Chapter VI. 

In Transition

 

Some day this man Russell will die, his corruption will be discovered, and his followers will be without a church, without a leader; they will have confidence in no man, and in the end will be a thousand times worse off than had they never heard the name Russell.-Sermon, Rev. J. J. Ross, Hamilton, Toronto, Canada, April 7, 1917

 

Your dying and this work going on. Why, when you die we will all complacently fold our arms and wait to go to heaven with you. We will quit then."-A. H. Macmillan to C. T. Russell [Faith, p.69]

 

 

ON OCTOBER 31, 1916, Charles Taze Russell died in a railway car outside Pampa, Texas. He was 64. Almost nothing he had foreseen had come to pass.

 

It is doubtful that the Witnesses could have survived the debacle of  their dreams had not World War I come along to deliver them. The Great War, which saw the imprisonment of their leaders, and which temporarily put a halt  to their work, was the instrument of their salvation. It allowed them to reinterpret Bible prophecy and to reassemble their chronological  complexities. and it provided them with an external focus at a time when internal dissension threatened to decimate their ranks.

 

In 1912, the Watch Tower Society launched what was to have been a final effort to get people out of the established churches. Debates were frequently held with rival Protestant churches. (One opposition speaker said his opponent's methods reminded him of a sign over a blacksmith shop: All kinds of twisting and turning here.") Traveling ministers called "colporteurs" were equipped with "Eureka Drama" outfits (recorded lectures and  music); and special representatives rented halls and theaters to show a four-part  "Photo-Drama Creation": stereopticon slides and primitive motion pictures, prepared at a cost of $300,000, were synchronized with recorded lectures and music to provide  potential converts with a panoramic view of human history, past and future, starting with Creation and ending with the 1,000-year reign of Christ. "The unfolding of a flower and hatching of a chick were among the memorable features . . . there was an accompaniment of very fine music, such gems as Narcissus and Humoresque." [Yearbook, 1975, pp. 59-60]

 

The Watchtower Society is now highly bureaucratized, but "C. T. Russell," according to A. H. Macmillan, "had no idea of building a strongly knit organization. . . . We saw no need for it. We expected 1914 would mark the end of this system of things on earth. Our big concern . . . . . was to preach as effectively and extensively as possible before that date arrived. In the meantime, we thought, we must prepare ourselves individually to go to heaven." [Faith, p.44]

 

The hysteria induced by these expectations was released at "love feasts" at the conventions for which railway cars were hired to transport the Bible Students. Leaders lined up in front of the speakers' platform as Russellites filed along, shaking hands, partaking of diced communion bread, singing "Blest Be the Tie That Binds Our Hearts in Christian Love." They wept tears of joy. Such minor raptures no longer take place among the disciplined and regimented Witnesses, but they were commonplace then. They expected, then, to be united in a perpetual love feast in heaven; and they thought their reward was imminent.

 

On September 30, 1914, Elder Macmillan told an ecstatic convention audience in California: "This is probably the last public address I shall ever deliver. because we shall be going home soon." [Ibid., p.47]

 

On October 2, 1914, Charles Taze Russell entered the Bethel dining room. "The Gentile Times have ended, their kings have had their day," he rumbled. "Anyone disappointed? I'm not. Everything is moving right on schedule." [Yearbook, 1975, p.73]

 

Thirty-six years previously, in 1878, a small band of Russellites had had to explain why they had not then been taken to heaven, since 1874 had marked the beginning of Christ's invisible presence in the spiritual "Temple of Jerusalem" and the economic panic of 1873 had been the first death spasm of a dying world. Once again, in 1914, they found  themselves having to account for failure. In 1879, Russell had predicted that an international nihilist-Communist-anarchist uprising would begin early in 1914 and that this period of turbulence would be followed, on October 2, 1914, by the establishment of God's kingdom on earth and the calling of the "living saints" to glory.

 

When this did not happen, many of Russell's followers, according to his apologists, "grew sour" and left the organization. Those who remained explained: "The mistake C. T Russell had made . . . was not as to the time, 1914, but his error was only as to where the Kingdom had been established - in heaven instead of on earth." [Faith, p 601 World War I was the sign of the Devil's displeasure, and his death throes. He had been booted out of the heavens, where hitherto he had had free access to the angels in the courts of the Lord, and he was now stalking the earth: "We learned that Jesus, enthroned in heaven [in 1914], had immediately begun his war on Satan and his demon associates in heaven. Satan and his demons~ those rebel spirit creatures associated with him, had been whipped and  hurled to the earth, never to return to heaven. The Scriptures stated this event was to mark the beginning of a time of unparalleled trouble in the earth."[1bid., p.59]

 

That the final collapse, and the final glory, had not occurred in 1914 was proof of God's beneficence: "Had Jehovah's great warrior, the Lord Jesus, continued the assault against Satan and his angels after that first skirmish which dusted those rebels from heaven, . . . no flesh would have been saved. So, for the sake of God's own people, and to fulfill his purpose, Jehovah 'cut short' those days of tribulation against the invisible rebel spirits by stopping his war for a period before . . . Armageddon," so that Jesus' prophecy - " 'This good news of the Kingdom will be preached in all the inhabited earth for the purpose of a witness to all the nations, and then the accomplished end will come' " - might be fulfilled. [Ibid., pp.59-60]

 

This new interpretation paved the way for an intensive proselytizing campaign, which obliged the Witnesses to begin work on a new theology: before 1914, they had been concerned only with their heavenly destiny, the harvesting of the saints." Now there began the evolution of a new idea, determined by altered circumstances. A handful of living saints would be called to heaven immediately upon their death; but a great number of as-yet-unredeemed worldlings would be given the opportunity to live forever on a cleansed and perfect earth.

 

And they scourged themselves for "independent thinking and private interpretation": "While we were all looking forward to 1914 and the end of wickedness and sorrow on the earth, many of us were thinking more of our own personal, individual 'change' than  anything else. Perhaps some of us had been a bit too hasty in thinking that we were going to heaven right away, and the thing for us to do would be to keep busy in the Lord's  service until he determined when any of his approved servants would be taken home to heaven." [Ibid., pp. 47-48] But this did not preclude their complaining about nonbelievers. "As 1914 passed, then 1915 and 1916, the reproach heaped upon us increased. In our effort to discern the meaning of Bible prophecy before the expected events had actually occurred . . . some partially inaccurate public expressions were made. When these minor details did not develop, the more important major fulfillment that actually did occur was entirely overlooked by those lacking full faith in God's word." (They were also overlooked by weary thousands who ceased, after 1914, to associate themselves with an organization they believed had betrayed their trust.) "Instead of viewing the increasing number of facts, actual events, piling up world-wide from day to day since 1914 as undeniable proof of the correctness of the marked date publicized by the Watch Tower from 1879, scoffers seized upon some minor point of Russell's writings to ridicule and mock." [Ibid., pp. S5-56]

 

Governments were reproached for not "surrendering their power" to the invisible Kingdom of God and for vesting their hopes instead in "the beast with seven heads" - the League of Nations.

