Rud Persson, Rutherford’s Coup: The Watchtower Succession Crisis of 1917 and Its Aftermath (2022).
Short quoted phrases appear only where the phrase is itself the thing under discussion — a document title, or wording that was disputed at the time. The appendices reproduce primary documents in full; those are described here rather than reproduced. Page numbers are not included because the Kindle edition doesn’t match the printed edition, so they are left out.
Title and contents
The volume is Rud Persson’s “Rutherford’s Coup: The Watch Tower Succession Crisis of 1917 and Its Aftermath”, published in 2022 by Hart Publishers, Inc. of Paris, Ontario, Canada, with a foreword by M. James Penton and a dedication to the author’s wife Birgit. Part One, “The Running Story (1916 – 1919)”, carries the narrative through twenty-four chapters, opening with the death of Charles Taze Russell and the maneuvering before the next election, then the annual meeting of January 6, 1917, the adoption of by-laws by the Peoples Pulpit Association, and the growing discontent surrounding Paul S.L. Johnson. The middle chapters track the confrontation itself, from Johnson’s British mission and the clash it triggered, through the crowded weeks between June 21 and July 16, 1917, the board meetings of “A Strenuous Day”, failed peace efforts, Joseph Franklin Rutherford’s legal arguments, and the breakdown Persson labels “Then It Will Be War”. The later chapters follow the aftermath: the Boston convention, the seventh volume, the run-up to and outcome of the 1918 election, the confrontation with the authorities, and the Watch Tower Society at its weakest point. The final chapters treat the successor bodies formed by those who left or were pushed out, namely the Pastoral Bible Institute, the Laymen’s Home Missionary Movement, the Bible Students Committee in Britain, and the Stand Fast Movement, before a concluding chapter. Part Two supplies twenty biographies, with birth and death years, of the men and women at the centre of the dispute, from Rutherford and William Edwin Van Amburgh to the ousted directors, Johnson, Alexander Hugh Macmillan, the Society’s counsel-turned-critic Francis Harris McGee, and Andrew Nils Pierson. Thirteen appendices reproduce the primary documents Persson leans on, among them Russell’s will and an examination of whether Rutherford tampered with it, the charters of the two corporations, the January 6, 1917 resolution and by-laws, the July 17 and July 19, 1917 board documents, the General Corporation Law of 1882, correspondence from Rutherford and Macmillan, and Henning Andersson’s testimony about Bethel. Closing apparatus includes a glossary, a bibliography, a separate list of sources for the biographies, and twenty-four figures reproducing buildings, pamphlet covers, vote results, the defendants, and archival letters.
Foreword (by M. James Penton)
M. James Penton introduces Rud Persson as a Swedish former Jehovah’s Witness and businessman, not a professional academic, with whom he has collaborated on the religion’s history for close to forty years and whose command of English, German and of historical method he vouches for. Penton stresses that Persson did not leave the Witnesses in disgrace: he and his family withdrew only after prolonged research, much of it alongside the Swedish ex-Witness Carl Olof Jonsson, convinced them that the movement’s claims about its own past were untenable, so he cannot fairly be dismissed as an embittered apostate. Persson’s insider background, Penton argues, is precisely what equips him to explain events at Watch Tower headquarters in 1917, given that both the name Jehovah’s Witnesses and the religion’s hierarchical governance came from J. F. Rutherford, and that the present Governing Body wrongly traces its own origin to 1919. Earlier treatments of the 1917 succession crisis by Alan Rogerson and by the dissertations of Joseph F. Zygmunt, William H. Cumberland and Jan Haugland are, in Penton’s judgement, useful but far shallower than Rutherford’s Coup, while books by Witnesses themselves range from solid scholarship to outright apologetics. Penton then turns to a broader grievance: scholars of new religious movements such as Lonnie Kliever, J. Gordon Melton and Bryan Wilson have declared ex-members inherently unreliable witnesses, a position he says amounts to disbelieving all whistleblowers and which he attributes to paid advocacy, book sales and, in James R. Lewis’s case, ideological credulity extending to defending Aum Shinrikyo after the Tokyo subway gas attack. He closes by predicting that despite hostility from CESNUR-style anti-apostate gatekeepers, Persson’s book will find its readership among the thousands leaving the Witnesses and among fair-minded scholars willing to judge it on its merits.
Acknowledgements
Persson opens by naming four people as indispensable to the book: M. James Penton in Canada, who kept the project alive, proofread every chapter, biography and appendix, and obtained the Peoples Pulpit Association charter and its amendments from the New York Department of State along with William H. Cumberland’s 1958 thesis, 1916 Brooklyn Daily Eagle articles, and material and a photograph of Francis H. McGee. The Bible Student historian James B. Parkinson in California started him researching and supplied early sources, among them the ousted directors’ circular of July 27, 1917 with its reproduction of a New York law firm’s legal opinion, a photocopy of the Society’s handwritten 1884 charter, newly surfaced papers on the Stand Fast defection, and biographical data on Alfred I. Ritchie and Isaac F. Hoskins. Mike Castro of Rhode Island furnished the board resolution of July 17, 1917 and its covering letter of July 19, 1917 sent to most American Bible Student classes, the rare second edition of the Russell memorial Watch Tower with its Rutherford biography, loans of the 1917-1919 Watch Tower volumes and the 1927 The Finished Mystery, photographs of Andrew N. Pierson and Gertrude W. Seibert, and information on M. Sturgeon, F.H. Fisher, W.F. Hudgings and Rutherford’s replacement director Dr. Walter E. Spill; Jeff Mezera of the Watch Tower History YouTube channel added late documentation on Rutherford and on another replacement director, J.A. Bohnet. Further help came from Carl Olof Jonsson, who shared the early issues of Paul S.L. Johnson’s The Present Truth; Brian Kutscher of Michigan, curator of the Bible Students’ Archives, who provided portraits, the 1911-1916 pilgrim schedules and material on Robert H. Hirsh and his wife Rose L. Hirsh; the Canadian lawyer David Penton, whose two books on Pennsylvania corporate law Persson calls crucial to understanding the rival legal claims; and Eric Wilson of Ontario plus two anonymous proofreaders who prepared the manuscript for print. A longer list of contributors supplied documents Persson leans on throughout: Barbara Anderson’s CD of The Golden Age for 1919-1937, Gerald Bergman’s first edition of The Finished Mystery and the Zion’s Watch Tower extra edition of April 25, 1894, Rolando Rodriguez’s 1955 article in The Watchers in the Morning, Charles Ryba’s copy of C.J. Woodworth’s August 1917 tract The Parable of the Penny, Freddy Holman’s newspaper reports on Hoskins’s death in 1957 and on Johnson’s 1903 break with the Lutheran Church, the Macmillan letter of August 6, 1915 released by the pseudonymous Marvin Shilmer, and the doctoral studies obtained through Alan Rogerson and the late Richard Rawe. He closes by crediting an anonymous researcher whose work in American public records enlarged what he knows about Alfred I. Ritchie, J. Dennis Wright, A.H. Macmillan and their wives and established Robert Hirsh’s middle name as Henry from a baptismal record, the genealogist Skip Higgins for Clayton J. Woodworth’s family, and his cousin Kurt Rubensson for tracing Andrew N. Pierson’s family in Swedish church records.
Introduction
Persson opens by placing the 1917 upheaval in the Watch Tower Society among the gravest crises of the Bible Student movement, which became Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1931, and ties it to the struggle over control of the corporation following the death of its principal founder and elected Pastor, Charles Taze Russell. The faction that won, he notes, soon gave the events a theological meaning, casting itself as the “faithful and wise servant” and its opponents as “that evil servant,” a verdict supposedly issued when Christ came to his temple in 1918 for cleansing and judgment. Although that teaching has since been softened, Persson observes, the Society still says four directors “rebelled” against the newly elected president, Joseph F. Rutherford, and that their expulsion in August 1917 from the Brooklyn headquarters known as Bethel was “a cleansing indeed.” He identifies the accounts he intends to test as the Society’s own: Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Divine Purpose (1959), the 1975 Yearbook, Jehovah’s Witnesses Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom (1993), and A.H. Macmillan’s officially endorsed Faith on the March (1957), all of which paint the winners white and the losers black. His doubts began while he was still a Witness, when Divine Purpose claimed on one page that Rutherford and two other officers rightly ignored the board in deciding to publish the seventh volume of Studies in the Scriptures, while an earlier page quoted the charter assigning publication decisions to the board. A second implausibility, Macmillan’s report that Paul S.L. Johnson later claimed to be “the world’s high priest,” reinforced the impulse to check the record, but Persson could not begin research until 1973, when Alan Rogerson’s 1969 study pointed him to two American Bible Student bodies and Raymond G. Jolly of the Laymen’s Home Missionary Movement and James B. Parkinson of the Dawn Bible Student Association supplied him with contemporary material. Persson argues that the Society’s “ambitious and prideful men” explanation collapses once one notices who sided against Rutherford: the movement’s leading lawyer Francis H. McGee, vice president Andrew N. Pierson, who had himself nominated Rutherford and turned against his course only in late July 1917, and Robert H. Hirsh, a Watch Tower editor and Peoples Pulpit Association director elected to the Society’s board in March 1917 at Rutherford’s own instigation. He then sets out demonstrable falsehoods in the published version: Divine Purpose says the ousted directors’ attorney conceded they had never legally been board members, whereas McGee in fact wrote that Rutherford had taken the law into his own hands and that only a court could declare the offices vacant. Macmillan, in Persson’s reading, confused the ordinary board meeting of June 20, 1917 with the alleged “extended session” of the Peoples Pulpit Association’s annual meeting on July 31, and ridiculed Johnson’s claim to be the “steward” of the parable of the penny while concealing that Rutherford’s own circle made exactly the same claim for Rutherford. Postponing the book from the late 1970s proved a benefit, since he later obtained the 1918 court transcripts of Rutherford et al vs. the United States, the 1943 Moyle vs. Franz record that preserved the by-laws laid before the shareholders in January 1917, Pennsylvania and New York corporate legislation of the period, and genealogical databases that allowed him to compile short lives of twenty participants. Reviewing earlier literature, he credits Rogerson, Tony Wills and M. James Penton with brief but creditable treatments and rates Rogerson’s 1972 doctoral thesis the best of three dissertations, while faulting those of William H. Cumberland (1958) and Joseph F. Zygmunt (1967) for serious errors and for ignoring the legal issues, and noting that none of the dissertations is publicly accessible. He judges George D. Chryssides’ 2009 chapter practically worthless, because it makes The Finished Mystery the cause of the controversy on July 17, 1917 when the contemporary sources show the uproar was entirely about Rutherford’s appointment of four new directors, transfers cartoons from the March 1918 magazine edition back onto the 1917 book, and misidentifies the founders of the Pastoral Bible Institute, including Pierson, who was neither ousted nor opposed to the Society in 1918. Poul Bregninge’s Judgment Day Must Wait (2013) is faulted in the same way, notably for claiming that Rutherford’s side feared nominations of Menta Sturgeon and Paul S.L. Johnson for president when the charter made non-directors ineligible, a point The Watch Tower had made before the election; Persson records that Bregninge’s 2021 edition removed many errors after his 2020 criticism. Persson closes by stating his method — contemporary documents take precedence, later recollections are admitted only when they fit the established picture, and unfavourable statements left uncontested by opponents are treated as reliable — and by noting that The Watch Tower Reprints, both court transcripts, the 1917 polemical pamphlets and much genealogical data are now available online.
Ch 1. Charles Taze Russell Was Dead
Persson opens with the night of 31 October 1916, when Associated Press dispatches reached the Watch Tower Society’s Brooklyn headquarters reporting that Charles Taze Russell had died aboard a train in the southwestern United States, a report the headquarters staff refused to believe until Menta Sturgeon’s confirming wire arrived at 6:30 the next morning. A. Hugh Macmillan read the telegram aloud at the breakfast table; although many knew Russell’s health had been failing since a severe illness the previous July, few had expected him to die before the “harvest work” ended, and Russell had left Macmillan in charge of headquarters when he departed on 16 October. Persson stresses how short the expected timetable was — Russell had written of “perhaps a year or two or three” — and sets out the expectations his followers carried into the crisis: the smiting of the antitypical “Jordan,” the separation of the Elijah from the Elisha class, the giving of the “penny” of the parable of Matthew 20, and the imminent seventh volume of Studies in the Scriptures. Russell was regarded by his followers, and by himself in private, as the “faithful and wise servant,” and was widely identified with the man with the writer’s inkhorn of Ezekiel 9, which explains his election as pastor by congregations from Pittsburgh to the Brooklyn and London Tabernacles. Persson reconstructs the Society’s constitutional position: the corporation incorporated in 1884 and renamed in 1896 gave ultimate authority to a board of directors, with the president intended only as chairman, and the board had merely conceded Russell personal supervision for his lifetime on the understanding that its own authority would reassert itself after his death. Russell’s power, Persson argues, rested on who he was rather than on his office — he cites Macmillan’s own admission that Russell effectively was the Society — and he directly contradicts later Watch Tower and Macmillan claims that the surviving directors, Alfred I. Ritchie, William E. Van Amburgh, H. Clay Rockwell, J. Dennis Wright, Isaac F. Hoskins and Joseph F. Rutherford, were “merely appointees of Russell’s,” noting that Rutherford himself called the board “self-perpetuating” in December 1916 and that every nominee had been legally elected by the board. The leadership was already fractious: Ritchie reportedly complained that Russell constantly had to settle disputes stirred up by Rutherford and Van Amburgh in his absence, and Rockwell had announced he was leaving Bethel, with Russell spending hours on 16 October trying and failing to reconcile him with Macmillan and Rutherford. On 1 November, the very day the death was confirmed, Macmillan — not himself a director — summoned the board and, according to Cora Sundbom’s recollection of Ritchie’s account, physically barred the vice president from the chairman’s seat with the words “We’re saving that for the Judge”; Paul S.L. Johnson’s later account agrees that Macmillan pushed Van Amburgh into the chair instead, and Persson notes Macmillan’s contrary later claim that Van Amburgh was unwell. Ritchie considered suing, then sought a sign from God and dropped the idea; meanwhile Rutherford, who had met Johnson for fellowship near Oakland, Maryland on 30 October, was summoned from Cleveland by telegram and reached Bethel on 2 November, the same day as Johnson, and at once asked Johnson, an expert in Biblical types, whether Scripture indicated that Russell was to have a successor — a question Johnson could not yet answer. At the board meeting of 2 November, A.N. Pierson, a wealthy 66-year-old Connecticut florist of Swedish origin who had never lived at Bethel or served as a pilgrim, was elected to Russell’s vacant seat; Persson argues the choice was engineered by Macmillan to keep out Menta Sturgeon, who would otherwise have been an obvious candidate for the presidency, since Macmillan and Rutherford both wanted Rutherford in that office, and the same meeting confirmed Russell’s plan to send Johnson to Britain, with Ritchie, Rutherford and Macmillan appointed to arrange it. Early on 3 November, Johnson returned with his answer: because Russell had died without giving out the “penny,” he could not have been the “steward” of the parable, so a successor must be coming — a conclusion Persson accepts as probably genuine on the strength of Johnson’s February 1917 cablegram, noting that within months both men had privately concluded that he himself was the steward, which destroyed their friendship. At noon that day Van Amburgh produced Russell’s will from the safe, saying it had been sealed in 1910 and untouched since, and handed it to Johnson to read aloud; Persson emphasises that although the will was fiercely argued over, its authenticity and wording went unchallenged at the time, and he refers claims of a substituted text to his appendices. The will showed that Russell had planned for no strong successor: The Watch Tower was to be run by a self-perpetuating editorial committee of five, warned expressly against “any spirit of ambition or pride or headship” and dependent on the board even for expenses, with a named panel of five and a reserve list that in fact contained six names. Persson examines a discrepancy in the reserve list, suggesting Rutherford was added when Dr. John Edgar died in 1910 while Edgar’s name was left in place, and observing that Rutherford could not have been named in 1907 since he had been baptised only a year earlier; the will also disclosed that Russell had donated his voting shares to the Society while vesting their management in five women trustees serving “for life,” and when William E. Page and E.W. Brenneisen at once declined to serve as editors — in terms suggesting their resignations were expected of them — Robert H. Hirsh and Rutherford took their places. Sturgeon reached New York with the body on 3 November; it was viewed at Bethel on the 4th, lay in state at the New York City Temple through the 5th, and was buried at dusk on 6 November in the Society’s plot at Rosemont Cemetery in Pittsburgh after a service in Carnegie Hall. Persson reads the Temple ceremony politically: of the seventeen talks reported in The Watch Tower, none were given by Rockwell, Hoskins or Wright, Ritchie’s was brief, while Macmillan and Rutherford each spoke alone in the morning and evening; the Brooklyn Daily Eagle later reported an actual dispute over who would speak, and Johnson used his own address to call Russell “Eldad” in prophetic type, an unnoticed hint of his later claims. Rockwell told Johnson at the Temple that he and other responsible brothers wanted Johnson as president and offered to vacate his own directorship so Johnson could be elected and become eligible — an offer Rockwell himself confirmed in a letter of 4 September 1917 — but Johnson declined, said he preferred Rutherford, and arranged for his 416 voting shares to be cast for Rutherford while he was abroad. Finally, at the Pittsburgh funeral on 6 November, Macmillan told Hoskins within feet of Russell’s body that every director except Rutherford and Van Amburgh should resign for “some decent men who know something” and that otherwise they would all “get kicked out”; Persson accepts the ousted directors’ report of this in Light after Darkness as true precisely because Rutherford answered many other charges in Harvest Siftings Part II but never this one, and concludes that the coming upheaval was already plain at the funeral.
Ch 2. Preparing for the Next Election
With Charles Taze Russell buried, the first question at Brooklyn was how the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society would actually be governed, since the charter gave authority to the seven-man board rather than to any single officer, and Vice President Alfred I. Ritchie — himself a stickler for the charter — could not simply inherit Russell’s role. Running every detail through seven men proved cumbersome, and Paul S.L. Johnson later said it was attempted “for about a week” before the board, on 7 November 1916, created a three-man Executive Committee answerable to it: Ritchie as chairman, William E. Van Amburgh as secretary-treasurer and Joseph F. Rutherford as director, with A.H. Macmillan appointed the Committee’s Representative. Persson sets the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s contemporary description of that arrangement against Macmillan’s much later claim in The Watchtower of 15 August 1966 that Rutherford “was made chairman,” treating the latter as a retrospective rationalisation of what the minutes show. Conditions in the British work and the wider wartime situation in Europe demanded attention, and Johnson — whom Russell had warned in Dallas on 21 October 1916 that London Bible Students were ignoring his arrangements — was the man sent, though Russell died before giving him the promised instructions. A detailed report from the London Tabernacle congregation reached Bethel on 8 November, Ritchie passed it to Johnson that evening, Johnson reported his assessment to the Executive Committee the next day, and on 10 November Gertrude W. Seibert added her own alarm and showed him Jesse Hemery’s long letter from the London office. Johnson’s paperwork had been prepared in advance — an appointment letter handed to him on 3 November but dated 1 November, and passports granted on 4 November — but an 8 November request to add Finland held things up until 11 November, the day he sailed. Almost immediately Rutherford pronounced Russell’s will legally defective and not binding, and by November 1916 was arguing that its provision for Russell’s voting shares was illegal; with the board’s consent he procured a lengthy opinion from a local law firm, read it to the five women trustees, and secured their agreement not to vote the shares. The board majority went along at the time but resented the setting aside of one of Russell’s arrangements, noting that the five “sisters” had held the shares as trustees for a decade and that article 5 of the charter provided for “assigns” to receive “non-forfeitable” voting shares — a grievance they would later use against Rutherford. Persson traces the shrinking of Russell’s holding — 35,577 of 62,044 shares in January 1907, no majority by 1908, about a fifth by 1916 — but insists the block was still large enough to matter in the coming election. He rejects Rutherford’s self-defence that the trustees would have voted for him anyway, pointing out that Rutherford could not have known this in early November 1916, and dismisses as strained Rutherford’s argument that voting the shares would set a precedent for hostile relatives of dead contributors. Since the question never went to court and a compliant firm’s opinion was easy to buy, Persson concludes the shares should not have been discarded and that Rutherford’s real object was to control the January 1917 election — for the vice presidency as much as the presidency, since he and Macmillan both wanted Ritchie gone. On the long-awaited seventh volume of Studies in the Scriptures, Persson shows Russell repeatedly declining to write on Revelation and Ezekiel and telling his travelling companion Menta Sturgeon that “someone else can write that”; the solution came from Seibert, whose letter of 6 December 1916 proposed “Bro. Woodworth” and “Bro. Fisher” as authors and supplied the title “The Finished Mystery.” The Committee replied on 7 December that it would consider any copy submitted, Woodworth wrote to Seibert on 11 December that the work was really hers and must pass her before reaching the Committee, and appeals for Russell’s unpublished comments were directed to her at the Hotel Margaret. Persson makes much of a discrepancy in sworn testimony: Rutherford said he received manuscripts “sometime in December” 1916 while Van Amburgh, also on the Committee, first saw them in May 1917 — evidence, he argues, that the Committee had become a formality, that Rutherford was ignoring the two men who were actually officers of the Society, and that he had taken over Ritchie’s work and the president’s duties in fact if not in name. The board pushed back on 13 December 1916 with a motion by Isaac F. Hoskins, seconded by J.D. Wright, requiring the Executive Committee to report to it on request, but Rutherford, writing in the summer of 1917, defended government by “one mind” against the charter and Russell’s intentions, prompting Johnson’s judgment that his pride had made figureheads of his two colleagues. Persson emphasises that Rutherford’s succession looked anything but inevitable: the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of 26 November 1916 headlined that the reins were going to Ritchie and quoted Macmillan doubting Rutherford would even want a job requiring him to leave Los Angeles, two days later the paper reported Ritchie in line for election at the January meeting in Pittsburgh, and at the 1943 Moyle trial Van Amburgh confirmed Ritchie was the only name he had heard. Behind the scenes Macmillan was telling Van Amburgh that Rutherford was the only competent man, an inconsistency with his later line that “individuals are unimportant to God’s work,” and the Eagle of 31 July 1917 said he had been “secretly working in the interests of Judge Rutherford.” Persson stresses how detached Rutherford had been — he left the Society’s active work in the summer of 1915 for Los Angeles, borrowing $1,000 from the Society for a law office, and was preoccupied with his wife’s failing health, only becoming prominent again from August 1916 — and argues Russell’s own preference is visible in Ritchie, elected to the board and then vice president in 1911 and re-elected every year through 1916, and given the most responsible Bethel duties when Russell left on his last trip on 16 October 1916. By the end of December 1916 Rutherford was confident of victory — Robert H. Hirsh, later a leading opponent, told him everyone knew he would be elected — and he was already preparing measures to free his hands before the decisive shareholders’ meeting set for Pittsburgh on Saturday, 6 January 1917.
Ch 3. The Annual Meeting of January 6, 1917
Persson opens by arguing that Joseph F. Rutherford needed a device to get around the Watch Tower Society’s charter before the shareholders’ election of January 6, 1917, because that charter, written by Charles Taze Russell himself, put management of the corporation in a board of seven directors who were to control publications and by-laws once Russell was gone. Rather than propose an honest amendment, which would have required court action and would have offended shareholders who regarded Russell as “that servant,” Rutherford arranged for an apparently neutral committee to recommend by-laws he had already written, intending afterwards to press the board to treat them as untouchable. Persson stresses that the charter gave shareholders no voice in by-laws at all, and that the original charter, which he reprints in his Appendix 3, has never appeared in the Society’s official histories although it was printed twice in the Watch Tower. Every party agreed Rutherford drafted the by-laws in advance; he said A.I. Ritchie handed them to the resolutions committee, Ritchie insisted W.E. Van Amburgh did, and committee chairman Ingram I. Margeson corroborated Ritchie, leaving Ritchie responsible only for appointing the committee. The meeting itself convened in Carnegie Hall on Pittsburgh’s North Side at 10:30 AM with Ritchie presiding, and he named Margeson of Boston, A.W. Ostrander of Cleveland and R.H. Bricker of Pittsburgh as the committee on by-laws and resolutions before adjourning until four o’clock, though it was nearly five when the session resumed. Directors Wright, Ritchie, Hoskins and Robert H. Hirsh later recounted that Rutherford intercepted the committee behind the platform and held them an hour, threatening a fight on the convention floor until they agreed to report his by-laws exactly as drafted; Rutherford conceded he had interfered but said only over certain parts. For Persson the episode shows the content was Rutherford’s rather than the shareholders’, a point he reinforces by noting that Section I was “slightly amended” later the same year with no shareholder involvement, the published revision differing noticeably from the text entered in the record in 1943. Paul S.L. Johnson’s later account, which he says Margeson confirmed, has Van Amburgh strolling up to the puzzled committee as if by accident and producing Rutherford’s resolutions; the members judged that these would make the Society “a one-man affair,” revised them to protect the board, and then gave way under Rutherford’s threat. As adopted, the by-laws made the president executive officer and general manager of the work in America and the foreign branches, allowed him to appoint an advisory committee at his discretion, and left the board entitled only to reports “from time to time upon request.” Persson reads this as licence for Rutherford to work through A.H. Macmillan and Van Amburgh while sidelining the directors, which made the by-laws the central quarrel within months; their full text survives because it was entered in the 1943 Moyle trial record and he prints it in Appendix 5. The election followed at about five o’clock with Macmillan chairing and roughly 150,000 voting shares present or held in proxy, and Persson works through why, of the seven eligible directors, only Ritchie and Rutherford were realistic candidates: Van Amburgh was the long-serving secretary-treasurer, A.N. Pierson was new to the board and elderly, Hoskins was gravely ill with pneumonia, Rockwell was at odds with Macmillan and Rutherford, and Wright kept too low a profile. Pierson, speaking as a proxy-holder, placed Rutherford in nomination, seconds came from several cities, nominations were then closed, the rule of balloting was suspended, and the convention secretary cast the whole vote so that Rutherford was declared unanimously elected. Persson calls two features grossly irregular: the absence of any rival nomination for Ritchie, the presumed successor, with evidence that proxies instructed for other candidates were disregarded or simply counted for Rutherford while Macmillan afterwards boasted before witnesses of his own cleverness; and the suspension of balloting, which paragraph VIII of the charter required, making the presidential election in his view illegal. He supports this with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of July 31, 1917, which described Macmillan’s faction secretly working for Rutherford against the general expectation that Ritchie would succeed Russell and reported surprise when it emerged that some had voted against him, and with Raymond G. Jolly, later head of the Laymen’s Home Missionary Movement, who told Persson he was present and that the proxy holders’ shares were never counted. For vice president both Pierson and Ritchie were nominated, Pierson took the larger vote and was then declared unanimous; Persson infers that large proxy holders meant to push Ritchie out of office altogether, aided by Rutherford’s personal lobbying on the floor. He judges Pierson, a Connecticut nurseryman living far from Brooklyn and busy with his floral business, to have been installed as a figurehead who would endorse rather than obstruct, an assessment Rutherford would later find mistaken, while Van Amburgh’s unopposed re-election as secretary-treasurer was uncontroversial and the remaining directors kept their seats as the charter required. In his “Reflections” Persson argues the by-laws were void because the charter forbade by-laws “repugnant” to it, citing Francis H. McGee, Assistant to the Attorney General in New Jersey, and Philadelphia lawyer J. Fithian Tatem against the provision that made an “opponent” cease to be a voting member when the charter declared voting shares “non-forfeitable.” Johnson, returning from England, charged that Rutherford, Van Amburgh and Macmillan had conspired before the election and prearranged every detail, including an account of the meeting handed to the press a week ahead that prompted the New York Herald’s editor to joke about the prophetic gifts of “those Bethel people”; Persson identifies the intermediary as Hirsh, the Watch Tower’s managing editor and a former newspaperman whom Rutherford got elected to the board on March 29, 1917 and who turned against him within weeks. The decisive proof for Persson is that several papers, including The Syracuse Herald, reported Ritchie re-elected vice president, which could only happen if the story was written before the voting, so the “unanimous” presidency must equally have been settled in advance; two tasks still remained for Rutherford, the Peoples Pulpit Association’s annual meeting on January 10 and the acceptance of the Pittsburgh by-laws by that corporation’s board.
Ch 4. The Peoples Pulpit Association and Adoption of By-Laws
Persson breaks from the narrative to explain the Peoples Pulpit Association, a body whose charter the Watch Tower Society has never printed and never adequately described, and which he reproduces in full in his Appendix 4. The Association was set up in the early spring of 1909, when Russell shifted headquarters from Pittsburgh to Brooklyn, on Rutherford’s advice as the Society’s legal counsel that the Pennsylvania corporation had no standing to hold property or do business in New York; the Watch Tower Society remained the parent body, with the Association only an auxiliary. Persson argues this advice was simply wrong, citing a 1917 opinion from the New York firm Davies, Auerbach & Cornell and section 17 of the state’s General Corporation Law to show that a non-stock foreign corporation like the Society needed neither registration nor a separate New York entity, so Rutherford’s counsel was unprofessional. He finds a second blunder in the drafting: the new charter set the Association’s elections in New York for the “first Saturday of each year,” the very day the Watch Tower Society’s charter fixed for its own annual meeting in Pennsylvania, making both impossible to hold. Written while Russell’s leadership was under attack, the charter insulated him by making the Association’s president hold office “for life” with no annual election, and restricted membership to people the directors approved after a thousand-dollar contribution, one vote each. Membership stayed tiny — 36 in 1910, named by L.W. Jones in the Souvenir Convention Report, 41 when the charter was amended in 1912, and “fewer than fifty votes” by 1917 — and at the 1918 sedition trial Van Amburgh and George H. Fisher admitted the thousand dollars was never actually paid but merely credited as a book transfer, which Persson reads as proof the Watch Tower board simply picked the membership it wanted. He traces the board from the 1909 incorporators through the 1912 amendment and the departures before Russell’s death in 1916, notes the charter’s rules for filling vacancies and for a vice president serving in the interim, and observes that nobody has ever revealed who held that post when Russell died. From a proxy form reprinted in Light after Darkness, Persson establishes that the Association’s annual meeting was held in Brooklyn on January 10, 1917 — a Wednesday, four days late — that no report of it was ever published, and that Rutherford was evidently elected president there, with Macmillan vice president, W.F. Hudgings secretary and Van Amburgh treasurer, leaving him one obstacle short of control. That obstacle was the by-laws: the Society’s charter reserved by-law making to its board alone, and only on January 19, 1917 did a meeting convene for the purpose, staged by Rutherford as a joint session of both boards so that his supporters Macmillan and Hudgings could press any dissenters, and conveniently missing Hoskins, who was ill, and Rockwell, who had just been removed from Bethel. The by-laws carried unanimously; Ritchie and Wright, who were not Rutherford men, later explained that they could not foresee that he would misuse the power, and Persson notes they could not have blocked it in any case. Only in The Watch Tower of March 15, 1917 did Rutherford announce that the Executive Committee formed after Russell’s death had lapsed with the election of a president — a statement Persson calls misleading, since the charter said nothing about the president being executive officer, Russell had acted as executive because he was Russell, and the very need for the Pittsburgh and Brooklyn by-laws proved the presidency carried no such power by itself.
