A comment from Dr. Dwight S. Mears on yesterday’s post “Defense Department to Review Wounded Knee Medals” significantly changed my thinking on the subject by drawing my attention to context about which I was unaware. Because he was a first-time commenter, his note got stuck in the moderation filter and was just discovered this morning. So, rather than continuing the discussion in a stale comment section, I decided to highlight it here.
Mears is currently a reference librarian at Portland State University but he’s a retired Army officer and a graduate of West Point, holds a JD from the Lewis & Clark Law School, and a PhD in American History from the University of North Carolina. He’s just published an article on this subject, “Removing the Stain Without Undermining Military Awards: Revoking Medals Earned at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890,” in the current issue of the American Indian Law Review.
His article expands significantly on the history of the Medal of Honor (about which Mears has written a book published with the University Press of Kansas) that I noted in the post and greatly expands on the reasons why we have been and should continue to be leery of revoking old awards based on new politics. But it also reminds me that the actions at Wounded Knee were prohibited by extant military law, the so-called Lieber Code (General Orders 100) signed by President Lincoln in 1863.
Additionally, this bit of context radically changes things for me:
The Department of War’s award of twenty Medals of Honor for actions that occurred at the Wounded Knee Massacre was part of the government’s effort to influence the public memory of the event. According to one historian, awarding the medals “reinforced the emerging national consensus calling the ‘Battle of Wounded Knee’ ‘civilization’s’ final triumph over ‘savagery’ in North America.” As both commemorative physical devices and symbols of distinguished conduct, the medals implicitly reinforced the Army’s original narrative that Wounded Knee was predominately a consequence of “‘[t]reachery’ . . . practiced by the Indians, whether by a preconcerted plan, or by the actions of the Indian who fired the first shot.”
Soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry also erected a twenty-five-foot-tall granite monument at Fort Riley, Kansas, in memory of their fallen comrades at Wounded Knee. At the monument’s dedication, the orator expressed that the soldiers in question had “clear[ed] the way for the coming of our splendid civilization,” which necessitated the removal of “a savage race that had made no progress in a thousand years.” The Lakota were thrust into this mold and described as “a wily and savage foe” that possessed only “ignorance and barbarism.” The orator expressed that he did not “mourn the fate of the poor Indian and lament his wrong,” for “no land belongs to any people or race . . . when the claims of a better civilization are asserted.”
To the extent the original awarding of the Medals were an attempt to whitewash history, reviewing them to ensure they were actually earned is a corrective, not a retrospective imposition of today’s values on a bygone age.
I still maintain, as I gather does Mears, that simply revoking the Medals en masse would be unjust and not in keeping with tradition. Additionally, there is significant reason to think that Congress lacks the authority to withdraw medals issued by order of the Commander-in-Chief. But, in this case, the Secretary of Defense has ordered a review and the particulars of the order require that each of the twenty awards be evaluated on their individual merits using contemporary standards and information based on official Army histories. Given the new-to-me context, this strikes me as quite reasonable.
Mears points to commissions appointed in the 1990s to review whether African Americans and later Native American Pacific Islanders* were unjustly denied the Medal of Honor as a guideline for how we might review this case. Those panels involved professional historians as subject matter experts to assist in the investigations. I would endorse that model in this case.
*I was actually offered a position on the latter shortly after I left graduate school but ultimately declined. I would have jumped at the opportunity to be part of the project but it was a temporary GS position (I believe as a GS-9 but it’s been a long time) in an expensive area (Monterrey, California I believe) that would have simultaneously morally obligated me to stay on through project completion and then immediately terminate, leaving me unemployed. It was too much financial risk.