 

The following exchange of letters is interesting for what it reveals about Witnesses who begin to ask hard questions and receive evasive answers.

 

The inference is made . . . that the leaders of all nations should have "hailed and accepted" the kingdom, and that if they did so they would "hand over the imperial sovereignty to Jesus Christ." It is a serious matter for a national sovereign  . . to turn over that sovereignty to someone else. Was there sufficient information known in 1914 and was it absolutely clear enough to cast every shadow of a doubt from the minds of world leaders that Christ would begin his reign then so that they could take the heavy responsibility, without even having a plebiscite among their subjects, of turning over their sovereignty to some other ruler? And if this was known, definitely and without doubt of any kind (which is the kind of information a responsible ruler would have to have in order to take such a drastic step), what specific steps would the rulers have taken in order to do so? Would a king just drop everything and go to his home in the country? Would the legislature adjourn? Would the men in the treasury work no more and walk off the job? - Letter from Walter Szykitka, former headquarters worker, to Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, March 1, 1962

 

In answer to Szykitka's letter, the Society pointed out that in 1914 the rule of the Kingdom and the "end of Gentile Times" had been proclaimed throughout the world, but the Christian churches and heads of state had ignored the message. Since they did not follow the biblical rules for pure Christianity in getting their affairs in order, they found themselves embroiled in the First World War, a war in which the goal was domination rather than bringing about the rule of the Kingdom of God.

 

While governments refused to permit the King to take over their functions, Russell moved to conciliate. He had prepared the way for the failure of his prophecies:

 

There surely is room for slight differences of opinion . . . and it behooves us to grant each other the widest latitude. The lease of power to the Gentiles may end in October 1914 or in October 1915. And the period of intense strife and anarchy . . . may be the final ending of the Gentile Times or the beginning of Messiah's reign.

 

But we remind all our readers again, that we have not prophesied anything about the Times of the Gentiles closing in a time of trouble nor about the glorious epoch which will shortly follow that catastrophe. We have merely pointed out what the Scriptures say, giving our views respecting their meaning and asking our readers to judge, each for himself, what they signify. These prophecies still read the same to us.

 

However some may make positive statements of what they know, and of what they do not know, we never indulge in this; but we merely state that we believe thus and so, for such and such reasons. [TWT, 1912, p.377; quoted in JWDP, p.53]

 

In November, 1914, a month after the Russellites' dreams of glory had been dashed:

 

Just how long after the Gentile Times close will be the revealment in "flaming fire" we do not know. . . . How long would this period be, in which present institutions will be ousted, and the present order of things be condemned and done away with, to make way for the Reign of Righteousness? We answer that . . . we might expect a transition to run on a good many years. [TWT, 1914, p.327]

 

He left the time of "transition" open-ended; and this gave his followers the out they so desperately required. (And the war came along fortuitously, so that the Witnesses are able to point to 1914 as a marked date and to attach their prophecies to it, never mind that they were wrong in all particulars.)

 

In December, 1914, Russell wrote, with a mixture of pathos and bravado: "Even if the time of our change should not come within ten years, what more should we ask? Are we not a blessed, happy people? Is not our God faithful? If anyone knows anything better, let him take it. If any of you ever find anything better, we hope you will tell us." [Ibid., p. 377]

 

If anyone knows better, let him take it. That, of course, is one of the keys to the survival of the organization Russell founded on soft mysticism, glorious visions, and worldly disaffection. The Witnesses had nowhere else to go. Their investment in their religion was total; to leave it would have meant spiritual and emotional bankruptcy. They were not equipped to function in a world without certainty. It was their life. To leave it would be a death.

 

(There was, when I was at Bethel, an old man, Brother Thorn, well into his 80s. He had lived through these times of promise and defeat, and his response to the vagaries of prophesying was, "Whenever I get to thinking a great deal of myself, I take myself into the corner, so to speak, and say, You little speck of dust. What have you got to be proud of?' " By the time I knew Thorn, who had been a colporteur in Russell's day, he was in advanced senility. One of my jobs was to clean the bathtub for the thirty men who lived on the first floor of the Bethel residence. Not infrequently, I would walk into the bathroom, having knocked to make sure none of the men was using the facilities, and find Thorn sitting on the toilet, his trousers draped around his ankles, nodding and beaming like a Buddha and welcoming me as if to a revival meeting: "Good morning, sister. God bless you." What a sad and inglorious end for a man who had expected to be raised to glory in 1914. But he was happy, and sweet-this "speck of dust" who was nothing without his God and his dreams.)

 

Russellites had endured scandal, the disapprobation of the world; they had cut themselves off from the world. They had been delivered from the staleness of the world to visions of glory; and they could not desert one another, or that vision of hope.

 

It is not to be supposed, however, that grumblings had not been heard among Russellites before the Pastor's death. Some Bible Students were growing weary. Russell had reproved potential rivals, who might have been forgiven for feeling that they could do at least as well as he at dates, and dampened individual inquiry as early as 1909: "From various quarters, the word came to us that the leaders of the [Bible] classes were protesting that Watch Tower publications should not be referred to in the meetings, but merely the Bible. This sounded loyal to God's word; but it was not so. It was merely the effort of these teachers to come between the people of God and the Divinely provided light." [TWT, 1909, p.371 (italics original); quoted in JWDP, p.46]

 

There is some evidence to suggest that Russell's control of his organization was eroding during the last three years of his life. Up to 1913, as majority shareholder of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, he was able to control elections, having bought, by varied estimates, $250,000 to $300,000 of voting shares at $10 apiece. After 1913, the number of votes smaller shareholders had bought outnumbered Russell's. [Cole, pp. 6 - 69; JWDP, p.64] Russell, by the time of his death, had less than one-fifth of the voting shares. The work of the Society, A. H. Macmillan told the Brooklyn Eagle [Nov. 28, 1916], had been for several years "largely in the hands of his lieutenants."