Ch 5. Brewing Dissatisfaction and the Case of Paul S.L. Johnson
Persson opens the chapter by noting that Joseph F. Rutherford, from the beginning of his presidency, pressed the common Bible Student conviction that Charles Taze Russell had personally been “that servant,” and that although he refused to be made the new “pastor” he accepted the designation “Counselor,” which in practice came to much the same thing. The title was resented even at headquarters: Russell’s former private secretary Menta Sturgeon said Rutherford was manufacturing a church office to gain prestige and power, the directors who later became his opponents objected that “counselor” was one of Jesus’ titles and had never been an office in the church, and Sturgeon further told Rutherford that the Bethel household generally believed he had used “political methods” to obtain the presidency, naming former vice president A.I. Ritchie among those who said so. Rutherford answered by having Andrew N. Pierson, W.E. Van Amburgh and A.H. Macmillan state at the Bethel table that he had never spoken to them about the election of January 6, 1917 beforehand, but Persson argues this missed the point, since Rutherford had more than once outlined the plan of closing nominations after a single name — the procedure Macmillan as chairman then applied, which kept Ritchie from ever being nominated — and he cites Macmillan’s own later recollection that Rutherford had been a lawyer and politician in his youth. Persson treats Rutherford’s remark that Ritchie had been unhappy about the management “since he failed election at Pittsburgh” as a tacit admission that strings had been pulled to remove Ritchie even from the vice presidency in favour of the newcomer Pierson; he then contradicts Rutherford’s autumn 1917 assertion in print that the office had run smoothly until about June 1917 and that Johnson’s English episodes started the trouble, since the directors had already stated in print that misgivings arose within weeks of the January 1917 by-laws and that objections to the president’s course ran from January to March, and at the 1918 sedition trial Rutherford himself testified under oath that the four directors had been disgruntled about other matters. Rutherford left New York for California on February 8, 1917, mainly for family reasons — he had moved his household to Los Angeles in 1915 and his wife Mary Rutherford’s health kept her there — and at a board meeting held earlier that day H. Clay Rockwell, a critic of his, resigned, his resignation being filed with no action taken. More pressing was news from England, where Paul S.L. Johnson, sent in November 1916 to settle trouble and at first warmly received according to a letter from Frank E. Barnett of London, had on February 3, 1917 dismissed Henry Shearn and William Crawford as managers of the London office, leaving Jesse Hemery alone in charge — alarming because the two men were also secretary and treasurer of the British International Bible Students Association. In Rutherford’s absence Macmillan acted as his representative with final authority although he sat on no board, so Vice President Pierson had no part at all in running Bethel or the Society, while on February 24 Johnson cabled Rutherford in California claiming to be the “steward” of Matthew 20:8 with “powers like Russell’s” and asking whether Rutherford would be his “right hand,” a tacit reference to their conversation at Bethel on November 3, 1916; Rutherford cabled London that the dismissals were “absolutely without authority” and ordered Johnson home. Johnson decided on March 6 that only the board, not the president alone, could recall him and resumed work at the London office; unable to get further replies from Rutherford or to reach the board, he had his credentials revoked under the Society’s seal on March 15, which Rutherford confirmed by cable on March 27. Persson reports Johnson’s health as the sources give it: a mental breakdown in 1910 had taken him out of pilgrim service for some months and led some Bible Students to call him “demonized and insane,” though three months of hard physical labour restored him; in 1916–17 he worked so hard in England that he feared a repetition, describing himself as almost completely exhausted from loss of sleep, and a number of British Bible Students concluded he was undergoing a severe breakdown. Rutherford cabled Hemery that Johnson was “demented” and “insane”; Hemery did not fully agree and Rutherford later admitted he had been mistaken, but Johnson himself afterwards said he had believed since 1910 that he was the antitypical Medad of Numbers 11, had told his wife, and confided the idea to Hemery in February 1917. Rutherford left California on March 7, stopped at Johnson’s home town of Columbus, Ohio on March 11 to tell Emma Johnson of his concern for her husband — she asked that he be kept in Brooklyn until recovered — and reached Brooklyn on March 14, by which time Persson holds him responsible for leaving the board at six members for 34 days: the charter required the seat to be filled within twenty days and gave the president a temporary appointment only if the board failed within thirty, yet no instructions were given, and only on March 29, 49 days after Rockwell’s resignation, did the board under Rutherford’s chairmanship elect Robert Henry Hirsh, a Peoples Pulpit Association director and Watch Tower editorial committee member who was then Rutherford’s own supporter and choice. When Hirsh turned against him about late April and became the board’s most vocal opponent, Rutherford had an outside lawyer declare the election a “usurpation of the authority of the President” because the thirty days had lapsed, and invalid besides for having been held in New York rather than in Allegheny, Pennsylvania — a position Persson calls illegal and shockingly immoral, since the delay was Rutherford’s own doing, he had voted for Hirsh, instigated the election and raised no objection to its venue at the time, and since his July 1917 claim that the Society had held no board meeting in Pennsylvania since 1909 would equally void his own election to the board in 1910 and Pierson’s in November 1916, all while he was the Society’s legal adviser approving the board’s business. At the March 29 meeting Rutherford at last reported the English situation and Johnson’s conduct to a board that had known nothing of it; Ritchie had misgivings about Johnson’s claimed power to dismiss the London managers but objected that so important a matter belonged before the board, and was told it was something with which the board had nothing whatever to do. Johnson reached New York on April 9, was met by Van Amburgh and received coldly at Bethel; at the hearing he requested on April 10, attended by five directors plus the non-members Macmillan and Sturgeon and therefore, as Johnson noted, not properly a board meeting, he said Rutherford acted for over an hour like a “pettifogging prosecutor” and met his requests to present the British case with sneers and ridicule. A second session on April 11 again excluded the British question as already settled, but Johnson used it to expound the Eldad and Medad type and David’s mighty men as proof that he was the Lord’s chosen messenger and the second-ranking figure after Russell, with Rutherford only the seventh; Rutherford abruptly closed the meeting and afterwards reported that all present agreed Johnson was labouring under “some mental delusion.” Persson turns that admission against Rutherford: if everyone present thought Johnson deluded, his later charge that the four opposing directors had Johnson as their “leader” directing their course cannot have been honest — a point pressed by Johnson and by the lawyer Francis H. McGee, and denied outright by the directors, who called the coupling of Johnson’s affairs with their own an attempt to becloud a quarrel that predated his return. Johnson then stayed quiet at Bethel for about two months, was persuaded by Sturgeon that Russell had been “the Steward,” and withdrew the claim before the Bethel family — the Bethel worker F.G. Mason describing an open apology that was apparently forgiven — whereupon Rutherford apologised to him on April 25 for having called him insane; he resumed half-days at the Tabernacle early in May and pilgrim work on Sundays from May 20 to June 24, 1917. Persson closes by noting Johnson’s own admission decades later that in withdrawing the “Steward” claim he had never abandoned the belief that he was the priestly executive and teacher in charge of the Lord’s special work after Russell’s death: he was biding his time.
Ch 6. Paul S.L. Johnson’s Visit to Britain [part 1]
Persson treats Paul S.L. Johnson’s four and a half months in Britain, from November 19, 1916 to March 31, 1917, as both a landmark in British Bible Student history and a direct trigger of the 1917 management crisis at the Watch Tower Society. The background was trouble in the London office and in the London Tabernacle congregation that had worried C.T. Russell before his death, and which Jesse Hemery had reported to him in September 1916 as a movement showing disloyalty; Johnson went as one of Russell’s most trusted men, and Persson notes that even Rutherford, by then furious with him, still called him the ablest brother in the land. Persson rejects A.H. Macmillan’s much later claim that a main object of the trip was preaching to and comforting soldiers, pointing out that no contemporary source mentions it; the stated purpose was to investigate the managers and the Tabernacle. He weighs his evidence explicitly: the two modern accounts, the Society’s 1973 Yearbook and Albert O. Hudson’s 1989 history, are useful but undocumented and error-strewn, so he leans on the 1917 pamphlet war and on Johnson’s later articles in “The Present Truth”. Wartime passport rules meant Johnson needed a documented reason to sail, so Rutherford dictated a “letter of appointment” on November 3 that was backdated to November 1 and sent to Washington the same day, and the passport was stamped granted on November 4. Before Johnson sailed, the London quarrel reached Brooklyn in writing: the three managers Hemery, Henry Shearn and William Crawford were also Tabernacle elders, with Shearn and Crawford leading a majority of elders who wanted more independence from Brooklyn while Hemery’s minority wanted no change. The elders’ majority and minority reports, meant for Russell, arrived only after his funeral; vice president A.I. Ritchie passed them to Johnson on November 8, and Johnson studied the whole file on November 9 and 10, while Gertrude W. Seibert showed him a further pleading letter from Hemery. Rutherford had Johnson transfer Hemery’s coded marks about each of the eighteen elders onto a clean Tabernacle schedule, and the Executive Committee forbade him to reveal in Britain that he had seen the correspondence — an order Persson says he kept. Because of this alarming material, Rutherford dictated a second and far broader document on November 10, the “credentials”, which named Johnson the Society’s special representative with power to inspect branch property and accounts anywhere outside the United States, signed by Ritchie and attested by W.E. Van Amburgh. Persson flatly calls Rutherford’s later assertion that the credentials were issued merely to obtain a passport an outright lie, since the passport was already granted on November 4 and the credentials were not signed and sealed until the morning of November 11 as Johnson was leaving — though he adds that Johnson later exercised more authority than the committee intended. Johnson landed at Liverpool on November 19, 1916, expecting to act as peacemaker, and threw himself into pilgrim work across England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland, claiming a hundred discourses and thirty-two public lectures, at real cost to his health, while British Bible Students were already strained by conscription and by the roughly sixty of their number then in prison. His first clash came over the Manchester convention programme: he forced a special managers’ meeting on December 20 and, invoking his standing as the Society’s special representative, refused discussion and had the programme rewritten, though he could not move the baptism; at the convention itself, attended by more than 600, all three managers spoke but Johnson took the most prominent places. Johnson’s disapproval of Shearn and Crawford hardened through December — he confronted the eleven elders on November 30, reported mildly against the two on December 3, and by the turn of the year was telling them not to stand for re-election — and he had Hemery compile a list of their office and Bethel offences, presented at a managers’ meeting on January 8, 1917 and later published, evidence Persson reads as confirming a discord the Society itself conceded in the 1973 Yearbook. On January 21 Hemery announced Johnson’s disapproval to the congregation, which resolved to hear Johnson the following Sunday; the same day Johnson formally recommended to the Executive Committee that both men be dismissed as “mismanagers”. At the Tabernacle meeting of January 28, 1917 Johnson accused Shearn above all of deceiving both the elders and Russell, delivered what he called the severest rebuke he had ever given a man, and declared both managers cut off from the Little Flock; Hemery’s own February 5 letter to Rutherford, which Johnson quoted and Hemery later admitted was quoted correctly, supports the account. Persson stresses the meeting’s effect on Johnson himself: he took the congregation’s support as proof that he held chief charge as the Lord’s special representative, a conviction that would destroy his position in Britain, while some thirty to forty dissatisfied members cabled and wrote to Rutherford. When Shearn and Crawford tried on February 3 to apply the Matthew 18 procedure to him, Johnson answered in writing with their dismissal as managers, cabled Brooklyn, and installed E. Housden and later A. Kirkwood as assistant managers under Hemery, who backed the move enthusiastically. Rutherford’s reaction was cautious — he asked for an agreed statement of facts — and Persson argues the Executive Committee plainly never expected Johnson to sack managers on his own, a reading supported by Ritchie’s later admission of misgivings and by Johnson’s own January 21 recommendation, which shows he had originally thought the decision was Brooklyn’s. Johnson’s standing then collapsed: Glasgow elders concluded his mind had lost its balance and cancelled his meeting there, Shearn blamed him for the High Court ruling of February 4 that subjected elders to conscription, and his planned continental tour, sketched in a February 15 letter to August Lundborg in Sweden, never happened. At a second, three-hour Tabernacle meeting on February 18 Johnson marshalled witnesses, extracted public confessions from six of the signing elders, concentrated his fire on Crawford, and won a vote of confidence — Hemery conceding the congregation accepted the outcome while disliking the extravagance of his methods. The cable exchange that followed destroyed him: after Rutherford ordered the managers reinstated on February 19 and appointed five British elders to investigate on February 22, Johnson replied on February 24 with a cable of Old Testament typology claiming he had been the “Steward” of Matthew 20:8 since January 28 and held “powers like Russell’s”; Persson accepts that cable and Johnson’s same-day letter to Hemery as authentic because Johnson never disputed a sentence of them in “Harvest Siftings Reviewed”, while noting in fairness Johnson’s plea that such typological talk was normal between him and Rutherford in private. Hemery switched sides on February 26, cabling Rutherford that he was resisting Johnson as the Society’s representative — a claim Persson calls dishonest, since Hemery’s own letter of February 25 had praised the changes as a cleansing of the sanctuary. Rutherford answered that Johnson was demented, had no powers and should be shipped home, and his recall cable of February 26 reached Johnson on February 28; Johnson’s last British engagements at Liverpool and Manchester on February 24–26, where he spoke of being Russell’s successor, left observers such as John J. Cochran convinced of his mental instability. Back in London from March 1 Johnson kept quiet for nearly a week, resisting Hemery’s advice to sail at once and lodge his claim in America, cabling Rutherford without reply, and — by his own later account — not yet questioning Rutherford’s right to recall him.
Ch 6. Paul S.L. Johnson’s Visit to Britain [part 2]
Having surrendered his official role on returning to the London Bethel on 1 March 1917, Paul S.L. Johnson nonetheless kept pressing his personal claims, and when Rutherford’s investigative commission sat at the London Bethel from 3 to 5 March he read it a protest and refused to testify, on the ground that a Special Representative holding powers of attorney could not properly be investigated by such a body. Persson accepts that Johnson genuinely regarded himself as the “Steward” of the Penny Parable and therefore above the commission, but he charges Joseph F. Rutherford with slander for later claiming Johnson had lobbied the commissioners after their appointment: of the two Crawford letters Rutherford printed as proof, the first predates the commission entirely and the second never says the interviews came afterwards. Persson accepts Johnson’s own explanation instead — that four of his eight British counselors happened to be chosen as commissioners, that he had summoned all eight to meet on 3 March to save time and money, and that he cancelled the meeting precisely because it would have looked like interference. The commission consisted of McCloy of Birkenhead, Warden and McKenzie of Glasgow, Robinson and Ebenezer Housden, Johnson’s own appointee as assistant manager in London; Persson notes that Rutherford plainly expected an exoneration of H.J. Shearn and William Crawford but that Housden in fact backed Johnson. On the night of 6 March Johnson reversed himself completely, reasoning that because the board had sent him and the Society’s seal authenticated his credentials, only the board could recall him, and he told Jesse Hemery he was resuming his work as Special Representative. The next morning he announced this to the Bethel family, took the chair at the head of the table before anyone else could, and — despite Hemery’s protest that this was open rebellion — carried most of the staff with him, so that the office ran on as usual until 12 March. On 7 March Johnson telegraphed Ritchie and Van Amburgh appealing to the board against Rutherford’s repudiation of him, and dictated a ten-point written protest, together with petitions asking the board to make Rutherford retract in the British Watch Tower and to strip him of sole executive power in favour of a committee; Johnson says Rutherford never let any of it reach the board. Johnson then took a still more radical line: reading the Watch Tower report of the 6-7 January Pittsburgh gathering only in early March, he took the word “convention” at face value and concluded that the officers had not been elected by the proper body, so from 10 March he cabled Ritchie as the last legally elected ranking officer. Persson judges this reasoning badly flawed — the December 1916 Watch Tower had announced the charter-mandated annual meeting for 6 January, roughly 150,000 votes were represented, and the balloting that gave Pierson the vice-presidency over Ritchie confirms a shareholders’ election — even though, as he has already argued, that election was rigged in ways Johnson could not then have known. Rutherford, back from Los Angeles, cabled Hemery on 10 March to take full possession, and was in Columbus, Ohio on 11 March. Monday 12 March brought a two-hour confrontation at the Bethel table in which Johnson declared the officers illegitimate and announced he would take charge of the British work; when Hemery refused to leave, Johnson suspended him in a document witnessed by Housden, and the household split, with only four people continuing to eat with Hemery. Persson suspects that one of the defectors to Hemery’s side was Alexander Kirkwood, the man Johnson had installed in February in Shearn’s place, since Johnson later withdrew Kirkwood’s authority and referred obliquely to “a suspended supporter” of Hemery. The bank’s decision on 13 March to honour only Hemery, Shearn and Crawford as signatories convinced Johnson that the three had concocted a financial “scheme”, and after obtaining from the auditors Davis and Winder a copy of their letter of 22 January he concluded it made the British I.B.S.A. an effectively independent corporation at the Watch Tower Society’s expense. He accordingly authorised a suit on 14 March against Hemery, Shearn, Crawford and the bank in the High Court of Justice; the same day Rutherford cabled Hemery to deprive Johnson of money and authority and to “Arrest and incarcerate him”, an instruction Hemery found impossible to carry out, saying he could not call Johnson insane, only proud. A sealed cancellation of Johnson’s credentials was posted on 15 March but bore only Rutherford’s and Van Amburgh’s signatures and, delayed by wartime censorship, arrived too late to matter; on 17 March Justice Sargant granted Johnson a temporary injunction on the view that only the board under seal could cancel his credentials. Hemery countered by bringing in the London Tabernacle elders and deacons, and on 18 March H.C. Thackway denounced Johnson from the pulpit as being in rebellion — decisive, Persson notes, because Rutherford had been elected the congregation’s pastor on 21 January and its chairman on 18 February — after which Johnson’s support at Bethel collapsed. Hemery seized the mail on 20 March after a failed attempt the day before, and on the night of 21-22 March had Johnson’s bedroom door blocked with a chunk of wood and Housden’s keys taken from his pocket; the safe was empty, Housden would not say where the money was, and a policeman who called about a blackout violation at 11.30 p.m. was afterwards used as a bluff to keep Johnson in check. Johnson broke his door open around 6 a.m., found Housden locked in and searched, and — with a guard blocking the front door and his court papers to protect before the next day’s hearing — lowered himself from the balcony onto the iron fence and into the street; Persson notes that neither Hemery nor the 1973 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses mentions that Housden stayed locked up until 2 p.m. Persson treats Hemery’s mocking account of milkmen seeing a man in a tall hat, frock coat and galoshes as probably invented, since Johnson’s overcoat covered the frock coat, and observes that Johnson’s fears were vindicated when Hemery went through his portfolio, read his private letters and sent papers to Rutherford — plain theft, in Persson’s words. Johnson moved to a hotel rather than, as Rutherford alleged, concealing himself; the injunction motion collapsed on 23 March because his credentials had never been notarised, was put off to 30 March and then to 30 April while Hemery’s solicitor waited for the posted cancellation, and on 7 May a judge held Johnson had no authority to bring the suit at all. Persson corrects two claims about the suit: it did not stop the British work, since Johnson consented to 1,250 dollars being drawn for expenses, and the alleged conspiracy dissolves on inspection, because the Davis and Winder letter records only the auditors’ own Board of Trade requirements and because Hemery could not in fact cooperate with Shearn and Crawford — a point confirmed when Housden, who had cabled Van Amburgh on 18 March alleging a “colossal effort” to defraud the Society, could produce no evidence and apologised in writing to Rutherford. Hemery cabled Rutherford on 24 March that the affair was “frazzled” and praised Kirkwood while conspicuously omitting Shearn and Crawford, who never returned as branch managers; Johnson gave up on 26 March, left London on 31 March, sailed from Liverpool on the St. Louis on 1 April and reached New York on 9 April, his planned visits to other countries abandoned. Only on 29 March, when Johnson was already homeward bound, did Rutherford report the British affair to the Brooklyn board, which Persson argues was a deliberate exclusion — four directors later complained he had acted without the board’s knowledge or consent — and he contends the whole crisis might have been contained had Rutherford consulted the directors as early as Johnson’s cable of 3 February or his “Steward” cable of 24 February, since the charter let the vice president preside in the president’s absence. Persson closes by noting Rutherford’s refusal at the board meeting of 20 June 1917 to allow a vote on Robert H. Hirsh’s motion that the Society pay 500 dollars to Johnson’s solicitor, though it had a four-to-seven majority behind it and though Rutherford later accepted Pierson’s proposal to give the ousted directors three hundred dollars each; he calls Rutherford’s linking of the British episode to his own quarrel with the board a red herring, and records that Rutherford, Hemery, Gilbert Mackenzie and Thackway all excused Johnson as mentally strained while several of his British critics still credited him with a cleansing work.
Ch 6. Paul S.L. Johnson’s Visit to Britain [part 3]
Persson closes his account of the British mission by arguing that Paul S.L. Johnson’s deepest handicap was his fixed habit of reading Old Testament persons and incidents as “types” whose “antitypes” he located in the Bible Student movement and, above all, in himself. He had brought this interpretive system with him to Britain, and it shaped practical instructions as well as doctrine: in February 1917 Johnson told Jesse Hemery to lay in wheat and “monkey nuts” against a famine he claimed was “at the very doors,” reasoning from the famine Elisha announced at 2 Kings 8:1. Persson is blunt that the forecast failed — no such famine came to Britain — and treats it as proof that the antitype was simply invented. A second example is Johnson’s ruling that the London Tabernacle congregation should have twelve elders rather than eighteen, a number he drew from Nehemiah, who in fact was describing Jerusalem in his own day and not London in 1917. Since there were exactly eighteen elders when Johnson arrived, Persson suggests the Nehemiah “type” may well have driven Johnson’s campaign to thin the Tabernacle eldership, though he frames this as a temptation to infer rather than a proven motive. Hemery, for his part, refused the whole scheme, telling Johnson that the British situation could not be expected to be the antitype of the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Persson notes that Johnson himself later conceded, in the 1941 tenth volume of his Epiphany Studies in the Scriptures, that he had lost his customary mildness and had let anger and severity mark his speech and writing against his opponents. Johnson also admitted that he had “at times went too far” in defending himself and his office, though Persson stresses he never abandoned the typology, which fills his later multi-volume writings. Beyond the types, Persson records other conduct he considers improper, chief among them Johnson’s attempt to break up William Crawford’s marriage. Crawford complained to Joseph F. Rutherford that Johnson had repeatedly approached his wife in his absence with the same accusatory story and on one occasion reduced her to near hysterics. On this evidence Persson allows that Rutherford and Hemery may have had a point when they questioned Johnson’s mental health, ending the chapter on that concession rather than a defence of Johnson. The remainder of the chunk is the chapter’s dense footnote apparatus, running to 277 notes, which shows the narrow documentary base Persson works from: the rival 1917 pamphlets Harvest Siftings and Harvest Siftings Reviewed, Hemery’s self-published rejoinder “Harvest Siftings Reviewed,” Itself Reviewed of December 7, 1917, Johnson’s Epiphany Studies Vol. 10 and his magazine The Present Truth, the Society’s Watch Tower and its Swedish edition VAKT-TORNET, the 1973 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Faith on the March for the Society’s later version, Hudson’s study, and the 1918 trial transcript in Rutherford et al vs. The United States.
Ch 7. Headed for a Showdown
Persson opens the chapter by showing that the four directors who came to oppose Joseph F. Rutherford did so first as a matter of information: they later complained that they could get almost nothing about the Society’s affairs even though the law held them responsible for it. Treasurer William E. Van Amburgh repeatedly refused board members access to the records, and even vice president Andrew N. Pierson, who backed Rutherford, said no satisfactory treasurer’s report had reached him since he joined the board. After a failed attempt to get information in early July 1917 the directors told the Bible Student attorney Francis H. McGee that Rutherford habitually shut down discussion by telling them they were not lawyers and so were not competent to judge; Dennis Wright added that a promise made just after Russell’s death to talk matters through at length was never kept. The clearest example Persson gives of information withheld is the seventh volume of Studies in the Scriptures, announced on July 17, 1917, whose preparation the majority of the board knew nothing about beforehand even though work had been under way since December 1916. By Rutherford’s own later account the executive committee of Ritchie, Van Amburgh and himself had commissioned Woodworth and Fisher to compile the manuscript on Ezekiel and Revelation, with no promise that it would be used. Rutherford alone handled the manuscript, reading it on his California trip from February 8, 1917 and finishing all but the closing chapters of Ezekiel by March 21, and he testified in court that he had discussed it with nobody in the Society. Persson picks apart Rutherford’s claim to have consulted Van Amburgh, Macmillan, Martin and Hudgings: only Van Amburgh sat on the board, Pierson was not asked at all, and the men chosen were unlikely to object. Van Amburgh, approached in May 1917, read only parts and still urged publication; on June 6 Macmillan declined to read anything but the preface and approved it anyway, and the printing contract was signed that same day. Martin swore he was not told until July 11, more than a month after the contract, and Persson infers that Hudgings, who ran the Society’s printing and filed for the copyright, was likewise informed only once the decision was made. Persson concludes that Rutherford was solely responsible for publishing the volume, which he called his sacred duty, and that ignoring the board flatly violated the charter clause reserving decisions on publications to the board of directors. The wider grievance was Rutherford’s treatment of Russell’s will and charter, which drew Robert H. Hirsh into opposition in April 1917 and gave the board a critical majority; Rutherford had already neutralised the voting shares Russell left to be cast by five trustees. The editorial committee of The Watch Tower was another breach: F. H. Robison was kept off it for about a year while his name still appeared in every issue, blocked, the four directors said, by trumped-up charges from Rutherford and Van Amburgh. H. C. Rockwell’s name likewise ran on for months after he resigned, the obvious reserve-list replacement I. F. Hoskins was unacceptable because Macmillan disliked him, and Rutherford eventually pushed through Menta Sturgeon, who was not on the list at all and appeared as editor only in the April 15, 1917 issue — a delay at odds with the will’s demand that the journal never lack a full committee of five. Reaching forward past the crisis, Persson cites Rutherford’s launch of The Golden Age in 1919 as proof that he set no store by the will’s ban on other periodicals, noting the objections acknowledged in The Watch Tower of October 15, 1919 and Paul Johnson’s charge that the Tower editors had wrested the will’s fifth paragraph. A further quarrel concerned the Angelophone, the hymn records Russell introduced in 1916: Macmillan moved to cancel the contracts the morning after Russell died, and the directors held that Rutherford, Van Amburgh and Macmillan had ridiculed and hampered the venture and provoked hundreds of complaint letters. Ritchie, who favoured the Angelophone, went after a board discussion of it on February 3, 1917 to McGee, then Assistant to the Attorney General of New Jersey; McGee recalled that Ritchie named no opponents but feared that the way Brooklyn was being run would end in trouble. Macmillan himself became the sharpest point of conflict: appointed representative of the executive committee by unanimous board vote on November 7, 1916 and kept in place by Rutherford, he was accused of wielding delegated autocratic powers, treating Russell’s will as a trifle and holding the board up to ridicule around the country. The directors insisted their wish to remove him was free of malice and driven by complaints about him, and matters came to a head on July 5, 1917 when Macmillan, with Rutherford away, called a policeman to put them out of the Tabernacle office. Persson supports their complaints with outside testimony: McGee doubted Macmillan had the mental balance for the post, and William L. Abbott of the St. Paul Enterprise, writing from Russell’s funeral in November 1916 and dead by March 15, 1917, described him as petulant and egotistical while foreseeing a coming time of trouble — a witness, Persson stresses, never allied with the directors. In the final section the directors move onto the offensive against Rutherford’s claim to control, which he defended in Harvest Siftings by arguing that the president had run the Society’s affairs exclusively for thirty years because the work needed the direction of one mind — a claim Persson notes the Society itself has since implicitly abandoned in a 1975 Watchtower endorsing group decisions. Rutherford’s account has Hirsh and Hoskins asserting that the board managed and gave the orders; the directors answered that Hoskins had only quoted paragraph VI of the charter placing management in a board of seven, and Persson calls Macmillan’s later gloss on Russell’s practice fraudulent, since Russell had said the corporation was to be board-managed after his death. Rutherford countered that parts of the charter were illegal and that his authority rested on the by-laws the shareholders passed in January and on his presidency of the Peoples Pulpit Association, but McGee advised the directors that only the board could make by-laws, that Rutherford’s by-laws were repugnant to the charter and therefore void, and Johnson recorded Rutherford claiming to be controller of the Society — leaving, in Persson’s judgement, only a matter of time before an open outburst.
Ch 8. The Johnson Case Triggers a Clash
After the humiliating confrontation of April 10 and 11, Paul S.L. Johnson kept quiet for some weeks before deciding to approach individual directors, emboldened by his discovery that they already objected to Joseph F. Rutherford’s claim to control the Society’s affairs single-handed. He showed Wright, Hoskins and Hirsh the protest and two petitions he had sent from London on March 7, 1917 through Ritchie, Van Amburgh and Pierson, papers Rutherford had never let reach the board, and told them enough about the British trouble to convince them he deserved a hearing. Persson insists that Rutherford’s picture of the British mission as an unqualified failure was misleading, since letters Rutherford himself printed — from Gilbert MacKenzie and W.O. Warden of Glasgow — credited Johnson with bringing real discord in the London Tabernacle and office to light. MacKenzie and Warden were two of five British Bible Students whom Rutherford had appointed as a commission to investigate Johnson’s dismissal of the London managers Shearn and Crawford; the commission sat on March 3 to 5, 1917 and sent its findings to Brooklyn. Rutherford referred to that report several times in his pamphlet Harvest Siftings but withheld its contents, because, as he admitted to Johnson, the commission had found in Johnson’s favour and he had overruled it and reinstated the two managers under Hemery. Persson notes that the reinstatement failed anyway: Shearn and Crawford refused it, left the Bethel staff, and were dividing the British church as officers of the I.B.S.A. — evidence, he argues, that Johnson had judged their appetite for independence more accurately than Rutherford had. On the disputed “credentials”, Rutherford maintained that the documents had been issued only to secure a passport, but Persson shows this is impossible: the passport was already dated and stamped on November 4, 1916, and only afterwards, on November 10, were two further papers drawn up — a letter of introduction to the British managers and one addressed “to all whom these presents may come”. That third document granted Johnson “full power and authority” to do whatever the corporation’s work required in any country he was sent to, and Ritchie and Van Amburgh signed and sealed it on the morning of November 11, 1916, just before Johnson sailed. Johnson later published all three papers verbatim together with a letter from Ritchie of August 18, 1917 recalling that Rutherford, Van Amburgh and Ritchie had each answered “Yes” when asked whether he should exercise those powers; Persson concludes that Rutherford had promoted an outright falsehood about Johnson’s authority. Convinced that complications had been hidden from them, the directors assured Johnson of a full and fair hearing — not, as their legal adviser Francis H. McGee later explained, because they trusted him, but because they thought he was entitled to state his case. On June 1, 1917 Johnson asked to be sent back to Britain and was rebuked, though Rutherford took the request seriously enough to sound out prominent British Bible Students and later publish five letters showing another visit would have been unwelcome; when a further request on June 13 for a hearing before the board was refused, Johnson learned that a board majority could compel a meeting by petition, drew one up the same day, collected four directors’ signatures, and handed it to Rutherford the next morning. Rutherford told him he had “neither the time nor the inclination”, summoned the four signatories and Van Amburgh to an informal conference in the drawing room, refused to call the board, and conceded only that the four should go over the matter with Johnson and report a week later — a moment the directors afterwards described as the point at which Rutherford’s autocratic manner drove them to take counsel and pray together. Johnson stopped his Tabernacle work on June 14 to prepare, and on June 19 spent five hours over two sessions laying the British case before the committee, which reported to the full board at the meeting of June 20, 1917 — a favourable report that agreed with the British commission that the dismissed managers had deserved dismissal, quoted the sweeping credentials the board’s own November committee had given Johnson, and moved that Pierson and Johnson settle the costs of the lawsuit Johnson had brought while acting for the Society. Rutherford opposed the report violently, ruled the resolution appropriating $500 for Johnson’s solicitor “out of order”, and claimed the charter, the law and the by-laws authorised him to do so; Persson replies that paragraph VII of the charter vests the transaction of business in a majority of the board, that no by-law could nullify the charter, and that the appeal to “the law” was a false diversion, so the directors were within their rights and Rutherford was not. Wright and especially Ritchie gave way under the pressure, the majority chose not to pass their resolution over Rutherford’s veto, and a milder resolution recording that the Society did not intend to send Johnson back to England was carried unanimously and entered on the minutes, a copy of which Rutherford gave Johnson and Johnson later published. Hirsh then drew a prepared resolution from his pocket proposing to amend the by-laws so that management would pass from the president to the board — an aim the directors described not as a takeover by four men but as restoring the board to the position Russell’s will and the charter gave it — and Rutherford raised such a storm that the question was deferred to a meeting announced for July 20; Persson points out that Rutherford had a private stake in defeating it, having signed a contract on June 6, unknown to the board, to print the seventh volume of Studies in the Scriptures and having asked the printer on June 19 for at least 50,000 copies, on press by July 1 and ready for delivery by July 15. Johnson, deeply cast down by the minute, was told on June 21 that there was no more work for him at the Tabernacle and served as a Society pilgrim for the last time at Passaic, New Jersey on June 24; he remained at Bethel, but the board never returned to his case. Persson closes by correcting Macmillan’s Faith on the March, which decades later described the June 20 meeting as an extended session of the 1917 annual meeting — confusing it, Persson argues, with a July Peoples Pulpit Association meeting Macmillan did attend — and wrongly said Rutherford ruled the by-law motion out of order rather than the resolution about Johnson’s solicitor; the error passed into the Society’s own account in the 1975 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Ch 9. From June 21 to July 16, 1917 [part 1]
By June 21, 1917, word of the boardroom quarrel had spread through the Bethel household and the workers were dividing into camps; that same day the four dissenting directors, A. I. Ritchie, J. Dennis Wright, Robert H. Hirsh and Isaac F. Hoskins, handed Joseph F. Rutherford a written request that he convene the board no later than June 27. Persson reads this as a shock to Rutherford, who assumed the men meant to repeal the January by-laws, and who stalled by pleading that Andrew N. Pierson could not travel and then writing to Pierson to confirm as much. The excuse was untenable, Persson argues: the charter needed only the president or vice president presiding over a quorum, and the January 19, 1917 meeting that adopted the by-laws had itself been held with only five directors present. After a second request on June 22, Rutherford seems to have looked for another way out in the undated resignation letters Russell had required from every director appointed from 1908 onward. Hoskins and Ritchie had signed such forms, while Wright and Hirsh had not; dating the two signatures would have removed the opponents and destroyed the majority that wanted the by-laws rescinded, and Persson thinks Rutherford was desperate enough to try it. The evidence is a taped public talk A. H. Macmillan gave in the early 1950s, in which he said Russell appointed directors “for life” only after demanding their resignations, and that the stenographer had destroyed or mislaid the papers because she sided with the dissenters. Persson suggests that stenographer was Edith Hoskins, Isaac Hoskins’s younger sister, who had typed for Paul Johnson before his June 19 hearing and was rebuked by Rutherford for it, left the Society with her brother in 1918, and ran the Pastoral Bible Institute’s correspondence department until 1960; although Persson stresses that Macmillan’s memory of 1917 is generally too poor to trust, he accepts the resignation-hunt story as substantially correct. On the morning of June 23 Johnson and Rutherford argued over whether shareholders could enact binding by-laws, and when Johnson cited McGee’s contrary opinion Rutherford shouted that he was “in a conspiracy” — the first appearance of a charge that would run prominently through Harvest Siftings a month later. Persson finds nothing behind it: Johnson said he was never admitted to the directors’ planning, and the four were pursuing a repeal that the charter plainly allowed, so their action failed even Rutherford’s own definition of conspiracy, yet Society publications have backed the charge ever since. He notes the irony that in 1918 federal prosecutors convicted Rutherford and his colleagues of conspiracy under the 1917 Espionage Act and the draft act using exactly the inferential reasoning Rutherford had turned on his own directors. Later on June 23 Rutherford left Bethel for four days, returning on the evening of June 26, and Persson places in that window his visit to H. M. McCaughey, a Philadelphia corporation lawyer, whose written opinion held that Wright, Ritchie, Hirsh and Hoskins were not legal board members and that the president could appoint four replacements. Rutherford’s claim that the lawyer was “disinterested” and that the opinion was meant only to persuade the board collapses, Persson argues, because Rutherford commissioned and paid for it, almost certainly told it what to say, and then refused to let the directors’ own counsel examine it — he must have intended to replace the four all along. On June 27 the four submitted a third written request, expressly disclaiming any plan to reopen the by-laws question and asking instead about the “Temple”, the Society’s finances and convention arrangements. Rutherford answered the same day that only the absent Van Amburgh could speak to the finances and that he had nothing of consequence to add, a reply Persson calls evasive and untrue, since it ignored the Temple entirely and said nothing of the seventh volume, whose printing contract he had already signed and whose set pages he would inspect on June 30. Withholding such information, Persson points out, directly violated Section III of the very by-laws Rutherford had engineered in January, which obliged the president to report to the board on request. Rutherford left on June 30 for a two-week preaching tour of the western states, leaving Macmillan in charge, and on July 5 the four directors, hearing a rumour that they would be barred from the Society’s Tabernacle office on Hicks Street, walked over to find out. The office manager Robert J. Martin showed them the rules, Macmillan appeared and ordered them out and sent Martin for a policeman, Van Amburgh refused their request for a meeting, and when the officer finally reached them in the upstairs chapel he declined to eject them and left of his own accord. Macmillan’s much later retelling — that the police actually removed the men, and that they had wanted Van Amburgh only to make up a quorum and “railroad” new by-laws — contradicts both sides’ contemporary accounts, since four of seven were already a majority under the charter, no advance notice had been given, and neither presiding officer was available; their real object, Persson concludes, was the financial information Van Amburgh had repeatedly refused them and which Rutherford’s June 27 reply had said only Van Amburgh could supply. That same evening the directors consulted Francis H. McGee in Brooklyn, who found they sought no reduction of Rutherford’s rightful powers but knew nothing of the Society’s funds, including a large cash trust repayable to donors on demand, and warned them they were personally liable and could be guilty of criminal neglect; at the 1918 sedition trial Van Amburgh had to admit that $96,000 in cash had been found in Russell’s safe and that the four had asked for an audit. Against Rutherford’s claim that the Peoples Pulpit Association charter gave its president absolute control of the work in New York, McGee advised the directors to throttle the Association’s funding if necessary and to require a second board signature alongside the treasurer’s on all bank transactions, and Persson cites Russell’s own statement that the Association was merely auxiliary and could act only through the Society. McGee also urged them to adopt proper by-laws, told them Pennsylvania statute required it, and introduced them to the New York firm Davies, Auerbach & Cornell; the draft they prepared for the July 20 board meeting was overtaken by the events of July 17 and eventually printed in their pamphlet Facts for Shareholders of November 15, 1917. That draft set up a three-member supervisory committee under the board, barred the president and treasurer from jointly signing cheques, and — reversing the position Rutherford had taken before the January 6, 1917 election — adopted Russell’s will and acknowledged his donation of the voting shares. Alerted by Macmillan, Rutherford telegraphed McGee from Duluth, Minnesota, the day after the conference, asking that the matter stand until his return about July 18, and McGee in fairness advised the directors to wait, which they did; Persson judges the plea deceptive, noting that warnings reached the directors of a “bomb” to be exploded on Rutherford’s return, and that Rutherford never named McGee in print, calling him only “a lawyer whom I knew” and one “not too friendly toward the Truth.” On Saturday July 7 the pilgrim William M. Wisdom spent about five hours on a train talking with Hirsh, reported the conversation to Rutherford at Chicago on July 10 — the report Rutherford later said decided him to fill the alleged vacancies — and followed it with a letter Rutherford published, whose charges the directors dismissed as jumbled rumour, denying both that they meant to tie up the Society’s money and that they claimed to be the board without its officers.
