William McCain with Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd (Patreon Preview)

Summary

Summary of "William McCain with Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd (Patreon Preview)" - This Guy Sucked

Podcast Title: This Guy Sucked
Host: Dr. Claire Aubin
Guest: Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd
Episode Release Date: June 5, 2025
Duration Covered: 00:00 – 14:37

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Introduction

In the preview episode of their Patreon-exclusive content, This Guy Sucked, host Dr. Claire Aubin welcomes historian Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd to discuss one of history's most contentious figures: Major General William David McCain. The episode delves deep into McCain's multifaceted and controversial legacy, highlighting why he deserves scrutiny despite his academic credentials.

Dr. Claire Aubin [00:00]: "Welcome to This Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead."

Background on William McCain

William McCain was a prominent historian with a Ph.D. from Duke University. His career spanned various academic and archival positions, including roles at esteemed institutions such as the National Archives. During World War II, McCain served as a Monuments Man in Italy, a role intended to preserve cultural artifacts. However, his tenure was marred by unethical behavior, including the theft of valuable items.

After the war, McCain became the president of Mississippi Southern College (now the University of Southern Mississippi) and was an influential figure in Southern politics. He was a staunch advocate for the Dixiecrats and played a significant role in organizations like the White Citizens Council and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who continue to honor his legacy with annual awards.

Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd [05:27]: "McCain... was an important voice for the Dixiecrats, the Mississippi States Rights Party... a hero of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who still give annual awards in his honor."

William McCain’s Misdeeds

Dr. Shepherd outlines a litany of McCain's transgressions, presenting a comprehensive picture of his unethical and malicious actions:

1. Plagiarism: McCain faced allegations of plagiarism serious enough that both the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Historical Association (AHA) determined he had indeed plagiarized.

2. Theft of Cultural Artifacts: While serving as a Monuments Man, McCain not only failed to preserve but actively stole artifacts. Notably, he retained Mussolini's autobiography, "The Story of the Year," as a personal keepsake, reflecting potential sympathies towards fascism.

3. Political Manipulation: As president of Mississippi Southern College, McCain attempted to transform the campus into a military stronghold. He orchestrated Red Scares and Lavender Scares to purge faculty and students, targeting especially women, thereby fostering a climate of fear and repression.

4. Eugenics Department: In the 1970s, McCain established a short-lived eugenics department on campus, a stark indicator of his regressive and morally bankrupt worldview.

5. Conspiracy Against Clyde Kennard: McCain was a conspirator in the arrest, torture, and imprisonment of Clyde Kennard, a student who attempted to integrate the college in 1959. This act stands as a stark example of his commitment to maintaining racial segregation and his willingness to engage in human rights abuses to achieve his ends.

Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd [10:09]: "He was actually the AAUP and the AHA determined that he did plagiarize... He was a thief of international proportions."

Specific Incidents and Analysis

Genealogy and White Supremacism

McCain's obsession with his own genealogy was not merely personal vanity but intertwined with his white supremacist beliefs. He authored the "McCain Chronicles," a 120-volume study tracing his lineage to the Scottish Highlands. This preoccupation with lineage manifested in his actions as president of Southern Miss, where he incorporated Scottish symbols into the college's culture, including a Scottish Highlanders unit in the marching band and the installation of a stone from Mingary Castle, symbolizing his ancestral pride.

Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd [12:00]: "He added a Scottish Highlanders unit to the Southern Miss band... It's like a nod to here's rock from where my family comes from."

Role in World War II and Theft of Mussolini's Autobiography

McCain's service as a Monuments Man was intended to preserve cultural treasures in post-war Italy. Instead, he misappropriated valuable items, including Mussolini's autobiography, which he inscribed and kept as personal trophies. These actions not only violated his duties but also suggested a disturbing alignment with fascist ideologies.

Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd [14:30]: "In McCain's archives, there is an original copy of Mussolini's autobiography, the Story of the Year. McCain's own inscription says that he took it from Mussolini's office."