 

Russell's will bequeathed "merely love and Christian good wishes" to his flock and $200 to Maria Russell. He had made no provision for a successor, and the Society's vice-president, A. I. Ritchie, did not automatically succeed to the presidency, although Macmillan told Eagle reporters that he had little doubt Ritchie would be elected; Macmillan denied that J. F. Rutherford, then the Society's legal counsel, had a shot at the presidency. Under the provisions of the Society's charter, the board of directors was to handle its affairs until the next election, which was scheduled to be held in Pittsburgh on January 6, 1917. From October 31, 1916, to January 6, 1917, a board-appointed executive committee (composed of Rutherford,  secretary-treasurer Van Amburgh, and Ritchie) directed the affairs of the Society; Macmillan, who was not a member of the Pennsylvania board, served as administrative aide. It was a time of intense politicking, electioneering,  maneuvering, manipulation, conspiracies, and dissension.

 

One of the bones of contention in the power struggle was A. H. Macmillan. Macmillan claims that shortly before Russell left on his final tour, he “wrote letters to . . . the heads of different departments, . . . informing them that 'A. H. Macmillan is to be in full charge of the office and the Bethel Home during my absence. Anything he says for you to do you must do; it doesn't make any difference whether you agree or not. If he tells you incorrectly, I'll attend to him when I get home.' " [Faith, p. 701]

 

Russell never got home. A majority of the members of the board was opposed to Macmillan's stewardship, and they were left to fight it out among themselves. Macmillan lost no time exercising his prerogatives. His story is that "a few ambitious ones at headquarters were holding caucuses here and there, doing a little electioneering to get their men in. However, Van Amburgh and I held a large number of votes. Many shareholders, knowing of our long association with Russell, sent their proxies to us to be cast for the one whom we thought best fitted for office" - J. F. Rutherford. [op. cit., p. 68] Four members of the seven-man board of directors vigorously opposed Rutherford's presidency.

 

In this they were supported by P.S. L. Johnson, a traveling minister whom Russell had sent to England to preach to the troops. Johnson, who arrived in England in November, 1916, and immediately contrived to seize control of the Society's London bank account, is described as "a Jew who had forsaken Judaism to become a Lutheran minister before he came to a knowledge of the truth" and as a man whose "brilliance led to his downfall." JWDP, p. 69] He is clearly seen as a kind of Lucifer. After his dismissal from headquarters,  Johnson attempted unsuccessfully to form a sect of his own. He believed until his death that he was the world's high priest and Russell's legitimate successor. (If Bible Students needed any further evidence that Jews and intellectuals were tricksters to be abhorred, Johnson provided them with it.)

 

On January 6, 1917, Joseph Franklin Rutherford was elected second president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. The Lord, it was said, had chosen the right man for the job, though many of the headquarters staff evinced an intense antipathy for Rutherford, a wintry-bleak man whose personality could not have been more unlike that of the passionate Pastor whose fires burned hot, and warmed when they did not scald.

 

In the spring of 1917, simmering opposition to Rutherford erupted when four directors of the Pennsylvania Society, at an extended session of the annual meeting, attempted to present a resolution amending the bylaws to place administrative powers in the hands of the board. Rutherford won this skirmish effortlessly - he simply ruled the motion out of order. Opposition stiffened, but did not prevail. The four dissenting directors were disposed of handily: as they were attempting to gather a five-man quorum in the  Society's Brooklyn Hicks Street office, Macmillan called the cops to evict  them. According to his folksy account, "an old Irishman, a typical old fellow . . . came in twirling a long nightstick around in his hand. 'Gentlemen,' he said to the four directors, 'it's after being serious for you now. Faith, and I know . . . Macmillan, but you fellows I don't know. Now you better be after going for fear there'll be trouble.' " After the friendly policeman's performance, the men thus warned, Macmillan says, grabbed their hats, tripped down the stairs, and fled to Borough Hall to get a lawyer. [Faith, pp. 79-80]

 

They could have saved themselves the bother. Through no fault of their own, they were not legally members of the board of directors. Russell had appointed them directors for life; but the law stipulated that they had to be elected by vote of the shareholders each year. Rutherford, having been elected to office, was by law a director, as were his two allies on the board, who had been elected vice-president and secretary-treasurer. Rutherford simply booted his enemies out, and took it upon himself to appoint sympathetic directors to fill the vacancies until the next corporation election in 1918.

 

Russell's autocratic heedlessness of the law had paid off handsomely for his successor. A legal lapse had altered the history of the Watch Tower Society.

 

Members of the headquarters staff who supported the dissident directors were more difficult to subdue. Their simmering resentment of Rutherford's and Macmillan's highhandedness erupted in the summer of 1917, when Rutherford, at a midday Bethel meal, presented each member of "the family" with a book called The Finished Mystery. This seventh volume of Studies in the Scriptures, which consisted of commentaries on Revelation, the Song of Solomon, and Ezekiel, was termed "the posthumous work of Pastor Rus­sell." Headquarters workers fiercely challenged Rutherford's assertion that the  volume had been assembled from notes prepared by Russell. For four or five hours they  rioted in the dining hall, loudly denouncing Rutherford,  shaking their fists at him, and using hard rolls as missiles.

 

The dissidents were eventually forced out of Bethel; some of them em­barked on extensive speaking and letter-writing campaigns throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. As a result, congregations of Bible Students were split into opposing factions, those loyal to Rutherford and those who thought he had desecrated the memory of their beloved Pastor and refused to accept his authority. There were bitter divisions among fam­ilies: Bible Students who remained faithful to Rutherford were able to harden their hearts against their families by meditating on the fact that if Jesus deemed their fathers or their mothers or their sisters and brothers worthy of 'the second death" it would be unbecoming of them to mourn; Christ had come to bring not peace, but a sword. It is estimated by Watchtower sources that one-fifth of the Bible Stu­dents defected from the Society between 1917 and 1919. [Yearbook, 1975, pp. 93 - 94]

 

When I was a young member, Witnesses who had lived through their civil war still spoke of these turncoats with horror and fascination. They scratched away at their sores with a passion that bespoke animal fear - as if somehow those "disobedient ones" could reach down through the years and drag  them into the terrible abyss of separation from their God.