Ch 9. From June 21 to July 16, 1917 [part 2]
Persson closes his portrait of William M. Wisdom by following him afterwards: he abandoned Joseph F. Rutherford in 1918 for the splinter group called “the Stand Fasts,” then sought out Paul S.L. Johnson’s following, then the Pastoral Bible Institute, then the Watch Tower Society again, and finally the Institute once more. Wisdom’s 1923 book on Charles Taze Russell, The Laodicean Messenger, asserted that Russell’s will had created a “Committee of Three” directors to manage the Society and that this provision “precipitated the trouble” of 1917; Persson says both claims are simply contrary to the facts and show Wisdom never grasped the real dispute. Persson therefore suspects that Rutherford had already decided to remove his opponents from the board before Wisdom ever appeared, and that the visit and letter served as a convenient pretext — though he admits this cannot now be established with certainty. On July 11, 1917, Rutherford left Chicago for Pittsburgh, and on July 12 he filled the board “vacancies” he claimed existed, acting in Pennsylvania because the legal opinion he had obtained said only there could it be done lawfully, and only until the next shareholders’ election. His four appointees were Walter E. Spill, an osteopath who chaired the influential Pittsburgh congregation; John A. Bohnet, another leading Pittsburgh elder; George H. Fisher of Scranton, one of the authors of the forthcoming The Finished Mystery; and A. Hugh Macmillan, Rutherford’s special representative at headquarters — the appointments being witnessed by the notary L.H. McCare. The secrecy was near-total: vice president Andrew N. Pierson first heard of it at the board meeting of July 17, and Macmillan later testified in court that he had not known Rutherford considered the sitting directors illegally in office until that same announcement. Against Rutherford’s claim that all four appointees had signed a statement consenting to a board meeting on July 17, Persson sets the notes of acceptance: Spill and Macmillan signed only on July 17 itself and Fisher on July 14, leaving Bohnet the sole man who signed on July 12 and the only one who actually consented to that meeting date. Persson explains the sudden haste — Rutherford had already agreed with the directors on July 20 — by the fact that The Finished Mystery was printed and ready, and that the charter gave the board authority over publications, so he needed his critics gone before the book was announced; his plan was to spring the replacements at the forenoon board meeting of July 17 and the book at the Bethel dinner table that noon, which did not go as intended. Back at Bethel on Friday July 13, Rutherford proposed the 17th to A.I. Ritchie, who agreed, and notified Pierson and the rest; the next day Robert H. Hirsh, J.D. Wright, Ritchie and I.F. Hoskins wrote Pierson that the meeting would not be held, Pierson telegraphed Rutherford for an explanation, and Rutherford answered that he had received no such message and the meeting stood. On the afternoon of July 16 Hirsh handed Rutherford a letter from the four directors refusing any meeting before the 20th, citing his refusal of three or four earlier requests, “untrue and false talk” spread about them, and threats and attempted violence by his “special representative” against “the legally constituted managers and officers” of the Society; Persson adds the mundane reason, that the by-laws they meant to table were still with their New York lawyers. The quarrel, until then confined to a few men who by their own account had not even told their wives, broke out publicly after the June 20 board meeting and the police incident at the Tabernacle, with both sides canvassing Bible Students at Bethel and in the congregations — a former Pittsburgh elder recalled Macmillan preaching there of a coming “big blow-up” in Brooklyn and an unprecedented sifting. The directors were no more silent: Hirsh talked freely to Wisdom on the train on July 7, and on the night of Sunday July 15 Hirsh and Hoskins addressed the Philadelphia congregation with accusations against Rutherford and W.E. Van Amburgh, chiefly about the Society’s finances, a letter from a Brother Work reporting their claim that $200,000 was being held in the office safe. Because the money touched the trust fund Russell had begun, whose details few knew and which held Bible Students’ savings, Rutherford said he must refrain from publishing what had been said; Persson judges the Philadelphia disclosure unwise but blames Rutherford and Van Amburgh, who had denied the directors their right to know the Society’s finances. On the printing side, Rutherford had ordered “at least 50,000” copies of The Finished Mystery from W.B. Conkey Co. of Hammond, Indiana on June 19 for delivery by July 15; William F. Hudgings reached Clayton J. Woodworth’s Scranton home on June 23 and the two proofread at Hammond for about six working days, still there when Rutherford arrived on June 30. Printing was finished by July 12, when Rutherford sent Robert J. Martin to superintend the mailing so that the most distant Watch Tower subscribers would receive the book simultaneously — nearly thirty thousand copies went out over three days with forty or fifty plant employees labelling cartons — a simultaneity Rutherford wanted, Persson says, because he believed he was fulfilling a prophetic role. A load of books reached Brooklyn headquarters on the evening of July 16, and Persson stresses that the four dissenting directors knew nothing of the volume’s existence until noon on July 17, a date he calls one of the most dramatic in the Society’s history.
Ch 10. “A Strenuous Day”
Persson opens the chapter by naming the three detailed contemporary accounts of what happened at the Brooklyn Bethel headquarters on 17 July 1917: a report by the Bible Student lawyer Francis H. McGee written on 15 August and published that 1 September, a letter from Andrew N. Pierson to Alfred I. Ritchie dated 26 July 1917 which Pierson later acknowledged in The Watch Tower of 1 January 1918, and the Society’s own board minutes preserved in the printed record of the 1918 sedition trial, published in May 1919. McGee was telephoned at Trenton by Isaac F. Hoskins and told that Joseph F. Rutherford had summoned a Peoples Pulpit Association meeting for 8 a.m. and a Watch Tower directors’ meeting for 9 a.m., and that at the breakfast table Rutherford had asked everyone to be present at the noon meal because he expected a “strenuous day”; the directors asked McGee to come over, and he did. Nothing at all is recorded about the Association meeting by any of the men who would have attended it, but Persson suggests Rutherford wanted a formal Association board action behind him before releasing the alleged seventh volume, since the book was copyrighted to the Peoples Pulpit Association rather than to the Watch Tower Society. The four opposing directors had already refused to meet that day, and one of them told Rutherford at breakfast that there would be no board meeting; Rutherford’s later published claim that he had merely hoped they would quietly acquiesce is treated by Persson as a falsehood aimed at the wider Bible Student readership, since Rutherford could not seriously have expected them to accept his move without taking legal advice. At the forenoon meeting sat Rutherford, Pierson, W.E. Van Amburgh, A.H. Macmillan, George H. Fisher, W.E. Spill and J.A. Bohnet; Rutherford read out the legal opinion he had procured, declared that only the three officers elected in January were board members under the charter, pronounced Ritchie, J.D. Wright, Hoskins and R.H. Hirsh “not in law nor in fact” directors, and announced that he had filled the supposed vacancies with Spill, Bohnet, Fisher and Macmillan. Pierson objected immediately, pointing out that if those four had never been legal directors then the Society had never possessed a legal board at all — a concession Rutherford made on the spot — and arguing that business conducted irregularly for years could safely continue so until the next annual meeting; no action was taken on the suggestion. Rutherford then delivered a long report on his presidency whose achievements were, Persson notes, almost entirely legal ones, including heavy work generated by the recently passed Conscription Act; the point Persson presses is that Rutherford could have handled all of it as the Society’s attorney without holding office, and that his insistence on being sole manager as well as lawyer produced a workload heavier than Russell’s and a management crisis that his charter role need never have created. In the same report Rutherford explained his arrangements for the seventh volume and claimed that consulting his opponents “would hinder the publishing of the volume” and would have been disastrous for the work; Persson concludes this was the first Pierson — and probably Spill and Bohnet — had heard of the book, Fisher being one of its authors and Van Amburgh and Macmillan being Rutherford’s confidants. A committee of those present then produced a resolution supporting Rutherford and condemning his opponents; Persson reasons that Van Amburgh, Macmillan and probably Rutherford himself drafted it, since the three Pennsylvanians had been too remote from Brooklyn to be useful, and records Pierson’s renewed objection both to the new board and to the committee’s intention of publishing the resolution, after which the meeting adjourned until 8 p.m. Persson reconstructs the setting of the noon meal from the trial record and Watch Tower sources: a dinner break from noon to 1.15 p.m. in a basement dining room seating two hundred, with a staff cut back by wartime finances to Macmillan’s estimate of perhaps a hundred in January 1917 and William F. Hudgings’s estimate of about seventy-five by June 1918. Visitors regularly ate at Bethel, and on 17 July the room also held McGee and Pierson along with Rutherford’s new appointees Bohnet, Spill and Fisher, and Clayton J. Woodworth, co-author with Fisher of The Finished Mystery, who had been specially invited. Rutherford’s reason for gathering the family was to announce that the seventh volume was available, but by his own account the absent directors forced him first to explain publicly why he had appointed Spill, Bohnet, Fisher and Macmillan, and only at the close of that statement did he say the volume was there for anyone who wanted it. Against the Society’s modern claim that he spoke as soon as thanks had been given for the food, Persson sets Van Amburgh’s testimony in the 1943 Moyle trial that it was shortly after the meal and Woodworth’s statement a fortnight after the event that the book was announced at 1 p.m., and says plainly that he raises such details only to show how careless the later Watch Tower accounts are. McGee’s account matches: Rutherford promised announcements that would make everyone happy, had the Philadelphia opinion read, declared the four off the board, said he had appointed replacements, and then announced the seventh volume, adding that its release had been hurried because of the trouble brewing and inviting all present to take a copy. These contemporary statements, Persson argues, dispose of the modern Society claim that a copy had been laid at every place before the meal; the first copies lay on one dining-room table and had not yet been given to the Bethel family, as Rose Hirsh confirmed to him in 1974 and as Harvest Siftings Reviewed stated at the time. The announcement provoked what Rutherford himself described as a lengthy statement by the opposing directors’ attorney followed by impassioned speeches from Hirsh and Hoskins; McGee said Rutherford had taken the law into his own hands, that only a court and not a lawyer’s opinion could declare offices vacant, and he advised the men Rutherford had appointed not to accept the places, speaking for three quarters of an hour by Van Amburgh’s later reckoning. The debate ran roughly five hours, from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., with Rutherford, Hirsh, Hoskins, Wright, Ritchie, Macmillan, Van Amburgh, Baeuerlein and others speaking; Paul S.L. Johnson recorded that six brothers protested and were supported by others in the family, but Persson rejects the Society’s claim that Johnson headed the protest, noting Rutherford named only Hirsh and Hoskins and never mentioned Johnson at all. The decisive argument came from McGee, who showed from the charter that officers had to be chosen from among the directors, so that on Rutherford’s own reasoning Rutherford, Pierson and Van Amburgh could not have been legally elected in January either — leaving Rutherford neither a legal director nor a legal president and therefore with no power to appoint anyone; the New York firm of Davies, Auerbach and Cornell reached the same conclusion about a week later. Persson reinforces the reading with Russell’s own words on incorporation in 1885, that the officers had been elected “from among” the named directors, and concludes that H.M. McCaughey’s contrary opinion ignored the charter’s eighth paragraph and can only be explained by Rutherford having asked for the answer he needed. Pierson’s own account shows that McGee’s summing up of the charter changed his mind, convincing him that if four of the seven were not legal directors the other three stood in exactly the same position; Persson promises a full legal examination in chapter 12 and notes that staff members who were similarly persuaded and said so would later pay a price for it. Rutherford’s afternoon offer to resign the presidency if that would bring peace is dismissed by Persson as a political manoeuvre, since he knew the four did not want him removed — they wanted only that he accept the limited presidential role the charter allowed, which he never offered to do. Persson then attacks head-on the Society’s claim, made since 1955 and repeated in a 2010 DVD, that the row of 17 July was caused by the publication of the seventh volume without the directors’ consent, calling it an absolute falsehood: Woodworth testified in 1918 that there was no opportunity to discuss the book that day and that he learned nothing of any opposition to it, Van Amburgh testified that objections came only after publication, and Rutherford himself conceded that The Finished Mystery formed no part of the difficulty. The belief took hold, Persson explains, because Rutherford gave the day prophetic meaning by casting his attackers as the “murmurers, complainers” of the parable of the penny in Matthew 20, so readers assumed the directors had objected to the volume; the ousted directors insisted they had never once referred to it and Johnson said the same, yet Macmillan, who was in the room, later propped up the myth of vehement objections in Faith on the March. When the board reconvened at 8 p.m. everyone but Pierson signed the resolution; he held out for hours, and signed only after objectionable statements were struck out and it was agreed that copies would go solely to classes and individuals who had heard of the trouble and asked for an explanation, McGee reporting that Rutherford personally laboured with him for several hours, while Johnson claimed in 1938 that Pierson had pressed for the ousted directors’ restoration and checked Rutherford with a threat to resign. Pierson later said he signed because he thought there was wrong on both sides and an explanation was owed to friends who had asked; two days afterwards the resolution went out to most of the American congregations in breach of that bargain, and he regretted having signed it — a document whose declaration that no one else in the church was as well qualified as Rutherford Persson reads as plain hubris, of a piece with the idolatrous pioneer’s letter Rutherford approvingly printed in The Watchtower of 15 July 1939. The minutes close with Spill moving and Bohnet seconding adoption of the resolution, signed by every member and the board adjourned to 8 a.m. on 18 July; Persson finds it striking that the two acted so boldly only hours after McGee’s warning and suspects they had been instructed beforehand as men Rutherford could wholly rely on. Finally Persson turns to the prophetic readings both sides attached to the five-hour dispute: Menta Sturgeon, who joined the opposition in the autumn of 1917, argued before the annual meeting of 5 January 1918 that the four ousted directors together with Johnson and McGee were the six men with slaughter weapons of Ezekiel 9, a view Johnson expressly rejected, while Rutherford identified the seventh volume with the penny of Matthew 20 — the coin is pictured on the book’s dedicatory page — cast his critics as the foretold murmurers without ever claiming they had opposed the book, and, by his boast of a part in placing Russell’s last work before the church and his arrangement to post it so all received it at once, showed that he took himself for the parable’s “steward,” which Johnson said was precisely why he had the volume prepared and distributed without the board’s authorisation. Persson ends by noting that the crisis had not yet peaked and that an unexpected move was coming the following day, 18 July.
Ch 11. Peace Efforts and More Confrontation
Persson opens the chapter with Joseph F. Rutherford weighing his position after the five-hour dining-room debate: Francis H. McGee’s stand had raised the real prospect of a lawsuit to restore the old board, some of the Bethel staff had sided openly with the ousted directors, and Andrew N. Pierson’s support was, in Persson’s reading, half-hearted at best. Because the new board was to reconvene at eight the next morning, Pierson, Spill, Bohnet and Fisher stayed the night, so all of them were at the July 18 breakfast where Rutherford prayed humbly and confessed some of his weaknesses to the family. Paul S.L. Johnson, moved by that display and already asked for advice by Isaac F. Hoskins, put a proposal to Rutherford’s new board that ended with Johnson accepted as mediator between the two sides, an outcome Pierson surely welcomed. Persson thinks Johnson had a private motive as well — he hoped a settlement would revisit the June 20 board decision against his British mission — but says this does not diminish the seriousness of his mediation. The minutes of the 8 a.m. board meeting show no discussion of the crisis at all, only relief voted for a distressed donor to the Tract Fund, placed on the Pilgrim list on A.H. Macmillan’s motion and Pierson’s second, plus a decision to meet next on August 6 because of the Boston convention of August 1-5. Rutherford later admitted that Johnson had come to him as a peace-maker and that Johnson did not deceive him; Persson inverts the sentence, arguing it was Rutherford who deceived Johnson, since he never meant to concede anything and only wanted time. Johnson’s own account, published weeks later, records that both sides accepted mediation on July 18 on the understanding that the legal questions would go to a friendly suit, and that Rutherford then broke his repeated promise to hand the four directors the legal opinion read out on July 17, refused the friendly suit, and finally abandoned the arbitration-board compromise he had appeared to accept. For Persson this pattern of retreat is decisive: a man confident of the law would have volunteered such tests, so Rutherford’s refusals show he knew the ousting was illegal, feared McGee would expose the flaws in McCaughey’s opinion, and used the mediation interval to shore up his support at Bethel and among the Bible Students generally. Meanwhile his trusted men were circulating two loyalty petitions at headquarters, one for the Tabernacle staff and one for the Bethel household, both dated July 18, 1917 and later printed on page 18 of his pamphlet Harvest Siftings; the Tabernacle text praised his management and the Bethel text promised to stand by him “through thick and thin unto the end.” Persson reproduces both signature lists and then deflates them: 39 Tabernacle and 17 Bethel names came from a headquarters population of 75-100, and the directors said signers were told that refusal meant dismissal, a claim supported by signatory F.G. Mason, who later wrote that he had signed under protest and regretted his weakness. Menta Sturgeon, Russell’s former private secretary, and his wife Florence refused to sign though their nineteen-year-old son Gordon did, which Persson treats as corroborating Mason; the Sturgeons left headquarters around November 1, 1917, and Gordon was working as a telegraph manager when he registered for the draft in 1918. Allowing for coerced signatures, Persson doubts that even a bare majority at Bethel genuinely backed Rutherford, and he stresses that the sympathisers had everything to lose; Johnson counted about 35 of the family forced out by early November 1917 and the ousted directors put the figure at some fifty efficient workers a fortnight later. On this basis he rejects Macmillan’s later claim that the office force threatened to quit had the four directors taken control: many workers could not have afforded to leave, some signed precisely out of fear for their places, and in any case the directors wanted the whole board restored, Rutherford and W.E. Van Amburgh included, so no one need have resigned. While mediation was still nominally under way, Rutherford mailed the July 17 resolution not merely to congregations that had already heard of the trouble, as Pierson had stipulated, but to most and perhaps all American classes, under a covering letter of July 19, 1917 announcing that a statement by the president was ready for any class that asked. Persson calls this the first printed material sent to Bible Students at large about the dispute and points out that the Society’s later complaints about the opponents’ publications ignore the fact that the opponents were replying to charges Rutherford had broadcast first. Pierson felt betrayed, writing to A.I. Ritchie on July 26 that had he foreseen general circulation he would never have signed the resolution even as amended, and Van Amburgh conceded on oath at the 1918 sedition trial that quite a good many copies had gone out. The covering letter’s claim that the president acted “in obedience to the direction of the resolution” strikes Persson as a fiction that hid Rutherford behind his own puppet board, and the resolution’s extravagant praise of him as the Lord’s chosen man betrays how badly the strain was telling; the promised statement became Harvest Siftings, dated August 1, 1917 and containing matter of July 23 that cannot have existed when the letter was written. July 19 also brought the confrontation at Philadelphia, arranged by a congregation of about 600 that had heard Hoskins and Robert H. Hirsh make their charges on July 15 and now, uniquely in the directors’ judgement, called both sides to argue for four hours. Macmillan and Van Amburgh stood with Rutherford, McGee argued the law for the directors, and Johnson stayed away because he was mediating; the directors noted that Rutherford answered in rebuttal without once addressing any legal point raised by McGee, who was Assistant to the Attorney General of New Jersey. Persson accepts Johnson’s second-hand but well-sourced account that McGee so thoroughly worsted Rutherford, first on the Society’s charter and then on the fallback claim of control through the Peoples Pulpit Association, that Rutherford broke down weeping at his defeat, a scene the congregation never forgot and still referred to in a resolution of January 5, 1919. On August 5, 1917 the Philadelphia church asked Rutherford to call a special shareholders’ meeting and warned that refusal would cost him their support and that of many others; he declined, and the resulting split cost the congregation more than half its members according to Raymond Grant Jolly, with the loyal remnant of about 200 publishing a resolution in The Watch Tower of March 15, 1918 excusing any mistakes as “of the head and not of the heart.” Having now shown two defeats for Rutherford’s legal case at McGee’s hands, Persson announces that the next chapter will examine those legal arguments in detail and warns that it contains shocking facts he could not omit.
Ch 12. Rutherford’s Legal Arguments [part 1]
Persson opens his examination of the legal arguments Joseph F. Rutherford deployed in the 1917 management controversy, arguing that they explain both why he refused an independent legal settlement and why he was helpless once Francis H. McGee took the arguments apart, noting that Rutherford invoked the Watch Tower Society’s charter where it suited him, appealed to the charter of the Peoples Pulpit Association elsewhere, and rejected as illegal the charter’s own stipulation that directors served “for life”. The clearest statement of that rejection, Persson shows, is in The Watch Tower of November 1, 1917, where Rutherford declared paragraph VIII of the charter “null and void” because Pennsylvania law required directors to be elected annually by the shareholders. Against the Society’s later histories, and against A.H. Macmillan’s Faith on the March, Persson insists that the ousted directors were not mere appointees of Charles T. Russell: the board had elected every one of them as the charter required, Rutherford himself acknowledged it, and the 2017 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses finally conceded that they “had been elected to the board in the past”. Robert H. Hirsh was the exception, having been elected only on March 29, 1917, so the annual-election argument could not reach him and Rutherford had to attack his position on different grounds. Persson treats the Society’s 1959 claim that Rutherford had warned Russell before his death that these men were improperly elected as fiction: Rutherford had himself been elected a director once and “for life” in 1910, exactly as they had been, a point the ousted directors made in Light after Darkness, and at the 1918 sedition trial he conceded he had not been “legally elected” either. He adds that a lawyer who genuinely saw the defect would have urged Russell to conform the charter to the law, especially given that Russell had sought incorporation in 1884 precisely to give the work “a legal standing”, and that Hirsh had never been a director in Russell’s lifetime at all. On the substance Persson concedes the point against the charter: the 1874 Pennsylvania corporate law did require directors to be “chosen annually by the stockholders, or members”, and it was already in force when the charter was granted in 1884, and Paul Johnson’s explanation that charters of religious non-profit corporations were examined only superficially, so that the life-tenure clause “passed the examiner uncorrected”, is accepted. Johnson’s later reversal, that the statute was not retroactive and so did not touch the Society, Persson rejects outright, since the Society was chartered ten years after the act, and McGee had raised the same statutory objection when Isaac Hoskins consulted him early in 1917, while noting that a judge had twice passed the clause as legal and that directors in any case hold over until their successors are chosen and qualified. Rutherford defended annual election as a “wise” rule that stopped seven men perpetually controlling the Society; Persson answers that paragraph VIII already allowed the shareholders to remove directors by a two-thirds vote, so in leaving them in place the shareholders had in effect approved them. Because his own title as director rested on exactly the same footing as his opponents’, Rutherford was driven to argue that his election as president, and Pierson’s as vice president and Van Amburgh’s as secretary-treasurer, made the three of them directors by virtue of office under both law and charter, a claim he repeated on the stand in 1918. The annual-election doctrine was duly applied on January 5, 1918, when seven directors were chosen “for the ensuing year”, and again in the autumn of 1918 when, with most of those directors imprisoned, the provisional leadership fell back on the same July 1917 legal opinion and went ahead with the election of January 4, 1919. Yet at the annual meeting of January 3, 1920, with Rutherford back at the helm, supporters he had primed complained of the labour and inconvenience of yearly elections, and Rutherford, saying the question touched his own position, sent them to outside counsel; Persson calls the manoeuvre hypocrisy and fraud and an assault on both the charter and Russell’s judgement, and he stresses that the law had not changed in the interval, citing E. Russell Shockley’s Pennsylvania Corporation Laws 1933 for the fact that the corporation acts of 1874, 1891 and 1927 left the election provision untouched. The Pittsburgh firm Dunn & Moorhead obligingly advised that meeting times and tenure could be fixed by by-laws, whereupon the board amended the by-laws during the meeting’s intermission and the shareholders ratified them the same day: the annual meeting moved to October 31, directors were to be elected tri-annually for three-year terms, and the three officers likewise every third year. Persson holds all of this unlawful, since triennial election violated the statute in force and the new meeting date and officer terms contradicted the charter, which itself said by-laws must not be “repugnant” to it, while before the Act of March 30, 1921 a charter-fixed meeting date could be altered only by petition to the court. He corrects the sociologist James A. Beckford, who wrote that Rutherford in 1920 persuaded shareholders to accept a charter amendment: no amendment was made at all, and paragraph VIII kept its 1884 wording until it was legally amended on February 27, 1945, three years after Rutherford’s death. Johnson’s verdict in The Present Truth of March 1, 1920 is quoted with approval, that the new by-laws were null and void because only the granting state can amend a charter and an opinion bought from lawyers who “for filthy lucre” say what clients want is no substitute for a court decree; by then, Persson notes, every prominent opponent of 1917 had left the movement. Turning to Hirsh, Persson sets out Rutherford’s claim, backed by his Philadelphia lawyer McCaughey, that because Hirsh was elected more than thirty days after H.C. Rockwell’s resignation the charter transferred the appointment to the president, and answers that the delay and the eventual election were both Rutherford’s own doing, so Hirsh was in substance Rutherford’s own choice; the New York firm Davies, Auerbach and Cornell held that a president could not seize the board’s power merely by failing to call a special meeting, and McGee added that he could not act secretly on vacancies the directors did not know existed. Worse for Rutherford, the Pennsylvania statute recognised no presidential power to fill vacancies at all, giving it only to “the remaining directors”, and J. Fithian Tatem of the Philadelphia Bar held that a statutory method overrides a contrary charter provision, so by invoking the statute against life tenure Rutherford had legally undercut his own authority to appoint anyone. Rutherford’s further claim that Hirsh’s election was void because it was held in Brooklyn also fails: the charter required only that the three officers be elected annually at the Allegheny City office, Tatem and McGee agreed that a Pennsylvania corporation could do business anywhere, and it was Rutherford who had called the Brooklyn meeting in the first place, and Persson turns the argument back on him, since Rutherford’s own paper “Statement of Facts and Points” admitted that after the 1909 removal to New York the board never met in Pennsylvania, which means his own election in 1910 and Pierson’s in November 1916 took place there, while Wright and Hoskins had been elected in Pennsylvania in 1904 and 1908, so that on his own reasoning he was never a legal director and was ineligible for a presidency the charter reserved to board members. McGee also caught the inconsistency of Rutherford describing his new board’s Brooklyn meeting of July 17, 1917 as having “transacted business in proper form” in the very state where he said such business could not be done, while the claim that election to office was election to the board Persson calls sheer fabrication, McGee pointing out that the charter has the president chosen from among the directors and nowhere the reverse, Johnson that Russell was elected a director only once because directors held office for life, and Russell’s own report on the incorporation showing the officers were chosen from among the incorporating directors. Neither Rutherford nor McCaughey ever produced any Pennsylvania statute for the point, and Davies, Auerbach and Cornell concluded, citing People ex rel Nicholl vs. New York Infant Asylum, that Rutherford’s propositions pushed to their logical conclusion would destroy his own title as director and president, and, quoting paragraph VIII in full, Persson shows that the charter deliberately distinguished vacancies “filled by vote” of the remaining directors from those filled by presidential “appointment”, only the appointees serving until the next annual election. Rutherford’s contrary reading in The Watch Tower of November 1, 1917 is refuted from his own words in The Watch Tower of December 15, 1916, that the board was “self-perpetuating”, a passage the deposed directors pointed out had been “written by Brother Rutherford himself”; Persson concludes he falsified the charter in order to justify deposing his opponents. The last argument treated is residency: Rutherford asserted that the statute required at least three directors to be residents of Pennsylvania and that his opponents had not lived there for five years, and on McCaughey’s advice he went to Pittsburgh and on July 12, 1917 appointed W.E. Spill, J.A. Bohnet and George H. Fisher of Pennsylvania together with A.H. Macmillan of New York; the deposed directors replied that neither Rutherford nor Pierson nor Van Amburgh lived in Pennsylvania while Hirsh did, and Persson states flatly that the claim about Hirsh’s residence was a lie. Tatem read the proviso as applying only to the incorporators at organisation, Davies, Auerbach and Cornell could find no such provision at all and noted that any defect would taint the whole board including Rutherford, and McGee concluded after study of the Pennsylvania decisions that the requirement did not apply to the Society, evidence Rutherford simply failed to answer at the Philadelphia debate of July 19, 1917, and the chapter breaks off as Persson turns to Rutherford’s fallback position, his presidency of the Peoples Pulpit Association, whose charter he said he had written so as to give its president “absolute power and control of everything” in New York.
