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Real Democracy: the New England Town Meeting and How It Works

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By Frank M. Bryan

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2004 Frank M. Bryan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226077977

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1 Introduction: The Methodology of Starting from Scratch

It is the spring of 1992. Twenty-five hundred years earlier in a place called Athens, a Greek named Cleisthenes took a risk for an idea. The idea took hold. Few others promised more happiness or provoked more anguish in the two and one-half millennia of Western civilization that were to follow. It was incandescent, this idea of democracy: coming and going, rising and falling, dodging in and out of the passions of history. It has been defined and redefined, cursed and cheered, understood and misunderstood, lived for and died for. Nations and regimes have been named in its honor. Tens of thousands of scholars have labored in its vineyard, and the fruits of their labor fill library shelves throughout the world. As a global enterprise, the principles of democracy rival even those of the planet's great religions. No other secular notion has so triggered the sanctimony and sincerity, the good and the evil, the despair and the hope.

Democracy.

Athens Is Where You Find It

On March 3, 1992, Stephen Fine, a citizen of Athens, Vermont, was unaware that he was marking the twenty-five hundredth anniversary of the birth of democracy when, at 10:01a.m., he was first at town meeting to rise and address the assembly. Neither was Marjorie Walker, who, as tradition in Athens dictated, was next to speak. When Athens, Vermont, first began to practice open, face-to-face democracy, women were not allowed to participate. But by 1992 that had changed. Walker made several announcements and then read the list of items (the town warning) that the assembled polis would address. Nearly 60 percent of the citizens of Athens were present. Their deliberations would end in votes that they and every citizen of the town not present would have to obey under penalty of law.

After introducing a few guests (who addressed the assembly briefly), Mr. Fine gave way to David Bemis, whose job it was to ask the people if they would reaffirm Fine's right to conduct the meeting. If not, they could choose someone else to do the job. Another citizen, James Waryas, immediately nominated Fine, and a third, Philip Reeve, seconded the nomination. A fourth, David Kenny, asked that the nominations be closed and that the clerk cast one ballot for Fine. Carol Bingham seconded this motion, a vote was taken, and Fine was elected. This process took less than two minutes. It was now 10:50 a.m. Fine stepped forward to take his position before the assembly again, and the people of Athens got down to the business of governing themselves.

About this time a pair of the world's leading experts on democracy, Josiah Ober of Princeton and Charles Hedrick of the University of California at Santa Cruz, were preparing an international celebration to mark the birthday of what the people in another Athens, the Athens of ancient Greece, had created twenty-five hundred years earlier. Because of their efforts the government of the United States provided funding, conferences were held in Washington and Greece, a display was mounted at the Smithsonian Institution, and a six-week summer institute was held in California. The summer institute attracted the participation of Bernard Grofman, a political scientist at the University of California at Irvine. The result was a series of short essays on Athenian democracy for a small journal sent to every member of the American Political Science Association.

The American Political Science Association consists of about 15,000 professionals whose business it is to know about governance. They probably represent at any given time over 50,000 years of postgraduate education, committed (usually at a dear price) out of their highest-energy years, simply to prepare to ply their trade. They have accumulated in the aggregate over 250,000 years of teaching and research. The essays they published for themselves under Grofman's direction were written by a cadre of scholars of singular competence, led by Sheldon S. Wolin of Princeton.

Here is the problem. While I doubt that any of the citizens of the Athens town meeting knew they were gathering to practice democracy on its twenty-five hundredth birthday, it is equally doubtful that any of these scholars writing about ancient Athens were aware of what was going on in Athens, Vermont. Worse, I suspect I could name--and count on one hand-- all of the members of the American Political Association who knew there was an Athens, Vermont, and had some idea of the character of the action taking place there that day. Besides me, none of the twenty members of the political science department at the University of Vermont did. I'll bet Richard Winters and Denis Sullivan at Dartmouth did, and I'm sure Jane Mansbridge at Harvard's Kennedy School did. Joseph Zimmerman of SUNY Albany may have. That's about it.

Why is this so?

