The Case for Town Meeting: Tradition

The Case for Town Meeting:  Tradition

The argument for tradition is both a strong and weak part of the case for town meeting.  It is strong because it is an essential link to our past.  It is New England. It is the history and character of Amherst.   Preserving town meeting is important in the same way that preserving the Dickinson Homestead is important.  It links us to something both valuable and fragile.  Perhaps I need not argue the value; most people acknowledge that both knowing and preserving our history is valuable.  But the fragility is less often remarked upon.

When I joined town meeting there were a few who remembered when Representative Town Meeting was established in 1938, to replace the open town meeting which Amherst had outgrown.  Now I imagine there are none.  The past keeps slipping away both in individual and collective memories.  That’s why we need to make sure that the useful past is preserved in our institutional memory.

Part of Amherst’s useful past, strangely enough, is the realization that town meeting has not been a particularly virtuous or progressive body.  Look at the records from the18th and 19th centuries and you discover that it has been cantankerous and mean-spirited on many occasions.  The early founders, whom we honor on our street signs, didn’t always love or trust one other.  Complaints about town meeting are as old as town meeting itself.

But somehow, in spite of complaints and frustrations, the Select Board/Town Meeting governance got things done, made decisions, encouraged development of infrastructure and institutions, linked our town to the great educational institutions which are the source of our intellectual and economic  wealth.  There is nothing much new about the current complaints or the current progress either.  We still encourage and distrust development.

We have a historical commission to ensure that physical links to our history are preserved and honored.  We have an unparalleled resource at the Jones Library in the extensive archives which celebrate and preserve our past.  We have cared enough about the mural at West Cemetery to arrange for its re-creation when the wall on which it is currently displayed is demolished in favor of new construction.

When, at town meeting sessions,  the “constable” proclaims “Mr. Moderator, we have a quorum,”  we are being true to a tradition as old as the town, and those are roots, for better and for worse, worth protecting.  The question is, can we preserve the tradition while ensuring that town meeting meets the challenges facing the town today.  

The appeal to tradition risks sentimentality.  And so does the appeal to democracy.  Traditional societies have not been notably democratic, and democracy itself has had a rough go both in the United States and elsewhere.  But I emphatically appeal to both.  Government of, by and for the people needs to work itself out of its current dilemmas rather than hope a small group will rescue it.  And tradition, especially in a town like Amherst where there is a larger than usual built-in transiency, is a central part of our character.  We preserve our distinguished older buildings as a buttress against the rather less successful recent ones.  But of course we install plumbing and electricity in them.  We preserve our open spaces and accept, sometimes reluctantly, the trade-off of density in our village centers.

And so too should we protect the political structures that bind us to our history and are central to our character.  Luckily, they have served us well, as I shall try to show in subsequent commentaries.  I think they can profit from some renovation, but I want to strengthen them, not abandon them.  

I grew up in a bedroom community on Chicago’s North Shore.  The husbands went to work in the city and the wives stayed home.  No one paid much attention to village government.  As long as the streets were cleared and the trash collected we were content to let the town manager and trustees run the government.  So it was a jolt to come to Amherst with my young family in 1970.  Town voters actually made the decisions about money, land use, and policy, and that seemed utterly archaic.  It didn’t take long for me to realize that self-government by the people was not at all archaic; in the scheme of things it is still a relatively new idea.  And an idea that is still developing and still at risk.

The tradition that Town Meeting speaks to is what historian Carl Becker called “our great experiment in democracy.”  Let’s not give up on it.