Every Wednesday in the small town of Canton, New York, a protest happens.
Around twenty-five to thirty people gather at the corner of Main and Park, some with signs, some without, waving at passing cars and greeting pedestrians. The signs are mostly handmade. “Abolish the I.C.E. Gestapo.” “Healthcare Not Warfare.” “No Kings, No War, Love Not Hate.” “Honk if you ❤️ Democracy.” One woman holds a panel framed in red and blue stars that simply reads “We The People.”
John was working the sidewalk with a clipboard, counting heads and taking notes. “This is about what we get,” he said. “We meet every Wednesday. Although for No Kings, we got a LOT more.” They have been doing this for over a year. “We hit 52 weeks a couple of weeks ago. We just didn’t feel right with…” he gestured widely at the street and the sky, “…everything that is going on. So we started meeting up.”
They get reactions. About one in three cars honked in support as they passed. A woman in a dusty blue Subaru Outback pumped her fist out the window as she slowed at the light. A St. Lawrence University van rolled past with students waving from inside. The protest runs into the edge of rush hour, which in Canton means steady traffic more than heavy traffic, but enough to keep the horns going. “St Lawrence County is pretty red,” John said. “So this helps people not feel so alone.”
He is not wrong about the math. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump beat Kamala Harris in St. Lawrence County by about eighteen percent, a comfortable margin. But the more interesting number is the one that tends not to get cited. Roughly 48 percent of eligible voters in the county stayed home entirely. That means Trump’s win, for all its size, came from only about 31 percent of eligible voters actually casting a ballot for him. And this same county voted for Obama. Twice.
The town itself carries an older, more stubborn politics just under the surface. The center of Canton is taken up by the austere stone buildings of St. Lawrence University, founded in 1856 by the Universalist Church. It was coeducational from its very first day, which makes it the oldest continuously coeducational college in New York State. The Universalists championed sex equality well before the Civil War, and the campus became a kind of northern hub for women who led the charge as reformers and suffragists. That history doesn’t live on a plaque. It’s walked over every day.
None of which means the protest goes unopposed. A few drivers held up middle fingers out their windows as they passed. One man in a black Chevy Tahoe, wearing a Trump cap with an American flag on the brim, held the hat out the window as a kind of silent rebuttal. Another driver, rounding the corner, shouted, “GET A JOB.”
A handful of protestors laughed. “That’s ironic,” said Bob, a well-known track coach in town. “Most of us are retired. And even when we WERE working, we were giving back and supporting our community. This feels like a continuation of that.”
And then they went back to waving.
