fantastical.

Let’s pause for a moment to consider and question the abstract McCain, the Silent Sam McCain. What does it mean to be a “war hero?” Why was the war that made him a “hero” fought? What even is a “patriot?” Of what value are “truth and principles” if we are not to evaluate what those principles actually are? Of what value is the “calling card” of “character” if we never stop to think about the contents of said character? And, finally, what exactly was the nature of McCain’s “public service?” These are all largely unanswered questions in the mainstream misremembering of John McCain.

When we memorialize John McCain in the way that the mass media and many liberals have, we are, in a curious way, silencing him — not in the pejorative sense that many on the left side of the political spectrum use the word, but in a more literal sense. In order to remember McCain as a hero, as honorable, as any of the above, one has to ignore the man’s actual words and deeds. A Silent Sam indeed.

In Word and Deed

It is curious that so many Americans — and especially the American commentariat — have such an emotional attachment to a leader who so rarely had the interests of the majority of human beings, in both the U.S. and around the world, at heart. Whenever specific claims about McCain emerge from within the media’s fortress enclosure of empty platitudes, the facts betray the late senator’s jerry-rigged legacy. To take just one example, despite his clear personal dislike of the current president, McCain voted with Trump 83% of the time — so much for “tak[ing] on the White House.” And the contradictions don’t end there.

Indeed, the “bright spots” on McCain’s dark record as a politician and legislator — his support for campaign finance reform and his opposition to torture — are notable not just as exceptions to the rule of his career, but also because they belie the moral calculus that undergirded his entire worldview: to side with the powerful, unless a certain issue had affected him personally. To put it glibly, McCain opposed torture because he had been tortured; he supported (some) campaign finance reform because his political career came within a hair’s breadth ending after he was implicated in a major corruption scandal in 1989.

Regarding the rest of his career, it is not an exaggeration to say that McCain’s political choices endorsed war, racism, misogyny, queerphobia, xenophobia, and class exploitation, at least until portions of the above were no longer politically expedient.

A quick laundry list would suffice, although I will initially dwell upon his pro-war record.

McCain has never voted against a single U.S. war, and indeed he has been hawkish beyond even the crass “geostrategic” mandate of the U.S. “defense” apparatus. The late senator’s lust for war has found expression in, among other things, his undying support for arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The dire consequences of such choices have been making headlines even after his death — at least 22 dead children in the Saudis’ most recent use of U.S. bombs on Yemeni civilians. But the horror does not stop there.

McCain’s complicity in military violence as a senator not only touched on the viscerally tragic, as above, but also affected other human beings on a scale that is quite literally incomprehensible. A fact that has managed to elude most Americans, not to mention the mainstream press, is the staggering human cost of the Iraq War. The World Health Organization and Iraqi government estimated at least 150,000 “violent deaths” between 2003 and 2011; a group of Iraqi, American, and Candian researchers found, using their own Orwellian term, an additional 461,000 “excess deaths” due to direct and “indirect” violence during the same period. The most comprehensive estimates of the human cost of the Iraq War have reached the figure of 1.2 million deathsby 2006.

McCain, of course, was one of the main cheerleaders for the initial U.S. intervention in Iraq, and he made continuing the war part of his 2008 presidential platform. He did not disavow his prior position until just before his death, describing it not as a human rights atrocity with entirely foreseeable consequences, but rather as a simple “mistake.” I am sure I do not need to point out that 1.2 million people are not murdered by “mistake.”

To continue the laundry list: the late senator also voted against the creation of MLK Day, stripped water rights away from indigenous people in his home state, and repeatedly referred to Vietnamese people as “g**ks,” refusing to back down when reporters challenged him on his use of racial slurs.

McCain also opposed employment discrimination protections for gay people and openly supported California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8. His attitude towards LGBTQ people has evolved only to a limited extent, his support conditional on their involvement in military “service.” Bewilderingly, rather than account for the queerphobia of his own nation, in 2016 he blamed the tragic massacre of 49 people at an Orlando LGBTQ nightclub on Obama’s unwillingness to continue wars in the Middle East.

Furthermore, McCain has repeatedly voted against wage equality for women workers, has made jokes about rape, and called his wife a “c**t” in public. He never wavered on his opposition to a person’s right to an unconditional, safe abortion.

He supported Arizona’s notorious anti-immigrant laws, which enshrined the racial profiling of people merely suspected of being undocumented. Even his too-little-too-late pleas for immigration reform involved an insistence on “border security upgrades” — in other words, more violence at the border, whether direct or indirect. Presaging Trump’s “build the wall” slogan, a 2010 political ad for McCain featured the senator’s insistence that the U.S. “complete the dang fence.”