 

The Watchtower Society is, in its strength, not loath now to publicize internal problems that beset it during the World War. The Society is able, after all, to point to its continued existence; it has prospered, while opposition has foundered. To an unbelieving eye, it might seem apparent that craftiness and wheeling-dealing had won the day, and that legal loopholes and disappointed hopes determined the course of the Watch Tower Society from 1914 to 1918. As far as the Witnesses are concerned, however, this chapter in their history is, once more, a fulfillment of Bible prophecy: Christ had come to the  Temple to judge his people in 1918. This was, they say, "a weeding out, a time of  judgment, a cleansing of the entire organization" [Faith], a "sifting" that was inevitable in view of Jesus' having told his disciples that he would cast the "evil servant" out, and in view of Malachi's having said that God would "purify the sons of Levi."

 

“The man was not important. The message was." That became a popular catchphrase after Russell's death. During Rutherford's incumbency, a subtle but calculated shift took place to ensure that the Society would never again founder on the shoals of personal loyalties, nor would overwhelming admiration attach to "personalities." Russell had been regarded - had, indeed, regarded himself - as Ezekiel's "man with the inkhorn, marking the foreheads of people"; it is said that when he was asked, "Who is 'the faithful and wise servant' to whom Jesus gave stewardship of his spiritual wealth?" he replied, "Some say I am; while others say the Society is." [Ibid., p. 126] Ilis answer was Jesuitical, evasive: for all practical purposes, Russell had been the Society. Few men have believed so entirely in their own manifest destiny. Rutherford lost no time reinterpreting Matthew 24:45-47:

"The faithful and wise servant," he said, was not a man, but a class, a "composite servant" - the     Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. No matter what its vicissitudes; it was this organization God had chosen; no man's personal peccadilloes or eccentricities or errors of judgment could alter that. The organization would, in perpetuity, be the "channel" for God's light. Russell had emphasized "character development," which meant, in effect, the careful cultivation of individual Style and the enlargement of individual personality; Rutherford was to emphasize organizational and legal development, which led to the subduing of individual personalities and resulted in the development of a vast army of organization men and women. Collectively, Bible Students conducted themselves in ways that outraged the sensibilities of the conservative religious community - Rutherford's slogan "Religion Is a Snare and a Racket" was not designed to appease - but individually they reined in their personalities. This is a process that reached its completion under the presidency of Nathan H. Knorr, a consummate organization man. Witnesses are now virtually indistinguishable one from another (to the outsider, that is); and the spice of differences is thought to be as deadly as the sting of the asp.

 

Rutherford - six  feet  tall,  hazel-eyed,  portly  and  senatorial  in appearance - permitted himself affectations in dress and demeanor. In the 1940s, he wore old-fashioned stand-up collars and a little black antebellum string tie, he sported a long black ribbon from which dangled a monocle, and he frequently carried a cane. But under his leadership, the organization became monolithic, and proselytizing techniques became uniform and highly structured. The days of fiery individualism were over. (Russell was fire; Rutherford was acid and ice; Knorr was rock, and gray.)

 

Joseph Franklin Rutherford was born on November 8, 1869, to James and Lenore Strickland Rutherford on their farm in Morgan County, Missouri. Little is known of his early life; Watchtower historians, in an effort to explain away what they call his "blunt" manner - his tattered humanity and his notorious insensitivity to other people's feelings - say that "his father was a strict disciplinarian, which deprived young Rutherford of any emotional life." [Ibid., p. 73] When he was 20, he became official reporter for the courts of the Fourteenth Judicial District in Missouri; at 22, he was admitted to the bar. He practiced trial law in Boonville, Missouri, for fifteen years, campaigning briefly for William Jennings Bryan. His enemies, among them Father Coughlin, frequently ridiculed him for appropriating the title "Judge" to himself. His followers, leaping to his defense, protested that he had sat as a substitute judge in Missouri's Fourteenth Judicial District "on more than one occasion." It is probably safe to assume that the title was one of those Southern honorifics conferred upon anyone of any distinction at all (in Boonville, a very small pond, it cannot have been too hard to be a big fish).

 

The "judge" was introduced to the teachings of the Bible Students when a traveling colporteur brought him a copy of Millennial Dawn. Thereafter he and his wife, Mary, began to hold Bible classes in their home. He was baptized in 1906. In 1907, he became the Watch Tower Society's legal counsel in Pittsburgh; in 1909, he moved to the Society's new headquarters in Brooklyn and was admitted to the New York Bar; on May 24, 1909, he was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.

 

Rutherford is said to have been skeptical of his ability to preach until one day he chanced upon a group of "colored men" in a field and, exercising Southern droit de seigneur, proceeded to lecture the field hands on Life, Death, and the Hereafter. His captive audience gratified him with choruses of "Praise the Lord, Judge!" A Missouri epiphany: From that moment, Rutherford never looked back.

 

Little is known of Rutherford's wife, Mary, and his son Malcolm. The Judge seems to have lived a compartmentalized life, the private person and the public person never merging, as they did so spectacularly in the person of Charles Taze Russell.

 

Rutherford was 48 when he was elected president of the Watch Tower Society, a position he was to hold for twenty-four years, until his death in 1942.

 

Hostile encounters have not infrequently been experienced by marginal religious movements, whether with the law or with public opinion, or, most often, with both simultaneously. . . . A study of these encounters . . . reveals that in every case the tension is a function not of the group's theological beliefs, no matter how alien they appear to be, but of positions or practices which threaten or entrench upon strongly held national secular values. When, by reason of change either in the group's position or in national secular norms, the threat disappears or becomes manageable, the legitimization of the group and its acceptance by the general community are practically           automatic and generally simultaneous.  - Leo Pfeffer, "The Limitation of Marginal Religions in the United States," Z&L, pp. 14-15

In June, 1917, six months after Rutherford became Watch Tower president, Congress passed the Espionage Act, laying heavy penalties on all persons who interfered with mobilization of military forces. The Sedition Act of 1918 was an even more severe measure to suppress war criticism. Dissenters were often arrested without warrants, hauled off to jail, and held incommunicado without bail. Prejudicial courts sentenced war critics to extraordinarily long prison terms: one adolescent girl was given twenty years. There were government listeners and informers everywhere. Intelligence agencies of the departments of War, Navy, and State employed amateur as well as professional detectives to collect information on citizens.

 

The Witnesses' accounts of their travails during World War I reflect a parochialism. They view Rutherford's conviction on the charge of espionage and his nine-month imprisonment in the Atlanta penitentiary as proof of a special relationship with God; they ignore the fact that clergymen of all denominations were sent to prison - sometimes for doing nothing  more than reading the Sermon on the Mount.