Notable Quotes

• On His Academic Integrity:

  "He was actually the AAUP and the AHA determined that he did plagiarize."
  (Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, 09:41)

• On McCain's Cultural Manipulation:

  "He added a Scottish Highlanders unit to the Southern Miss band... It's like a nod to here's rock from where my family comes from."
  (Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, 12:00)

• On the Significance of His Theft:

  "It's really funny because when he became the president of Southern Miss, he added a Scottish Highlanders unit to the Southern Miss band... and he set up... it's like a nod to here's rock from where my family comes from."
  (Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, 13:14)

Conclusion

The episode paints a damning portrait of William McCain, showcasing his academic misconduct, unethical wartime actions, and vehement support for segregationist and supremacist ideologies. Through Dr. Shepherd's meticulous research and candid discussion, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of why McCain is a figure deserving of historical criticism and condemnation.

Dr. Claire Aubin [11:12]: "To be like, well, that's number two. And we've got three more that are two to three more that I want to talk about is wild."

As the conversation continues beyond the provided transcript, it is expected that the hosts will delve deeper into McCain's conspiracies and the broader implications of his actions on American history and society.

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Note: This summary captures the discussion up to the 14:37-minute mark of the podcast episode. For a complete understanding of William McCain's legacy, listeners are encouraged to access the full episode via Patreon.

Transcript

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Hi there, It's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're listening to the free preview of one of our Patreon episodes. We switch off every week between free and Patreon exclusive episodes. So if you'd like to hear the rest of this conversation, head over to patreon.com thisguysucked and join our honorary Haters club. A list of sensitive themes and topics covered in this episode can be found in the episode description Foreign welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Dr. Lauren Lusab shepherd, who is a historian of American. She's a historian. That's a normal way to say that. She's a historian of American colleges and universities. She's the host of the weekly American Campus podcast, the author of Resistance from the Conservatives and the Campus wars, and you can find her writing all over the place, including the Guardian, the New York Times, npr, my favorite Teen Vogue. So we're very lucky that she has time in her busy schedule to chat with me. Welcome to the show.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

Thank you. It's great to be here. You've had, like, a fantastic lineup of guests, so it's an honor to be invited in the.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Amongst the sort of vaunted pantheon of people talking about guys they hate.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

Glad to be with the rest of them.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Well, yeah. Here's the question. I think about it a lot because of what I research, because what I research, similar to what you research, always, like, shows up in the news as being sort of, like, constantly relevant. And that sometimes can be frustrating. If you could go back and pick a different historical topic to become an expert on, perhaps one that isn't always this level of politically relevant, what would you pick? What are some. What are your, like, other history things that you like to learn about?

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

So actually, I wouldn't even be a historian. I would be a sociologist. I'm so fascinated by the way that groups of people interact with each other. Yeah, I'm kind of. I don't know, I feel like I'm an amateur sociologist. Anyway, I'm not trained in that, but I try to read a lot of sociology, and I always just catch myself in situations where I'm just, like, observing people and what they're doing. Maybe that's just because I'm nosy. I don't know. But I would go. I would just step out of the historical world and go entirely to a different field.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

To be fair, I spent a lot of time being like, historians are essentially just people who are paid to gossip, because in some. At some point, like, we are, our job is literally to find things out about people and then tell their business to the whole world like that. It's truly our job. Sometimes they're dead, sometimes they're not. We just do that as. As our job. So it makes sense that you'd be like, well, I'm just a little nosy. Like, yeah, that's your job. Actually, even now, that's your job.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

My job is to find the tea?

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, pretty much. When I think about this, I think I. I said this on an episode that came out or is about to come out. At the time someone hears this, it will have already come out. But that my favorite historical topic that has nothing to do with mine is, like, weird medieval girls. I think, like, little medieval freak girls are, like, my favorite. I love reading books about them, like. Like fiction, nonfiction. Like, I think that there's. I feel some strange kinship, some connection to, like, the idea of, like, a weird girl in a scriptorium to me is like, oh, so that's what doing a PhD is. So it's like, it feels natural that I have some.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

That's what I would be maybe in an alternate life. Maybe that was you in a past era.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

If I believed in past lives, I would be like, yeah, I'm a. I'm a girl in a nunnery who's. Who's in a. In a monastery who's writing things that she's not supposed to be writing. Um, okay, there is a reason for this show, so maybe we should talk about that. Who do you want to talk about today?

