Vermont Research News: Town meetings past and present.
March 8, 2018
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Editors’ Note: Town Meeting 2018 is now in the rearview mirror. What were the impacts? What is the future of this 200-year old tradition? In this issue of the Vermont Research News we explore research on town meetings past and present and invite your comments for a project the Center has launched with collaborators at Castleton, Johnson and UVM.
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| Frank Bryan, the Vermont Political Scientist said “Real democracy takes place in small places” — drawing a direct line from ancient Greece to the New England Town meeting. Bryan argued that town meeting represented what he called ‘real democracy.‘ “What town meeting says is that we trust ordinary people so much to govern themselves that we’ll let them make the laws rather than having them elect somebody to make the laws..” Bryan said. “In a way that large scale political systems cannot, making decisions face-to-face creates a habit of civility, allowing us to recognize our common humanity.” |
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| For thirty years, Bryan and his students attended more than fifteen hundred Vermont town meetings, cataloging more than two hundred and thirty thousand individual acts of participation by more than sixty thousand citizens – documenting Vermont’s town meeting as an authentic and meaningful form of direct democracy. See his book Real Democracy. |
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| Looking back, there is a description of how town meeting was traditionally conducted into the 1960s in Andrew E. Nuquist and Edith W. Nuquist, Vermont State Government and Administration (1966). Legal scholar Paul Gillies examined town meeting in Vermont State Government Since 1965 (CRVT & Snelling Center: 1999). Gillies’ essay discusses some of the issues that have undercut the role of town meeting, from the Australian ballot, changes in work and life time commitments and the ever declining authority of towns. |
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| Gillies and Frank Bryan have both written about the increasing use of town meeting for external movements, most famously the nuclear freeze resolution that appeared on 163 town meeting agendas in 1982 – a resolution that saw traction in the US Congress and may have contributed to nuclear weapons treaties with the Soviet Union. Speaking of the Soviet Union, one of the most famous foreign-born people to live in Vermont was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who was drawn to Vermont in part because of town meeting, according to Russian Scholar Kevin McKenna. Solzhenitsyn lived for almost twenty years in Cavendish inspiring a community book about him. |
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| Russian Scholar Kevin McKenna discusses Solzhenitsyn’s life and work. |
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Some towns in Vermont were even created to host a town meeting, writes historian Mark Bushnell in a column in VtDigger. And the detailed history of Vermont, Freedom and Unity, also discusses the origins of town meeting and changes during the Progressive era of the late 19th century (page 63).
Political Scientist Jane Mansbridge’s Beyond Adversary Democracy examines town meeting in a town she called “Selby” relying on surveys, ethnography and her own lived experience to contribute to theories of democracy and citizen participation. Participation which has been in decline in the last few decades. |
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| Concerns about this declining attendance have led towns to move town meeting from Tuesday to Saturday and Monday nights. Some towns have undergone extensive soul searching to maintain the viability of town meeting, such as Stowe, as described in this report here. |
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 Town meeting scholar Susan Clark discusses declines in attendance in a 2015 update to her book with Frank Bryan: All Those in Favor: Rediscovering the Secrets of Town Meeting and Community.” Drawing from the data published in Real Democracy – the book examines the strengths and vulnerabilities of town meeting and offers specific tips for citizens and local officials. Clark, who is also the moderator in Middlesex, describes the best attended town meetings as those that combine school and town meetings on the same day. This brings us to 2018, in which a new law, Act 46, has led to the elimination of floor meetings in most consolidated districts. “The “collateral damage” to Vermont’s town meeting democracy may be significant,” Clark wrote last week. |
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| Although we won’t know all of the attendance figures and other ramifications of the 2018 meetings, this year a group of students from Castleton, Johnson and UVM re-visited Frank Bryan’s data collection – attending 38 town meetings, counting participation and attendance. Again, the small towns, as Dr. Bryan found, are where democracy is the most robust. Belvidere, for example, repeats as the most “democratic town” in Vermont – with almost three-quarters of the townspeople in attendance having something to say during the meeting. The first cut on this data is summarized here and presented in more detail here. |
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 In 2003, Kids Voting Vermont published a book for middle school-aged kids and a coloring book: Town Meeting Day A Vermont Tradition and Vermont Town Meeting Coloring and Activity Book. The illustrations by Vermont cartoonist Tim Newcomb are excellent. |
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| In a companion project students in Dr. Williams’ Backpack Journalism class “covered” the town meetings, posting short video stories, see Facebook here (for photos and videos) or these pieces on the towns of Shelburne, Starksboro and Hinesburg. |
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| Vermont’s town meeting has also showed up in movies, art, drama, books, music and TV shows among other places. Norman Rockwell, of course, painted a man speaking at a town meeting as one of his Four Freedom’s paintings — representing freedom of speech — where residents listened respectfully to an opposing opinion.
And when it comes to TV shows, Gilmore Girls has several unflattering scenes of town meeting, for example see this scene here, as do the Simpson’s here. And Chevy Chase’s Funny Farm also takes on town meeting here. The US Army also produced a short newsreel about a town meeting in Pittsford, VT in the 1940s. |
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| Which brings us back to today and what is happening in town meeting and how it continues to function as an example of local democracy. Over the next few months, the Center for Research on Vermont in a collaboration with Rich Clark, Castleton Polling Institute and David Plazek, Northern Vermont University and colleagues and students at UVM plans to dive deeper into the data we collected this past week. We invite your comments, questions and suggestions. Send them to Center Director Richard Watts. |
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