C
Concord usually gets attention for its past. Even Louisa May Alcott worried that her town was “degenerating into a museum of revolutionary relics.” She, of course, belonged to an intellectual event that gave a second chapter to Concord’s celebrated history, but the Concordian of today is liable to feel that everything great belongs to the past. There are many wonderful things about the town – wonderful people and places to walk – but what is there that, like the Battle of Lexington and Concord or the Transcendentalists, can be held up against the whole of human history and still shine bright and, furthermore, is available to us in the present? There is town meeting. Town meeting is not unique to Concord – it exists in over 1000 New England towns – but if it were, then uniqueness would be just one more of its remarkable qualities. First and foremost, the Concord town meeting 14
Discover CONCORD
| Summer 2022
BY SAM COPELAND
is a direct democracy. Those in attendance of town meeting, which is open to any voter registered in Concord, are simply the legislature of Concord’s town government. Their sovereignty is not mediated by representatives or plebiscites. Political theorists from Alexis de Tocqueville to John Stuart Mill have looked on jealously at the direct democracies of New England. Thoreau asserted that, “When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town-meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.” Direct democracy makes the Concord town meeting, if not a unique institution, at least a very rare one. Although modern democracy is often traced back to the direct democracy of ancient Athens, direct
democracies are rare in modern societies. Even some formerly direct town meetings have switched to representative models. In fact, the democratic system established in the American Constitution was expressly created in opposition to the direct democracy of New England town meetings. Alexander Hamilton, a favored figure of today, said, “It has been observed that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. Their very character is tyranny; their figure deformity.” But town meeting proves that the drafters of the Constitution are not the sole founders of American democracy. Another remarkable feature of the Concord town meeting is its age. Being as old as Concord itself, it predates the US government by roughly a century and a half. And the relationship
istock.com
Town Meeting: Concord’s Living Wonder