Real Democracy: Now and Then

I make twoclaims: First, what happened in Athens, Vermont, in 1992 was not strange, or random, or even a unique event. Second, it was real democracy. The first claim is easily supported. In America, town meeting predates representative government. It is stitched into the fabric of New England and dominates the patchwork of its public past. It occurs in each New England state at a set time and in a set place. It is accessible toevery citizen, coded in law, and conducted regularly in over 1,000 towns. In my state of Vermont citizens in more than 230 towns meet at least once each year to pass laws governing the town. Since the dawn of modern political science the people have come together to govern themselves in approximately 11,280 individual, properly "warned," town-based, democratic assemblies in Vermont alone.

The second claim is more tendentious. Certainly all polities that call themselves democracies are "real." But I say that nearly all representative structures that provide the frame of governance for the "democracies" of the world are substitutes for democracy, not approximations of democracy. This is not to say these "democracies" are less than they might be or that they are not better at what they do than town meeting is at what it does. It is to say that using the word "democracy" to cover representative systems is, as Robert Dahl observed, an "intellectual handicap." Real democracy (for good or ill) occurs only when all eligible citizens of a general-purpose government are legislators; that is, called to meet in a deliberative, face-to-face assembly and tobind themselves under laws they fashion themselves.

Real democracies come in better and worse forms. They promote both good and bad policies. They make their participants both satisfied and frustrated. "Real" does not mean "good." Real democracy is better to the extent that all wholive in a jurisdiction are citizens and all citizens are eligible to participate. It is better when attendance at meetings and participation in them are high and egalitarian. Real democracies are whole when they make all the laws that govern them. Otherwise they are to some degree partial. Nor is real democracy to be confused with direct, plebiscite democracy. The bottom line is this: in a real democracy, the citizens--in person, in face-to-face meetings of the whole--make the laws that govern the actions of everyone within their geographic boundaries. This definition is strict. It means that only governments can be real democracies. Poker clubs and snowmobile associations may govern themselves democratically under this definition, of course. They may indeed be more "democratic" than a town. But they can never be democracies.

To what extent does democracy in Athens match democracy in Athens? Remarkably well, as it turns out. True, substantial (indeed, paradigm threatening) differences are present. But given the passage of time, the variations in geography and cultures, and the lack of any direct genetic linkage between the two, the similarities are compelling. These similarities extend far beyond the single most obvious likeness that both were lawmaking assemblies of the whole. In town meetings, spectators, the press, and other "outsiders" are often asked to sit in places reserved for them. When the assembly met in Athens (at the Pnyx), outsiders and spectators sat on the side of the hill behind the speaker's podium. The Athenian democracy made laws not only for Athenians but also for "metics"--residents who paid taxes but could not vote. Vermont towns make laws not only for their own registered voters but also for out-of-town, second-home, and "camp" residents who pay (often very high) local property taxes but cannot participate in town meeting. Political manipulation appeared in both places as well. In Vermont, items that farmers might oppose were sometimes placed near the end of the agenda in the hope that they would have gone home to milk before the items were called up. In Greece more conservative proposals were often postponed until the navy, which required the rowing power of the more radical thetes, was out to sea and thus underrepresented in the assembly.

Like the Athenian assembly twenty-five hundred years earlier, the Vermont town meeting jealously protects its participatory prerogatives. The Greeks guarded entry into their assembly with six lexiarchoi. Those caught trying toparticipate illegally could receive a death sentence. Athens, Vermont, has never gone this far, but individual towns have often denied citizens of other jurisdictions the right to speak. In 1844 the town of St. Albans, Vermont, refused to allow General Winfield Scott, a special emissary of President Martin Van Buren, to speak to them on the matter of the town's "flaunting" American neutrality laws by supporting anti-British forces in Canada. More recently the governor of Vermont found herself standing outside the Duxbury meeting hall while the citizens within voted on whether toallow her tospeak tothe town.

The Board of Selectmen sets the agenda for town meeting in Athens, Vermont. In Athens, Greece, it was set by the prytaneis (an executive committee of the Council). The agenda in Vermont (the warning) must be published ("warned") at least thirty days before the meeting. In Greece it was posted four days before the meeting. In Vermont agenda articles may be open-ended proposals for discussion or more or less concrete ordinances to be voted up or down. In Greece proposals or probouleuma could similarly be open-ended or specific. In Vermont the meeting starts in the morning and can run all day. The same was true in Athens, although the meeting was often over by noon. So too in Vermont. In the Greek ekklesia, discussion began with the question "Who wishes to speak?" In the Vermont town meeting the phrase is often "What is your pleasure?"