 

Although Watchtower publications now lambaste the rest of the clergy for their chauvinism during the Great War, Bible Students were themselves divided on the question of neutrality. Russell's personal representative delivered words of comfort to troops before they went off to the trenches. Many Bible Students, in the absence of a clear directive from the Society, fought at the front; others served in the Army Medical Corps.

 

Rutherford disclaimed any responsibility for those of his followers who resisted conscription; defending himself against the charge of  sedition, he said that his advice had been simply to suggest that if they could not, in conscience, take part in war, the Draft Act allowed them to apply for exemption. He insisted that he had always advised the Bible Students to conform with the law of the State provided it did not conflict with a higher law.

 

In order to curb the excesses of wartime hysteria, members of the Congress had introduced the "France Amendment" to the Espionage Law. The amendment provided exemption from prosecution for any person who uttered "what is true, with good motives, and for justifiable ends." In a successful effort to defeat the France Amendment, the Attorney General said:

 

Experience teaches that such an amendment would to a large degree nullify the value of the law and turn every trial into an academic debate on insoluble riddles as to what is true. Human motives are too complicated to be discussed, and the word "justifiable" is too elastic for practical use. . .

 

One of the most dangerous examples of. . . propaganda is the book called The Finished Mystery, a work written in extremely religious language and distributed in enormous numbers. The only effect of it is to lead soldiers to discredit our cause and to inspire a feeling at home of resistance to the draft. . .

 

The International Bible Students' Association pretends to the most religious motives, yet we have found that its headquarters have long been reported as the resort of German agents. . .

 

The passage of this amendment would greatly weaken American efficiency and help none but the enemy. - Congressional Record, May 4, 1918

Passage of the Espionage Act was a disastrous blow to civil liberties, and the Watch Tower Society was caught, as were so many others, in its net. Intelligence agents were disabused of the idea that dismantled radio equipment found in the Society's Brooklyn headquarters had been used to transmit broadcasts to the enemy; nevertheless, warrants for the arrest of Rutherford, Secretary-Treasurer Van Amburgh, A. H. Macmillan, and five members of the Watch Tower editorial committee were issued by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York on May 7, 1918. They were arraigned in Federal Court. A grand jury returned an indictment charging them with "unlawfully, feloniously and willfully causing and attempting to cause insubordination, disloyalty and refusal of military duty in the military and naval forces of the United States of America, in, through and by personal solicitations, letters, public speeches, distribution and public circulation throughout the United States of America of a certain book called 'Volume Seven - Scripture Studies - The Finished Mystery'; and obstructing the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States when the United States was at war." Rutherford, Van Amburgh, Macmillan, and R. J. Martin (one of the compilers of The Finished Mystery) were also charged with trading with the enemy. (Funds deposited in the Society's Zurich bank account were alleged to have been earmarked for Germany.) The defendants were released on bail; on May 15, 1918, appearing before Judge Harland B. Howe, they pleaded not guilty to all charges. [Yearbook, 1975, pp. l0 - 05]

 

The trial lasted fifteen days. Outside, soldiers marched and clergymen stood on corners reading the Lord's Prayer. The defendants testified that they had never conspired to affect the draft or to interfere with the Government's prosecution of the war; that they had never had any intention of interfering in any manner with the war; that their work was wholly religious and not political; that they had never advised or encouraged anyone to resist the draft, but merely offered advice to conscientious objectors; that they were not opposed to the nation's going to war but that, as dedicated Christians, they could not themselves engage in mortal combat.

 

On June 20, 1918, after deliberating for four and a half hours, a jury returned a verdict of guilty. Seven defendants were sentenced to eighty years in the penitentiary (twenty years each on four counts, to run concurrently), and one defendant, Giovanni DeCecca, was sentenced to forty years (ten years on each of the same four counts). Friends and families of the convicted men sang "Blessed Be the Tie That Binds" in the Marshal's Office of the Brooklyn Federal Court. Rutherford proclaimed, "This is the happiest day of my life. To serve earthly punishment for the sake of one's religious belief is one of the greatest privileges a man could have." [Ibid., p. 108.          Reported in New York Tribune, June 22,  1918]

 

He had, however, gone to great lengths to avoid the "privileges" of earthly punishment. The Society had seriously compromised itself. The Bible Students wished to receive accolades for their neutrality as they also declared their unswerving loyalty to the United States Government: "We are not against the Government in any sense of the word. We recognize the Government of the United States as the best government on earth. We recognize that governments, being political and economic institutions, have the power and authority, under the fundamental law, to declare war and to draft their citizens." [TWT, 1917, p.6221] Watch Tower leaders had conferred with government authorities and agreed to delete objectionable portions of The Finished Mystery. They took the further step of advising colporteurs to halt distribution of the volume.

 

When none of this served to keep their leaders out of prison, the Bible Students, at a convention in Pittsburgh on January 2-5, 1919, unanimously passed a resolution attesting to "their loyalty to the government and people of these United States." They protested that their leaders had "technically violated" a "law they did not understand." [Souvenir Report of  the Bible Students Convention, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, January 2-5, 1919,  p. 37; see also JWDP, p.85]

 

The Watch Tower instructed its readers to honor President Wilson's designation of May 30, 1918, as a day of national prayer and supplication for the success of the American war effort. [TWT, June 1, 1918] The Bible Students did not then, nor do the Witnesses now, call themselves pacifists.

 

About one thing, however, the Bible Students were unequivocal and absolutely certain: "Without a doubt, the prosecution . . . had been initiated by some nominal ecclesiastical adherents. The Bible's terrible arraignment of the Papacy . . . is quite probably the cause of . . . action against them." They saw themselves as victims of a conspiracy of clergymen. [TWT, 1917]

 

Without question some of the orthodox clergy were glad of an excuse to be rid of the Bible Students. (Upton Sinclair was extremely censorious of the clergy for not leaping to Rutherford's defense.) But with the end of the war, and a change in the national temper, opposition to the Bible Students ebbed. In February, 1919, liberal newspapers began to agitate for the release of the Society's president and his associates. More than 700,000 names were secured on a petition for their release. On March 2, 1919,  the judge who had convicted them recommended "immediate commutation" of their sentences. In a letter to Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory, he said "My principal purpose was to make an example, as a warning to others, and I believed that the President would relieve them after the war was over. . . They did much damage and it may well be claimed they ought not to be set at liberty so soon, but as they cannot do any more harm now, I am in favor of being as lenient as I was severe in imposing sentence." [See JWDP, p.86; Yearbook, 1975, p.116]

 

On March 25, federal authorities, acting on the instruction of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, released the Society's leaders from the penitentiary on bail of $10,000 each, pending further trial. On April 14,1919, in a hearing before the Federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, their convictions were reversed, and they were remanded for retrial: "The defendants in this case," Judge Ward ruled, "did not have the temperate and impartial trial to which they were entitled." [Rutherford v. U.S., 258 F855, 863] The indictments were later dismissed, the government entering a motion of nolle prosequi. [See JWDP, p.86]

 

Jehovah's Witnesses now acknowledge that they "did not," during World War I, "display the proper neutrality of the Christian." [JWDP, p.92] This admission does not prevent them from railing against the clergy for behaving as they did. That the clergy were not pure means that they were the instrument of the Devil; the fact that the Witnesses were not pure is, they say, proof that God was using them to fulfill the prophecy of  Revelation 11:2, 7: "And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them." The period of "witnessing," or prophesying in sackcloth and ashes, they say, began during the first month of November, 1917; and the Devil's beastly political system warred against the symbolic "two witnesses" of God, eventually "killing" them - or killing their work of prophesying. In 1919, they became "spiritually alive" again, in fulfillment of the prophecy that the two witnesses should be resurrected.

 

The Witnesses claim on the one hand that they were victims of a devilish religious-political conspiracy and, on the other, that they were exiled from God's favor during the War, their own period of "spiritual bondage" having been "typified" by the Jews' languishment in captivity in Babylon.

 

Their spiritual error, as they later saw it, was to misread Romans 13:1: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God." They, like the orthodox churches, had understood the Apostle Paul's words to apply to governmental authorities. Their error, they say, was in not recognizing that the “higher powers" were in fact Jehovah God and Christ Jesus (a construction difficult to make in the context of Paul's injunction to the Romans).

 

From 1929, up until the politically volatile '60s, the "higher powers, in contradistinction to the World War I interpretation, were stated to be God, Jesus, and the "theocratic organization" through which the Father and Son worked: "When [Paul] says, 'The Powers that be are ordained of  God,' does he have any reference whatsoever to the Gentile nations of the earth? Is it not more reasonable that he directs his words exclusively to the powers possessed and exercised in God's organization, and not to those that are exercised in Satan's organization?" [TWT, 1929, p. 164] This reading of Paul's words prepared the way for their principled stand of absolute neutrality during World War Il-by which time the organization, free of internal problems had grown so strong it could withstand external pressures, indeed thrive on them. The Witnesses remained faithful to this interpretation until the early '60s, when it became necessary to differentiate themselves from war protestors and civil-rights agitators and to be regarded as bastions of "normalcy" in a world that trembled on the brink of massive social change.

 

As the Witnesses became less and less a threat to the established order and the status quo in America, they performed another 180-degree turn: in the 1960s, without apology or embarrassment and with their customary aplomb, they once again reversed themselves and pronounced human governmental authorities as the "higher powers.”

 

Jehovah God, though not originating them, has allowed man's governmental authorities to come into existence, and they continue to exist by his permission. . . There being no reason for Christians to set themselves in opposition to an arrangement that God has permitted they have good reason to be in subjection to the superior authorities. Governmental rulers, though they may be corrupt personally, would not normally punish others for doing good.-Aid, p. 1560

 

Every soul must "be in subjection to the superior authorities," for these constitute an arrangement of God and are an object of fear, not to the law-abiding, but to those who do bad deeds. Christians are to be in law-abiding subjection, not only on account of the fear of punishment, but on account of Christian conscience, therefore paying their taxes, rendering their dues. - All Scrip, p.207

 

And so they readopted the reading of Romans 13 - the reading for which they had once calumnized the clergy.

 

It is no accident that during the '60s, when war protestors sprang up like dandelions and  law-and-order was a rallying cry for the middle class, the expansion-minded Witnesses, who were perceived by the establishment as less of a threat than "hippies" or political radicals, received preferential treatment from draft boards. (See Chapter VII.) They are an example of social Darwinism: they have evolved; and they have survived.

 

The year of 1925 is the year clearly set in the Bible for the judgment on the Satanic order that now rules the world. The offer to live forever is made to you and you need not die unless you repudiate it. The perfect food will make you eternal. You men who are bald will be bald no longer. Your teeth will be restored to you. You will be as beautiful as you were in your youth. The whole world will be as beautiful as Prospect Park in Spring. - Judge Rutherford, 1921

 

The kingdom of heaven is at hand; the King reigns; Satan's empire is falling; millions now living will never die. . . . This is the day of all days. Behold, the King reigns! You are his publicity agents. Therefore advertise, advertise, advertise, the King and his kingdom!-Judge Rutherford, Cedar Point, Ohio, 1922 [TWT, 1922, pp.335-37]

 

In the calm that followed the storms of war, the Bible Students - the release of their leaders had acted on them like a shot of  adrenaline - were mobilized by Rutherford to form an army of "Kingdom advertisers." Canvassers fanned out across the nation; sound trucks jarred the Sunday peace in towns and in the country, blasting Rutherford's denunciations of the churches. The "pastoral work" Russell had initiated was unorganized and low-keyed in comparison with the highly organized proselytizing techniques perfected during the 1920s and '30s. Cities were divided into territorial districts; female Bible Students went from door to door distributing tracts, delivering memorized "testimonies" issued from headquarters, and inviting householders to public lectures delivered by male Bible Students.

 

The Bible Students were less concerned now with "harvesting the saints" than with aggressive attacks on the clergy: Watchtower publications ran full-page pictures of a preacher walking down the aisle of a church with a gun in one hand and a collection plate in the other. The Roman Catholic Church was branded with "the number of the beast" - 666 - and was pictured as a semiclad harlot reeling drunkenly into fire and brimstone. Millions of dollars were poured into radio broadcasts. Network facilities were used weekly. In 1922, twenty-four acres of land was purchased in Woodrow, Staten Island, New York, and the Society built its own radio station, WBBR, with a 25,000-watt directional antenna; it functioned until the Staten Island property was sold in 1957. During these Depression decades it began to develop its own printing plants, and to amass more property.

