Debating for boys

by William Horton Foster

And the idea worked! They have not lost their independence. Oh, no! They think just as intensely as they ever did. But they realize that the other man is doing the same thing too.

In the Ford Hall audiences, are men of all faiths and of none, of all economic and political creeds. Most of them are workers with their hands. Most of them are poor, many extremely so. Many of them have fled the terrors of oppression and massacre, and, in too many cases, when they arrived in America they found misunderstanding and even brutality, little less than that which they escaped overseas. So when they did find Ford Hall, the place where brotherhood is preached and, better yet, where it is lived, you can see that liberty, justice, equality and freedom, came to mean something to them.

I am telling you these things in such detail for I want you to realize that democracy and brotherhood are very real things; they touch our lives closely and intimately. If you have been fortunate enough to have escaped the miseries so many of these brothers of ours have had to endure, you ought to feel an added sense of responsibility for the maintenance of the democracy they believe in.

In the Ford Hall meetings, then, we have a group of people with a passion for brotherhood trying to find the ground common to all their beliefs. But these meetings were only discussing the theories of democracy. How should the theory be converted into practice? The answer is The Town Meeting.

All the Ford Hall Folks are enthusiastically democratic. They said: “We all want to do something. What shall we do? What can we do? What are people who think as we do, doing now? Have we laws which would do what we want done, if they were enforced? If they are not enforced, why aren’t they? Is it because of remediable defect in the law, or is it because the people need further education?”

You see how different the abstract idea may be from the measure necessary to carry it into practice? For example, during the winter of 1914 we all agreed that the man who wants work and is starving because he can’t get it ought to have his chance, ought to have work. One speaker at a Ford Hall meeting discussed: “The Right to Work.” He was eloquent, logical, forceful; his hearers again received the message of democracy, that every man had the right to self expression in terms of his industrial life—had a right to a job. But there could be no discussion of how he was going to get that job. The next Thursday night, however, a bill was introduced in the Town Meeting providing that the State should engage in active work in reforesting and reclaiming waste land, thereby providing work for the unemployed. Do you see the difference? Do you see how the Town Meeting supplements and carries into definite expression the Ford Hall Idea? The Sunday night speaker discussed the theory of the rights of the jobless man. The Town Meeting sought to put that theory into practice the next Thursday night. That’s the Town Meeting angle of the Ford Hall Idea.

I hope I have made clear to you the reasons for organizing the Town Meeting. We all felt that there was plenty of talk lying around loose, good talk, full of good ideas and worth while. But if that talk could be translated into workable measures, into specific plans for doing things, we would be taking a distinct step ahead. So the Town Meeting was organized.

The Town Meeting, in form, is a group of men and women who are organized to discuss such measures as would be introduced into a real town meeting, a city council or a state legislature, to relieve social ills. The ordinance or bill, as the case may be, is not a mere declaration of a theory, but a definite programme for carrying some theory of betterment into action. We confined the sphere of its discussions to matters arising within a State, and not the nation, because we wished, for the sake of simplicity, to avoid the complications of inherent and delegated sovereignty. We assumed, therefore, that the Town Meeting could legislate on all matters except those belonging to the National or Federal government.

In Town Meeting citizenship, there are no distinctions of sex, race, creed, or position or rank of any kind. The suggestion of an age limit was voted down after a lad in knee trousers had made an impassioned plea for a chance to supplement the work of the schools. Young and old, rich and poor, foreigner and native, join in a citizenship whose sole test is service. We believe in each other, in the Town Meeting. We trust each other. Take, for instance, the single matter of taxes. Of course we need money to pay our bills. Therefore we arranged our budget and levied our appropriation to meet it but imposed no taxes. Our citizens know that we must have money; they know our needs, and every meeting envelopes like this are passed around: