Let the People Speak: Rethinking the Initiative Process

Let the people speak! Words enshrined in American political life since we were but a collection of colonies and the issues of the day were aired and decided at the Town Hall Meetings that defined the political culture of the time. And speak they did, whether in the late-seventeenth-century Salem witch hunts inspired by Puritan theology or in 1773, when the Boston Tea Party signaled the popular discontent with British rule that led to the American Revolution.