1975-03-03 to 1975-04-16 ATM-min

Browse Search

1_r ADJOU TOWN MEET - MARCH 2 5, 1.975 The meeting was called to order at 7:45 P. M. in Cary Memorial Hall by the Moderator, Lincoln P. Cole, Jr. There 181 Town Meeting Members present. The invocation was offered by Rev. Herbert R. Adams, Pastor of the Follen Church. 7:48 P. M. The Moderator stated that the meeting was in recess subject to the call of the chair. 7:50 P. M. The Moderator called the meeting to order at 7:52 P. M. Article 2. At the request of the Town Meeting Members Association, the Moderator stated that the Bicentennial Committee, under Article 2 as part of its report, sponsored Professor Robert B. Kent to present a dissertation on the heritage of town meeting. Professor Kent, who is a former Town Moderator, made the following presentation: "When members of the Town Meeting Members Association first spoke with me concerning this talk, I was quite in awe of the prospect of such an invitation. I remain so. Beyond that I feel deeply honored, I shall try to follow the admonition of a colleague contained in his instructions to law students charged with writing a paper, to at least try to say something worthwhile and to try to say it well. I am grateful to those who have helped me. Many of us find a need 'to identify in some way with the events which Lexington celebrates annually. The special celebration this year evokes, I think, a special need for that identification. I interpret the desire of members of the Town Meeting to hear some reflections on this subject as an expression of that need. One of my favorite flights of fancy is to speculate on the positions I might have taken had I been alive at earlier times which we have come to look upon as great moments in history. Never having had any affinity for organizations which advocate overthrow of established government by force and violence, I have never been at all certain that in 1775 I would have been a Patriot and not a Tory. Not only may one express doubt about whether, deprived of the ad- vantage of hindsight, he would be on the side we now declare to be that of the angels; would we have even recognized that we stood at a turning point in history? The answer here is almost surely "no ", and indeed the participants in those great events were doubtless but dimly aware, if that, of the part they played in what we now view as belonging to the ages. There is something unsettling about this. We are talking about the beginnings of independence, yet in contemporary terms we are talking about civil disobedience, disobedience in aid of protecting a cache of arms gathered for purposes of which established government understandably took a dim view, a view which subsequent events proved to be quite warranted. On April 19th we celebrate that disobedience, and the revolution to which it helped give birth. Our reaffirmation . of the rightness of those events rests on our understanding of the values involved, of the principle of government by law and not by arbitrary fiat, and ultimately the principle of self- government. There can be no doubt about it, Mr. Moderator, this Town Meeting was deeply enmeshed in events leading up to April 19, 1775. In 1765 the Town Meeting adopted strong resolutions against the Stamp Act. In 1769 it voted not to use tea or permit tea or snuff to be kept until the duty be removed. In 1772 it passed strong resolutions on the unhappy state of the colony, authored by Rev. Jones Clarke. The meeting directed the Representative of the General Court to take positions consonant with the Town's views; Hark, Mr. Moderator: "Sir It is not to call in Question your Capacity, Disposition or Fidelity of our Estimation of which we have Given the fullest Evidence, in the Choice we have made of You to Represent Us in the General Court of this Province; but in exercising our Right of