Ch 12. Rutherford’s Legal Arguments [part 2]
Persson finishes his examination of the Peoples Pulpit Association by noting that its charter made the president a lifetime officer with “the general supervision and control and management” of the Association’s business, a clause originally meant to entrench Charles Taze Russell but which Joseph F. Rutherford now invoked to claim unchallenged managerial power. The clause, Persson argues, was simply void: Francis H. McGee pointed out that New York’s Membership Corporations law vested all authority in the board of directors and that the members could amend the charter whenever they chose. Persson backs this with a contemporary New York legal treatise stating that the affairs of every corporation are managed by its board, and that section 29 of the general corporation law gives directors general management of corporate affairs. He therefore treats both the Society’s Pennsylvania charter and the Association’s New York charter as containing provisions at odds with the statutes under which they were granted, and cites Paul S.L. Johnson’s explanation that charters for religious non-profit corporations were examined carelessly, and Johnson’s flat verdict that the clause was illegal. Persson adds that Rutherford’s attempt to make the Association the controlling body also contradicted Russell’s own published instruction of December 1, 1915, that the Peoples Pulpit Association could transact no business except through the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society; according to Johnson, McGee “thoroughly refuted” the argument when Rutherford raised it at the Philadelphia debate of July 19, 1917, though the Association question was never settled because attention moved to the January 5, 1918 annual meeting, after which the opposition left the movement. Turning to Rutherford’s counsel, Persson charges that H.M. McCaughey of Philadelphia gave deliberately deceptive advice: his assertion that the failure to elect a full board in 1917 was “wholly immaterial” ignored the charter rule that officers had to be chosen from among the directors, which would have made Rutherford’s own election as president invalid on McCaughey’s own premises. Persson also rejects McCaughey’s claims that election to office automatically carried election to the board and that directors chosen to fill vacancies served only until the next annual election, calling the latter an intentional misreading of the charter, and remarks pointedly that Rutherford was still using McCaughey as late as 1937. Against the Society’s position Persson sets the doctrine of hold-over directors: the seven incorporators named in the charter were indisputably lawful directors, and in the absence of elections they continued in office, a point argued in the autumn of 1917 by J. Fithian Tatem of the Philadelphia Bar, who held that such directors are directors de facto and de jure, able to elect officers and equally liable for failures of duty. McGee said the same, noting that Pennsylvania courts allow directors to hold over until successors are actually elected and that hold-over boards generally may meet, fill vacancies and vote to sell property. McGee further argued that Rutherford was estopped from disputing the directors’ standing, since he had sat with them repeatedly in Brooklyn and had himself taken part in electing Robert H. Hirsh to the vacancy left by Rockwell’s resignation that year. Persson lists further inconsistencies: Rutherford said he had known since 1909 that directors ought to be elected annually at Pittsburgh yet said nothing at the January 1917 election, excusing himself on the ground that he would have seemed to be overturning Russell’s arrangements — an excuse Persson dismisses, because Rutherford had no such hesitation about setting aside the part of Russell’s will dealing with his voting shares, for which he obtained a legal opinion that the shares could not be bequeathed. Persson also notes the effrontery of Rutherford’s statement that the legality of the four directors’ office would never have been questioned had they behaved quietly, which on Rutherford’s own reasoning meant he was willing to keep transacting business through a board he considered illegal. McGee’s contrary conclusion was that the board as it stood on June 20, 1917 was validly constituted with no vacancies, that only a court judgment could declare the offices vacant, and that twelve interested lawyers, two of them Pennsylvania attorneys, concurred; Johnson accordingly described Rutherford’s move as the illegal ousting of four legal directors and the installation of four “pseudo-directors,” while the deposed directors wrote in November 1917 that Rutherford, long reputed to be deeply learned in law, had been wrong on almost every important question of his presidency. Persson argues that the one honest remedy open to Rutherford, had he really believed the board defective, was a special shareholders’ meeting — which he avoided because it would have required admitting that Russell and the charter had ignored legal requirements, would have exposed the impossibility of his being a lawful president without first being a lawful director, and might have gone against him; consistent with this, he later refused every request for an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting. In his summing-up Persson restates the whole case: Rutherford needed the annual-election rule and the charter’s defective “for life” tenure to remove his opponents, but his own directorship was no better founded than theirs, so he could not have been validly elected president nor validly appointed replacements; his claim that election to office made him a director was supported by neither charter nor statute, and in 1920 he discarded the same annual-election law by opting for three-year terms. Persson likewise dismisses the Pennsylvania-residence argument — neither Rutherford, Vice President Pierson nor Secretary-Treasurer Van Amburgh lived in Pennsylvania while Hirsh did, and the residence rule applied only to the original organisation of corporations — and the claim that directors had to be elected in Pennsylvania, which Rutherford contradicted by his own Brooklyn election, by arranging Hirsh’s election there, and by continuing to hold board meetings in Brooklyn; yet, as he concludes, the opponents never took their strong case to court, and Rutherford dominated the Society and its subsidiaries until his death in early 1942. The chapter closes with 102 footnotes that expose Persson’s documentary base: the rival 1917 pamphlets Harvest Siftings and its Part II, Harvest Siftings Reviewed, Light after Darkness and Facts for Shareholders; The Watch Tower and its Reprints; Johnson’s The Present Truth and Epiphany Studies; the 1918 Rutherford et al vs. The United States trial transcript; nineteenth-century treatises on Pennsylvania and New York corporation law; and later Society histories he treats as unreliable.
Ch 13. Then It Will Be War
After McGee appeared to get the better of Joseph F. Rutherford in the Philadelphia debate of 19 July 1917, the four ousted directors concluded that a lawsuit was winnable, and Persson argues Rutherford reached the same conclusion; to deter them he handed them a written opinion titled “Statements of Facts and Points” insisting that even a wrongful and unlawful ouster could not be “redressed in the New York courts.” That document survives only through quotations in the opinion the directors obtained from the New York firm Davies, Auerbach & Cornell on 23 July 1917, which flatly rejected Rutherford’s claim and agreed with McGee that his own reasoning would destroy his title as director and president. Meanwhile A.I. Ritchie asked Vice President Pierson why he had signed the resolution circulated to class secretaries on 19 July, and Paul S.L. Johnson kept trying to broker peace, later complaining that Rutherford “broke a number of his agreements.” By Johnson’s account, on 25 July Rutherford abandoned his agreement to submit the dispute to three lawyers as arbitrators and rejected Johnson’s final terms — reinstate the ousted directors and accept two board-elected brethren alongside himself as an executive committee — countering with a demand for submission backed by a threat to publish the British and board affairs, which ended the mediation. Pierson answered Ritchie on 26 July, and the deposed directors, now armed with their lawyers’ opinion, drafted a circular to the Bible Students at large to offset the damage done by Rutherford’s 19 July resolution, an effort Rutherford and his allies tried to block. The four also served formal notice — signed by J.D. Wright, I.F. Hoskins, Ritchie and R.H. Hirsh as a claimed majority of the board — calling a special meeting of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society directors at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn on Saturday 28 July to restrain the rival board, the officers’ spending, and any disposal of records or transfers of funds to the Peoples Pulpit Association; Persson accepts this as reasonable on their own premises, since if Rutherford had acted illegally it was their duty to act. Rutherford for his part convened the Peoples Pulpit Association on the morning of Friday 27 July, an occasion he styled an “adjourned” annual meeting because an 1911 by-law allowed members to be removed only at the annual meeting — a device that also let him vote proxies collected for the January 1917 election, on the theory that the January meeting had been legally adjourned first to March and then to 27 July with all proxies still in force. The plan misfired: the meeting had to be put over to 31 July because notice had been legally insufficient, but it ran on to nearly noon in bitter argument, with the four refusing to recognise the new Society board or even to talk further without counsel, until Rutherford sprang from his chair shouting “Then it will be war” and ordered everyone out of the house by Monday noon and Johnson out that same day. At the midday meal Rutherford told the Bethel family they must leave by Monday noon; when the directors insisted on reading Pierson’s letter saying he “would stand by the old Board,” Rutherford refused, accused Johnson of misleading Pierson, and — on Johnson’s denial — seized him with force that nearly pulled him off his feet, threatening ejection before nightfall, which duly followed, Johnson’s effects being put outside and watchmen posted at the doors. F.G. Mason, a Tabernacle worker, added in a letter of 20 August 1917 that Rutherford said he “had not yet begun to fight” but would fight “to the finish,” and made the family physically take sides across the room while supporters hissed “in a manner that would resemble bar-room rowdyism” and others offered to call the police; Persson notes Rutherford never disputed Mason’s account. Rutherford’s own version was that Johnson and others started a disturbance, that he was merely “taken by the sleeve and asked to go out,” and that “no force whatsoever” was used — a minimisation Persson treats with open scepticism. The directors’ circular, dated “Brooklyn, July 27, 1917” and probably written after these scenes, laid their case before the Bible Students, asked for their “advice and guidance,” invoked their duty to preserve the arrangements Russell had wanted, and hoped the Society could be “repaired from within” so as to avert litigation. It printed both the lawyers’ opinion and Pierson’s letter of 26 July, in which he retracted his support for the 17 July resolution, called the appointment of new directors wrong, and declared he would stand by the old board — a letter reprinted in Light after Darkness and acknowledged by Pierson himself in The Watch Tower of 1 January 1918; Persson doubts, however, that the circular reached every class that had received Rutherford’s letter. The board meeting called for 28 July appears never to have happened — no contemporary publication reports it — and Persson reasons that Rutherford and W.E. Van Amburgh would have refused to attend and Pierson would then hardly have come alone, so Hoskins and Hirsh would have done better to prepare for the 31 July Association meeting at which their membership was at stake. With the Boston general convention of 1–15 August approaching, Rutherford prepared a full statement of his side, naming the pamphlet Harvest Siftings after an earlier statement by Russell on an internal schism; dated 1 August 1917 and eventually mailed to Watch Tower subscribers worldwide, copies were already carried to Boston by William F. Hudgings on 29 July and read to the city’s elders and deacons that evening. Persson stresses how thin its endorsement was — only Van Amburgh, A.H. Macmillan, Hudgings and D.J. Cohen signed; three of the Watch Tower editorial committee, including Hirsh, Fredrik H. Robison and Menta Sturgeon, did not; H. Clay Rockwell wrote of its “many errors and false statements” on 4 September; and Pierson, who according to Johnson called it “a production of Satan,” was conspicuously absent. The four did not obey the order to quit Bethel by Monday 30 July, staying more than a week longer, and on 31 July the Association reconvened expressly to expel Hirsh and Hoskins from membership and the directorship — an event reported first by the directors, since it fell too late for Harvest Siftings. By their account fourteen of some forty members attended, the “trumped-up” charges of withdrawn moral support were easily refuted, and those present would not vote expulsion; the outcome was secured only by proxies from absent brethren who had heard none of the charges, over the earnest protest of seven of those present, in an operation they said Rutherford ran with Macmillan and Van Amburgh. Rutherford’s rebuttal a month later did not deny who drove the expulsion: he claimed the adjourned annual meeting convened “legally and in proper form,” that five votes were cast against removal and twenty-three for it, that Hirsh and Hoskins could not vote on their own removal, and that proxy-givers had since written approving the action — but Persson catches him misrepresenting the directors, who had said seven present “protested,” not that seven votes were cast, the protesters being the four ousted directors together with Johnson, present as a member despite his eviction on 27 July. One of the proxies Macmillan voted belonged to Paul E. Thompson of Detroit, Michigan, whom Macmillan then wrote to for retrospective endorsement; Thompson rebuked him instead and sent both letters to Hoskins and Hirsh, who printed his reply verbatim — which prompts Persson’s question of why approval had to be sought at all if the proxy use was lawful. McGee argued in November 1917 that proxies for an annual meeting may only be voted on matters that would have come before it, not on new business arising later, that this proxy form authorised nothing but the election of directors, and that its use was “entirely unlawful”; Persson endorses that verdict, noting that expulsion was certainly not on the agenda of the 10 January meeting where both men had been re-elected for the year, and that Hirsh was then still a Rutherford supporter, the motive to remove him arising only much later. McGee also asked pointedly who had written up the minutes so that they showed adjournment to 27 July, and how the directors could have known they would meet that day to expel members when they did nothing else; Persson reads him as convinced the record was falsified, and cites Johnson, present at both meetings, saying Rutherford “doctored the minutes to suit himself.” Testing Rutherford’s story directly, Persson finds the claimed adjournment “until some time in March” implausible and notes that no actual date is given: Rutherford left for California on 8 February, was expected back “about March 15” and returned on 14 March, so there was ample time for a March meeting, and the chain of adjournments looks like a later invention devised to unseat two directors. The four warned that such conduct was “subject to criminal indictment” and would draw swift punishment in court; Rutherford’s only reply was that if they believed it they would stop calling him “brother” — an argument Persson calls feeble and bogus, since Rutherford himself accused them of trying to “wreck” the Society while still calling them brothers, and their “good authority” included McGee, a lawyer on the staff of the Attorney General of New Jersey. The sessions of 27 and 31 July were, in Persson’s judgement, the peak of the crisis: positions hardened beyond peaceful settlement, mutual disfellowshipping began when Van Amburgh refused Johnson’s offered hand on 31 July, and the timing was probably deliberate, since the Boston convention opened on 1 August and both parties sailed from Brooklyn that night with hundreds of Bible Students to a gathering that would deal at length with the management crisis.
Ch 14. The Boston Convention and Its Immediate Aftermath
The convention at Boston, Massachusetts, August 1–5, 1917, was the first general convention after Charles Taze Russell’s death; it served the eastern states and drew, by the Society’s own report, an average of 1000 to 1400 people. Persson rejects the Society’s later story that Joseph F. Rutherford acted as “permanent chairman” to stop an opposition takeover, calling it a retrospective rationalisation contradicted by The Watch Tower of August 15, 1917, which says the convention was simply “turned over to the chairman” after Rutherford’s opening remarks. A takeover was impossible anyway, he argues, because the program had been fixed well in advance by A.H. Macmillan and the Pilgrim Department — as Rutherford himself told the four dissident directors on June 27 — and Macmillan would have kept both the deposed directors and Paul S.L. Johnson off it. The daily Praise and Testimony meetings were the one opening, but Johnson said he was barred from testifying twice at W.E. Van Amburgh’s instigation, and Persson thinks the directors were probably handled the same way; meanwhile Macmillan put Rutherford’s Harvest Siftings into the delegates’ hands at the start of the convention, which Johnson said left him “the gazingstock and a reproach.” Vice President Andrew N. Pierson, distressed by that distribution, signed the Open Letter to the Boston Convention that Robert Hirsh, a trained journalist, drafted for the deposed directors on August 4; it was handed out on the closing day and reprinted in their full reply, Light after Darkness, dated September 1, 1917. On Saturday, August 4 Woodworth spoke on the parable of the penny and days later issued the address as the tract The Parable of the Penny, making the newly issued seventh volume of Scripture Studies the “penny” of Matthew 20:1-16 and naming Rutherford as the “steward,” while assigning the five leading opponents a far less flattering role and likening their complaints to the murmuring of Korah, Dathan and Abiram. Woodworth placed the giving of the “penny” at the Bethel dinner table on July 17, appealed emotionally to “these five brethren” to let their pride die, and leaned openly on “the evidence presented in Harvest Siftings.” He reported that Rutherford forbade the talk’s publication in The Watch Tower two hours afterwards, but Persson insists this was not disagreement, since the whole reading came out of Rutherford’s own pages linking the volume’s arrival to the immediate attacks on him by Hirsh and Hoskins. Persson builds the case that Rutherford saw himself as the steward from his dispatch of Woodworth to repeat the talk at the Aurora convention, the directors’ later protest at that, Johnson’s charge that Rutherford “literally raged” when Johnson claimed the title yet encouraged others to claim it for him, the penny device and Matthew 20:9 reference on the dedication page of The Finished Mystery, and the praise letters printed in The Watch Tower of October 15, 1917; only in 1923 did the Society redefine the steward as a corporate body rather than an individual. Pierson’s signature on the open letter alarmed Rutherford’s circle because it publicly asserted that the board had never received a statement of the Society’s finances during his presidency, and on the last day Rutherford sent Van Amburgh to discuss the matter with him. Pierson asked the lawyer McGee to attend and gave him a written statement demanding to know the standing of the trust fund, the financial relationship between the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society and the Peoples Pulpit Association, and the source, repayment and interest of the $100,000 borrowed for the Drama work, while insisting in capitals that the board be recognised and left to do business until the directors could resign. The statement went unused; Van Amburgh instead offered to summon a Brother Thompson of Washington, D.C., who could describe the finances as they stood at the time of the Brooklyn Eagle case years earlier, and then proposed that Pierson resign, which he refused, though the directors reported he did afterwards get some financial information. Persson notes that Pierson later complained in The Watch Tower that his name had been used in controversy publications without his consent, but because he never denied or corrected the contents, Persson treats the note to McGee as genuine. On the same day Rutherford, under pressure from Pierson’s stand, put a proposal to the directors’ representative: each side would choose six prominent brethren, the twelve would co-opt thirteen more, and the committee of twenty-five would hear the facts, with Rutherford resigning if it went against him and the opposition ceasing agitation if it went against them — an offer they declined and never later denied had been made. Persson explains the refusal by distrust: Rutherford was about to leave on a two-month western convention tour that allowed no real investigation, the directors’ aim was still to make the board rather than the president supreme, and a resignation would have put the reluctant Pierson in the chair. He reads the offer chiefly as a move to head off the special shareholders’ meeting the directors and “hundreds of other friends” were seeking, noting that Rutherford afterwards objected to such a meeting while safely promising to do whatever “a majority” of shareholders asked — a majority he and his proxies could prevent. That very August 5 the Philadelphia ecclesia signed a “final appeal” for a special stockholders’ meeting and warned that refusal would cost him their support; Johnson reported in 1918 that Rutherford replied he was too busy to arrange one, which Persson sets against his willingness to face a committee of twenty-five. The convention ended in a “love-feast” of about 1100, reported warmly in The Watch Tower, though Johnson recorded that Macmillan and others refused the separated brethren’s hands and that Sister Seibert, Macmillan and Woodworth refused his. At a board meeting on August 6 in Brooklyn, decided upon back on July 18, Pierson concluded that backing Ritchie, Wright, Hoskins and Hirsh had destroyed his own capacity to restore harmony, and he quietly withdrew, apparently assuring Rutherford that he opposed going to court. Rutherford afterwards described calling the four together before his western trip to ask whether they meant to sue, receiving only the answer that they would not talk without their lawyer; Persson judges he overrated Pierson’s influence, since Johnson said Ritchie balked at a suit while McGee and Johnson pushed for one, and dates the decision against litigation to between August 6 and 8, driven mainly by letters from Bible Students invoking Paul’s warning in 1 Corinthians 6. Pierson went on interceding, and Rutherford claimed to have offered Ritchie the pilgrim work in Canada, Hoskins the same in the United States, provision for the other two on condition of peace, and then a two-month vacation at the Society’s expense — all refused; Persson doubts the sincerity of employing as pilgrims men Rutherford had publicly accused of trying to “wreck” the Society, and treats it as a gesture to keep Pierson from returning to their side. On August 7 Pierson negotiated $300 for each departing director, Rutherford offering the alternative of $150 with a two-month vacation or $300 and immediate departure; the directors said they were leaving only under repeated threats of forcible ejection, and on August 8 Ritchie, Wright and Hoskins left Bethel, Hirsh staying a few days longer as managing editor of The Watch Tower. Pierson had pleaded with them beforehand to suffer the wrong without retaliating, a position Persson finds hard to square with his demand on August 5 that the board be recognised, which was the crux of the whole dispute between the charter’s board and Rutherford’s presidential authority. Johnson put Pierson’s collapse down to a temperamental craving for peace; Persson adds that Pierson, born in 1850 and the oldest participant, saw his health fail in 1917 while his Cromwell florist business came close to bankruptcy under wartime conditions. Still regarding themselves as the lawful board and Rutherford’s appointees as usurpers, the directors abandoned litigation and set out instead to persuade the shareholders to unseat Rutherford and Van Amburgh at the 1918 annual election and restore the old board. Persson calls this hope naive — quoting Isaac Hoskins’s reflection twelve years later — and points to the handicaps: they could reach only 17,000 of the more than 55,000 Watch Tower addresses to which Harvest Siftings had gone, while Rutherford controlled the mailing lists, the conventions and the magazine, so that without an impartial settlement before the 1918 election their chances were slim, even though Rutherford fought on “to the finish.”
Ch 15. The Seventh Volume [part 1]
Persson turns to the seventh volume of Studies in the Scriptures, a book long promised and still unwritten when the succession crisis broke: Charles Taze Russell had spoken in 1886 of “several” volumes before settling in his first-volume preface on a plan of seven, and had said the last would expound Revelation and Ezekiel. As late as 1916 Russell publicly refused to write it, saying he would not guess at Revelation until he understood it, and on his deathbed in October 1916 he reportedly told Menta Sturgeon that someone else might write it instead. Nothing was done for the first weeks after Russell’s death, but in late November 1916 the subject came up at the Scranton home of George H. Fisher, where Gertrude W. Seibert was a guest and Clayton J. Woodworth dropped in; Woodworth later testified he had volunteered that he understood Revelation well and thought Fisher could handle Ezekiel. A few days later Fisher explained Ezekiel chapter one to Seibert to her evident satisfaction, and she acted at once, writing to the Society’s Executive Committee on December 6, 1916 to recommend Woodworth and Fisher as writers — a letter later put in evidence and printed in full in the 1918 sedition trial transcript. Persson stresses Seibert’s standing: a confidante of Russell, compiler of the Society’s “Manna Book” and a much-published Watch Tower poet, while Woodworth had compiled the Berean Bible Teacher’s Manual (1909) and Fisher was a named reserve for the Watch Tower Editorial Committee in Russell’s will. The Executive Committee replied the next day promising only to consider a submitted manuscript and, as The Watch Tower later emphasised, made no commitment to publish; Woodworth, receiving the news on December 11, wrote back insisting that everything must pass through Seibert for approval and editing before it reached the committee, and he and Fisher began writing that same day. Fisher drafted in pencil, Woodworth typed and returned it for checking, and chapters went out to Seibert at the Hotel Margaret as they were finished; Woodworth claimed to have written his portion in exactly one hundred days of evenings, which Persson calculates would place its completion around April 22, 1917, with his earlier Berean manual serving as the “skeleton work,” while Fisher’s final chapter on Ezekiel’s temple was not done until June 25, 1917. Joseph F. Rutherford, then one of three Executive Committee members, received parts of the manuscript in December 1916 but said he only read it between February 8 and March 21, 1917, partly on a trip to California. Persson argues that once Rutherford became president and “the executive” in January 1917 he cast himself as the “steward” of the Matthew 20 parable and the seventh volume as the “penny” he owed the Bible Students, which is why he refused to let the board of directors decide whether to publish and wrote the preface himself. Against Alexander H. Macmillan’s 1918 testimony that the board would not have been consulted and that Russell would not have consulted them either, Persson sets paragraph two of the Watch Tower Society’s charter, which vests publishing decisions in the duly constituted board, and Russell’s own statement that the directors’ usefulness would come to the front after his death. Rutherford’s summer 1917 excuse was that the directors’ “violent opposition” would have delayed publication and that he had instead consulted Van Amburgh, Macmillan, Martin and Hudgings; Persson answers that of these only William E. Van Amburgh sat on the board, that vice president Andrew N. Pierson was not involved, and that Rutherford’s July 17 boast that consulting Hirsh, Hoskins, Ritchie and Wright would have been “disastrous” reveals plain autocracy rather than a reaction to opposition. The consultation claim also fails on dates: Robert J. Martin testified he learned of the book only on July 11, 1917, when printing was already finished, and Macmillan only on June 6, 1917 — the day Rutherford signed the printing contract, and eleven days after he had already placed the order on May 26 — whereupon Macmillan declined to read the manuscript but endorsed publication anyway. Van Amburgh, given part of the manuscript before April 1, 1917, admitted he had read only parts of it before telling Rutherford to go ahead as “the Lord’s representative,” and his court testimony also revealed the financing manoeuvre: rather than draw Society funds without board approval, Rutherford used several thousand dollars handed him by a friend, with the treasurer’s encouragement. That friend was George Butterfield, a wealthy Bible Student then living in Colorado after most of a lifetime in Iowa, who mailed a $5,000 check by return post; Rutherford kept it out of the Society’s treasury and paid the printers from it directly, drawing on Society money only after it ran out. When the ousted directors pointed out that a donation routed around the Society deprived Butterfield of the voting shares he would otherwise have earned, Rutherford closed the gap before the annual meeting of January 5, 1918 by having the sum entered in Van Amburgh’s books and Butterfield credited with 500 voting shares, an entry Rutherford dated to about October 13, 1917. Seibert had proposed the title The Finished Mystery in her December 1916 letter, claiming Russell had once approved it, but Persson shows the name was still unsettled in late June 1917 when William F. Hudgings went to Scranton to proofread: Rutherford was then favouring “The Fall of Babylon” and Woodworth “The Winepress of God’s Wrath,” and only at Hammond was a compromise struck that made The Finished Mystery the title and the other two subtitles. Because the name was fixed so late the copyright lagged: the book was handed out at headquarters on July 17, 1917, the publication date was reported as July 21, and the Register of Copyrights received Hudgings’s application only on July 24 — entered, tellingly, in the name of The Peoples Pulpit Association rather than the Watch Tower Society, since Rutherford controlled the former outright and his headship of the latter was in dispute. Woodworth had told director Alfred I. Ritchie in March 1917 that the book would appear in October, but Rutherford drove it forward, telling the printer on June 19 that at least 50,000 copies were needed for the July and August conventions and that the book had to be on press by July 1 and deliverable by July 15. The Watch Tower of August 1, 1917 admitted the volume “was rushed” without explaining why; lawyer Francis H. McGee, present when Rutherford announced the book to the Bethel workers, reported him saying that distribution had been hurried because of “the trouble brewing.” Persson dates the acceleration to June 20, 1917, when the dissident directors announced they meant to repeal the by-laws underpinning Rutherford’s rule, and reads the timing of July 17 — new directors announced immediately before the book — as confirmation of the ousted directors’ later suspicion that he feared the board would demand the Editorial Committee edit the volume. Apart from Fisher’s temple chapter, which reached Rutherford on June 30 after the pages were set, the manuscript was with the Hammond, Indiana printer from June 6; Martin was sent there on July 12 to superintend mailing to Watch Tower subscribers and had dispatched nearly thirty thousand copies before returning to Brooklyn on July 17, the day headquarters staff were each offered a copy at noon. The Society then promoted the book harder than any earlier volume: The Watch Tower of December 15, 1917 reported that an initial contract for under 100,000 copies had been exhausted and orders placed up to an 850,000 edition, with Swedish and French translations complete, serialisation in the German, Polish and Greek editions, and four more languages under way. A paperback issued as a special Watch Tower dated March 1, 1918 and known to workers as “ZG” carried cartoons mocking clergy — one witness recalled placing forty or fifty a day on the strength of a single picture — which offended Bible Students such as the former Swedish pilgrim J.O. Melinder, who called them un-Christian in an open letter to Rutherford. After the 1918-1919 ban new hardbound editions resumed from 1920, accompanied by a long list of corrections in The Watch Tower of June 1, 1920 and a “revised” edition announced that June 15, followed by the 2,524,000 Edition of 1924, the 2,604,000 Edition of 1926, and a drastically cut 1927 edition retaining only the Revelation section and renaming the chapter on Revelation 12 from “THE BIRTH OF ANTICHRIST” to “Birth of the Nation” in line with the reinterpretation published on March 1, 1925. On its own account the volume was the “POSTHUMOUS WORK OF PASTOR RUSSELL” — Rutherford’s preface insisting “he did write it” — yet Persson notes it speaks of Russell only in the third person while raising him extravagantly, calling him the figure foreshadowed in Revelation and Ezekiel, treating his marital troubles as prophesied at Ezekiel 24:15-17, saying he still managed the Harvest work from beyond the veil, and, at Revelation 16:9, reading the blasphemed “name of God” as the name of Charles Taze Russell. Persson further flags the book’s investment in 1918 as the year of the Little Flock’s glorification and of wholesale destruction of the churches, its forecast of the Kingdom in Palestine “probably” in 1925, its definition of patriotism as “a narrow-minded hatred of other peoples” — a formulation Russell never used and one that would put the authors and Society leaders at odds with the authorities — and Woodworth’s alteration of Revelation 14:20 from “sixteen hundred” to a poorly attested “twelve hundred furlongs” so the figure would match the distance from Scranton to Brooklyn and prove the book divine. Rutherford’s own men objected early: Van Amburgh criticised the Scranton-to-Bethel passage and the railway locomotive reading before printing, Macmillan thought the locomotive of Nahum 2 meant the automobile, and on November 4, 1917 Macmillan told a Washington, D.C. convention that the book had enough mistakes to keep its writers humble, as Mrs. William L. Abbott reported. Because the 592-page book was simply handed out on July 17 without discussion, Persson accepts Paul Johnson’s judgement that its divisive effect was barely visible before September, when the ousted directors’ pamphlet Light after Darkness warned of “fanciful interpretations” and doctrinal errors, stinging Rutherford into saying they were against the volume outright; by Facts for Shareholders of November 15, 1917 Ritchie, Hoskins, Hirsh and Wright rejected it flatly, denying it was posthumous and disclosing that its Song of Solomon exposition was Woodworth’s own work, shelved by Russell and returned after his death. Persson shows the rejection reaching ordinary congregations, quoting his own translation of David Kihlgren’s 1918 letter to Swedish branch manager August Lundborg — printed by Lundborg in 1926 and now on Barbara Anderson’s website — describing how a neutral two-thirds majority in Springfield, Massachusetts was cut off by the Society after a visiting pilgrim ordered loyalists into a separate class, and adding the March 1, 1918 A Letter to International Bible Students, in which three ousted directors with Francis H. McGee and Johnson called the word “posthumous” false advertising, a view Charles F. Main echoed from South Australia after part of the Adelaide ecclesia separated. Johnson later dismissed the whole enterprise as “hothouse production” whose crudeness he blamed on Rutherford’s driving of the two writers, while the Society’s rhetoric ran the other way, from the volume’s own claim to be “Divinely provided” and Woodworth’s tract The Parable of the Penny through The Watch Tower’s declarations of December 15, 1917 and April 1, 1919 that the Lord himself had supervised and served it.
Ch 15. The Seventh Volume [part 2]
Persson closes the chapter by showing that the Watch Tower Society eventually abandoned the very book it had once forced on the movement: the last specific advertisement for The Finished Mystery ran in The Watch Tower of November 15, 1928, and the discounted seven-volume offer of November 1, 1929 looks to him like nothing more than a way of clearing unsold stock. Joseph F. Rutherford himself repudiated the volume’s exposition in stages, writing in the preface to LIGHT (1930) that no satisfactory explanation of Revelation had been published before that year, and declaring in 1931 that Ezekiel’s prophecy had until then not been understood. Later Society publications continued the retreat, with a 1969 book conceding that pre-1918 explanations had failed to satisfy Bible Students and that The Finished Mystery had proved unsatisfactory, a judgment repeated in the 1988 Revelation Its Grand Climax At Hand and softened into “in general, the explanation offered was hazy” in The Watchtower of March 15, 2000. Persson notes the sharpest admission of all in the Society’s 1973 God’s Kingdom of a Thousand Years Has Approached, which granted that the book had “tended to establish a religious sect centered around a man.” His argumentative point is that the ousted directors, Paul S.L. Johnson and other early defectors reached these conclusions decades earlier and said so in print while the leadership was still calling the volume the height of divine wisdom — the directors’ 1918 A Letter to International Bible Students objected that it praised Charles Taze Russell beyond his deserts, C.F. Mann in Australia said it practically deified him, and Johnson later criticised C.J. Woodworth’s extravagant treatment of Russell. Against those critics the leadership responded by branding them enemies of truth and righteousness, an accusation the 1973 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses still repeated, which Persson calls self-serving evidence of the leadership’s sectarianism. He concludes that with its far-fetched interpretations, its failed predictions for 1918 and 1925, and its deification of Russell, The Finished Mystery may be the most flawed book the Society ever issued, and that Johnson was right to call it unfit for the edification of the Little Flock. Credit, in Persson’s view, belongs to the ousted directors, Johnson and Francis H. McGee for rejecting the book, while Rutherford deserves blame for imposing it; had he followed the charter and allowed the directors a fair voice on publication, much of the ensuing trouble could have been avoided. The chapter’s footnotes rest overwhelmingly on the 1918 trial transcript in Rutherford et al vs. The United States, supplemented by Harvest Siftings, Light after Darkness, Facts for Shareholders, The Present Truth, The Watch Tower, and later Society histories and yearbooks.
Ch 16. On the Road to the 1918 Election [part 1]
Persson opens the chapter with both sides positioning themselves for the annual meeting of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society set for January 5, 1918: Joseph F. Rutherford left Brooklyn after his new board met on August 6, 1917 for a two-month convention tour of the western states, while the deposed directors moved out of the Bethel headquarters on August 8, with Robert H. Hirsh following shortly after. Having decided against suing Rutherford, the ousted directors put their effort into a printed answer to his pamphlet Harvest Siftings, which Persson says had thoroughly defamed them, while Rutherford set out to use the conventions and The Watch Tower magazine to secure his re-election, necessarily by further blackening his opponents. At the January 1918 annual meeting Rutherford claimed “more than 24 conventions” had been held during the year and that he had personally attended “about 20”; the first, at Boston, was followed by nine more covered in a report in The Watch Tower of October 15, 1917, which boasted that the friends “refused to discuss past troubles or disturbances” and that resolutions approving the present management and pledging “unreserved loyalty to the Society” passed almost unanimously everywhere. Persson reads these claims against the grain: refusing to discuss past troubles simply meant Rutherford’s opponents were given no chance to argue their case, yet at Aurora, Illinois on August 8-12 C.J. Woodworth was permitted to repeat the slanderous exposition of the parable of the penny he had first given at Boston; the uniform loyalty resolutions he treats as evidence that Rutherford could pull strings in his own favour and as a sign of a sectarian spirit foreign to the movement under Charles Taze Russell, for whom unreserved loyalty to a fallible human agency would have been unthinkable. The tour ran past Los Angeles to St. Joseph, Missouri, Des Moines, Iowa and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Rutherford was back in Brooklyn by October 3, when the New York congregation, where his opponents were strong enough to trouble him, held its annual election of elders and deacons; Persson suggests the western convention report may have been timed to coincide with that election. The attacks continued afterwards, with W.E. Van Amburgh addressing the Washington, D.C. convention on November 2 on the “present difficulties” and the St. Louis thanksgiving convention of November 29 to December 2 classing objectors to the Seventh Volume as murmurers; in November the ousted directors complained of a run of conventions staged “largely to boom the President for reelection,” and Paul S.L. Johnson later called it a country-wide campaign of misrepresentation. The directors’ reply, LIGHT AFTER DARKNESS A Message to the Watchers, Being a refutation of “Harvest Siftings,” was dated September 1, 1917 and ran to 24 pages; the “five brethren” who prepared it were the four deposed directors and the lawyer Francis H. McGee. Vice President Andrew N. Pierson took no part and did not sign, having “quietly withdrawn” from the opposition after the Boston convention to support Rutherford — something neither the directors nor McGee knew at the time, which is why McGee’s OPEN LETTER TO THE SHAREHOLDERS OF THE SOCIETY, dated August 15, 1917 and printed on pages 15-19, was addressed to Pierson along with Ritchie, Wright, Hoskins and Hirsh; Rutherford later said Pierson had refused to sign and accused the directors of arranging the reprinted OPEN LETTER TO BOSTON CONVENTIONERS, which Pierson genuinely had signed, so as to suggest he endorsed the whole pamphlet, while Pierson said his name had been used without his knowledge or consent. Persson draws a point of evidence from what the pamphlet is not: Johnson, the chief target of Harvest Siftings, neither wrote it nor had his case argued in it, which he says disproves Rutherford’s claim that Johnson was the directors’ leader; he attributes much of the drafting to Hirsh, a professional journalist, but notes the inconsistent spelling of A.H. Macmillan’s name as a sign of several hands at work. Still convinced they were the lawful officers, the directors conceded that short of going to court only the shareholders could settle the question, and under AN APPEAL TO THE VOTING SHAREHOLDERS asked whether the Society’s affairs were safe with a man showing such contempt for Russell’s wishes, while McGee’s letter told them plainly to notify the shareholders that they had been ousted by illegal means; the pamphlet also reprinted the Society’s charter in full — Persson thinks the first time most Bible Student readers had seen it — and revealed that Menta Sturgeon, who had been with Russell when he died, had been called Judas and traitor by Rutherford, the directors admitting all the while that Rutherford’s side controlled the mailing lists. Rutherford’s first response was A LETTER FROM OUR PRESIDENT written in California and printed in The Watch Tower of September 15, 1917, in which he said a full answer might follow, repeated his charge that his opponents meant to “wreck” the Society before the January election, and complained that his own motives were being maligned — a complaint Persson finds rich given his treatment of them in Harvest Siftings. The Watch Tower of November 1, 1917 announced HARVEST SIFTINGS, PART II, offered free on request and said to be published at the request of the board in reply to Light after Darkness; it ran only eight pages, paginated 25 to 32 as a continuation of the first pamphlet, opened by dismissing the directors’ work as merely “Opponents’ Paper” and not a reply at all, and in Persson’s judgment never delivered the promised complete answer, since Rutherford ignored McGee’s legal argument entirely, never even named him, and said nothing about the charge that he had turned on Sturgeon. Rutherford’s excuse was that the only real issue was whether the president had been justified in appointing four directors on July 12, 1917 to fill vacancies until the January 5, 1918 election, and that everything else beclouded the question — an evasion, Persson argues, since Rutherford’s own Harvest Siftings had been stuffed with material irrelevant to the vacancies, a point the directors made by asking what Johnson’s conduct in England had to do with the president’s power to fill board seats. On page 26 Rutherford answered the directors’ use of Russell’s 1894 statement that the directors’ usefulness “would come to the front” after his death by objecting that none of the four were then connected with the Society and that the words appeared in neither the will nor the charter; Persson replies that the directors never tried to write them into either document, only to show that the board, not the president, was to succeed Russell in controlling the Society’s affairs. The second pamphlet also dwelt on the by-laws that put management in the president’s hands, Rutherford conceding that technically the power to enact by-laws lay with the board but insisting the shareholders’ voice should prevail; Persson answers that paragraph 7 of the charter gave the board “full power to make and enact by-laws” with no role for the shareholders at all, as McGee had pointed out, and that the by-laws had not come from the shareholders in the first place — Van Amburgh handed them to a resolution committee, and when it amended the clause so the board rather than the president would appoint an Advisory Committee of three, Rutherford held the committee behind the platform for an hour and threatened a fight before the convention until they changed it back, one of those by-laws being “slightly amended” by his new board later anyway. He calls page 31 an outright lie: Rutherford claimed the opposing brethren had admitted everything ran smoothly until June 1917 and that Johnson’s English episodes began the trouble, whereas Light after Darkness had said the opposite, that self-exaltation and objections to the president’s course preceded Johnson’s return; at the 1918 sedition trial Rutherford in effect conceded the point under oath, testifying that Johnson was recalled from England and that the four had been disgruntled about other matters. Shabby as the reply was, Rutherford turned it to account in the Watch Tower’s “Interesting Letters” column, and judging that it had still not finished the job he returned to the subject in the article “The History and Operations of our Society” in The Watch Tower of November 1, 1917, where — because the directors had published the charter — he printed it himself with his own analysis and the claim that it had “seemingly” been misunderstood. In it he asserted that the president, vice president and secretary-treasurer sat on the board by virtue of the charter and alone constituted its legal members, and that directors appointed to vacancies held office only until the next annual meeting, whereas Persson notes the charter gave such appointees office “for life, unless removed by a two-thirds vote of the Shareholders”; under WHO ARE ENTITLED TO VOTE he also set out the by-law cancelling the vote of anyone who “becomes opposed to the work of this SOCIETY,” and the proxy form mailed with that issue asked shareholders whether they were in harmony with the Society, though The Watch Tower of November 15, 1917 denied the by-law bore on the dispute over the legal board. Persson accepts the by-law predated the crisis but finds it impossible not to read Rutherford’s new emphasis as groundwork for disfranchising his opponents, as McGee said at the time in calling it a studied effort to exclude anyone disagreeing with Rutherford, Van Amburgh and Macmillan. Against the by-law he sets the charter’s provision that every ten-dollar donation earned a “non-forfeitable” share and a vote and its rule that by-laws must not be repugnant to the charter; McGee held that a charter right to vote could not be removed by by-law, J. Fithian Tatem of the Philadelphia bar agreed that only a formal amendment could do it, and McGee nonetheless advised shareholders to answer “yes” to the harmony question since one man could not be the Society — an attempt at exclusion Persson thinks failed. The same article made a second attempt to control the election, this time over proxies: Rutherford argued that a proxy was a general power of attorney on which it was improper to write candidates’ names, that a shareholder’s wishes bound the holder only if his candidates were nominated, and that it would be inconsistent for a proxy-holder to nominate opposing candidates, while proposing that five suitable persons besides the officers and directors present act as proxy-holders — an arrangement that would have let Rutherford’s side control the election whatever names the proxies carried. McGee objected that the November 1 proxy let the holder disregard the shareholder’s wishes, and circulated a rival form with Facts For Shareholders naming particular candidates and authorising votes “for no other person and persons than as named herein”; Johnson likewise answered that a proxy-holder may make as many nominations as there are shareholders he represents, and Persson calls Rutherford’s contrary rule a trick he himself ignored when it suited him, as the next chapter will show. The article’s last manoeuvre addressed the danger posed by large proxy-holders such as Pierson, whose proxies from friends across the country had been decisive in electing Rutherford in January 1917; confident after a season of one-sided conventions but aware that, as a later Society history put it, the majority could not express themselves because the election was a corporation matter confined to voting shareholders, Rutherford published and endorsed a letter from A.B. Dadley proposing that the classes across the country vote and report their sentiment, calling on all congregations to assemble on Wednesday, November 21 at 7:30 p.m. to vote first on the board and then on the officers. Persson treats this as a repudiation of the voting procedure Russell himself had written into the charter, under which only those who had contributed money had a say in how it was spent; no such straw vote was ever proposed before or after 1917, and he concludes Rutherford would not have promoted it had he not been certain of the result.
Ch 16. On the Road to the 1918 Election [part 2]
Paul S.L. Johnson answered the personal attacks Joseph F. Rutherford had made on him with a twenty-page pamphlet, Harvest Siftings Reviewed, dated November 1, 1917; most of it had been drafted in August but publication was held back, and the whole text was later reprinted in his Epiphany Studies, Vol. 6 of 1938. Persson rates the pamphlet a major source for the management schism, chiefly because Johnson printed documents and letters in full that survive nowhere else, but he notes that Johnson also quietly passed over damaging material — the cablegram he had sent Rutherford from Liverpool on February 24, 1917 claiming stewardship and “powers like Russell’s,” and a letter of the same date to Jesse Hemery in London predicting that the Lord would reveal who was Charles Taze Russell’s true successor. Where Johnson did score, in Persson’s reading, was on the credentials issue: Rutherford had said the papers Johnson carried to England were merely “for procuring a passport,” but Johnson showed that the passport application and the supporting letter of appointment predated the credentials of November 10, 1916 by a week. Johnson’s most valuable disclosure was a detailed narrative of his attempt to mediate between Rutherford and the ousted directors between July 18 and 25, 1917, an episode Rutherford admitted but never described, and the directors effectively certified Johnson’s version by commending his pamphlet as “another contribution to the truth.” Rutherford never replied to the pamphlet directly; instead he printed a letter from William E. Page in The Watch Tower of December 1, 1917, in which Page refused Johnson’s suggestion that he, a former vice-president, would make a better president, on the grounds that he lacked the financial and platform skills Rutherford had. Persson observes that Page, one of the five men named to the Watch Tower editorial committee in Russell’s will, had not grasped that Russell meant the board of directors to govern collectively with the president merely as its chairman, so his flattering letter let Rutherford turn Johnson’s attack to his own advantage. Hemery, the Society’s British manager, issued his own twelve-page rejoinder dated December 7, 1917, which Persson finds useful on Johnson’s conduct in England but decisive in one respect: Hemery conceded that he agreed with Johnson’s review of his letters of January 27, February 5 and February 25, 1917, and still thought Johnson had been used to do “a cleansing work.” That concession, Persson argues, makes it safe to conclude that Johnson had judged the British situation more sensibly than Rutherford was ever willing to concede. On October 3, 1917 the New York City congregation — probably the largest body of Bible Students anywhere, with 917 partaking at the Memorial that spring — met to elect elders and deacons, an event documented only in the ousted directors’ report of November 15, 1917, in Johnson’s account published twelve years later, and in Rutherford’s passing remark that he polled 302 votes. Because the congregation required a 75% vote to elect an elder, and because many of his opponents belonged to it, Rutherford proposed that pilgrims should count as elders of the church at large and need no vote at all — a claim never made before, which members answered by citing a standing resolution that no one was an elder of that congregation unless duly elected. The meeting was adjourned, and when it resumed Rutherford’s faction found the hostile minority so large that even with the Bethel family voting he and his associates could not have reached the 75% threshold. The way out was a motion from one of his own supporters to postpone the election until after the Society’s election of January 5, 1918; it carried, and the congregation’s annual election was finally held on Wednesday January 9, 1918, as reported in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle of January 10, 1918. The deposed directors warned that had the pilgrim-as-elder plan gone through, the president would have built a hierarchy rivalling that of the Catholic church — and Persson notes that Rutherford’s men had been ready to go that far to keep their eldership. The directors answered both Harvest Siftings, Part II and the Watch Tower article “The History and Operations of our Society” with a sixteen-page pamphlet, FACTS FOR SHAREHOLDERS of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, dated November 15, 1917 and signed by A.I. Ritchie, J.D. Wright, I.F. Hoskins and R.H. Hirsh, who vouched for the “DO YOU KNOW” questions written by New York friends while disclaiming the anonymous “Prefatory.” That preface urged shareholders not to scatter their votes and put forward a slate headed by Menta Sturgeon for director and president, with Ritchie as vice-president, H. Clay Rockwell as secretary-treasurer, and Wright, Hoskins, Hirsh and Andrew N. Pierson as directors — Rockwell having resigned from the editorial committee and board in early 1917 and Sturgeon having been forced out of the editorial staff and the Bethel family. McGee opened the pamphlet with more than six pages of legal argument, denying Rutherford’s framing of the “real issue” as whether the president could fill existing vacancies and insisting the real question was whether any vacancies existed at all, which he answered in the negative. He also printed the detailed by-laws the dissident directors had meant to adopt at the board meeting called for July 20, 1917 — a meeting pre-empted by Rutherford’s public ouster of them on July 17 — as proof that they had never intended to wreck the Society, and the pamphlet carried a legal opinion from J. Fithian Tatem of the Philadelphia Bar contradicting Rutherford on five points. A further charge was that Rutherford played on words, hiding usurpation behind the term “management” when the dispute was really about controllership; Persson shows that in Harvest Siftings, Part II Rutherford misrepresented Light after Darkness as conceding the point, when the directors had said only that the management question came to the front once he told them Johnson’s British case was none of their business. Rutherford, who had spent heavily on two editions of Harvest Siftings, now announced in The Watch Tower of December 1, 1917 that he would make no reply to further papers from the opposition — a reversal Persson reads as an admission that he had nothing left to answer with. As Facts for Shareholders went to press in November 1917, 156 members of the New York congregation circulated a three-page “Open Letter” and “A Petition” to Rutherford and the deposed directors, objecting that the referendum vote set for November 21, 1917 was neither necessary nor wise because it forced them to vote for brethren lying under serious charges. They proposed instead an investigation committee of fifteen — three chosen by Rutherford, three by the four deposed directors, a seventh elected by those six, and the rest chosen by the seven — to examine the Society’s finances, organisation, legal status and relations with the Peoples Pulpit Association and the foreign branches and report to the shareholders at Pittsburgh on January 4, the day before the election. The directors welcomed the plan, but Rutherford answered in The Watch Tower of December 1, 1917 that he would “pay no attention to the petition,” since everything was already in print and fifteen men could only repeat known facts; Persson replies that this misstated the request, which was for an impartial verdict and recommendations, and cites Johnson’s later judgment that an investigation was the last thing Rutherford wanted. Rutherford went further and called the petition “calculated to deceive,” while claiming he had himself proposed such an investigation at the Boston Convention on August 5, and he pressed his advantage before the election by printing a repudiation from A.E. Burgess, one of the 156 signers, whose weight came from his being a director of the Peoples Pulpit Association and a reserve nominee for the editorial committee in Russell’s will. Persson notes that Burgess changed his mind only because Rutherford had condemned the petition, so that supporting an impartial inquiry was made to look like opposition to the Lord, the Society and Rutherford personally — even as members were assured the problems would be discussed at the shareholders’ meeting itself. The referendum of November 21, 1917 was tabulated by E.H. Thomson, General W.P. Hall and J.T.D. Pyles and reported in The Watch Tower of December 15, 1917 in time to influence the January 5, 1918 election: 813 congregations voted while 55 classes were unable or unwilling to do so, and fewer than 12,000 Bible Students took part against the roughly 75,000 adherents the Society claimed in the United States. Persson concludes that the voters were mostly Rutherford’s own supporters and cannot have represented “a majority of the members of the Ecclesias” as he had predicted, and he quotes McGee’s pre-vote warning that class voting favours whoever can sway an assembled meeting. Rutherford had helpfully listed “the present members of the Board” in The Watch Tower of November 1, 1917 — himself, Pierson, W.E. Van Amburgh, A.H. Macmillan, W.E. Spill, J.A. Bohnet and Geo. H. Fisher — while noting that Ritchie, Hirsh, Hoskins and Wright merely claimed board membership, and every man on his list duly polled far ahead of everyone else, Pierson taking 8,888 votes as director and 5,722 as vice-president against Macmillan’s 1,856, while the loyal C.J. Woodworth managed only 1,776. Through the autumn of 1917 the seventh volume became the Society’s central book, with The Watch Tower of September 1 urging readers to place it with neighbours rather than clergy and the issue of October 1 telling colporteurs to “specialize on the Seventh Volume” ahead of the earlier Studies in the Scriptures. Persson argues this mass distribution overturned Russell’s own position, stated in 1910, that the volume was for the Little Flock and the Great Company and “not for the world,” a point the opposition made by quoting the foreword to The Battle of Armageddon, while Rutherford’s side leaned on an unrelated 1916 remark of Russell’s about the faithful wielding a “two-edged sword” and on Ezekiel 21:15 to call the book “the point of the Sword” aimed at Babylon. The urgency came from the expectation that the Harvest would close in the spring of 1918, leaving only a few months to labour, so congregations began Berean studies in the volume and the Society launched a four-page tract, “THE FALL OF BABYLON,” whose mass distribution of 10,000,000 copies began on December 30, 1917. The book also became a loyalty test for speakers: at a convention in Westfield, New York in early September 1917 the name of Frank F. Cook, a former Bethel staff member, was struck from the programme after Brooklyn made clear no pilgrim would be sent if he spoke, following a letter of August 22 from Charles R. Cox of Westfield asking his view of the volume — a reply, soon printed as a tract, in which Cook said he earnestly did not believe the so-called seventh volume should be classed with Russell’s six.
Ch 16. On the Road to the 1918 Election [part 3]
Persson closes his survey of reaction to the seventh volume with a tract reprinting a Bible Student’s letter refusing to attend the convention, in which the writer objected that a Society imprint alone could not make a book authentic and invited the recipients to circulate his protest; Persson notes he cannot establish whether Cook or Cox issued the tract. A Pittsburgh elder, in office since the Bible House moved from Allegheny to Brooklyn and forced out on January 1, 1918, described reading the volume hurriedly at the steel works and then being told by telephone on election day that acceptance of it would be the test for eldership. At that election, Persson relates, nominees who praised the volume were returned while those who said they could not teach it were defeated, the Pittsburgh elder among them because he would not endorse a book he had not yet proved. Persson stresses that this local test anticipated policy by only two months: in March 1918 the Society declared in print that a teacher opposed to the seventh volume was opposed to the Society’s work and should not stand for election as an elder. He then turns to the prominent Bible Students who publicly backed Joseph F. Rutherford, beginning with Gertrude W. Seibert, one of Charles T. Russell’s confidants, a Watch Tower poet and compiler of the widely used “Manna” book. Seibert’s letter in The Watch Tower of December 1, 1917 called the opposition to the current management a device of the Adversary to obstruct the seventh volume; Persson judges her stand predictable given her part in producing the book, but allows that few readers knew of that involvement, so her endorsement helped Rutherford considerably. More consequential, in Persson’s account, was the reversal of vice president Pierson, who at the Boston convention in early August 1917 had sided with the opposition and, on Paul S.L. Johnson’s testimony, had called Rutherford’s Harvest Siftings a satanic production, and who in October was still assuring Johnson that he stood for Light after Darkness. Yet on the eve of the 1918 annual meeting Pierson published a letter declaring himself glad to cooperate heartily with the Brooklyn brethren directing the Society’s work — a complete about-face that Persson says Rutherford timed to appear at the last possible moment before the vote. On the other side, the four deposed directors were kept off the platform at the Society’s conventions in the second half of 1917 and, though all had been elected elders in the New York congregation, were denied general service as elders, a disability soon extended to Menta Sturgeon and made easy by Rutherford’s standing as permanent chairman of the congregation. At the memorial service for Russell in the New York Temple on October 31, 1917, the deposed directors and Sturgeon were permitted to take part, but Johnson was passed over and later complained that he was ignored while standing to testify. Johnson meanwhile settled on an interpretation of Russell’s 1916 expectation of a trying experience separating the “Elijah class” from the “Elisha class,” announcing to a small group in Philadelphia on December 17, 1917 that the separation was the ongoing split over the Society’s management; rival explanations followed, including one from Rutherford’s side, and Johnson’s version would shape his behaviour at the election. Sturgeon, back from a New England trip, reached the Pittsburgh convention of January 3-6, 1918 that framed the annual meeting of January 5, and startled fellow opponents by pronouncing the management and its supporters in the “Second Death Class” and the seventh volume “entirely of the Devil” — views more extreme than Johnson’s or the directors’, but coming from one of the movement’s most learned men and a noted preacher, so that, Persson concludes, the stage was set for a decisive election and a major division. The chapter’s footnotes rest the account on the contending pamphlet literature of 1917-18 (Harvest Siftings and its Part II, Light after Darkness, Harvest Siftings Reviewed, Facts for Shareholders, A Letter to International Bible Students), on runs of The Watch Tower, The Present Truth, Epiphany Studies and the St. Paul Enterprise, and on court records including the 1918 transcript in Rutherford et al vs. The United States and the Moyle vs. Franz transcript. One footnote corrects later writers directly: Persson says Charles F. Redeker and Poul Bregninge both erred in supposing that Pierson signed Light after Darkness, a misconception he attributes to insufficient study of the contemporary material.
Ch 17. The 1918 Election and Its Immediate Consequences
The Pittsburgh convention had been advertised for January 3 to 5, 1918, but a later report shows it actually opened on Wednesday January 2, an early start Persson reads as Joseph F. Rutherford buying extra time to work the delegates before the annual meeting set for ten o’clock on Saturday January 5. The ousted directors had no hand in the programme, speakers attacked “the opposition” as they had at the late-1917 conventions, and the changed stance of Andrew N. Pierson — who stayed away — was used against the former directors, while enthusiastic reports about the seventh volume flowed in; Paul S. L. Johnson later called it a thoroughly “bossed” convention. Rutherford took the chair of the annual meeting without being elected and, Persson argues, used that chair throughout to rule against the four ousted directors, opening with a long presidential report in which he claimed to have saved the Society “approximately $56,000” — a claim Persson notes would have carried little weight had he still been merely the Society’s lawyer, since he had once done such work for Russell for nothing. A treasurer’s report followed, unprecedented in 1917 or before, offered to defuse the opposition’s complaint that the directors and even vice president Pierson had been denied financial information they were legally entitled to see. William E. Van Amburgh’s report in The Watch Tower of December 15, 1917 was thinner than the critics wanted, but Rutherford had shrewdly had his appointed board name an auditing committee — Eliot H. Thomson, Harry J. Aldrich and Clayton J. Woodworth — which inspected the books at the Brooklyn Tabernacle on December 8, 1917 and pronounced them in excellent condition and the cash properly deposited. Persson observes that Woodworth was an unwavering Rutherford man and the other two probably were too, so a genuinely disinterested committee would have carried more weight; he concedes the report may have been perfectly accurate but says there is now no way to test it. Francis H. McGee then moved “to delay matters for investigation,” but he was cut off on a point of order and his supporters were accused of obstruction; The Watch Tower afterwards reported that the shareholders overwhelmingly felt both sides had already published their case and that this was a time for action rather than talk. Persson rejects the claim that “the friends were fully advised as to the facts”: Rutherford had reached every Watch Tower subscriber, while the opposition could reach only 17,000 of more than 55,000, and he concludes Rutherford preferred a split to an inquiry he knew would go against him, leaving whoever won open to suspicion. The dissidents’ own account in A Letter to International Bible Students of March 1, 1918 records their bitter disappointment that classes had been told these matters would be aired at the shareholders’ meeting, only to see every attempt at explanation suppressed. In the nominations for seven directors the pilgrim Richard H. Barber invoked the November referendum as “the Lord’s will” and put forward Rutherford, Van Amburgh, Pierson, Alexander H. Macmillan, William E. Spill, John A. Bohnet and George H. Fisher; McGee, dropping Pierson now that he had gone over to Rutherford, nominated Menta Sturgeon, Alfred I. Ritchie, H. C. Rockwell, Isaac F. Hoskins, Robert H. Hirsh, James D. Wright and Johnson. Johnson withdrew before the ballot, holding that the old board was still legitimate so no election should occur at all and reading the split as the prophesied division between antitypical Elijah and Elisha; he refused both the nomination and any vote in the officers’ election, withholding at least 416 votes from the opposition, and McGee appears to have substituted W. J. Hollister for him. Rutherford stated two years later that each nominee had to answer three questions publicly before the vote: whether he was in harmony with the Society and its work as provided by the charter and Russell’s will, whether he had answered the V.D.M. questions, and whether he accepted The Finished Mystery as the seventh volume of Studies in the Scriptures. Johnson recalled only the first question, moved by R. G. Jolly, and remarked on the double-mindedness of men who claimed harmony with charter and will after violating both; Persson nonetheless thinks Rutherford’s account probably correct, since four days later the New York candidates for elder faced the same seventh-volume test, and since the book’s opponents had to answer honestly and thereby forfeit the election they must already have expected to lose. McGee had argued in November that the law required inspectors of election chosen by the shareholders present — a requirement ignored in 1917 — yet Rutherford again appointed the inspectors himself, one of them Woodworth; balloting was still in the forenoon but the count ran until about 8:30 in the evening. The opposition did not wait for the result: the four former directors, Johnson, McGee and others withdrew just before the returns were read and gathered in a parlour of the Fort Pitt Hotel, where an informal evening of fellowship on January 5, 1918 grew into a small convention of its own. The declared figures were Rutherford 194,106, Macmillan 161,871, Van Amburgh 160,215, Spill 118,259, Bohnet 113,422, C. H. Anderson 107,175 and Fisher 83,260 elected, against Pierson 57,721, Sturgeon 27,261, Hirsh 23,198, Hoskins 22,660, Ritchie 22,631, Wright 22,623, Rockwell 18,178, Johnson 6,469 and Hollister 3,931; The Watch Tower of March 1, 1918 called it about 88 per cent for the management and 12 per cent against. Persson dwells on Anderson, who had never been nominated yet polled almost twice Pierson’s total and displaced him: since only Rutherford’s inner circle would have dared vote against the referendum they had called “the Lord’s will,” this exposes the referendum rhetoric as hypocrisy, and Rutherford’s defence that unnominated men could lawfully be voted for contradicts his own insistence a year earlier that votes only counted for those placed in nomination. Drawing on the Bible Student historian James B. Parkinson, Persson finds the arithmetic suspect: dividing the total votes by the seven names each share could support yields roughly 163,300 shares, a 9 per cent rise on 1917, so Rutherford’s 194,106 exceeds the shares voting by some 31,000, and allowing for Sturgeon’s voters the gap widens by about 58,000 and implies a 47 per cent jump on the roughly 150,000 votes of 1917 — which he dismisses as preposterous. His preferred explanation is cumulative voting, legal under the Pennsylvania corporation law of the day and demonstrably in use at the 1919 meeting, where Bohnet offered to have any votes meant for him thrown to Rutherford; Parkinson suspects Rutherford also voted Russell’s 35,557 shares of January 1907 as Society property, which Persson notes would have flatly contradicted Rutherford’s own November 1917 ruling that a dead member’s certificates die with him. Persson leaves manipulation open — the inspectors were Rutherford’s own men — but records that the opposition never actually alleged fraud in the election. The seven then chose officers: W. E. Page nominated Rutherford as president, Macmillan nominated Anderson as vice president and Spill nominated Van Amburgh as secretary-treasurer, all elected unanimously, after which Rutherford declared from the platform that the Lord had manifested his will through his people. Persson sets this against Macmillan’s later claim, made from the Atlanta penitentiary, that the 1919 election was the first in which Jehovah’s choice of president was clearly evident, and treats both readings as sectarian wishful thinking; Rutherford meanwhile invited the men he had accused of trying to “wreck the Society” to work in harmony with it, a gesture Persson calls a safe one since the opposition had already walked out and would never accept the seventh volume. The Society’s convention closed on Sunday January 6, 1918 with a love feast of about a thousand, just before which the convention unanimously requested Hirsh to resign from The Watch Tower’s editorial committee — a step flatly contrary to the will the new directors had professed harmony with the day before, since the will allowed removal only by impeachment brought by three editors and carried by thirteen of sixteen judges. Hirsh, long cut off from editorial work but still named in the issue of January 15, 1918, ignored the request and was replaced by Fisher’s name in the issue of February 1, 1918; the motion passed easily because he was absent and could not answer it. While that was happening, the seceders held three sessions at the Fort Pitt Hotel, and in the afternoon Ingram I. Margeson of Boston proposed and nominated a committee of seven to find out what Bible Students who could no longer stay with the Society needed — Sturgeon, Ritchie, Hirsh, Hoskins, Wright, McGee and Johnson, all elected unanimously, who then chose Sturgeon as chairman, Ritchie as secretary-treasurer and Hirsh as vice chairman before an evening resolution instructed them to write to Bible Students everywhere who stood by Russell’s arrangements. The New York congregation’s postponed election of elders was held on January 9, 1918 and survives only in a hostile Brooklyn Daily Eagle report of January 10 headed “THE VOLUME” FOES CRUSHED AT RALLY OF “RUSSELLITES”, which Persson judges detailed enough to use: Ritchie objected that requiring the 73 candidates to affirm three questions, the last on teaching the seventh volume, departed from Russell’s rules, and Rutherford as chairman overruled him. Every candidate answered yes to the first two questions, but a dozen or more insurgents including Ritchie and Wright refused to call the seventh volume genuine and none of them reportedly drew even a dozen votes, a collapse from the 85 the best-supported opponent had won in the autumn that Persson attributes to withdrawals after Rutherford’s re-election and to fear of voting against so high-handed a chairman. Rutherford closed that meeting with a plea for harmony and the maxim that a decided majority should be taken as the Lord’s will — a principle Persson says he applied only when it favoured him, given his anxiety about the 1919 election he could not influence from Atlanta and Macmillan’s relief at the result as proof Jehovah was running the Society. The opposition made no attempt to upset the 1918 result; accepting that the shareholders backed Rutherford, they founded an independent and large congregation in New York immediately after the ecclesia election, with about two hundred withdrawing in Philadelphia and a significant body forming in Boston, while at Chattanooga nearly all the original class stayed with the opposition and only a few left to keep with the Society. Elsewhere sympathisers lingered for a time inside Rutherford’s ecclesias — Bohnet reported them still meeting with the Pittsburgh congregation — though by 1929 between 75 and 150 Bible Students were said to be meeting independently in Pittsburgh every Sunday and increasing. McGee formally resigned his shareholding, his letter printed in The Watch Tower of March 15, 1918 declaring that he was not in harmony with the Society or its subsidiary corporations as conducted since Russell’s death, while Johnson served as an elder in the separated New York congregation and kept visiting Society-loyal classes to press his doctrines until The Watch Tower of March 1, 1918 warned them against him. Pierson, tricked out of the board at Pittsburgh, stayed with the Society a few years before joining one of the movements begun by the 1918 seceders, and two of Rutherford’s prominent supporters in the crisis, Fisher and William F. Hudgings, later broke with him too, Fisher becoming an outspoken opponent. Sturgeon and Ritchie resigned from the Fort Pitt Committee on January 22, 1918 fearing Johnson would dominate it, and on February 11, 1918 Jolly and Margeson took their places; the committee’s most consequential act was its four-page A Letter to International Bible Students dated March 1, 1918, and from its work grew the Pastoral Bible Institute and the Laymen’s Home Missionary Movement in 1918 and 1919, while the Society suffered a further schism as the Stand Fast movement broke away over Rutherford’s compromise on the war issue.