And McCain, no friend of workers of in any country, has voted against a federal minimum wage increase 19 times, voted to cut taxes for large corporations (including the Trump tax cuts, which effectively nullified his last-minute vote to “save” Medicare), voted for national anti-union “right-to-work” (for less) laws, and has consistently opposed strikes of the organized working class. He voted for NAFTA, which destroyed 650,000 jobs in Mexico in tandem with the country’s subsistence agriculture sector, leading to increased instability, violence, and yes — immigration into the U.S., a phenomenon he thought we should treat with barbed wire fences, weapons, and indefinite detention. (The “path to citizenship” he sold to the public alongside liberal politicians was reserved, as ever, for a lucky few.)

If this list is exhausting, or mind-boggling, it should be. (And yet it’s far from exhaustive.) The violence required to maintain the status quo in and of the United States does just that: it boggles the mind. All the more troubling that so many have treated McCain’s support for and complicity in the above as banal, immutable facts of life.

War Hero/War Criminal

Indeed, John McCain’s record is probably not the worst it could have been in every area. Perhaps with the exception of McCain’s record on war, it does not even stand out in midst of his former colleagues in the Republican Party. As one acquaintance remarked to me, if McCain was a “war criminal,” then wouldn’t scores of other U.S. politicians also be war criminals due to their support for the wars in the Middle East? And, McCain’s own uniquely bloodthirsty politics aside, wouldn’t that then “cheapen” the term?

But that’s precisely where the depth of most Americans’ inability to reckon with their nation’s structural position in the world becomes so crystal-clear to me. The existence of scores of U.S. politicians who are, by definition, war criminals (although they will never be treated as such) does not dilute the meaning of the term “war criminal.” It simply means that scores of U.S. politicians are just that — war criminals. And what follows from this confrontation with the facts must be a reckoning with the consequences of those facts, not a retreat into hollow, self-serving rhetorical niceties.

Indeed, it is emphatically not my task to argue that McCain was exceptionally evil. Rather, my goal is to come to terms with the ways in which McCain’s political actions constitute the acceptable “norm,” and to examine the consequences of instantly whitewashing his destructive legacy. Put another way, John McCain’s death is not noteworthy because of the uniqueness of his crimes against humanity. Rather, the peculiar memorialization of the man has revealed one of the mechanisms by which U.S. elites continue to insist on the righteousness of maintaining an empire abroad and a stiflingly exploitative and oppressive economic and social system at home.


One of the curious features of the Silent Sam form of hagiography, usually conducted (although not exclusively) by the powerful, is the inherent murkiness of the rhetoric used to sanctify. The erectors of Silent Sam could not simply insist on the righteousness and beneficence of racism and chattel slavery, because to do so would have seemed uncouth. (Besides, insisting on the positive goods of slavery and racism was the job of the Ku Klux Klan.) Instead, as one Mrs. H.A. London remarked at the statue’s dedication, the erectors were doing no more than “honoring the memory of our Confederate heroes.” Because they felt unable to openly justify the direct goals and aspirations of the Southern cause, Silent Sam’s erectors fell back on the trite discourse of heroes and heroism.

Analogously, one feature common to the rushed hagiographies of McCain has been the repeated insistence that the man was a “war hero.” Without any context, it’s easy for many to reflexively call McCain a “war hero.” It’s more difficult to extol the virtues of the circumstances of his “heroism.” The bombing of a civilian light bulb factory amidst Operation Rolling Thunder, which resulted in the deaths of at least 50,000 innocent Vietnamese human beings, certainly does not fit common perceptions of heroism.

When McCain called for imperialist war and aggression from the United States throughout his political career, he did so using a similar rhetorical veneer: that of spreading freedom and democracy. Nakedly cheering on the plunder of “shithole countries” was something he preferred to leave to the Trumps of his party.


In the early 20th century U.S., a tactically diverse movement served the interests of white supremacy. Those who erected Confederate-worshipping statues throughout the South and screened Birth of a Nation in the White House represented its respectable arm. The paramilitaries of the Ku Klux Klan and their express desire for a white ethnostate represented another, less polite one. No historian worth her salt would declare that these two phenomena were disconnected.

Today, some American politicians declare the necessity of U.S. imperialism on the grounds of freedom, democracy, stability, and, as McCain said of his desire to invade Iraq in 2001, because “a nation has the right to defend itself.” Behind closed doors, this type of politician will concede imperialism’s necessary function in securing American profits.

Others declare empire a necessity on the grounds of a “clash of civilizations,” of a global race war, of a confrontation with the Islamic Other, or because those “shithole” countries must be remade in America’s image and be taught superior American ways.

The two are not so disconnected as they seem.

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