The Vermont Athens of 1992 and the Greek Athens of antiquity shared other similarities. In neither could items not on the agenda be approved intolaw. Both meetings might open with a prayer. Most voting in both places was conducted by voice or a show of hands, and secret ballots were few. In a town meeting's secret ballot citizens walk forward and drop marked slips of paper into a box. In the assembly of Athens they dropped pebbles intoan urn. It appears that from time to time the process of voting was quite complicated in ancient Athens, as it is in Vermont when amendments toamendments are offered and soforth. Even the rh´etores of the Athenian assembly (defined loosely as citizens who move articles, frame debates, or in other ways participate a lot) have their Yankee counterparts.

The differences between the twomeetings have more todowith structure. Athens, Vermont, usually has only one meeting a year. In Greece, Athens had as many as forty. In Vermont town officers are never chosen by lot, although the practice of appointing those not present to office from the floor of many town meetings might be considered extremely bad luck by some of those so selected. In Greece selection by lot was the common practice. Athens, Vermont, has no term limits for town officers. There were such limits in ancient Athens.

But the most important differences between the Mediterranean Athens of 500 BC and the Athens, Vermont, of AD 1992 involved size and power. Athens, Greece, was a nation. It had an army and a navy. It fought wars in which thousands died. Athens, Vermont, is a town within a state within a nation. It has no army other than the town constable, unless one counts the members of the road crew and local rescue squad who may own deer rifles. No one knows for sure exactly how many citizens there were in Athens in the fourth and fifth centuries BC when democracy flowered there, but most agree that about 30,000 male citizens were eligible to attend the meeting at the Pnyx in the year 500 BC. In AD 1992 in Athens, Vermont, 183 citizens of both sexes were eligible to attend town meeting at the schoolhouse. Do these vast differences in size and power scuttle the comparison between Greek and Vermont democracy?

Not necessarily. For most of the democracy in Attica (the geographical expanse of the city-state, or polis, of Athens) did not take place, as Lewis Mumford pointed out as early as 1961, in Athens proper. Indeed, the fact that (from the founders to the present day) the comparative reference point of America's only example of real democracy, the New England town meeting, has been based on the Athenian city experience is an intellectual tragedy. How different our understanding would have been had we known the dimensions of real democracy as it took place in the little Greek communities scattered over the countryside--communities that lack chronicles but that must have been in some degree analogous to Vermont's towns. For many Athenians these communities, called demes, were, says R. K. Sinclair, "the center of their lives." According to David Whitehead, the scholar of record on the subject, not only did the demes provide the political and demographic infrastructure of Athens the city-state, they also contribute "one of the most obvious explanations [for the] success with which radical participatory democracy functioned in fifth and fourth century Athens."

It marks the place where lowlands along the southern end of the Gulf of Evvoiea begin to rise into the rougher (what used to be) grazing country just north of Mount Hymetto. Athens, Vermont, is much more clearly akin to Pallenais than it is to Athens. First and most important, the two were about the same size. The Vermont Athens had 183 citizens eligible to participate in its democracy in 1992. Pallenais is estimated to have had 191 in 498 BC. As core units of larger political entities to which sovereignty was owed, both were only partial democracies. Yet Athens, Vermont, and Pallenais (and the systems of towns and demes of which they were but a tiny part) were undoubtedly cradles for the citizenship of the sovereignties that housed them. Athenian citizenship was administered by the deme as the jurisdiction of first resort. In Vermont also, towns administer citizenship. Vermont citizens' right to vote in statewide elections is validated when their names appear on the town's "grand list." Athens, Vermont, in 1992 and Pallenais in 492 BC were represented at the next level by population, Athens in the state legislature in Montpelier (where it has shared a representative with several other towns in southern Vermont since 1965), Pallenais in the Council of Five Hundred in Athens.