Ch 18. Confrontation with the Authorities [part 1]
Persson opens the chapter by noting that Joseph F. Rutherford’s charge that his opponents were trying to “wreck” the Watch Tower Society did not stop with the January 1918 election, and that an even graver accusation followed in the summer of 1918; to make sense of it he first sets out the Bible Students’ deteriorating relations with the American authorities. Rutherford left Brooklyn on January 16, 1918, taking his wife to California for her health, and did not return until March 5, so the first blows against the Society fell while he was away. Since the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917 the movement’s pacifist stance, held since 1915 and hardened in 1917, had brought trouble: The Watch Tower of January 15, 1918 reported Bible Students court-martialled, given long prison terms, or held in detention camps. The legal instrument was the Espionage Act passed by Congress on June 15, 1917, carrying fines up to $10,000 and prison terms up to twenty years for obstructing the war effort or aiding the enemy, and the authorities were alarmed both by leading Bible Students advising young men against military service and by the seventh volume, The Finished Mystery. Persson quotes the book’s page 247 denunciation of patriotism as “a narrow-minded hatred of other peoples”, together with its approving citations of C.E. Jefferson on militarism as a contagious disease and of the clergyman John Hayes Holmes, who called war an “open and utter violation of Christianity” and its prosecution “a crime”. The first serious official action came in Canada, where conscription became law on August 29, 1917 and where, as M. James Penton records, a warrant of January 30, 1918 banned both The Finished Mystery and the Bible Students Monthly on pain of a $5,000 fine and five years’ imprisonment, the ban being gazetted in the Canada Gazette on February 9 and 16 but reaching the public only through newspapers on February 12 and 13. Persson suggests the Canadian action may have prompted the Americans: Clarence L. Converse, a United States government officer, searched the Society’s Brooklyn office on February 27, March 1 and March 6, 1918, and in June 1918 swore a detailed inventory of what he removed on the first visit, including twenty-seven letter files, two directors’ minute books, ledgers, check books, account books, pamphlets and bundles of Italian and German correspondence. On March 6 Converse also seized a dismantled wireless outfit from the Bethel Home at 122 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, which the Bible Students surrendered without resistance; the press nonetheless carried the story nationally as evidence of communication with Germany, an inference Penton attributes to wartime paranoia since radio could not then receive messages over such distances. The Los Angeles congregation’s hall and quarters were raided and Society publications confiscated on Thursday February 28, 1918, and on March 4 several prominent Bible Students, among them The Finished Mystery co-author C.J. Woodworth, were arrested at Scranton, Pennsylvania and bonded for later trial. Rutherford and his circle blamed the churches for the campaign, and Persson concedes this may have been remotely true given sociologist Ray H. Abrams’s claim that clergy were “originally” behind the drive against the Bible Students, but he insists the sweeping clergy-blaming still current among Jehovah’s Witnesses rests on bias and ignorance. Against it he sets Abrams’s evidence that fifty-five ministers of various denominations were arrested under the espionage and sedition laws, that some 1,200 cases of Lutheran clergymen were investigated with convictions sent to Atlanta, and that Clarence H. Waldron, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Windsor, Vermont, got fifteen years at Atlanta for causing insubordination and obstructing recruiting. Persson’s own conclusion is that with so many copies of The Finished Mystery in circulation, a war-hysterical United States would have moved against the Bible Students with or without clerical enemies. Once Rutherford grasped that the offence lay chiefly in “pages 247 to 253, inclusive”, he acted fast: on March 5 he cabled the printer at Hammond, Indiana to halt work, and the same day the Society told colporteurs and distributors to stop selling the volume and to push Pastor Russell’s Sermons and the other volumes instead. A colporteur-department letter of March 7, 1918 relayed a telegram ruling from Washington that the government would not interfere if pages 247 to 253 were eliminated, and instructed workers to cut the pages out leaving a half-inch stub for replacement text; but on March 14 the Department of Justice told the District Attorneys that any further distribution of the book violated the Espionage Act, and it later emerged that the preface and pages 406, 407 and 469 were also objectionable. The Society’s widely distributed tract Kingdom News, dated March 15, 1918, plainly aimed at conciliation, denying any disloyalty, calling the United States government “the best on earth” and Wilson “the greatest of earth’s rulers”, conceding the government’s power to declare war and draft citizens, while asking only that members of a recognised religious body be spared combatant service. Kingdom News no. 2 of April 15, 1918 continued the appeasement by denying that the Association’s teaching or The Finished Mystery had influenced anyone against the government or retarded the war, and no. 3, dated May 1918, avoided the war altogether; a Society letter of March 16, 1918 to colporteurs and class secretaries meanwhile admitted the book was under examination in the light of the new law and told them to withhold it from sale. Liberty Bonds were the other pressure point: Abrams described Liberty Loan Sundays, government literature sent to every minister, and the visits from federal agents, tar-and-feather mobs and court sentences that followed clerical non-cooperation. When the Brooklyn Tabernacle congregation voted down a Liberty Bond speech on Sunday April 28, 1918 under W.T. Baker’s chairmanship, Rutherford answered publicly in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, disclaiming any reflection on the government, explaining that the auditorium was reserved for religious matters, and stating that the International Bible Students Association was not against the Liberty Loan and that members who could afford bonds should buy them. None of this deflected the authorities: warrants issued on May 7, 1918 out of the Federal court for the Eastern District of New York for Joseph F. Rutherford, William E. Van Amburgh, A.H. Macmillan, Robert J. Martin, Clayton J. Woodworth, George H. Fisher, Robert Hirsh, Giovanni de Cecca and Fred H. Robison, charging conspiracy to obstruct or impede the war work of the United States, and most were served on May 8 by United States Marshal Power. Persson explains the apparent arbitrariness of the selection — vice president C.A. Anderson, directors W.E. Spill and J.A. Bohnet, editor W.E. Page and the Cromwell, Connecticut resident A.N. Pierson, vice president until January 5, 1918, were left out — as reflecting who actually lived and mattered at Bethel, with Woodworth and Fisher of Scranton included because they wrote the book. He notes bitterly that The Watch Tower of June 1, 1918 went on flattering the authorities, arguing on page 168 that a Christian unable to kill might still lend money to his country and, on page 174, echoing the president’s May 30 day of prayer with thanks for “the promised glorious outcome of the war”; such compromises with the principles held since 1915 drove thousands out of the Society and, half a year later, produced the Stand Fast Bible Student Association. The six Bethel defendants were arraigned on May 8 and Fisher and Woodworth on May 9, all pleading not guilty with bail at $2,500 each and trial set for June 3; Robert Hirsh, advised by the Bible Student lawyer F.H. McGee and by Paul Johnson, tried on May 10 at Washington to get his indictment quashed, was arraigned on May 14 on $1,000 bail, and on June 4 the Attorney for the United States moved successfully to dismiss the indictment as to him. The other defendants’ attorneys objected, suspecting Hirsh would turn government witness; Hirsh’s widow later wrote only that he was present at the trial and set free as no part of the charges, and Persson observes that Hirsh had been a prominent 1917 Editorial Committee member barred from functioning that summer who left headquarters in August, and that Rutherford would afterwards exploit the dismissal “in a most vicious way”. The bench changed twice — Judge J. Garvin was replaced on June 3 by Judge J. Chatfield and he by Judge B. Howe on June 4 — while the prosecution subpoenaed many witnesses, questioning four of the “opposition” (Wm. Hollister, I.F. Hoskins, R.H. Hirsh and Paul Johnson) before a U.S. Attorney on May 13; Johnson reported that because they defended the accused so strongly the prosecutor never called them, though he did subpoena the ousted directors, Bethel staff and the Society’s printer Walter A. Conkey, whose testimony was long. Seven of the eight defendants testified and Persson shows them retreating from the book: Fisher said he had never opposed conscription and had always encouraged those who could conscientiously serve; Woodworth said his patriotism passage was “stated too strongly”, pushed responsibility for the Holmes quotation onto Holmes, and agreed it was right for sinners to go to war. Van Amburgh said he was opposed to war for himself “but not for the nation” and thought it perfectly right for the United States to wage war, which Persson contrasts with his own affidavit for fellow Bible Students that the movement was “against war in any form”; Robison cited a fifty-dollar Liberty bond bought on May 1, 1918, and R.J. Martin, head of the Watch Tower office on Hicks Street, said he favoured the war, had bought a bond, and denied the book called patriotism devil’s work. Rutherford was on the stand longest, his testimony filling pages 964-1072 of the court transcript; he limited his opposition to consecrated Christians, repudiated the Holmes quotation as ill-advised and something he would not have included, confined the patriotism passage to European hatreds, and claimed he did not know it referred to the United States — a claim Persson meets by pointing to the American wars with Mexico in 1846 and Spain in 1898 against Rutherford’s assertion that “The United States have always been a government of peace.” Macmillan was the government’s weak point: on June 10, 1918 Judge Howe told the United States prosecutor, Mr. Oeland, that he was satisfied as to the other seven but that nothing had been shown against Macmillan beyond his signing of checks, and that absent evidence of conspiracy he would be discharged. Macmillan’s own book tells only of an evening at the attorneys’ office where he told a Mr. Fuller he would rather go to Atlanta with his friends than be released; Persson supplements it with the contemporary report of William F. Hudgings, secretary of The Peoples Pulpit Association and a government witness, that Macmillan asked the attorneys to withdraw the dismissal motion and wrote and signed a statement accepting his share of responsibility. On June 11 Oeland introduced overlooked evidence marked Exhibit 31 — printed at pages 1266-1268 of the transcript — the mimeographed resolution of July 17, 1917 by six members of Rutherford’s new board, and put it to Hudgings, who would say only that the signatures looked like Van Amburgh’s and Macmillan’s writing and might be forgeries; the judge held that he was testifying falsely about never seeing Macmillan write and committed him to jail for contempt in the Marshal’s custody. Persson calls the attempt to convict Macmillan on that resolution unfair and desperate, since the prosecutor ignored the co-signatures of A.N. Pierson, W.E. Spill and J.A. Bohnet, who were never charged with anything. The government then used the ousted director Alfred I. Ritchie, who identified the mimeographed signatures — Van Amburgh’s confidently, Macmillan’s less so but still probably his — a passage Persson notes the 1975 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses quoted correctly on page 106, adding that Fisher and Van Amburgh made the same identifications, which is why Macmillan himself was never asked about them; Macmillan’s own most striking claim was that he had never read the Holmes quotation, which Persson thinks hard to believe though possible. On the indictment, Persson notes the defence established that most of the book predated the American declaration of war without affecting the outcome, and quotes Macmillan’s summary that the government, unable to show intent in the writing, argued instead that continued sale of the seventh volume after the Selective Draft and Espionage laws were passed constituted intent and established conspiracy. The jury returned a verdict of guilty on all counts against every defendant on June 20, 1918, and Judge Howe pronounced sentence on June 21; Macmillan, rather than the court record, quoted The New York Herald of June 22, 1918, which declared the men’s religious propaganda “more harmful than a division of German soldiers” and their punishment fittingly severe.
Ch 18. Confrontation with the Authorities [part 2]
Persson tests A.H. Macmillan’s retelling of the sentencing against the trial transcript and finds it slanted: Macmillan, who elsewhere boasted of quoting the record exactly, put into the judge’s mouth the claim that the defendants “have denounced all the ministers of all the churches,” words the record does not contain, which Persson reads as an eagerness to damn the clergy at the cost of accuracy. What the record does say is that the court considered the defendants’ religious propaganda a greater danger than a division of the German Army, more harmful than if they had joined that army with guns and swords, and that sincerity in a preacher only aggravated the offence, so the punishment had to be severe. The court accordingly sentenced Joseph F. Rutherford, William E. Van Amburgh, Robert J. Martin, Fred H. Robison, George H. Fisher, Clayton J. Woodworth and A. Hugh Macmillan to twenty years in the federal penitentiary at Atlanta, Georgia on each of the four counts of the indictment, the terms to run concurrently, and refused both a stay of execution and bail. Sentence on Giovanni de Cecca was held over so the court could look into his past, and on July 10 the judge, holding that de Cecca had hardly been a leader and had largely acted under the direction of the others, gave him ten years on each count concurrently while again denying bail on the ground that the men at liberty “might continue to do much harm.” About nine months afterwards Judge Howe explained that his “principle purpose was to make an example to others, as a warning to others,” the Bible Students being the best-known of the groups hostile to military service; Persson notes, following Ray H. Abrams, that the newspapers then reprinted the very excerpts the men had been jailed for circulating, and leaves it an open question whether silencing them achieved anything. Against the modern Watch Tower Society’s claim that “the clergy of Christendom” “railroaded” the eight officials into prison, Persson sides with M. James Penton, for whom the evidence points instead to the police, the secret service and the military as the parties who pushed the U.S. Attorney General’s Department to prosecute. The seven-man Fort Pitt Committee, Rutherford’s 1917 opponents, followed the trial closely, most of them having been compelled to attend, and on June 22 I.F. Hoskins and H.C. Rockwell put to their colleagues a scheme to seek reunion with the Society and, through a New York firm of corporation lawyers, to recover control of it once the leaders were convicted — a plan the majority rejected and never carried out. Rutherford appears to have got wind of it, and on July 3, the night before he was taken to Atlanta, he wrote to his supporters a letter later circulated to the congregations and printed in The Watch Tower, warning that seven who had opposed the Society “attended upon the trial and lent aid to our prosecutors” and citing Romans 16:17, 18 against their overtures. Persson stresses that this accusation of aiding the prosecution went well beyond anything Rutherford had charged before, that it was repeated in Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Divine Purpose (1959) and the 1975 Yearbook, and that Rutherford hardened it in 1926 into a claim that consecrated men had “conspired with the enemy and betrayed their brethren” in fulfilment of Matthew 24:10. Paul S.L. Johnson, one of the accused seven, answered at once that this was “a gross and untruthful slander,” arguing that the government had acted because the leaders witnessed against the war spirit and because they interfered with the draft through intercepted letters into the camps telling brethren not to wash dishes, pare potatoes, clean barracks or wait on tables — that is, the leaders had betrayed themselves, and the opposition knew nothing until the arrests. Ten years later Rutherford escalated again in The Watchtower of January 1, 1936, casting himself and his followers as “the Samson class” and his opponents as “the Delilah class,” and alleging that one man indicted by the federal grand jury under the espionage law escaped trial because he “rendered the enemy service against his brethren,” refused an offer of bail bond and defence counsel brought by a special messenger, was let off on a straw bond, and was seen talking with government representatives during the prosecution. Persson identifies that man as Robert H. Hirsh and calls the charge a glaring lie: Hirsh consulted the Bible Student lawyer McGee, took his case to Washington, was bailed pending trial, and had his indictment dismissed on June 4 before the trial proper, because — as Johnson explained — the prosecution found he had stopped acting as an editor before the offending Watch Tower article appeared and therefore moved to set the indictment aside. He adds that Macmillan himself nearly escaped for want of evidence and was probably convicted only because he had signed a statement accepting his share of the alleged offence, that Hirsh never took the stand, and that on Johnson’s information Hirsh told the pilgrim brother Cole and de Cecca that he sympathised with the accused and had used his own arrest to defend them, being unable to say so to the rest because of their unapproachableness. The defendants’ own attorneys had objected to the dismissal of Hirsh’s indictment for fear he would become a prosecution witness; Poul Bregninge says Judge Howe upheld the objection and struck a bargain with Rutherford’s lawyers that Hirsh would not be called, but Persson finds no such thing in the court record and thinks the prosecution simply saw no value in him — and he notes that neither Macmillan’s book nor any Society history admits that the defence tried to keep Hirsh indicted alongside them. Under subpoena the ousted directors had no choice but to attend, so their presence was no disgrace, and the only opponent actually put on the stand was the former vice president Alfred I. Ritchie, who merely identified the signatures of Van Amburgh and Macmillan — identifications the defendants Fisher and Van Amburgh also made. Macmillan’s book misreports even that, claiming Ritchie could not remember seeing him write yet flatly affirmed the signature, whereas the transcript has Ritchie saying he had seen Macmillan write, though “not as frequently as Mr. Van Amburgh,” and hedging that “Mr. MacMillan’s is not so recognizable, but I think it is his signature.” Macmillan’s story about June 10, 1918 — a government attorney whispering in the hallway with opposition leaders, “Don’t let that fellow go; he is the worst of the bunch” — was approvingly reprinted in the 1975 Yearbook, but Persson dismisses it as hearsay about words supposedly spoken in low tones, and points out that the opponents, still dependent on the Society for copies of Russell’s books, had every reason to want Macmillan keeping the operation running. He then turns the argument round: loyal Rutherford supporters — Hans Insberg, Mabel Campbell, Agnes and William Hudgings, Jerry de Cecca and Camel Nicole, some of them Bethel residents — were subpoenaed and gave the prosecution far more testimony than the single opposition witness, yet were never accused of conspiring with the enemy in any Society publication. Nor did the opposition supply any of the prosecution’s documents: the authorities had ransacked the Society’s headquarters and seized everything they needed, including the minutes of both the Watch Tower Society and the Peoples Pulpit Association, while the ejected men, shut out of the offices, had nothing to give. Persson concludes that the betrayal charge served a purpose — with the leaders bound for prison, painting the opponents as traitors was the surest way to stop them regaining influence, and the slur was kept alive as rival Bible Student movements drew off disillusioned members — and he directs the reader to Johnson’s rebuttal “A PROTEST AGAINST MISREPRESENTATION,” printed in The Present Truth of September 1, 1919 and reproduced in Appendix 12. The chapter’s 102 footnotes rest overwhelmingly on the transcript of record in Rutherford et al vs. The United States (1918), supplemented by Macmillan’s Faith on the March, Abrams’s Preachers Present Arms, Johnson’s Epiphany Studies, Another Harvest Siftings Reviewed and The Present Truth, Penton’s work on the Bible Students in wartime, Bregninge, Society publications from The Watch Tower and Kingdom News to the 1975 Yearbook and the 1989 Watchtower, and a 1974 letter to Persson from Rose Hirsh.
Ch 19. The Watch Tower Society at Its Lowest Ebb [part 1]
Persson opens the chapter at the Society’s weakest point: the sedition verdict of June 21, 1918 sentenced four of the seven directors elected the previous January to long prison terms, leaving only vice president Charles H. Anderson of Baltimore, Dr. Walter E. Spill and John A. Bohnet of Pittsburgh available, none of whom lived at the Brooklyn headquarters and none of whom together made a quorum. Anticipating this in June 1918, the directors contrived a board meeting at which Alexander H. Macmillan and George H. Fisher resigned and were replaced by the “pilgrim” Richard H. Barber and Dr. L.C. Work, both Brooklyn residents, on the understanding that Macmillan and Fisher would resume their seats if they returned; Joseph F. Rutherford stayed president and William E. Van Amburgh secretary-treasurer, and the board kept a quorum, though Persson notes the arrangement caused trouble later. The New York subsidiary, the Peoples Pulpit Association, was in worse shape: of the seven directors listed in The Watch Tower of November 1, 1917 only Burgess, Baeuerlein and William F. Hudgings remained at liberty, and with Hudgings jailed about six months for contempt of court the Association could actually muster two, while its vice president Macmillan could not convene anyone from prison. Persson quotes the Association’s charter on filling vacancies and argues that the only lawful remedy — resignations followed by presidential appointments — could not begin until thirty days had elapsed, so the legal position looked all but impossible; yet some solution was evidently found, since the Association’s board took part in the autumn 1918 move to Pittsburgh, and the New York Herald of August 25 already called Spill the Association’s vice-president. Writing in the National Labor Tribune of January 15, 1919, Rutherford described the seven days in dungeons at Raymond Street jail and seven more in light cells at Long Island City jail, during which the officers communicated daily with the office and continued to direct the work until their removal to Atlanta on July 4, 1918. Barber recalled decades afterwards being summoned to Pennsylvania Station as the prisoners waited for the Atlanta train, receiving Rutherford’s instruction to sell Bethel and the Brooklyn Tabernacle and move to Philadelphia, Harrisburg or Pittsburgh if harassment grew severe, and watching Rutherford dictate the selling instructions to Frank Horth aboard the train while Agnes Hudgings took copies. The committee Rutherford named to act in his stead consisted of Barber (correspondence and preparing The Watch Tower), John F. Stephenson (treasurer) and Spill (outside matters), and although it signed collectively as the “Executive Committee” in The Watch Tower of August 15, 1918, Persson concludes from C.E. Stewart’s remarks at the January 4, 1919 meeting and from Rose Hirsh’s later recollection that Spill, the only director among them, was effectively in charge, Anderson acting only when legally necessary. The editorial committee was likewise reconstituted: The Watch Tower of August 15, 1918 listed Spill, W.E. Page, R.H. Riemer, Stephenson and E.T. Horth, but by February 1, 1919 the imprisoned men’s names were restored with C.A. Wise, Hudgings, J. Hutchinson and Riemer named as substitutes, dropping Spill, Barber, Stephenson and Horth — a shift Persson suspects Rutherford engineered from prison, Hudgings having been released on December 12, 1918 and being then a firm Rutherford loyalist. In Atlanta the eight leaders worked in the prison tailor shop, Rutherford eventually moving to the library; Rutherford shared a cell with Van Amburgh and Macmillan with Clayton J. Woodworth, visits were limited to close relatives roughly fortnightly, and the men used compulsory Sunday chapel attendance as a chance to hold an hour-long Sunday school class for other prisoners. Rutherford’s National Labor Tribune article of January 15, 1919 on Elijah and Elisha was, in Persson’s judgement, probably his first doctrinal break with Russell; he argued Elisha pictured the part of the Society working with the official board rather than the Great Company, and refined the view in The Watch Tower of August 15, 1919 without ever admitting he had departed from Russell. Paul S.L. Johnson was surprised the article never appeared in The Watch Tower and later said he had learned the temporary editors refused to approve it. Persson digresses to Frederick Homer Robison (1885-1932), for whom Atlanta was a turning point in the study of church history; drawing on Robison’s own account in The Divine Message (Takoma Park, D.C., 1922), which Persson could read only in August Lundborg’s Swedish translation in I Morgonvakten of 1 and 15 November 1926, he traces Robison’s adoption of Ethelbert W. Bullinger’s reading of Revelation. Robison asked on December 20, 1921 to be relieved of leading the Friday evening study of The Finished Mystery, offering fifteen reasons; Rutherford answered on January 2, 1922 with twenty-four questions demanding an immediate reply, and on January 3 Robison resigned from the editorial committee, the Peoples Pulpit Association, the Bethel family and the Brooklyn eldership, though his name stayed on the masthead until May 1, 1922, and he died of pneumonia and pleurisy on April 17, 1932. Persson describes 1918 as a season of hostility for American Bible Students — persecution, even tarrings and featherings, documented at length in The Golden Age of September 29, 1920 — with work continuing on a reduced scale; at the Milwaukee convention of August 30 to September 2, 1918, federal officers barred the doors during Bohnet’s afternoon talk and demanded draft cards from the young men before the talk resumed. Following Rutherford’s advice, the boards of the Society and the Peoples Pulpit Association together with the Executive Committee moved the offices from Brooklyn to the Martin Building in Pittsburgh’s North Side, a removal dated August 26, 1918; the Tabernacle was sold for about $16,000 and Bethel was all but sold to the government when the armistice intervened, and Hugo Riemer remembered only about ten staff in Pittsburgh. Earnest D. Sexton’s 1919 pamphlet The Case of the International Bible Students catalogued prosecutions over The Finished Mystery — three years’ imprisonment in Washington State for mailing a copy, men jailed at Globe, Arizona, and four colporteurs sentenced to three years at San Bernardino, California — and the Society inserted a supplement in The Watch Tower of September 1, 1918 suspending circulation of the book, the March 1 special “ZG” edition, the Bible Students’ Monthlies and Kingdom News for the duration of the war. Persson unpicks the “ZG”: a magazine-form printing of The Finished Mystery issued as the March 1, 1918 Watch Tower, duplicated by another issue of the same date whose contents refer to events of March 4 and Department of Justice instructions of March 14, which he reads as evidence the ordinary issue was printed later to displace the ZG. He suggests the ZG was an attempt to keep the book in circulation after the Canadian ban of January 30, 1918 became public in newspapers of February 12 and 13, and notes its conciliatory editing — patriotism unmentioned, only Germany blamed, the Jefferson and Hayes quotations and Russell’s 1915-1916 war statements dropped — which he says gave later critics of the leadership’s compromise their ammunition, and which was never raised at the June 1918 trial. Distribution of the magazine edition was halted by the notices in the Watch Tower issues of September 1, September 15 and October 1, 1918, and only in summer 1920, on legal advice that the ban no longer bound them, did the Society release it again on June 21, 1920 at twenty cents a copy despite its printed claim to be a free sample. With president and treasurer in prison there was serious talk of postponing the election due on January 4, 1919, and a letter went out to class secretaries saying there would be none; but the Society was caught by Rutherford’s own 1917 legal argument that board-elected directors hold office only until the next annual election, which would vacate Work’s and Barber’s seats and destroy the quorum, so an annual meeting became indispensable. Anderson, as “the Acting President,” telegraphed Bohnet, Spill and Barber that postponement had been an error and that the December 1 Watch Tower must announce an election on January 4, calling the decision final, and Stephenson as “Acting Secretary” announced the meeting on the same page; Rutherford, aware he might not be re-elected, told Macmillan on the day that they might be dropped and left in prison forever. The meeting at Pittsburgh on January 4, 1919 is reported in unusual detail on pages 20-37 of the Souvenir Report of the Bible Students Convention, Pittsburgh, Pa., January 2-5, 1919: Hudgings, out of prison after six months, had visited Rutherford in Atlanta days earlier, carried back a dictated message, and first moved that the election be recessed six months to the first Saturday in July lest a new slate be read by the Government as repudiating the appellants — a request he said came from the prisoners themselves, contradicting the December 1, 1918 Watch Tower. Hudgings attacked the acting directors, calling them weaklings, which drew Stewart’s defence of Spill’s courage; Rutherford’s dictated message quietly slighted them too, proposing E.J. Coward for president, Anderson or Wise for vice president and Hugo H. Riemer for secretary-treasurer, from which Persson reads implied criticism of Anderson and of Stephenson, the man Rutherford had himself appointed in July. Sexton, a Los Angeles “pilgrim” who arrived forty-eight hours late through snowdrifts, argued that re-electing Rutherford would be the greatest compliment the shareholders could pay him; the speech carried the room and after a recess Hudgings withdrew his motion. Sexton’s ticket of Rutherford, Wise, Van Amburgh, Anderson, Hudgings, Coward and Barber faced rival nominations including Spill, E.H. Thompson, Stephenson, G.F. Kendall, R.H. Riemer and E.F. Christ, and Bohnet publicly asked that any votes meant for him be transferred to Rutherford, which Persson identifies as cumulative voting in action. After about four hours of checking proxies the result was announced around 8:30 p.m.: Rutherford 112,000, Wise 111,712, Barber 97,828, Van Amburgh 88,307, Spill 84,148, Hudgings 75,942 and Anderson 70,113; Persson finds Rutherford’s exact round thousand curious enough to tempt suspicion of trickery while conceding no evidence is likely to surface, and Sexton then nominated the officers, Anderson moving that the vote be made unanimous. Persson rejects the Society’s later claim — in the 1975 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses — that opponents came to the 1919 meeting hoping to install their own man: the opposition had already built the Pastoral Bible Institute, Johnson was busy in Philadelphia and had declined to vote his 416 shares in 1918, Francis H. McGee had resigned as a shareholder, and Sturgeon and Johnson had fallen out with the rest, so there was no candidate for them to run. He allows that Rutherford may have feared such a move but insists he cannot have “realized” it, and endorses the 1959 history Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Divine Purpose where it says none of the 1917-1918 opponents had any voice in the proceedings — because, he adds, none of them tried. Rutherford’s two chief backers at the 1919 meeting both later left: Hudgings had dropped off the “pilgrim” list by the 1928 Yearbook, spoke at the 1931 Pittsburgh reunion convention outside the Society, published Zionism in Prophecy in 1936 against the Society’s 1932 teaching, and became an editor of The Dawn; Sexton resigned his Los Angeles eldership and then the Society altogether, sending his resignation letter for publication in The Herald of Christ’s Kingdom of February 15, 1931, in which he cited the recent Watch Tower articles and the “Light” book as decisively misleading. The armistice of November 11, 1918 changed the climate: newspapers agitated for the release of Espionage Act prisoners, Bible Students circulated a petition for their leaders with an overwhelming response, and on March 3, 1919 Judge Harland B. Howe, who had passed the sentences, wrote to the Attorney General that his purpose had been to make an example, that he had expected the President to relieve them after the war, and that he now favoured leniency since the men could do no further harm.
Ch 19. The Watch Tower Society at Its Lowest Ebb [part 2]
The appeal never reached a hearing in the form first expected: on March 21, 1919 the Circuit Court of Appeal ordered bail of $10,000 for each of the eight imprisoned Watch Tower men, who left Atlanta by train on March 25 and were bailed in Brooklyn the following day. On May 14, 1919 the convictions were reversed and the case sent back for retrial, Judge Ward holding that the defendants had not received the temperate and impartial trial they were entitled to; with the war and the war hysteria over and a real chance of losing, the Government finally abandoned the prosecution in open court at Brooklyn on May 5, 1920. Joseph F. Rutherford and his fellow prisoners were feted at the Bethel Home, which the Society still held, and again at the Pittsburgh headquarters on April 1, 1919 with a banquet at the Hotel Chatham. Persson treats as plausible rather than proven the report that Rutherford used the Pittsburgh reception to snub Dr. Walter E. Spill, who had run headquarters during the imprisonment, refusing even to shake his hand — an account Paul S.L. Johnson said he had on reliable information and which deepened conservative distrust. About the same time a board meeting saw R.H. Barber, regularly elected in January 1919 as a stand-in for Alexander H. Macmillan, step aside so that Macmillan could be re-elected until the next shareholders’ meeting; since Rutherford and William E. Van Amburgh counted Macmillan an ally, Persson sees no reason anyone would have objected. The Society had just come through the worst period in its history — wartime persecution, its president and other officers nine months in prison, and damaging schisms — and the leaders’ return promised recovery, but Rutherford’s health at once became a fresh danger. A useless ventilation fan in his cell had left him with a dangerous lung condition; pneumonia followed soon after his release, and while convalescing in California with his wife and son his survival was genuinely in doubt. Had he died the vice president, Wise, would have had to take over and a new director be found, which the Society would have counted a serious setback; instead Rutherford improved, though never completely, and was back at the Pittsburgh headquarters by July 1919. In his absence George Butterfield, who had helped finance the publication of The Finished Mystery in 1917, arrived at headquarters with $10,000 for the work — substantial help in the circumstances. Rutherford and the editorial committee were still working within the framework of The Finished Mystery and its 1918 date, so The Watch Tower told readers in 1919 that the crowns of the 144,000 “kingdom class” had probably all been apportioned in the spring of 1918, that newcomers could no longer be promised an immortal crown, and a month later that the harvest was finished and “the door is closed.” Persson points out that this was very close to what the separated Stand Fast Bible Students had published in December 1918, with the difference that the Society soon dropped it, and that its public preaching turned instead to earthly blessings under the kingdom. At the Brooklyn convention of May 29 to June 1, 1919 Macmillan, deputising for the absent Rutherford, gave a closing address that The New York Times reported on June 2 under the headline “NEW DATE FOR MILLENNIUM,” quoting his promise that the millennium would arrive in 1925 and that Moses and Abraham would be present. This was a version of the talk “Millions Now Living Will Never Die,” which Rutherford had first delivered in Los Angeles on February 24, 1918 and which The Watch Tower had repeatedly urged on the congregations before the sedition trial; after the leaders’ release the campaign was pushed harder than ever, the issue of October 15, 1920 calling it “the message of the hour.” Rutherford complained in 1921 that Bible Students who had gone over to the rival movements would not carry the new message, and Persson confirms from their own publications that they rejected it — the Pastoral Bible Institute’s The Herald of Christ’s Kingdom of January 1, 1922 answered that no one could say when death would cease, and Johnson wrote in The Present Truth of October 1, 1922 that the “Millions” proposition was pure guesswork with no scriptural basis. Karl Klein of the governing body of Jehovah’s Witnesses later recorded Rutherford’s own admission about 1925, “I made an ass of myself,” but Persson insists that calling it merely misguided understates the case: it was a false message spread by all of Rutherford’s supporters, and hardly evidence that they were God’s chosen servants. In his concluding remarks Persson observes that most of Russell-era Bible Students eventually left under Rutherford, partly because he discarded Russell’s teachings — most strikingly his 1932 claim that the holy spirit had ceased to act as advocate and guide since 1918, which Johnson called a preposterous absurdity and which the Society itself repudiated in 1944, two years after Rutherford’s death. The other reason, Persson argues, was Rutherford’s appetite for power: the four directors he dismissed in 1917 were the first to try to check him and were replaced by yes-men, Russell’s will failed to protect the editorial committee from “any spirit of ambition and headship,” and in 1931 Rutherford abolished the committee and made himself sole editor, having already in 1920 pushed the shareholders into three-year terms in defiance of the state charter. Rutherford also redefined the “Society” from Russell’s “only a business association” into the whole body of anointed Christians, so that electing him president made him head of the church — a claim borne out by John H. Mitchell’s signed 1937 statement recording L.C. Work’s assertions that Rutherford was automatically an elder of every I.B.S.A. congregation and head of the visible church, and by W.B. Fowler’s letter, printed approvingly in 1939, that Jehovah had honoured Rutherford as no man before. The chapter’s footnotes rest chiefly on The Watch Tower and later Watchtower issues, Macmillan’s memoir, the Souvenir Report of the January 1919 Pittsburgh convention, the 1975 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Johnson’s The Present Truth and Epiphany Studies, with contemporary New York newspapers and a 1974 letter to Persson himself among the supporting material.
Ch 20. The Pastoral Bible Institute
Persson opens the chapter by counting four separate Bible Student movements that emerged within eighteen months of the decisive January 1918 Watch Tower election, three of them growing directly out of the 1917 management crisis and a fourth out of Rutherford’s accommodation over war bonds in May and June 1918. He takes the Pastoral Bible Institute first because it was organised earliest, tracing it back to the opposition shareholders who walked out of the annual meeting on the afternoon of January 5, 1918 and regrouped at the Hotel Fort Pitt in Pittsburgh. The next day they chose a committee of seven — the four ousted directors together with Russell’s former secretary Menta Sturgeon, Francis H. McGee and Paul S.L. Johnson — with Sturgeon as chairman, Ritchie as secretary and Hirsh as vice chairman. The Fort Pitt Committee met for the first time on January 20, 1918, but within four days Sturgeon and Ritchie both resigned, each fearing that Johnson meant to dominate it. On February 11 the survivors replaced them with Raymond G. Jolly, an educated former pilgrim, and Ingram I. Margeson, who had chaired the elders of the Boston ecclesia; Hoskins took over as secretary, and since no new chairman could be agreed on, Hirsh presided as vice chairman for the committee’s whole life. Persson argues that the resignations were well founded: although Johnson publicly disclaimed any headship on February 11 and again before the independent Brooklyn ecclesia on March 11, McGee noted that he simultaneously identified himself with the Old Testament figure Medad, with Russell as Eldad, a typology that would give him a standing in the church equal to Russell’s. Johnson’s own later writings, Persson says, expose the denial as dishonest — he admitted that he had never stopped regarding himself as the priestly executive and teacher after Russell’s death and that his control of the committee’s teaching and executive functions was implied in his claimed office of Epiphany messenger, merely left unspoken and disclaimed only under pressure in the autumn of 1917. A second quarrel concerned corporate form: Johnson urged a new corporation at the opening of the Fort Pitt gathering on January 5 and was voted down the following day, so the committee’s circular letter of March 1, 1918 asked supporters only about pilgrim service and a periodical. By the meeting of April 29 the positions had reversed, with McGee, Hoskins, Wright and Margeson pressing for a business corporation while Johnson — who had decided on March 31 that corporations were unscriptural — joined Hirsh and Jolly in resisting; the deadlock was still unresolved when the committee met for the last time on July 18, 1918. Doctrine deepened the split, since Johnson’s fresh readings of biblical types and symbols, notably his interpretation of Elijah and Elisha, were adopted by Hirsh and Jolly but rejected outright by the committee’s majority, who said publicly that they thought the Elijah-Elisha typology wrong. The committee elected an editorial board for its planned magazine on April 13, 1918 and pointedly left Johnson off it; the project then stalled when the government arrested the Society’s leaders on May 8, and Johnson afterwards accused Hoskins, Margeson and Wright of repeatedly delaying publication of The Bible Standard and Herald of Christ’s Kingdom out of fear of prosecution. The day after the Society leaders were sentenced, on June 22, Hirsh was made managing editor, and a general convention had already been called. That convention — the first held outside the Watch Tower Society — met at Asbury Park on the New Jersey shore from July 26 to 29, 1918, drawing about 300 Bible Students by letter invitation. Hirsh sprang the first issue of The Bible Standard and Herald of Christ’s Kingdom on the audience on the opening evening; the rest of the committee had expected to wait, and McGee only consented to its circulation as an unattributed sample, after which no further issues appeared. Persson calls the convention one of the least edifying gatherings Bible Students ever held, with the committee frozen into a majority of Hoskins, Wright, McGee and Margeson against a minority of Johnson, Hirsh and Jolly. At a business session on the afternoon of July 27 the committee admitted it could not work together and asked the convention to name a replacement; the Fort Pitt electors present ceded their appointing rights, all seven members resigned, and a new committee of J.D. Wright, I.F. Hoskins, F.H. McGee, I.I. Margeson, H.C. Rockwell, F.F. Cook and P.L. Greiner was elected on a far broader franchise than the 32 people who had acted at Fort Pitt. Rockwell had himself sat on the Watch Tower board until resigning on February 8, 1917; Johnson, Hirsh and Jolly were all left off the new body, Hirsh and Jolly declining nomination and Johnson, McGee reported, never being nominated at all, and Persson rejects Johnson’s later claim that the convention was “bossed” by his opponents, citing McGee’s evidence that Johnson spoke more than anyone else. On July 28 the convention voted to issue a free monthly interim paper until a doctrinal journal could be produced, and authorised the new committee to organise pilgrim service and further conventions; the interim paper, The Committee Bulletin, ran for three issues in August, September and October 1918. Johnson answered on August 22, 1918 with a twelve-page pamphlet, Another Harvest Siftings Reviewed, devoted to the committee’s quarrels and the hostility at Asbury Park; McGee objected that the title was a misnomer, since unlike Rutherford’s worldwide Harvest Siftings nothing defamatory had been published against Johnson by this group, and Johnson had done plenty of attacking himself. The new committee replied with A Brief Review of Brother Johnson’s Charges, sent out with the August Bulletin, and McGee added his own A Timely Letter of Importance dated September 10, 1918 with the September Bulletin; attempts at reconciliation during the autumn failed and the North American opposition permanently divided into two movements. A general convention called for Providence, Rhode Island on October 18-20, 1918 was pushed back to November 8-10 by the Spanish flu, and about 300 Bible Students, mostly from eastern states, attended. On November 8 the convention authorised a non-profit business corporation with the committee as trustees — Frank F. Cook having resigned after moving to Detroit and been replaced by C.P. Pritchard of Andover, Massachusetts — and authorised an editorial staff of five for a journal to be called The Herald of Christ’s Kingdom. The editors named in the first issue of December 1, 1918 were R.E. Streeter, a former pilgrim under Russell, H.C. Rockwell, I.F. Hoskins, I.I. Margeson and the physician S.N. Wiley. The Pastoral Bible Institute’s charter was granted as a New York membership corporation on November 23, 1918, printed in full in The Herald of January 1, 1919, naming the seven directors and giving 262 Fulton Street, Brooklyn as headquarters, while local congregations were urged to call themselves “Associated Bible Students”. Persson stresses that the charter deliberately departed from the Watch Tower Society’s: a five-dollar contribution bought membership and exactly one vote, directors stood for annual election on the first Saturday in June, the titles president and vice president were avoided in favour of chairman and vice-chairman, and secretary and treasurer were kept separate — safeguards plainly drawn from what these men had just lived through. At the first annual election on June 6, 1919 all seven charter directors were returned and chose Wright as chairman, Margeson as vice chairman, Hoskins as secretary and Greiner as treasurer, with fifteen pilgrims reported in service since August 1918 and the Herald’s subscription list up from about 800 to roughly 2,500. The Herald set itself apart by refusing both speculative interpretation — a rebuke aimed at Johnson and at the Watch Tower Society alike — and controversy with opponents, a policy Persson says it kept, criticising the Society’s decline only in general terms and never naming individuals. In 1930, as Rutherford’s doctrinal changes unsettled Watch Tower members, the Institute went on the offensive with a 314-page translation of The Desolation of the Sanctuary by the German Bible Students Emil and Otto Sadlack, a sustained critique built from the Society’s own publications, advertised by an eight-page leaflet, A Message To The Watchers And To All who Mourn in Zion, which told readers that Russell’s death had brought a complete change of spirit and policy and arrogant claims to be a divine “channel”. The Institute had already reprinted Russell’s The Divine Plan of the Ages in 1922 and issued Streeter’s two-volume The Revelation of Jesus Christ in 1923 and 1924 — a less speculative counterweight to the Society’s 1917 The Finished Mystery that did not treat Russell as a prophetic figure — followed in 1928 by Streeter’s Daniel the Beloved of Jehovah, four years after his death. By 1930 the Institute had worldwide support, close ties to the Bible Students Committee in Britain and the Berean Bible Institute in Australia, a German edition of the Herald running since 1925, and about 3,000 subscribers. Its most contentious intervention came with “Watchman What of the Night?” in the Herald of April 15, 1921, which moved the end of the Gentile Times from 1914 to 1934 by reading the seventy years as servitude rather than desolation and dating Jerusalem’s destruction to 587 B.C. rather than Russell’s 606 B.C. — a position, Persson notes, closer to what secular historians held. Johnson counterattacked in The Present Truth from June 1, 1921 through several 1921 and 1922 issues, the Herald held its ground across its own run of replies, and the Watch Tower Society, without ever naming the Institute, published at least six articles on chronology from May 1, 1922 to July 1, 1923 complaining that some were spreading the idea that Russell had erred — evidence, for Persson, of how much influence the Institute had among Watch Tower adherents. Persson illustrates the Society’s hostility with two family cases: W. Norman Woodworth, a distant relative of Finished Mystery co-author Clayton J. Woodworth, was expelled from Bethel in 1928 merely for visiting friends at the Institute, denounced as a spy, refused the chance to resign, and required to declare all outsiders dishonest as a condition of staying — a demand he refused. The second case is Clayton J. Woodworth’s daughter Mary Elizabeth, born 1893, who married the Bible Student George Filchett Herde in 1917; after his vaccination article in The Golden Age of October 8, 1924 the couple left the Society for the Institute, and Woodworth conceded her Institute sympathies under oath at the 1943 Moyle trial, while her son Byron later reported that her father had disowned her — proof to Persson that the hostility broke up families. During the 1920s the Institute sheltered many who left the Society, holding a high standard of personal holiness, but its missionary zeal faded; when W. Norman Woodworth and other prominent Pittsburgh Bible Students left the Society late in that decade and pressed for more public witnessing, the Institute would not support them, which produced Dawn Publishers in 1932 and the Dawn Bible Students Association in 1934. Persson qualifies this by noting that the Institute as a body was not against public witness — its own director Margeson, a founder of 1918, became a Dawn Publishers trustee alongside Woodworth, and its British partner the Bible Students Committee witnessed energetically. The Institute’s founding emphasis on Christian liberty, a reaction to the intellectual bondage its founders had known in the Society, could also be pushed far enough to tolerate pilgrims and ecclesias departing from cherished doctrines such as Christ’s presence, the church’s share in the sin offering and the distinction between the covenants. Isaac Hoskins, senior director after Margeson’s death in 1935, tried to reverse this in 1936 by replacing the liberal directors with conservatives; he lost, taking only forty-four per cent of the vote, failed re-election himself and lost his seat on the editorial committee, and afterwards charged that the new directors had abandoned the institution’s founding purpose. Hoskins and his supporters withdrew and, with no corporation behind the venture as he confirmed at the Moyle trial, he began a monthly magazine, Watchers of the Morning, dated from April 1937 and running until June 1957, a few months before his death that September. Merger talks between the Institute and the Dawn Bible Students Association in 1946 and 1947 came to nothing, though cooperation improved steadily, particularly after 1992 when the Herald returned to a more orthodox Bible Student stance. That shift followed the removal of editor Peter J. Pazucha, a director since 1980 who had supervised the Herald since 1985 and whom a majority of the board found too liberal; they weighed closing the magazine before recruiting Carl Hagensick of the Chicago Bible Students, assuring him that his lifelong Dawn ties were no obstacle. The May-June 1992 Herald announced that Pazucha and Jarmola had withdrawn from the ballot and the July-August issue that Pazucha and three fellow editors were standing down; Persson, having read the issues Pazucha oversaw, can find little that was objectionable beyond a January-February 1991 article contradicting Russell on the sin offering, and admits the episode remains unclear since Pazucha, who returned the Institute’s library to board chairman Tim Thomassen and apparently left the Bible Students altogether, will not discuss it. Hagensick’s first issue was September-October 1992, announcing a wholly new board of editors under the motto “Continuity and Freshness”; after his death in 2008 James Parkinson reports that lead editors Michael Nekora and Leonard Griehs have kept the magazine close to its early roots, with about 1,800 subscribers in some 30 countries and editions in Tamil, Polish and occasionally Croatian. Membership has fallen to about 180, based now at Bremerton, Washington, with seven directors still elected annually under the 1918 charter and a five-man editorial committee, and close cooperation with the Dawn Bible Students Association and the Berean Bible Institute in Australia — a sizeable minority of Dawn members, including the Bible Student historian James Parkinson, also belong to the Institute. The Institute republished Streeter’s Revelation commentary in 1998 and 2015 and his Daniel commentary in 1998 and 2016, and in 2016 put online the “RVIC” — a Revised Version Improved and Corrected based on the 1901 American Standard Version, retaining archaic English but making factual changes at passages such as Luke 23:43, John 1:1 and 1:18, Revelation 20:10 and 20:5, and adding a passage before 1 Samuel 11:1 from a Qumran manuscript and Josephus; a printed edition of a thousand copies with six appendices followed in early 2020.
Ch 21. The Laymen’s Home Missionary Movement
Persson traces a third body of Bible Students out of the 1917 crisis to Philadelphia, where after a four-hour debate on 19 July 1917 the local ecclesia warned Joseph F. Rutherford that it would abandon him unless he called a special shareholders’ meeting on the disputed issues. Rutherford refused, and after the January 1918 election that secured his control the large Philadelphia congregation broke apart, the dissenters forming an independent ecclesia of roughly 200 members in which Paul S.L. Johnson, Raymond G. Jolly and Robert H. Hirsh were all serving as elders by the summer of 1918. Dissatisfied with the Asbury Park convention, the three pressed the Philadelphia ecclesia to ask the Fort Pitt Committee for a general convention in September 1918; Isaac Hoskins, as the committee’s secretary, refused, so the ecclesia voted 42 to 6 to let Johnson convene it himself, a narrow turnout that Persson reads as evidence the congregation was less than wholehearted. The committee and most of its followers boycotted the September convention and afterwards dismissed it as a local affair, a judgement Johnson half-conceded when he admitted it was poorly attended. The convention’s closing session named a committee, including Francis H. McGee, to break the deadlock between the two dissenting factions, but McGee declined to serve, and the rebuff led the Philadelphia church to cut its ties with the Fort Pitt Committee on 17 September 1918. When the Providence convention in November nonetheless resolved to win Philadelphia’s support, Johnson drafted a resolution, adopted 1 December 1918, offering talks only if the committee first cleared itself of the irregularities charged against it, did so in the Philadelphia church’s presence, and submitted to an investigating committee of the September convention’s choosing; the same page carried his call for a further convention on 20-22 December. Persson argues the moment for agreement had already passed: the committee had chartered the Pastoral Bible Institute on 23 November and issued The Herald of Christ’s Kingdom on 1 December, while Johnson’s own The Present Truth and Herald of Christ’s Epiphany appeared on 9 December announcing that present light lay hidden in types, symbols and prophecies, a method he himself acknowledged was “practically taboo” to the committee. Since Johnson rejected corporate organisation altogether and the Institute could not un-incorporate itself, the committee abandoned the effort, boycotted the December convention, and on 28 December told Philadelphia by special delivery letter that a conference would accomplish nothing while its charges stood; a long Philadelphia reply of 5 January 1919 was merely acknowledged on 10 January, ending the correspondence, though a separate Pastoral Bible Institute ecclesia had by then split off from the Johnson-led congregation. The Present Truth went monthly on 1 June 1919 with fewer than a thousand subscribers by year’s end, and at a general convention in Philadelphia on 5 July 1919 the movement, taking a name Russell had sometimes used, made Johnson its General Pastor, Teacher and Executive Trustee with sole control of its funds. Johnson insisted the Laymen’s Home Missionary Movement was an activity rather than an organisation, with no charter, by-laws, directors or elections; Persson concludes that he ran it exactly as he pleased and believed himself divinely appointed, so that his earlier disclaimers of leadership counted for nothing and Herbert H. Stroup was near the mark in calling it “the Paul Johnson Movement.” He launched a lighter public paper, The Herald of the Epiphany, in July 1920 and moved the headquarters to Snyder Avenue in Philadelphia that September, where it stayed for the rest of his life; the movement drew Bible Students internationally but almost no other Bible Student body would work with it. Persson sets out the doctrinal system Johnson built on Russell’s late end-times teaching, beginning with Russell’s two heavenly classes: the “little flock” of 144,000 who would rule with Christ, and the “great company” who had compromised, forfeited their standing, were saved through tribulation and would serve as antitypical “Levites,” the two groups being foreshadowed by Elijah and Elisha and due to be separated shortly. Johnson held that this separation actually occurred in the turmoil after Russell’s 1916 death, the Watch Tower leaders and their firm supporters becoming the Elisha class and the “great company” through their “revolutionism” against Russell’s will and charter, losing their crowns and standing revealed as “manifested Levites”; he named such people freely, including Pastoral Bible Institute leaders, while still treating them as brothers on a lower plane. Johnson explained his own superior insight by the claim that since about the time of “that servant’s” death the church had passed from the Parousia into the Epiphaneia stage, which he rendered as the epiphany, a concept central to his magazine’s title and to the 17 volumes of Epiphany Studies in the Scriptures he wrote between 1938 and 1950, yet one Persson says no other Bible Student movement took seriously. Because the “great company” could only be drawn from former members of the “little flock,” and because Johnson dated the closing of the “high calling” to the spring of 1916, he assigned everyone converted afterwards to a new class he called the “youthful worthies” in February 1919, taken from the “young men” of Joel 2:28 and paired with the “ancient worthies” of the Old Testament. The youthful worthies were not spirit-begotten, would be prominent men on earth in the millennium and be changed to spirit beings afterwards, were to be baptised and admitted to the memorial, and were told to marry only within their own class; Persson notes that the closing of the high calling became a lasting quarrel with other Bible Student fellowships. Johnson never wavered on Russell as the “faithful and wise servant” of Matthew 24:45 even as others softened the teaching in the 1920s, defending it in print in 1920 and 1925, reprinting Russell’s will, and devoting two volumes, The Parousia Messenger of 1938 and its 1949 sequel, to Russell’s fulfilment of biblical types; when the Society stopped printing Russell he reissued Studies in the Scriptures, Tabernacle Shadows and Hymns of Millennial Dawn, still on sale today. Against the Society’s identification of Nelson H. Barbour as the “evil servant” of Matthew 24 and the “foolish shepherd” of Zechariah 11, Johnson from a Philadelphia lecture in February 1918 onward applied both figures to Rutherford, arguing them out in articles of 1920 and 1922 and in a chapter of Epiphany Studies in 1938 — a view, Persson notes, that most Associated Bible Students shared and still share. The movement’s theology also took in Johnson himself as the “Epiphany Messenger,” a claim Persson finds nowhere argued in a single Present Truth article but running through the 1941 autobiography of that name, published as volume 10 of the Epiphany Studies and so plainly intended as a tenet, in which Johnson said the Lord had appointed him teacher and executive of the Epiphany work. This put him alongside Russell without claiming to be “that servant”: the two were the pair of Deuteronomy 32:30 and the Eldad and Medad of Numbers 11:26, Russell prophesying from the 1870s and Johnson anointed in 1903 as a Lutheran minister — applications Persson calls far-fetched — and he also styled himself the antitype of Joseph, Job, Ezra and Nehemiah, claims every Bible Student outside his movement rejected. Persson defends Johnson on one point, insisting he never claimed to be “earth’s great high priest”: the Society’s 1959 history Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Divine Purpose and the 1975 Yearbook made the charge on the authority of A.H. Macmillan, but Johnson listed it among the falsehoods circulated about him and consistently taught that the world’s high priest was Jesus and the church together, a correction Jolly rightly pressed on the Society. Of Johnson’s 17 volumes Persson singles out the 749-page Merariism of 1938 as one of the most substantial examinations of Rutherford’s theology ever written, better than the Pastoral Bible Institute’s The Desolation of the Sanctuary of 1930, and thinks his 1920 Life-Death-Hereafter also of wider interest. Johnson turned on both his chief lieutenants: he read Hirsh’s wish for independence as proof he was “a Levite,” withdrew “priestly fellowship” from him before the Philadelphia ecclesia in May 1920 over his wife’s protest that Johnson had no right to label anyone, and in July 1920 Hirsh publicly denounced him at the Jersey City convention, ending his connection with the movement. Jolly, accused of calling Johnson impractical and of opposing him in the ecclesia, was condemned in November 1923 after backing what Johnson called a revolutionary method of elections, and was likewise pronounced a crown-loser of the “great company”; unlike Hirsh he accepted the verdict, later confessing publicly to the class, while Johnson maintained he was not judging anyone but merely reporting a judgement God had already made — a distinction the Hirshes and others rejected as delusion. Through the following decades Johnson used The Present Truth to dissect every rival Bible Student body and to name and censure individual leaders, devoting much of 1927 and 1928 to refuting the universalism of the former Watch Tower editor F.H. Robison, who had left the Society in 1922; an unpaid Bible House family of seven, his wife among them, freed him to spend six or seven months a year travelling as a pilgrim. The movement grew — more than 6,000 Polish adherents were reported in 1933, subscriptions to the two papers stood at over 23,000 and 12,000 in 1934, and a supporter bought the Epiphany Bible House outright in 1936 — though Polish defections, some of them to the Pastoral Bible Institute, were reported in 1938. Johnson’s health failed from 1946; he arranged in May 1948 for Jolly to succeed him, and died in October 1950 at 77, leaving over 300 congregations in about 40 countries and a lecture bureau of more than a hundred speakers. Persson sketches Jolly’s background — a Presbyterian upbringing, college at Bloomsburgh and Lafayette abandoned after reading Russell, marriage to a fellow Bible Student in 1910, service at Brooklyn headquarters and as a pilgrim, then eldership at Philadelphia from 1916 and the 1918 invitation that brought Johnson to the city. As trustee Jolly renamed The Herald of the Epiphany as The Bible Standard and Herald of Christ’s Kingdom in December 1951 — the very title the Fort Pitt Committee had chosen in 1918 for a paper that never went beyond a sample copy — and in 1967 moved the headquarters to Chester Springs; his later work spread the movement in Eastern Europe and, from 1954, greatly in Africa. His booklet on the teachings of Jehovah’s Witnesses shows where the movement parted from them, rejecting their refusal to salute the flag, their view of the cross, and their ban on blood transfusion, which Jolly held the biblical prohibition on eating blood did not touch; in 1976 he reissued Russell’s The Photodrama of Creation in a modernised form. Under Jolly the movement’s most notable doctrinal change was the ruling that no more “youthful worthies” could be gathered after October 1954 and that later converts formed a further class, “The Consecrated Epiphany Campers,” who were to be baptised and share the memorial but whose reward was everlasting life on earth rather than the youthful worthies’ greater millennial role and eventual heavenly change. Jolly’s tenure brought repeated schisms, catalogued by James Parkinson: Cyril Shuttleworth’s departure in 1951, John W. Krewson’s split in 1954-1955 over whether he could hold the teaching office and his rival Laodicean Home Missionary Movement, and John F. Hoefle’s withdrawal in about February 1956; Jolly had named August Gohlke his successor in 1975 and died in February 1979 in his ninety-third year. Gohlke took over as planned and mixed more freely with other ex-Watch Tower groups, and was followed by Bernard W. Hedman in 1985 and by Ralph M. Herzig in 2004, under whom the movement adopted the publishing name The Bible Standard Ministries in 2005 and whose doctrinal changes were made compulsory. Financial trouble and doctrinal disagreement then produced what Persson calls the most significant division since Jolly’s death, a former member estimating that some 40 per cent left across the United States, United Kingdom, Poland, Germany and Canada without forming any new organisation; Herzig stood down through illness in 2014 and Leon J. Snyder, still in charge, continues the two magazines, the Johnson and Russell reprints, and an electronic Bible Standard Cyclopedia from the Chester Springs address.
Ch 22. The Bible Students Committee in Britain
Persson turns to Britain, where an independent Bible Student movement was already forming by late 1917 for much the same reasons that produced the Pastoral Bible Institute in America in November 1918. Joseph F. Rutherford had reinstated Henry Shearn and William Crawford as managers of the London branch after Paul Johnson dismissed them in February 1917, but new branch rules issued on March 16, 1917 placed authority in Jesse Hemery as the president’s representative, which the two managers would not accept. Johnson reported from America on November 1, 1917 that Shearn and Crawford had left the Bethel staff and were splitting the British congregations. For the narrative Persson leans heavily on Albert O. Hudson’s 1989 history Bible Students in Britain, noting that Hudson belonged to the London Tabernacle congregation during Johnson’s 1916-1917 visit and witnessed the events, though Persson cautions that the book is not always accurate. Shearn and Crawford, forced back into ordinary business life, attached themselves to reorganised London congregations, notably Forest Gate in East London, which had publicly declared independence from the Society; its leading elder Frederick George Guard was Crawford’s father-in-law and naturally opposed Hemery. News of the American headquarters crisis reached Britain quickly: William Robertson’s Edinburgh quarterly The Bible Student described Harvest Siftings and the directors’ replies in its December 1917 issue, and Axel Sjo’s Swedish paper had already summarised them in October 1917, so Persson concludes British Bible Students were suspicious of Rutherford by that autumn. Secessions followed at the end of 1917 as the elder Robert Cormack joined an independent Glasgow assembly and the Kensington ecclesia broke fellowship with the Tabernacle, while Hemery told the Tabernacle audience on October 28, 1917 that the departing classes were welcome to their supposed freedom. The Watch Tower’s 1918 insistence that anyone rejecting The Finished Mystery was outside the Elijah class and unfit to serve as an elder accelerated the split, and by early 1919 more than a hundred independent classes existed in the United Kingdom. A conference at University Hall, London on April 5, 1919 created the Bible Students Committee, deliberately annually elected and with no titular head, seating Crawford, Frank Edgell, F. G. Guard Sr., Alex Guy, William Seager, Shearn and George Tharatt. A circular letter of May 1919 announced a convention held at East Ham Town Hall on August 2-4, 1919, where some six hundred delegates ratified the Committee, re-elected it, and made Shearn its first secretary. Before assuming the Society’s former functions of printing, publishing and supplying pilgrims, the fellowship elected a Reconciliation Committee of eight to seek unity, believing no real doctrinal differences separated them apart from the Society’s recent claims for itself. Rutherford answered with a conciliatory article, “Let Us Dwell Together in Peace,” in The Watch Tower of April 1, 1920, even allowing that a man who denied the Society was the Lord’s channel could still be treated as a brother, but Persson observes that he neither withdrew the 1918 pronouncements on the seventh volume nor addressed congregational self-government. Frederick Lardent’s claim in the New Era Enterprise that many of the bewildered were returning is contradicted by the facts, Persson argues, since Lardent himself later joined the secession and served as secretary of the independent London convention of 1931 alongside Crawford and Isaac Hoskins. At the Society’s London convention of September 10-13, 1920 Rutherford spent a two-hour Kingsway Hall session on the Committee’s points, insisting the Society was no ordinary business corporation and that publication had given The Finished Mystery a standing beyond a mere commentary by Clayton Woodworth and George Fisher, and the reconciliation effort collapsed because returnees were required to accept the Society as the sole channel of truth. By 1921 the movement counted 135 independent churches and some three thousand adherents, roughly half the British body of 1916, implying about 6,000 Bible Students in Britain before the split. Rutherford’s 1922 Scottish trip proved costly: intervening in the Glasgow election of elders and telling dissenters to “let the lame ducks get out,” he saw nearly five hundred of a thousand present walk out, making the Glasgow independent meeting the largest in Britain, and by 1924 there were 181 independent centres served by a pilgrim circuit of Shearn, Crawford, Edgell and Ebenezer Housden. Persson catalogues the leading seceders and the Committee’s terms of service, including Shearn as “architect of the secession” and secretary from 1919 to 1935, Housden, Alexander Kirkwood, Hubert Thackway, and the pyramidologist Morton Edgar, who left after Rutherford repudiated the Great Pyramid in 1928; Hudson told Persson the independents afterwards took almost no interest in what the Society said or did. The movement published its own library edition of The Divine Plan of the Ages in 1922 jointly with the Pastoral Bible Institute and the Berean Bible Institute, along with Shearn’s popular abridgement The Plan of God in Brief and, from 1924, Housden’s BSC Monthly, renamed Bible Students Monthly in 1927; a Benevolent Fund begun in 1919 was distributing money and clothing through sixteen centres by 1933, with the greatest need in the South Wales mining valleys. The fellowship peaked around 1930 at roughly 240 assemblies and four thousand active members and was, unlike its American counterpart, notably tolerant of doctrinal disagreement, even counting the small Laymen’s Home Missionary Movement contingent as part of the fellowship. Decline set in with deaths and the disruption of the Second World War, and a national vote dissolved the Committee in 1945 when regular classes had fallen to 47, though the Bible Fellowship Union, whose editor Hudson had left the Society in 1924 and served as Committee secretary from 1936 to 1945, carried the work on. The periodical became Bible Study Monthly in 1951 and its circulation multiplied after 1956, the Benevolent Fund passed to the Bible Fellowship Eventide Trust which opened a retirement home at Gainsborough House in Milborne, Somerset in the 1990s, and Hudson died in 2000 aged 101, yet membership by 1970 stood at only 60 percent of the 1930 figure. Persson rejects the Jehovah’s Witness writer Gary Perkins’s verdict that the Witnesses were “the victors” over the British Bible Students, arguing the Society itself honours failed medieval dissenters such as the Paulicians, Albigenses and Waldenses, and attributing Witness growth partly to threats of annihilation at Armageddon that the independents avoided. He closes by setting the British movement as the third and last group thrown off by the 1917 crisis, distinguishing it from Alexander Freytag’s central European movement, which arose after Rutherford dismissed him from the Geneva branch in 1919 and had no connection to the 1917-1918 disputes, and from the later Dawn Bible Students Association, and points ahead to the Stand Fasts, a 1918 American reaction to Rutherford’s stance on war bonds.
Ch 23. The Stand Fast Movement
Persson opens the chapter by recalling that the Bible Students had held an uncompromising anti-war position since 1915, so that American entry into the war in 1917 exposed them to mounting harassment, and that when the authorities hardened their stance in 1918 the Watch Tower Society softened its own. Joseph F. Rutherford advised that a Christian should buy war bonds, the so-called “liberty bonds”, insisted that the International Bible Students Association was “not against the Liberty Loan”, and wrote in The Watch Tower of June 1, 1918 that a Christian should feel able to lend money to the country as to a friend in distress. This reversal, Persson stresses, provoked resentment among Bible Students across the world but above all in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. Two of the Society’s travelling representatives, or “pilgrims”, led the reaction: Charles E. Heard of Vancouver, British Columbia, who said he “shuddered” at the Watch Tower articles, and W.M. Wisdom in the United States, who circulated an open letter urging everyone back to Russell’s writings. Heard told the Vancouver ecclesia in June 1918 that the Society had ceased to be God’s channel of truth, and in the second week of June its elders and deacons unanimously passed and circulated nationally a condemnation of the offending articles; Persson underlines that both Heard and Wisdom had backed Rutherford in the 1917 management crisis and accepted The Finished Mystery as the seventh volume, so the new movement owed nothing to the four ousted directors or to Paul S.L. Johnson. About 200 Bible Students met at Portland, Oregon on December 1, 1918 and founded The Stand Fast Bible Students Association, governed by an elected Committee of Seven drawn from Victoria, Vancouver, Bellingham, Seattle, North Yakima, Tacoma and Portland, with F. McKercher as its sole officer, “Chairman-Treasurer”; the absence of other officers suggests to Persson that no state charter was sought. The Committee announced a small paper, Old Corn Gems, made up largely of Russell’s writings, taught that the harvest had ended and the door had been “shut” since the Passover of 1918, and in a letter of January 6, 1919 offered the ecclesias only “a comforting work” performed by pilgrims renamed “comforters”. At a Seattle convention on January 12, 1919 Heard delivered the address “The Ship”, printed and widely circulated, arguing from Acts 27 that the Society was the doomed vessel Paul sailed on and that every Bible Student had to abandon it, and that no saint remaining in the old fellowship would ever gain a crown. Heard also read the Israelites’ fortieth Passover at Gilgal and the ceasing of the manna in Joshua 5 as a type of the forty-year harvest, concluding that spiritual food from the Watch Tower had stopped at Passover 1918; Persson notes that only two detailed accounts of the movement exist, August Swanson’s TRUE HISTORY OF THE “STAND FAST” MOVEMENT of 1936, now on Bible Student Archives, and Paul S.L. Johnson’s treatment in volume 6 of his Epiphany Studies in the Scriptures of 1938, which substantially agree. The movement’s early strength is measured by the Memorial of April 13, 1919, when Old Corn Gems reported some 1,200 Stand Fast participants, with 210 at Portland, 182 at Vancouver, 153 at Victoria and 64 as far east as Minneapolis; James B. Parkinson estimates perhaps 40 per cent of the Watch Tower following in the Northwest defected, while Johnson put the movement at between 2,000 and 3,000. Because they held the door to the High Calling permanently closed, the Stand Fasts told new converts that baptism admitted them only to the “family” rather than the body of Christ, with the hope of being hidden in the day of anger and perhaps counted with the Ancient Worthies, a teaching Persson observes was close to Johnson’s although the two groups were openly hostile. At a Victoria convention on April 20, 1919 they resolved that public work had “passed”, that Sunday discourses should be aimed at the saints and that advertising should give only place and time; they endorsed everything the Society had done up to March 27, 1918, when they held the Lord cast it off, and, unlike the other two splinter groups, made acceptance of The Finished Mystery a test of fellowship, still claiming its sacredness in 1936 long after the Society had dropped it. Like other Bible Student bodies they read the parting of Elijah and Elisha as the separation of the Little Flock from the Great Company, and claimed the Elijah role for themselves, a view stated bluntly by the former pilgrim turned “comforter” R.O. Hadley. Swanson called the “Westward Movement” a “Mad Hatter” notion: because the gospel had always travelled west and the movement had begun in the West, leaders pressed adherents to abandon homes and jobs and relocate to Oregon, Washington or British Columbia, and, as Johnson recorded, taught that the elect would be taken to glory at the Passover of 1920 only if gathered there, causing real distress to those who could not afford the journey or whose families did not share the belief. The Society’s counter-attack came while Rutherford and other leaders were imprisoned and the stand-in leadership at Pittsburgh was largely paralysed; after their return to New York in April 1919 The Watch Tower struck back, first obliquely in the March 1, 1919 article “Stand Fast—Striving Together” and then directly in “Who will gain the victory?” of June 1, 1919, which named the Standfasts. Persson judges the Society’s defence of its bond compromise weak, quoting its admission that probably it would have been better to have said nothing about Liberty Bonds, but concedes it handled Heard’s pamphlet more effectively by observing that the Society still existed and that only Paul, Luke and Aristarchus on Acts 27’s ship professed Christianity; against the Stand Fast condemnation of Red Cross giving it pointedly recommended Russell’s own advice of November 15, 1915 that such donations need trouble no conscience, a bitter pill for people who upheld Russell as “the faithful and wise servant”, and it printed a returning defector’s letter. Dissension set in quickly: by about June 1919 McKercher was driving a doctrine that baptising consecrated believers was no longer permissible, splitting the Portland ecclesia, and Wisdom, after a false report of his departure had to be retracted in Old Corn Gems of July 1, 1919, attacked the Committee of Seven, the comforters, the two warring headquarters factions and the Westward Movement in an open letter of December 22, 1919, then left, briefly joined Johnson, returned to the Society as a pilgrim for over a year and finally went to the Pastoral Bible Institute; Hadley also left, and F.M. Campbell of Minneapolis was dismissed and disfellowshipped for sympathising with Johnson. A general convention of about 300 held at the turn of 1919-1920 brought the first major split, when the question of retaining the Committee of Seven wrecked the business session, a large group including Swanson walked out, met separately and voted the Committee out of existence; Johnson called them “the No-committeeite Standfasts” and noted their objection to the Committee’s lording and squandering, though both wings kept identical doctrine and equal inactivity. That inactivity produced the Elijah Voice Society in 1922-1923, formed after southern Stand Fasts came north wanting to act, with John A. Hardeson as driving force and Swanson helping to launch it; it published the Elijah Voice Monthly, issued twelve doctrinal papers called “The Twelve Stones”, claimed to be an independent religious organisation rather than a Stand Fast faction, never reached the 300 antitypical Gideonites it expected, and, small but abrasive, aimed its “smiting” material at civil and military authorities alike while its December 1923-January 1924 issue condemned rival Bible Student groups and endorsed Rutherford’s Harvest Siftings against the four directors and Johnson. In 1925 the Elijah Voice Society came to regard saluting the flag as sinful, and Swanson recorded that several of its parents, with the tacit or express approval of elders including himself, withdrew their children from public schools in protest at compulsory patriotic exercises. Persson uses this to argue that Jehovah’s Witnesses were not the first religious objectors to the flag salute, citing M. James Penton’s judgement that Mennonites, Churches of God adherents and the Elijah Voice Society of Washington state objected first, though the issue only became a public one when the Witnesses took their stand in 1935. The Elijah Voice group’s reliance on the seventh volume undid it as its predictions for 1918, 1920, 1921 and 1925 failed and Swanson himself withdrew in 1926; meanwhile the original body under Heard and Ian C. Edwards adopted an even more radical position, set out in a two-page letter Persson found in Canada in April 2019, sent from 2526 Government Street, Victoria, B.C. and dated August 28, 1923, reporting that nearly all Stand Fast brethren were taking their places as probationary Modern Worthies while claims to spirit-begettal fell away daily. A postscript dated September 4, 1923 records that the Duncan Convention of September 1-2, held on Vancouver Island some 50 kilometres from Victoria, endorsed Heard’s discourse with only one dissenting vote and resolved that the only spirit-begotten Little Flock were the three comforters, William B. Palmer, Heard and Edwards, all of them former Watch Tower pilgrims; the Elijah Voice Monthly denounced this as another of Satan’s delusions. In the autumn of 1923 Heard and Edwards organised the Victoria membership into the Star Construction Company, a cooperative paying wages by family need with some members living in the rented “Scott Block”, though Heard’s wife persuaded him to remain in Vancouver; fearing the predicted time of trouble, Edwards moved the colony in the autumn of 1924 to a tract on Sooke Harbour, 22 miles from Victoria, bought by a wealthy sister, where they farmed, ran a fish fertiliser factory and built a temple, laundry, hospital, barber shop and dentist’s room, selling choice lots at $100 while the poor were housed in rows of tents. According to the account Johnson published from a former member, the resulting inequality bred dissension, communism was preached, Edwards demanded all incomes be handed in and frightened members with a sermon on Achan’s hidden silver until they emptied their children’s banks, after which he bought two government boats and moved the remnant a further 22 miles to Renfrew, where they voted him out for spiritual pride and, starved out and penniless, disbanded; the business failed and the colony closed in 1927. Persson notes that the Sooke and Renfrew settlers, like the rest of the original body, concluded they were not in the high calling at all though many later reclaimed the hope, that by 1938 Johnson found the movement reduced to a few small classes with Heard’s Vancouver class the largest, and that it is now extinct, its members having mostly joined the Associated Bible Students of the Pastoral Bible Institute, with smaller numbers going to the New Covenant Bible Students who had left the Society about 1909, to Johnson, or back to the Watch Tower Society. Persson closes by attacking the Society’s historiography: its major histories and A.H. Macmillan’s Faith on the March (1957) ignore the Stand Fasts entirely, while the 1979 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Lloyd Burtch’s life story in The Watchtower of July 15, 1964 blame “ambitious individuals” seeking power, suppressing the fact that the Society’s own compromise on war bonds created the movement, which he says rejected the flag salute years before the Society did and very likely influenced the Society’s later position.
