Ten years ago, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, in a Harvard Kennedy School Commencement address, told the graduating students that democracy is self-correcting.
Calling for the strengthening of human and civil rights at home and abroad, she said:
Democracy wins out in the long run because it offers a chance to fix its own mistakes. It is the only system built on the premise that if something is not working, people can actually correct it, from the bottom up. Democracy works best when people are given the opportunity to constantly monitor and repair the kinks in the machinery.
In other words (my words), the willingness and ability to recognize, admit and correct wrongs is certainly one of the hallmarks of a true democracy.
Just yesterday I wrote about how our leaders, the military and the American people have, over the years, investigated and awarded hundreds of Medals of Honor to soldiers who had been unjustly denied the nation’s highest military award for valor in combat because of “prejudice, religious or racial bias, ethnic discrimination.”
For some it took ten years or less, for others fifty years or more, for some a century. But justice was finally done.
That is democracy. Self-correcting democracy.
In “The Medal of Honor: For Some an Honor too Far,” I explained how extremely high, “exacting,” the standards are for the award of the Medal of Honor.
I wrote, “The recommendation, review and approval processes are equally rigorous and time consuming. Each step is subject to intense scrutiny…All recommendations require thorough reports on the act itself, the battlefield and its setting. Every aspect of the action that led to the nomination is documented, from eyewitness statements to the action itself, to weather reports…every piece must be examined and verified…”
Yet sometimes the Medal is awarded in cases where it is not warranted. Sometimes there are “kinks in the machinery.” Sometimes, even with an award as revered as the Medal of Honor, mistakes are made.
And indeed, in 1917, after a 1916 Army-appointed board reviewed for eight months all the Army Medals of Honor awarded since the Civil War – 2,625 in total – 911 Medals were rescinded.
Most of those were from two large groups: the 27th Maine Infantry and President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral guards.
In the case of the 27th Maine Infantry, the 1916 Review Board determined that the “bases for the awards were suspect” and rescinded all 864 awards.
The Review Board decided that 29 of the Medals awarded to members of President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral guard were “erroneously bestowed.”
An additional 19 Medals of Honor were rescinded when the Board determined “the action was not valorous, even by the original standards.” Among these were six Medals awarded to five civilians and to the only woman to ever receive the Medal of Honor, Dr. Mary E. Walker.
These six Medals would be reinstated decades later.
The Board, however, did not rescind twenty Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers of the 7th Cavalry for their actions during the December 1890 engagement at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, referred to as the Wounded Knee Massacre.
An “engagement” that was “part of a larger effort by the U.S. government to repress Native American tribes of the Great Plains and eradicate a religious movement known as “Ghost Dance.”
An “engagement” that resulted in the death and injury of approximately 350 to 375 Native American (Lakota) men, women and children, according to a 1990 Senate resolution and one that has been called “one of the most infamous Native American massacres in U.S. history.”
Congress officially apologized for the massacre in 1990 and, in 2022, passed legislation urging the Pentagon to review the awards.
In a memo signed last week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III directed the Defense Department to review the Medals of Honor awarded to approximately 20 soldiers for their actions during the December 1890 engagement at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, “to ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor.”
The review will be completed by Oct. 15 by a five-person panel of experts who will provide recommendations for each recipient. Austin will then provide his recommendations to the president.
“It’s never too late to do what’s right,” a senior defense official said. “And that’s what is intended by the review that the secretary directed, which is to ensure that we go back and review each of these medals in a rigorous and individualized manner to understand the actions of the individual in the context of the overall engagement.”
Correcting flaws and errors in both the failure to award when merited and in the undeserved award of the nation’s highest military honor is another sign that “democracy is self-correcting.”