Some dramatic differences add spice to the comparison. For Athens, Montpelier is not the final repository of sovereignty. The United States of America is. In Pallenais a citizen did not have representation in Greece. Greece was not a sovereign nation, and the Greeks had no system of representation in any entity larger than the city-state. The 191 eligible citizens of Pallenais were expected tojourney toAthens ten times a year and help in person to pass laws for the entire city-state. The citizens of Athens, Vermont, have no such opportunity. For the comparison to hold, the Vermont legislature would have to serve as a statewide "board of selectmen" (as did the Council of Five Hundred in Athens, Greece) that would submit proposals to mass meetings attended by Vermonters from all over the state. But for all these differences, the comparison of Pallenais and Athens, Vermont, remains remarkable. The demes anchored democracy in the most democratic Greek city-state (Athens), and the towns anchor democracy in the most democratic American state (Vermont).

In 1951 Alistair Cooke, a British journalist, radio and television commentator, and author of many books on America, including the popular Letters from America, commented on the Greek influence in the beautiful little town of Newfane, Vermont.

WITNESS

IN NEWFANE'S SMALL VALLEY (1951)

Walk into the center of this village of Newfane. It is a handsome common with a couple of shops, an inn and a quite magnificent courthouse. The town was settled in 1776, but the county courthouse didn't go up until fifty years later, and we can be thankful for that. For in the interval Americans conceived a passion for everything Greek, believing that they had just successfully established the first genuine democracy since the Greeks and the grandest Republic since Rome. In this small village in Vermont, the county courthouse is an exquisite symbol of what Americans did in wood with Greek forms.

Opposite the courthouse is the inn, which is also the jail. Newfane has kept up its habit of feeding its prisoners from the inn, and since the inn serves the best food around here, it's sometimes hard to get the inmates out of jail. Theodore Roosevelt said he would like to retire here, commit some "mild crime" and eat his way through a cheerful old age.

If you went along the valley you would be walking without knowing it through another town called Brookline, for Brookline is simply the scattered houses of the valley. It has less than a hundred people, mostly farmers, and they are their own rulers. Its first town meeting was held in 1795 and the last one was held last week. The names at the first meeting are still there: Moore and Waters, and Ebenezer Wellman and Cyrus Whitcomb, and Christopher Osgood (there has always been a Christopher on the Osgood farm). Walking along the road you might run into the tractor of a Mr. Hoyt, to all intents a farmer. He is also the road commissioner of the valley. His wife, Minnie Hoyt, is the town clerk, a justice of the peace, and when she isn't doing the farming chores she's busy signing fishing licenses, or marrying a visiting couple, or telling the comfortable city-people who have made a summer home here that by decision made at the last town meeting their taxes will be twice as much next year. What is striking to an Englishman is that the few fairly well-to-do people are all what they call "summer folks," people who made a farm over as a summer retreat from New York or Boston. But the summer folks are strangers and underlings. The valley has heard many delicate sounds through the years. But it has never heard the advice of a squire or the accent of noblesse oblige. The farmers are ruled and rulers.

Alistair Cooke

Why Not Town Meeting?

There is emotion in the study of Greek democracy. First comes wonderment at the panoply of laws and institutions created so long ago by a people committed to self-government. Accordingly, the effort expended to understand what happened there is equally wondrous. Over the centuries thousands of anthropologists, archaeologists, architects, historians, linguists, and students of drama and poetry have spent their professional lives unearthing the empirical evidence from which we now craft our own political science. Much remains to be done. Yet our poring over the existing record, our exploration of every nook and cranny of nuance, our attention to every scrap of evidence, every subtlety of argument, are profoundly impressive. We have probed our own interpretations of our own interpretations in an incessant stirring of the intellectual broth. We seem compelled to make sure we have gotten right what we say about what we think we know. We care about real democracy. Deeply.

Then comes puzzlement. If this be so, why haven't we looked at real democracy where it exists, here in our own land? For the fact is, we know much more about the Greek democracy of twenty-five hundred years ago than we do about real democracy in America today. We have as accurate estimates (based on heroic efforts in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and literature) of how many eligible citizens attended the assembly in the Athens of old as we have of how many eligible citizens attend a New England town meeting today. Until the publication of Joseph Zimmerman's book in 1999, the human race had no aggregate published data on attendance rates of the New England town meetings.

