The amendment strategy prevailed. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. Walker had been right about the goal and wrong about the strategy, or right about the constitutional theory and wrong about the political reality — depending on how one assesses the question. The country she died in was 544 days away from ratifying the amendment, and the women who voted in the first elections after ratification were doing what Walker had spent decades arguing they had the right to do.
## The 27th Maine and the Scale of the Rescission
The 1917 rescission of 911 medals is often described without the context that changes its meaning significantly.
Of the 911 names struck from the rolls, 864 were members of the 27th Maine Infantry Regiment. The 27th Maine’s medals had been issued in 1863 through a process that the review board found procedurally deficient. The regiment had been offered the Medal of Honor as an inducement to extend its enlistment past the contractual end date. When the regiment’s enlistment expired and the question of extension was put to a vote, some men agreed to extend and others did not. The medals were then distributed to the men who agreed to extend, without the individual review and verification of specific acts that was supposed to precede an award.
The board found this mass distribution had not met proper standards — that the medals had been used as an administrative incentive rather than as individual recognitions of distinguished service. The rescission of the 864 Maine men’s medals was the board’s correction of what it found to be a systematic procedural failure.