William D. Johnson II, the Society’s 2nd Vice President and the chair of its ROTC committee, presented the Society’s award to an Army ROTC cadet from Johns Hopkins University on Saturday, May 9, 2026.

The cadet belongs to the Blue Jay Battalion, which has been at Hopkins since 1916, when the National Defense Act of that October brought the Reserve Officers Training Corps into being, and Hopkins was among the first places Congress established a unit. The battalion now takes cadets from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Stevenson University, the University of Baltimore, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, as well as from Hopkins itself. More than three thousand officers have been commissioned out of it.

The Society presents its award to cadets and midshipmen at units across Maryland each year. It takes almost no time to hand over a certificate, and it is one of the plainer things the Society does, but the thread it draws is a real one. The men this Society exists to remember were tradesmen and clerks who took up arms for their state, and a cadet standing in that hall has taken the same decision in a quieter century.

Congratulations.