 

However harsh Pastor Russell's public messages might have been, there was a kind of starry-eyed gentleness, a sweet dreaminess about the Bible Students when they gathered together in his time. Rutherford put an end to that. There were no more "prayer, praise, and testimony" meetings, no more convention "love feasts." Now congregation meetings centered around readings of The Watch Tower, and Bible Students were required to answer catechistic questions by summarizing each paragraph of that journal. Their conventions, which had been otherworldly, self-congratulatory affairs of men and women who thought they were soon to reconvene in heaven, became occasions for scathing denunciations of the clergy. At a postwar convention, Rutherford, casting the first stone, "exposed the clergy's disloyalty by participating in the war" [JWDP, p.105] (though the Pope, appalled by the carnage of the war, had called for a negotiated peace after the second battle of the Somme, at a time when the Bible Students were saying their prayers for the success of the American war effort). A series of  "Resolutions" was presented at the conventions of the 1920s; all inveighed against the established churches; many castigated the clergy for their support of the League of Nations. (These resolutions are now said to have been fulfillments of the apocalyptic prophecies of Revelation, Chapter 8: each time Rutherford delivered a resolution, an angel "blew his trumpet.")

 

The Watch Tower Society was, in fact, pursuing a vigorous course of isolationism: London was branded "the seat of the beast"; "Let Britain withdraw from [the League - the seven-headed beast] tomorrow," Rutherford said in 1926, "and it will go down immediately." [Ibid., p. 111]

 

During the Depression years - when Watch Tower literature was bartered - Russell's notion that the great war of Armageddon was to be essentially a fight between capital and labor, with Jehovah expropriating the spoils for the unpropertied meek, was dispensed with: Armageddon was now seen as God's fight against "Satan's organization," represented on earth by Religion, Politics, and Commerce; and the function of Jehovah's people was to warn of its arrival and, in the meantime, to abstain from taking any part in the political system.

 

Underneath was a bedrock conservatism: the Bible Students talked about the destruction of the status quo but abhorred attempts to change it. The failure of the clergy to fall prostrate before the invisible Christ, and its acceptance of the League, was seen as a major factor in "the rise of radical, revolutionary elements, pictured by the restless 'sea' of  Revelation." [Yearbook, 1975, p. 136]

 

As they expanded, the Bible Students became more and more centralized, more and more uniform. The right to appoint congregational overseers was taken away from individual congregations and placed in the hands of the Society. Rutherford, unlike Russell - who had allowed a certain amount of latitude among his traveling representatives and derived some pleasure from the eccentricities and foibles of others, when they did not threaten to eclipse his own - insisted that each public speaker conform absolutely to headquarters material. There were to be no colorful embellishments or departures from the prepared word.

 

Having grown up under Russell, who prized individualism, many Bible Students chafed under Rutherford's authoritarian ("theocratic") dicta: "A few spent their time studying - looking up ideas that were not published or printed in the Watchtower. Their intention was to attract attention to themselves by telling something new. . . . Those who refused to swallow their pride and follow the example of Jesus and his disciples in door-to-door ministry soon found themselves out of the organization entirely." [Faith, p.158] The regimentation imposed upon them, detested by so many, would serve the Society well during the late 1930s when they tested the laws and the patience of the land and were the object of vigorous opposition.

 

By 1927, the pressure for all Bible Students - male and female, elders and laypersons - to become door-to-door preachers and to turn in weekly activity reports to headquarters had become so intense that many of Rutherford's followers dropped away. (There is a very high turnover among the Witnesses. One sees disproportionately few elderly people at Watchtower conventions.) The departure of many Bible Students in 1927 was no doubt hastened by the fact that Rutherford, who was as mathematically adroit as his predecessor, had led the Bible Students to believe that 1925 marked the time for Christ's anointed followers to go to heaven and for "the faithful men of old" to be resurrected to rule as princes on the earth. Some Bible Students made preparations for the resurrection of their loved ones in that year - getting spare rooms ready, airing out old clothes from attic trunks.

 

I wonder about those imaginations: Did they visualize the ancient prophets rising from their graves? Were they brushed by a dream, or set on fire by an imagined reality? When I was a child Witness, I used to ask, What will the prophets wear when they're resurrected? Will they take planes from Palestine to Brooklyn? How will they pay their carfare? Will they speak English? Will we understand Hebrew? I wondered if we'd have David and Jonathan to dinner, and whether they'd like Italian food. I tried to imagine Noah riding a subway. My elders, I soon learned, were greatly disquieted by my questions and my conjectures; I learned rapidly to quash my curiosity, when instead of answers I met baleful, dismissive glances. And my feeling, consequently, is that the Witnesses who believed these stories were anesthetized, as if in a morphine dream, sleepwalking through fantasies.

 

(In 1950, I ceased to wonder whether Prince David would find me attractive. At a convention that year in Yankee Stadium, Fred Franz, then the Society's vice-president, announced, "The princes are here in our midst, among us tonight!" A fearful hush came over that stadium. I was sitting, I remember, next to a Bethelite from Texas, of whom I was mildly enamored, woolgathering after seven hours of speeches, wondering whether he would take me home and, if so, whether he would kiss me good night. When Franz dropped his bombshell I felt a quick stab of  disbelief, followed immediately by flutters of guilt, and then by overwhelming anxiety. Franz paused for maximum effect, as thousands gathered in the dusk shifted restlessly in their seats, craning to see - what? Did any of us believe that Solomon would step before the lectern? "You," Franz cried anticlimactically, "are the princes"; and he explained that Jehovah had shed greater light on his word, and the princes were not, as we had for so many years believed, the "faithful men of old," but congregational overseers, whom God was grooming for positions of authority in his New World. There was great and fervent applause, as if a dream had been fulfilled, and not mercilessly deflated. I was very angry.)