Imagine the world twenty-five hundred years from now. And imagine that the archaeologists of that time could unearth intact the entire empirical record of town meeting democracy as it exists today--the newspapers, popular literature, scholarly works, private diaries, and even the town clerks' records. Practically nothing of what we would want to know about real democracy in America in the year 2000 would be knowable. It has never, literally, been recorded. Imagine now that we could travel back in time to classical Greece, carrying with us the information technologies of the present. Would we let the practice of real democracy in the demes be lost to history? Would we condemn ourselves again to centuries of backbreaking discovery that, in spite of many ingenious undertakings, have produced only a frustrating tidbit of what we want toknow?

Puzzlement provokes inquiry. Yet we need not long speculate over why serious scholarship on town meeting is rare. First, town meetings are found only in New England, and the greater portion of them in northern New England. Second, town meeting has hardly been ascendant in recent decades. In many places it seems near death. Third, town meetings do not affect most U.S. citizens. The participants do not start wars or write the federal budget. Fourth, political scientists are primarily liberals, not communitarians. Their interests turn their research away from real democracy. Fifth, political scientists tend to come from cities, not the countryside. I suspect most of my colleagues around the country would welcome three or four years in rural Vermont with the same enthusiasm I would feel for a similar stay in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, or Los Angeles. Sixth, even those political scientists who are interested in face-to-face, communal participation (and there are more and more good ones these days) are unlikely to believe this form of participation can be attached to real legislative bodies making policy for real governments.

Indeed, the important work predating and that stimulated by Robert Putnam's celebrated enterprise to establish the civic underpinnings of democratic society rests on the assumption that governments are manifestations of the civic process. The idea that a government could itself be an important, even primary component of civil society has been pretty much abandoned. Our eyes have understandably fastened instead on participation in groups that practice real democracy rather than governments that do. An exception was Jane Mansbridge, whoas early as 1970 decided to include a government (the town of "Selby," Vermont) in her pathbreaking Beyond Adversary Democracy.

Although all of these reasons explain, they do not suffice. Northern New England may be a bit of a trip for many scholars, but an entire subdiscipline of political science travels the globe to investigate governance in out-of-the-way places. Town meeting is in decline in some of the largest towns, but it is going strong in many more. So what if individual town meetings do little more than buy trucks, vote for local school budgets, rule on salt for the highways, and determine when taxes come due? We are scientists. Physics can be learned and taught as well from the perspective of a spiderweb as from that of the Golden Gate Bridge. Surely the discipline has had enough enthusiastic communitarians over the past half century to produce more than the half-dozen studies that have been done. No article on town meeting has ever been published in a major political science journal. Never. Finally, are we sure that real democratic governance is impossible? And even if it is, are we convinced that knowing how real democracy works would tell us so little about other forms of democracy that we are willing to let it go completely unstudied?

A single point explains a great deal. Logistics. For the most part town meetings are held only once a year and most on the same day. Minutes are not required, and although most towns produce some kind of record, the thoroughness varies greatly. Even the very best minutes usually do not record complete attendance data. None produce an accurate record of verbal participation. In short, what happens at a town meeting can be known in only one way. Attend. A single meeting needs at least two, usually three, and sometimes even four persons to record data on such basic items as attendance, verbal participation, and voting results. Thus, to study more than two or three small town meetings a year requires a cadre of researchers. The expense would be enormous. Consequently, no database on real democracy exists, and therefore there is no developed science. My intention in this book is to do something about that. I want to get the science of real democracy under way.

Going into the Outback

In the spring of 1969, while teaching at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont, I tested the possibility that the logistics of an extensive town meeting study could be overcome. I developed a data-recording procedure, devoted two lectures to town meeting and instructions in its use, and sent sixty-two students (in two class sections) out to pretest the procedure on twenty-five town meetings.



Continues...

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Excerpted from Real Democracy: the New England Town Meeting and How It Works by Frank M. Bryan Copyright © 2004 by Frank M. Bryan. Excerpted by permission.
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