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

I would like to introduce listeners to a figure that they almost certainly have never heard of before, and that is Major General William David McCain. McCain was a historian. He had a Ph.D. in history from Duke, and he worked as an archivist in some of the most important collections in the country, including the National Archives. And During World War II, he was a Monuments man in Italy, tasked with preserving Italian arts books and other cultural artifacts, some of which he stole and kept for himself. But I think probably, if listeners have ever heard of him, it's because of his longtime profession as the president of Mississippi Southern College, which today is the University of Southern Mississippi. And then one more tiny detail. He was a politician and fundraiser, an important voice for the Dixiecrats, the Mississippi States Rights Party. Yeah. And a speaker and a writer for the White Citizens Council and a hero of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who still give annual awards in his honor. So that's who we're talking about today.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And you know what's so funny is that we're not even into the like, what's wrong with him? These are just our little. These are just little Easter eggs, little tidbits that are foreshadowing what his problem is going to be. So for some more sort of background on, on him, he has a PhD from Duke and from there he started his career working at a bunch of different schools. A classic problem even 80 years ago that you couldn't get a long term job contract like the list. He worked at a lot of different schools actually. This. And I was like, wow, I feel that, that he's junctification was happening then too. Like Ole Miss and Mississippi State.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

Handful of community colleges in the Delta. Yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Oh, yeah. And he did this before becoming the director of the Mississippi Department of Archives. And I would just like to say that this is the first real academic historian that we've talked about on the pod.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

Oh, what an honor.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, we've had a few wacky self stunning who are like, I'm a historian, but none who were actually like academically trained to be a historian. So he gets the sort of dubious honor of being the first historian we critique, although we're not really critiquing him for being a historian, which I think is funny. It's not even that.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

That's like, well, we can. There's a plagiarism allegation that we can get into.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Perfect. Even better. You know what? We can talk about both the ethics of our field and our discipline and also all of his other problems. He did write a bunch of history books. He also was a founding member of the Society of American Archivists. He worked for a few years at the U.S. national Archives. But yeah, he wrote a bunch of history books, some genealogical, others concerned that with like state and national history. So this is clearly a guy who's very concerned with what's happening in Mississippi and in some of the other southern states as well as with the US politically and historically, and has sort of made himself a part of that political establishment.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

Yeah, this guy spent his life fighting the Civil War.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

And he died in the 1990s.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. I mean, it is interesting that you can kind of see even just from his bird's eye. View biography slash bibliography. You can look at that and be like, something's up with this guy. Like, hmm, I wonder what the problem is gonna be. Because saying someone is a college president in Mississippi in the 50s and 60s should already raise eyebrows. I feel we can get into that in just one second. He's also very involved in something that I think will be a good segue into what I want to talk about. And he's very involved with the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

Yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Which on the face of it sounds.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

Fairly innocuous as it's designed to.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. Can you explain that to me and everyone at home?

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

Yeah. So the Sovereignty Commission was created to prevent school integration after the Brown Board Supreme Court decision. So Brown Board directly applied to K12 schools, but it's a little unclear or it was a little unclear if the enforcement reached up to higher ed. Although many listeners will probably know that Southern states didn't abide by the K12 recommendation anyway. They just shut down public schools rather than integrate them, and then created these private segregation academies for white kids. Private. So they didn't have to follow the federal desegregation orders. But yeah. So that's what the, the Sovereignty Commission was designed to do. Keep schools racially segregated.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. And so his relationship with that, I think precipitates the conversation that we should be having. Will be having on the podcast, which is what's your main issue?