 

What in the world did I suggest an international convention for when I have no special speech or message for them? Why bring them all here? - J. F. Rutherford to A. H. Macmillan, 1931 [Yearbook, 1975]

 

It is Scripturally and factually clear that only Almighty God Jehovah himself founded or ordains and continues to ordain his witnesses, and in proof of this he gives them his name. - Let God Be True, p. 222

 

In 1928 Rutherford had dazzled the Bible Students with further proof of their singularity by "revealing" to them the pagan origins of Christmas and birthday celebrations and abjuring them from celebrating those holidays. By 1931, having already framed eight resolutions "indicting ecclesiastics," he had run out of suitably impressive material with which to energize his followers. According to Macmillan, "he began to think about" what he would say to Bible Students that was new and of any consequence at an international convention scheduled for July 2~3 1 in Cleveland, Ohio. (The realities of dust bowls and Depression and war clouds over Europe seem not to have exercised his imagination.) "Isaiah 43 came to his mind": "But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, 0 Jacob, and he that formed thee, 0 Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. . . . Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen."-Isaiah 43:1, 10, King James Version.  (The American Standard Version, which the Witnesses preferred - at least until they produced their own New World Translation of the Bible - uses Jehovah in place of the Lord.) Rutherford "got up at two o'clock in the morning . . . and the Lord guided him." [Yearbook, 1975, p. 151] What Rutherford had come up with at 2 o'clock in the morning was a new name for Bible Students: Jehovah's witnesses. It was forever after a proof that Jehovah had chosen the Witnesses to be His people: who else was called by His name.- The Lord, it is said, "guided" Rutherford; none of the Society's leaders has ever laid claim to direct inspiration - but that is surely a distinction without a difference.

 

Conventions of Witnesses are like catered weddings: you have to come home with party favors. The illusion that something new and fresh has come down from headquarters is essential to the ongoing work of the Society. This was something new; their batteries recharged, the newly christened Jehovah's Witnesses applied greater energy to the search for "the other sheep" - the "great multitude," who, they now saw clearly, would inherit the earth.

 

They began to deemphasize the glories of heaven and to focus on those "people of goodwill" who would ally themselves with the "heavenly class" and to whom, as a result, God's Kingdom-Blessings would come on earth. (The new emphasis proceeded in part, perhaps, from their failure to be gathered to heaven in 1925, and also from having to justify amassing property and accelerating their proselytizing in the face of the imminent destruction of the world.) Their God, who before was going to revivify and shower beneficence upon all the disinherited of the earth, had become more discriminating: the "other sheep" would live forever on earth; the goats of Jesus' parable would be destroyed. Those who did not heed the Witnesses' message were "goats."

 

At a convention in Washington, D.C., in 1935, Rutherford asked, "Will all those who have the hope of living forever on earth please stand?" And it became apparent that this was the moment thousands were waiting for - those thousands who did not entertain heavenly hopes (in Russell's day, they all had). Over half the audience stood. Rutherford cried, "Behold! The Great Multitude!" Everybody cheered. Now their preaching work had greater purpose, and greater intensity: millions now living would never die.

 

There are 144,000 places reserved in heaven, and most of these, it is assumed, have been taken up by first-century Christians and Russellites and Rutherfordites. The call is now to earthly life. (Vacancies may occur when one of the heavenly class sins against the Holy Spirit.) Attendance at the yearly Memorial of Christ's death - when those who expect to go to heaven to serve as Christ's coregents partake of bread and wine - reflect the changing expectations of the majority of Witnesses. In 1935,  35,000 Witnesses celebrated "the Lord's evening meal" in the United States; 71 percent of these partook of the Memorial emblems. In 1955, U.S. Memorial attendance was 878,303, and 1.9 percent ate the bread and drank the wine. One subject of painful, though romantic, conjecture for the Witnesses of the 1940s was what would happen if one marriage partner were of the

heavenly class and the other of the earthly class. Their ultimate separation was assured, and as Jehovah was going to renew His mandate to multiply and replenish the earth to "other sheep" who survived Armageddon, they were forced to imagine the heavenly partner gazing down benevolently while the earthly partner was busy being fruitful and multiplying with a mate chosen for him or her by God for this purpose.

 

The commission to separate the sheep from the goats took some extravagant forms. In 1938, in London, a thousand-man, six-mile-long parade of Witnesses bore signs reading RELIGION IS A SNARE AND A RACKET. When they were heckled - observers took them for Communists - Rutherford neutralized the signs by adding SERVE GOD AND CHRIST THE KING. It must have been confusing to anyone who didn't know the Witnesses'  definition of religion, which was that it came from the Latin, to bind back, and that it applied to all "false systems" of worship. (In 1951, the Witnesses began to make a distinction between "true religion" [them] and "false religion" [everybody else].)

 

The Witnesses no longer carry signs or banners, and the hand of God is seen in this, as it is seen in everything else: Grant Suiter, the Society's current secretary, has said that in view of the many public demonstrations of protest taking place, it must be clearly understood that the Witnesses have no part in these and that this form of their activity has come to an end, showing Jehovah's direction for them.

 

The hand of God was also seen in the introduction of the "magazine work" - hawking magazines on street corners-in 1940, when the Witnesses took up this new activity as another means of promoting their work, proving their loyalty and service to God as well as their wholehearted commitment to advancing the Kingdom..

 

They are always having to prove themselves, set themselves tests, always investing events with enormous significance; they are naked and afraid in the face of ordinary life and must substitute for the excitement of an inner life the scent of danger - Daniel in the lions' den. If ever a religion promised serenity, this is not it. The more trouble the outside world gave them, the more they made themselves the butt of opposition, the more secure they became in their beliefs. To be buffeted and racked by worldly forces, to choose martyrdom, to excite the animosity of a crowd satisfied some hunger in them, gave them rest of a kind, rest from self-doubt. What was important was that something should always be happening. As we shall see, during the 1930s and '40s, a great deal did happen: They were the victims of mob violence; they were jailed, molested, tarred and feathered; and it is not extravagant to say that they altered the history of civil liberties in the United States. There is reason to believe that they were complicit in their own victimization - manipulating national fears, milking national traumas to invite opposition, in order to enhance their self-esteem. In their persecution, they found a kind of peace.

 

Joseph Franklin Rutherford died on January 8, 1942, in San Diego, California. He was 72 years old. The nine months he had spent in the Atlanta Penitentiary had damaged his lungs, the Witnesses say; he had spent most of his presidency in the salubrious climate of San Diego, in Beth-Sarim, the mansion constructed for him and for "the ancient worthies."

 

His lieutenants, squabbling with local authorities who refused permission to bury Rutherford in a crypt at Beth-Sarim, did not disclose his death to his followers. The news was released by a local mortician. [The New York Times, Jan.10, 1942] He was buried, three months after his death, on April 26, in Woodrow Cemetery, next to what was then the Watchtower radio station, WBBR.

 

I worked, the summer of 1953, at the Watchtower cannery in Woodrow, and I never knew Rutherford's grave was there. For all his public exposure, the private man remained mysterious, remote, inaccessible. His grave is unvisited.