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

Why is he a villain? I wish I could explain in one sentence are so many crimes. So I'll just list them from bad to worst. So first, and I do think this was a big deal because he was an academic historian. So it's the plagiarism allegations or not allegations. He was actually the AAUP and the AHA determined that he did plagiarize. So that's one. Second. He was a thief of international proportions. Third, fourth, and fifth.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. The Monuments Men thing, I didn't even think about that. Yeah.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

Yeah. He tried to turn his college campus into a military base. He orchestrated red scares and lavender scares to purge faculty and students, especially women. And he set up a thankfully short lived eugenics department on the campus in the 1970s.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

In the 70s.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

In the 70s. Yeah. It didn't shut down.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

It's so late.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

It didn't shut down until 1975. Yeah. But it was like, even though I think officially I'm going to periodize this as 71 to 75 that it was up and running. Plans for it predated that back to the 1950s, but we'll get there. His chief crime, though, is that he was a conspirator in the arrest, torture and imprisonment of Clyde Kennard, who was a student who tried to integrate the college in 1959. So that's. Those are, those are his crimes. I'm sure there's more, but that's, that's what I have for us today.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, I mean, I will say thief of international proportions being low on the list does not bode well for the rest of this guy's life, career and personality. Like, to be like, well, that's number two. And we've got three more that are two to three more that I want to talk about is wild. Where do you want to start?

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

I mean, we can start with. I guess we can go chronologically. Yeah. So, like all good white supremacists, McCain was obsessed with his own genealogy. You mentioned a second ago that he was an archivist. He was, he did work at the National Archives in D.C. for two years, but before that, he was a genealogist and archivist at the Morristown National Historical Park. And while he was there, he published a 120 volume study of his own family origins called the McCain Chronicles that traced his lineage all the way back to the Scottish Highlands. And it's really funny because when he became the president of Southern Miss, he added a Scottish Highlanders unit to the Southernmist band. So there was a drum corps, a 30 piece bagpipe chorus, and they all wore the plaid of the McCain clan. And across campus, he had just like different renditions of his McCain family coat of arms and their colors, red and green, which is hilarious because the official colors of the college are not red and green, they're black and gold. And in the lobby of one of the buildings he constructed, the Performing Arts center, there's this giant black rock that's engraved, saying that it's stone from the mingary castle where in Scotland where the origins of the McCains. You know, it's just, it's like a nod to here's rock from where my family comes from. He's such a. I don't know. He's such a. I can't, I don't want to. I don't want to call him like a neo Nazi because it's so boring. But I mean, you, you get the vibe, right? Like, this man really loves his white Scottish heritage for sure.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And can I just say, having lived in Scotland for many, many Years of my adult life. Scottish people hate that when you do that. Like, if you show up and you're like, my family is Clan McCain and they've. They've been out of Scotland for 200 years. Scottish people are like. Like they. Scottish people are. Do not claim you. I'm very sorry to say they're not interested in the fact that your family was at one point had a castle. We're talking, you know, your great, great, great, great, great grandfather had some castle like that. They don't care about that. So it is very funny whenever I see people making that their whole personality. And I love that we have someone on the show that made being Scottish his personality.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

That is way in the game.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Okay, so he sort of already starts off his career in life being like, you know, who are really great white people. And then does he. Does he go to Italy after this? Wait, no. What are the plagiarism allegations? I want to go through this method methodically.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

The plagiarism allegations come at the end. Actually, there's. Well, I mean, I have no idea if he wasn't plagiarizing before that, but he gets caught in 1967. But before that, if you want to do the. If you want to go chronologically, we can. Or something.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Let's go chronologically.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

Okay.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Okay. Sorry, I'm all over the place today.

[Dr. Lauren Lusab Shepherd]

No, no worries. I mean, truly, he probably was plagiarizing before 1945, but 1945 is where the story really picks up. So he was a soldier in World War II, and originally he worked as an anti aircraft in an anti aircraft artillery unit. But then he was reassigned as a military historian under army officer Mark Clark, who is an avowed segregationist and xenophobe. So as his historian, McCain followed the US 5th army across North Africa and Sicily and Italy. And then he took an assignment under Major Harry Bell in the new Monuments Fine Arts and Archives units. So this is where he becomes a monuments man in the Lombardy region of Northern Italy. So it was his job to locate and return not just cultural artifacts, but also evacuated government documents back to rome. So in McCain's archives, there is an original copy of Mussolini's autobiography, the Story of the year. And McCain's own inscription says that he took it from Mussolini's office. And this is one of two Mussolini texts in his papers at Southern. I don't think he was supposed to keep these, but I suspect he personally held onto them, like, as mementos, Some sort of, like, testament to his sympathies for fascism and the American version of it that he was trying to play out across the South.