Ch 24. Conclusion
Rud Persson closes by arguing that the history he has laid out puts the Watchtower organization’s central self-justifying doctrine at risk: its teaching that Jesus inspected the spiritual temple between 1914 and 1919 and then appointed the headquarters leadership as his “faithful and discreet slave.” He holds that no evidence supports such an inspection, and that in any case Joseph F. Rutherford and his associates cannot plausibly have been the men Jesus was pleased with, since everyone in the dispute, Rutherford included, had regarded Charles T. Russell himself as that slave. Persson catalogues the conduct he says disqualifies them: repeated lying about opponents, including the false charge that the ousted men had informed on them to the authorities in 1918; the 1917 book that he calls perhaps the Society’s worst, full of idolising of Russell and failed predictions; the condemnation of Bible Students who rejected it; and compromises on the war question such as endorsing war bonds and telling courts they were not opposed to the war. He suggests these men better fit Jesus’ description of the “evil slave,” and points to their later record as well, above all the worldwide preaching that people alive in the early 1920s would never die because the kingdom would function on earth by 1925 — a message he calls among the falsest ever preached and a cause of mass disillusionment and defections. Turning to later headquarters leadership, he notes the 1966 book that fed expectations about 1975 and observes that the Society’s own 1980 post-mortem shifted blame onto unnamed “persons” connected with the publication rather than admitting that the organization had misled its followers. On Romans 13 he shows that Russell-era Bible Students already taught relative subjection to worldly rulers, that Rutherford overturned this in 1929 by making the “higher powers” God and Christ, and that in 1931 he condemned those who kept the older view as self-deceived and destined for destruction. Persson stresses that the Society quietly reverted to the original understanding in two 1962 Watchtower issues, then in 1981 denied that any reversal had occurred, comparing doctrinal shifts to a boat tacking toward its destination — a claim he rejects outright, since the early Bible Students had already grasped relative subjection and the leaders were therefore raising a smoke screen. He treats the 1917–1918 crisis as a demonstration of how dangerous and arbitrary the use of biblical “types” and “antitypes” is, giving wishful thinking a veneer of legitimacy; Rutherford, Paul S.L. Johnson and the Stand Fasts all indulged in it, and both the Society and Johnson’s Laymen’s Home Missionary Movement later built elaborate doctrine on it, though the Society itself pulled back from the practice in 2015. As a test case he takes the Society’s claim, set out in its 1981 book on the kingdom, that Nebuchadnezzar’s “seven times” of madness in Daniel 4 was only a typical first fulfilment whose greater meaning is a 2,520-year Gentile Times ending in 1914. Persson lists what he considers fatal objections: Jesus never tied the trampling of Jerusalem to Daniel 4; Jerusalem was in fact a free city under the Maccabean kings before the Romans took it, so the trampling cannot have run continuously from Nebuchadnezzar; the 2,520-year reading was unknown to the apostles and unheard of before the nineteenth century; Acts 1:7 forbids calculating the kingdom’s arrival; and no one applies the same logic to the seven years of plenty and famine in Genesis 41. He also dismantles the Society’s defence that Daniel’s prophecies were “sealed up until the time of the end,” noting that Daniel himself interpreted Belshazzar’s prophecy with same-night fulfilment, and that the Society’s own “seven times” chronology was already in print in Russell’s 1889 book, long before the sealed period supposedly ended. Persson then addresses why so few Bible Students left in 1917–1918: the Society was widely felt to be Russell’s sacred creation, and many assumed God would correct Rutherford’s errors, an attitude typified by Philadelphia brethren who saw Rutherford lose the July 1917 debate with F.H. McGee yet wrote that any mistakes were of the head and not the heart. He judges that waiting did not pay, since most of Russell-era Bible Students eventually left anyway — Andrew N. Pierson being his example, a 1917 vice president who defended the ousted directors, then abandoned opposition for the sake of peace, and only years later quit and joined Rutherford’s former opponents. Citing the directors’ own November 1917 pamphlet and their appeal to James 3:17 that wisdom is pure before it is peaceable, Persson argues that piety has too often masked cowardice and cemented corruption, and that Russell himself would never have founded anything had he merely waited. Finally he attacks the claim that there is “nowhere else to go,” which the Society grounds in Peter’s words in John 6:68; Persson calls this blasphemy because Peter addressed Jesus, not the organization, and concludes that leaving an apostate body for the sake of Christian faith is not leaving Jesus, who promised to remain with his disciples, with genuine fellowship still attainable.
Biographies [part 1]
Persson opens Part Two, the sequence of historical biographies of the people most prominently involved in the succession crisis, beginning with Joseph Franklin Rutherford (1869-1942). He argues that Rutherford more than anyone else set off the management crisis by insisting that the presidency made him head of the corporation, which in effect cancelled the arrangements Charles Taze Russell had left for the future work, at a time when every party still acknowledged Russell alone as “that servant”; the biography is deliberately partial — life, family and leadership traits rather than doctrinal changes, travels or books — but far longer and more heavily documented than the others, because so many conflicting claims about Rutherford circulate and his 1917 conduct is covered elsewhere in the book. The two principal early sources he relies on are the second edition of Russell’s memorial Watch Tower issue of December 1, 1916, published in the spring of 1917, and Rutherford’s own testimony at the 1918 sedition trial, which fills much of the court transcript. Rutherford was born on November 8, 1869 a few miles north of Versailles, Morgan County, Missouri, the seventh of eight children of the farmer James Calvin Rutherford and Lenora Strickland Rutherford, was raised a strict Baptist at the nearby Freedom Baptist Church and joined it zealously at seventeen; his elder brother William would later turn bitterly against him. Persson doubts the familiar story that Rutherford went to college at sixteen and studied law there, since no record of it has been found, and points instead to an 1891 notice in the National Stenographer showing shorthand training at the Normal Shorthand Institute in Carbondale, Illinois, consistent with the memorial issue’s claim that at twenty he was official reporter of Missouri’s Fourteenth Judicial Circuit. Following M. James Penton, he holds that Rutherford read law under the apprentice system, passed the bar in 1892, was licensed in Missouri on May 5 of that year, joined the Boonville firm Draffen and Wright and practised for roughly fifteen years. On December 31, 1891 he married Mary Malcolm Fetzer of Boonville, daughter of the surgeon Dr. John Fetzer and a woman fluent in German and French; his Baptist pastor’s assurance that his Presbyterian fiancee could not go to heaven drove Rutherford into agnosticism until he encountered Russell’s writings. Their only child, Malcolm Cameron Rutherford, was born on November 10, 1892, while Rutherford was campaigning energetically for the Democrats — for Grover Cleveland and twice for William Jennings Bryan — and, by his own 1918 account, held money in stocks, bonds, farms and city property. Persson stresses two contempt-of-court fines, on April 8, 1894 at Versailles and May 15, 1895 at Boonville, which Richard Felix drew from the court records in his 1937 booklet Rutherford Uncovered and which a fierce Golden Age attack on Felix in July 1937 conspicuously left unanswered; against the four years as public prosecutor at Boonville and four single-day stints as a substitute judge, he agrees with Felix that no such service conferred the title “judge”, so Rutherford’s later use of it among the Bible Students was personal aggrandizement. Rutherford bought three volumes of Millennial Dawn from two women at his Boonville law office early in 1894; Mary accepted the message first while he spent years testing Russell’s record, before being baptized by A. H. Macmillan at the St. Paul, Minnesota convention on August 16, 1906 and privately publishing “Man’s Salvation from a Lawyer’s Viewpoint” at Russell’s suggestion. In 1907 Russell put him in charge of all the Society’s legal affairs and his own personal ones, which meant closing the Missouri practice, and on June 2, 1907 he entered the pilgrim service, becoming a frequent convention speaker and chairman. For the 1909 move of headquarters to Brooklyn he joined the New York bar, arranged the incorporation of The Peoples Pulpit Association and personally wrote its charter, though he was only one of its 36 members and not a director; in 1910 the board, Persson assumes at Russell’s prompting, elected him a director, and the census that year shows the family in Brooklyn with Malcolm working as the Society’s mail clerk. Rutherford travelled with Russell to Europe, Asia Minor and Egypt in 1910, Mary going only as far as Paris because of her health, and again in 1913, when with Andrew N. Pierson he toured Sweden, Finland and Norway between August 13 and September 3; in Britain in 1914 he signed the charter of the new International Bible Student Association on June 29 with Jesse Hemery, Henry Shearn and William Crawford, was in Hamburg when the war began, and sailed home from Liverpool on the S.S. Mauretania with his wife and son. Persson rejects the tradition, argued by Kenneth Rawson in 2010 and accepted by the Danish writer Poul Bregninge in 2013, that Russell quietly dismissed Rutherford in 1914 or 1915: there is no hard evidence, and Rutherford’s 1917 opponents living at headquarters, who would have known and would have used it, never mentioned any such thing. He assembles the counter-evidence — the letter of December 16, 1914 written from Brooklyn, the hotel room during the Los Angeles debate with the Baptist minister John H. Troy on April 21-24, 1915, the booklet A Great Battle in the Ecclesiastical Heavens ordered from a New York post office box, and Rutherford’s presence at the Oakland convention of May 30 to June 6, 1915 — and offers instead Paul S. L. Johnson’s account of Rutherford weeping over his “dried up” spirituality at Bethel and the Society’s 1915 financial collapse as the real reasons for the move west. That collapse forced Russell to send some seventy people away from headquarters and left Macmillan writing on August 6, 1915 that the Society was “about broke”, so with a wife who could no longer bear New York winters Rutherford had every honourable reason to relocate; Persson supports the plan with Isaac Hoskins’s sworn testimony at the 1943 Moyle trial and with board minutes of August 30, 1915, copied after Russell’s death and known to the researcher Barbara Anderson, recording a $1,000 loan to Rutherford and W. R. Mitchell of Denver for a Los Angeles law office. Examining the sources said to prove a dismissal, Persson finds Laura Burgess implausible because her brother-in-law Isaac Hoskins, a leading opponent of Rutherford, never raised it, notes that Cora Sundbom’s taped recollection said only that Rutherford had been sent away, and observes that W. A. Baker wrote a letter supporting Rutherford printed in The Watch Tower of November 1, 1919, before endorsing Jeff Mezera’s verdict that the whole story is hearsay. In 1916 Rutherford was, on his own 1918 testimony, mainly on the Pacific coast and still a Los Angeles resident in November, yet he lectured widely — “Why Do Nations War?” at Kalamazoo, Oklahoma City on April 16 and Ogden, Utah on August 25 — chaired the Los Angeles convention of September 2-10 which Russell attended, and according to Johnson visited the Soda Lake mine in Nevada on September 12. Surviving letters to his sisters in Tipton and Versailles in September and October 1916 show him near destitution, matching Johnson’s claim that he was “practically penniless”, which Persson says raises the question whether money influenced his bid for the presidency, and one letter of October 11 asks that his brother Will not be prosecuted should he kill him, because of threats made. Rutherford was at Bethel on October 16, 1916, the day Russell left never to return, when Russell’s last act was a failed attempt to reconcile him and Macmillan with the director H. C. Rockwell, who soon resigned; he left on October 29 for the Society’s printer at Akron, met Johnson at Oakland, Maryland on October 30, was cabled in Cleveland about Russell’s death on October 31, reached Bethel on November 2 and spoke at Tampa on November 24, while Mary wintered in Los Angeles and was absent even from the shareholders’ meeting of January 6, 1917 that made him president. Family relations still looked good for some years: he visited Mary in Los Angeles from February 8, 1917, handling a lawsuit there for two local Bible Students, returned again in the late summer of 1917 and in January 1918, when he gave the Los Angeles discourse “The World Has Ended—Millions Now Living May Never Die” on February 24; after the June 1918 sedition sentence of twenty years at Atlanta she visited him at least twice and his son Malcolm sent a warm letter of July 21, 1918 printed in the St. Paul Enterprise. Persson traces the drift apart through the censuses and the press — separate households in 1920, Monrovia visits in 1923 and 1925, Robert J. Martin’s 1930 explanation of the San Diego house built in 1929 on Dr. Eckols’s advice, the 1930 census showing Mary as head of her own Monrovia household, and William P. Heath’s Moyle trial testimony that she was an invalid for whom Rutherford merely “provided” — concluding that by his death neither wife nor son was even the informant on his death certificate, that role falling to his secretary Bonnie Heath. Mary Rutherford refused all interviews, lived to 93 and died at Monrovia on December 12, 1962, still a Jehovah’s Witness, and Persson notes that the Society, whose literature under Rutherford he thinks shows him no gentleman — as in the 1941 St. Louis remark about women as “a stack of bones and a hank of hair” — had reason to keep supporting her. The chunk closes with George H. Fisher, one of Rutherford’s 1917 replacement directors and a fellow prisoner, who in a letter to W. Niemann in Germany of April 27, 1926 charged Rutherford with attending the burlesque show “Artists and Models” at Al Jolson’s Winter Garden Theater; Fisher died of a heart attack on July 30, 1926, the charge lapsed, and Persson reads the evasive rebuttal that Clayton J. Woodworth printed in The Golden Age of May 4, 1927, via E. W. Brenneisen’s letter to Thomas Smedley, as evidence that Fisher was right, since Rutherford found ample time to answer charges when it suited him.
Biographies [part 2]
Persson closes his discussion of George H. Fisher by arguing that even a church trial would probably not have touched Rutherford, because he could pull strings and because the rank and file had grown too deferential to hold him to account. He then turns to Olin R. Moyle (1887-1966), the Society’s own lawyer, who left a private resignation letter for Rutherford at the Bethel lobby desk on July 21, 1939, complaining of Rutherford’s public humiliation of staff (Clayton J. Woodworth being called “a jackass”), of the contrast between Rutherford’s comforts and workers living in unheated rooms “like campers”, and of a Bethel culture that glorified alcohol and condemned abstinence. Rather than settle the matter privately, Rutherford read the letter to the boards of both the Pennsylvania and New York corporations and then to the whole Bethel family, confident that compliant boards and an intimidated staff would side with him. Persson uses the minutes of the August 8, 1939 board meeting, printed in full in the later court transcript, to portray Rutherford as a bully who evaded Moyle’s charges — pleading that he owned “not a foot of land” while living like a king, justifying his rebukes from 1 Tim. 5:20, and falsely accusing Moyle of calling him the god of wine when Moyle had only written of a “Bacchus like attitude” among the family. The Watchtower then announced Moyle’s severance (September 1, 1939), published a signed article calling every paragraph of his letter false and likening him to Judas (October 15, 1939), and followed with “Snares” (November 15, 1939), which attacked him without naming him. Rutherford’s campaign followed Moyle to Milwaukee, where, as Moyle told the local congregation in a statement of September 25, 1940, he was excommunicated on March 21, 1940 on the president’s orders. Moyle sued the two corporations, Rutherford and eleven associates for libel; after Rutherford’s death in 1942 forced the dismissal of the claim against him personally, the case was tried May 10-27, 1943 and, after appeal, decided finally on November 22, 1944 by New York’s highest court, the Society paying $15,000 with interest. Persson reads Moyle’s later remarks about “Jonadab babies” displacing Restitution and Resurrection as evidence that he was drifting toward the older Bible Students; he served briefly on the Pastoral Bible Institute’s pilgrim staff, later edited the Bible Student Inquirer, and died on November 26, 1966. A second casualty was Walter F. Salter, long the Society’s Canadian branch manager, dismissed in 1936 and disfellowshipped at Toronto in 1937, whose widely circulated open letter of April 1, 1937 described buying cases of whiskey at $60 a case and other liquor on Rutherford’s orders and called it a misappropriation of the Society’s money, adding that Rutherford sent Witnesses “from door to door” while he went “from drink to drink”. Woodworth’s reply in The Golden Age did not deny the drinking but defended it on the ground that Jesus too was called a winebibber and drank under nervous strain — reasoning Persson rejects point by point, noting that Salter had complained of expensive liquor and squandered funds, not of drunkenness. Corroboration comes from Phoebe N. Moyle’s 1943 trial testimony about the many empty bottles she cleared from Bethel rooms, and from the Swedish Bethel worker Henning Andersson (there 1927-1934), who stayed a Witness and confirmed both the trimmings and the drinking while insisting it was done decently and privately. Persson next shows that Rutherford, who from early in his presidency pressed all Bible Students into door-to-door work and rebuked resistant elders at the Detroit convention of August 2, 1928, conceded in the same Watch Tower article that he himself had little time to go from door to door, even while a monthly goal of sixty hours was set for ordinary breadwinners in his last years. The case of eighteen-year-old Robert Whitney, told that he could not excuse himself from full service by obligations to a shell-shocked father and an ailing mother, is offered as proof that Rutherford disregarded family duty and the plain sense of 1 Tim. 5:8. Against Rutherford’s claim in Religion (1940) that Jehovah’s witnesses “have no earthly leader”, Persson assembles the 1931 convention paper The Messenger — produced by Woodworth, Robert Martin and Nathan Knorr — which called him “their visible leader”, “Generalissimo of the Convention” and “the chief”, and a pioneer’s letter he printed unedited in The Watchtower of July 15, 1939 hailing him as the visible leader of Jehovah’s theocratic arrangement; Persson concludes he became a pope with more power than Rome’s. The editorial committee of five that had governed The Watch Tower under Russell’s will of December 1, 1916 was, on Persson’s account, dismantled because it obstructed Rutherford: George H. Fisher, dropped from the masthead on March 15, 1924, recorded Rutherford’s boast that he would print what he liked regardless of the other editors, and the 1925 fight over “The Birth of the Nation” marked, in Rutherford’s own 1938 words, the beginning of the committee’s end. The names disappeared in October 1931, a board resolution formally abolished the committee in December 1931, and Rutherford then declared that the work could not be carried on as outlined in “that paper called a ‘will'” — hiding, Persson says, behind a puppet board, a manoeuvre the Watchtower historian Tony Wills mocked as the belief that God became the Tower’s editor once Rutherford could write freely. Turning to Beth-Sarim, Persson argues the San Diego house built in 1929 was constructed for Rutherford’s health and would never have existed otherwise, the “House of the Princes” explanation being a later red herring; the 20-room mansion described by the San Diego Sun and examined by the Bible Student historian James Parkinson could not conceivably have housed the resurrected worthies from Abel to John the Baptist. That the Society voted at the Los Angeles convention of 1947 to dispose of the property because it had “fully served its purpose”, sold it in 1948, and heard Nathan H. Knorr explain that faith did not rest on the house, confirms for Persson that it had been Rutherford’s winter residence all along — a point the San Diego Union made wryly in 1950. He calls the treatment of the caretakers’ children, Bonnie and Joseph Barak Balko, paraded in The Messenger of July 30, 1931 as princess and prince at ages two and about six months, a tasteless consequence of the fiction, and notes the Society never reported what became of them. Persson holds that Rutherford, unable to winter in New York, should have resigned and joined his wife in California — indeed should not have stood for president in 1917 given her condition — and details the establishment: entry into the house on January 13, 1930, the address at 4440 Braeburn Road in Kensington Heights with a hundred acres and views to Mount Helix, and the Cadillacs at San Diego and Brooklyn that W.E. Van Amburgh called gifts from friends, a kind of gift Russell had refused in his 1915 letter to J.A. Bohnet. The San Diego Deed Books show Albert Eckols and his wife Muriel conveying lots 110 and 111 of Kensington Heights, worth twelve thousand dollars, to Robert J. Martin for ten dollars, recorded at Rutherford’s own request on October 8, 1929; since Eckols was the son and partner of Rutherford’s chiropractor A.G. Eckols, and since Paul S.L. Johnson showed the mortgage of the previous day to be camouflage for a purchase the penniless Martin could not have made, Persson infers string-pulling, and finds Van Amburgh’s 1937 claim not to have known of the house simply incredible. On Rutherford’s end, Persson traces lung trouble dating from his release from the Atlanta penitentiary in 1919 and a fusing of six vertebrae, a serious illness before the Detroit convention of July 1940, five speeches at St. Louis in August 1941, an operation at Elkhart, Indiana in November 1941, and death at Beth-Sarim on January 8, 1942 at 72 from uraemia due to rectal carcinoma; the plan to bury him at Beth-Sarim through a cemetery corporation called Beth-Sarim Rest failed when the authorities refused, and Consolation records interment at sunrise on April 25, 1942 in the Society’s plot beside the WBBR radio station on Staten Island — which Persson takes as refuting stories of a secret burial at the house. Two shorter notices close the chunk: Rutherford’s son Malcolm Cameron Rutherford, registered a Republican in the 1924 California voter rolls and therefore no longer a Bible Student, lived with his mother at 159 Stedman Place, Monrovia, lost his wife Pauline in 1948, remarried about 1950, died in 1989 aged 96 and never would speak of his father, while Rutherford’s sister Virginia Ross, born 1860, became a Witness and appears in the 1940 census living with five other Witnesses in Richmond, New York City. The biography of John Adam Bohnet (1858-1932) then opens: the eldest child of Württemberg emigrants Johan Adam Bohnet and Christina Dorothea Unkel, who settled at Pittsfield in Washtenaw County, Michigan, he was raised Lutheran, flirted with agnosticism and Methodism, was given Russell’s first three volumes of Millennial Dawn by a Presbyterian Bible-class leader in Salt Lake City, dated his coming “into the truth” to 1892, and was immersed at the 1893 Chicago convention where he met Russell.
Biographies [part 3]
The chunk opens midway through Persson’s life of John Adam Bohnet, who joined the Bible House family in Allegheny, Pennsylvania in April 1895 as C.T. Russell’s stenographer, briefly returned to his parents in Ann Arbor after injuring an ankle, and in 1896 won over both parents and three siblings to the Bible Student faith within five weeks. Bohnet’s usefulness to Russell was as much commercial as spiritual: in 1896 he helped incorporate the United States Investment Company in Pennsylvania with Ernst C. Henninges and Russell, one of several corporations the Watch Tower Society ran through Russell, and in 1897 he spent eight years earning money in Washington, D.C. to help the Society’s borrowing needs. From 1905 he was an occasional pilgrim and one of five incorporators of the Rosemont Mount Hope and Evergreen United Cemeteries Company in Pittsburgh, becoming superintendent of the cemetery and of the farm across the road, both effectively controlled by the Society; when the Bible House family moved to Brooklyn in 1909 he stayed behind to manage them. Persson tracks Bohnet’s role as a reliable partisan of Russell — an elder in the Pittsburgh Bible House congregation from 1906, a supporter of “the vow” in 1908 and 1909, a public advocate of the claim that Russell was “that servant,” and an opponent of the New Covenant defectors in The Watch Tower of February 1, 1910. He was also entangled in the “miracle wheat” affair of 1910-1911 that cost Russell so dearly, defending it as late as an article in The Golden Age of April 9, 1924, and in October 1915 he proposed that Bible Students buy Russell “a Ford machine” for Christmas, a suggestion Russell publicly refused in a letter printed in the St. Paul Enterprise. Bohnet designed the pyramid monument for the Society’s plot in the Pittsburgh cemetery at Russell’s wish, though it was not erected until years after Russell’s funeral of November 6, 1916, at which Bohnet served as an honorary pallbearer and afterwards entertained prominent Bible Students at the farm. When the management crisis broke in the summer of 1917 Bohnet took Rutherford’s side and was one of the replacement directors named on July 12, 1917 — his Pennsylvania residence being, Rutherford argued, particularly important — and he was declared reelected by the shareholders on January 5, 1918. Persson characterises Bohnet’s later career as subservient loyalty: a letter attacking “the opposing faction” in 1918, the nomination of the winning board slate in January 1920, enthusiastic endorsements of Rutherford’s “Birth of the Nation” article and the book Creation, and more than forty nature articles in The Golden Age between 1922 and 1931. Persson records one episode reflecting badly on Bohnet: a New Era Enterprise item of February 8, 1921 in which Bohnet, asked about the Ku Klux Klan, said he was “watchfully waiting” to see the Klan’s attitude toward the International Bible Students Association and noted approvingly that Klan officials in Atlanta had reprinted a Golden Age article. By the 1920 census Bohnet had left Pittsburgh for Pittsfield near Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his aged parents and brother Jacob lived; he never married, lived alone by 1930, and died on April 14, 1932, buried in the family plot in Forest Hill Cemetery, with Grant Suiter later recalling him as a modest man who hid the quality behind a gruff exterior. Persson then turns to George Herbert Fisher, born January 10, 1870 in Albany, New York, the second of eight children of the Episcopalian clergyman George Fisher and Ellen E. Wright; he hoped for Episcopal ordination, served as lay reader and organist, taught school outside Philadelphia and then in Scranton, Pennsylvania from 1895, and married Harriet Brown King there on February 8, 1900. Fisher met Russell in 1897, was baptized in 1899, and won enough of Russell’s trust to be placed on the reserve list for the editorial committee in Russell’s will; from November 1916 he worked on the Ezekiel portion of The Finished Mystery, the long-awaited Seventh Volume, while Clayton J. Woodworth took Revelation, finishing about June 25, 1917. He was drawn straight into the crisis: appointed a director by Rutherford on July 12, 1917, accepting by letter on July 14, and present at Bethel in Brooklyn on July 17 when the change of board was announced; Persson notes that he and Woodworth read Rutherford as the “steward” of the parable of the Penny in Matthew 20:8, with their own book as “the Penny” and the ousted directors as the “murmurers.” Fisher replaced Menta Sturgeon on the Watch Tower editorial committee in September 1917, joined the People’s Pulpit Association in October, was approved in the November 1917 congregational referendum and reelected in January 1918, and was then arrested in May 1918 and sentenced on June 21, 1918 to a long prison term for alleged sedition. Persson follows Fisher’s break with Rutherford: dropped from the board while in prison in January 1919, reelected in January 1920, criticising Rutherford from the summer of 1922, expelled from Bethel, defeated in an October 1923 attempt to remove Rutherford and four other officers as elders of the Brooklyn church, and himself set aside from eldership before leading a group into an independent ecclesia. Persson stresses that Rutherford’s published version of Fisher’s resignation from the editorial committee — a letter of February 27, 1924 citing only his “physical condition” — was misleading, since Fisher’s name had already vanished from the masthead in the March 15 issue and, as Fisher told correspondents, his real objection was to “the new and vicious doctrines,” notably the second-death teaching in the sheep-and-goats article of October 15, 1923. A private Fisher letter that reached Paul S.L. Johnson and was printed in The Present Truth of February 1, 1929 describes his rough treatment by Rutherford, Van Amburgh, Woodworth and Riemer in two conferences with the directorates of the Society and the People’s Pulpit Association, and Rutherford’s declaration that he would print whatever he liked in The Watch Tower regardless of the other four editors. Fisher conducted the funeral of his old friend Andrew N. Pierson at Cromwell, Connecticut on November 1, 1925 — Pierson, the Society’s vice president in 1917, having quietly withdrawn before his death — and on April 27, 1926 wrote to a German correspondent that he had two witnesses ready to testify that Rutherford had visited a burlesque show at Al Jolson’s Winter Garden Theater on the eve of the Memorial; Fisher died in New York on July 30, 1926 and the charges lapsed. The life of Jesse Hemery is included, Persson explains, because Rutherford’s pamphlet Harvest Siftings of August 1, 1917 was built largely out of Hemery’s letters and statements: born in Eccles-area Lancashire on June 7, 1864 to Jesse Hemery and Nancy Walton, orphaned of his father and sister early, working as clerk, baker and railway signalman, he accepted The Plan of the Ages in 1888 and met Russell on his first British visit in 1891. Hemery became manager of the British office and pastor of the Forest Gate church in November 1901, a pilgrim from 1905, briefly a public critic of “the vow” in 1908-1909 before submitting, and from 1911 assistant pastor of the new London Tabernacle at Craven Terrace 36, sharing branch management uneasily with Henry J. Shearn and William Crawford, all three becoming officers of the International Bible Students Association registered in London on June 30, 1914. Persson shows how the London quarrel — over the Tabernacle pulpit and the building’s ownership — fed the American crisis: Russell sent Paul S.L. Johnson to settle it on October 21, 1916 but died first; Johnson arrived at Liverpool on November 19, 1916, blocked Shearn and Crawford’s reelection as elders and dismissed them as managers on February 3, 1917, leaving Crawford liable to the military draft. Hemery backed Johnson until he grasped at the end of February 1917 that Johnson was opposing Rutherford, then denied his own support and denounced Johnson from the Tabernacle platform; left sole British manager, he was named in Johnson’s Harvest Siftings Reviewed of November 1, 1917 and answered with his own pamphlet of December 7, 1917, and he halted printing of the British edition of The Finished Mystery once told it offended Regulation 18 of the Defence of the Realm Act. The cost in Britain was heavy — by 1921 some 3,000 Bible Students, about half the 1916 membership, had left for independent fellowships, Forest Gate having declared independence in 1917 and Shearn organising the Bible Students Committee in 1919 — but Hemery kept Rutherford’s backing, joining the Watch Tower editorial committee in May 1922 in F.H. Robison’s place and serving until the committee was abolished in 1931. Persson dates Hemery’s own turn to the late Rutherford years, quoting a 1952 letter to Roy D. Goodrich in which Hemery traced his doubts to Rutherford’s 1935 announcement that the magazine would attend less to the church and more to the “Jonadab brethren”; Rutherford replaced him as British branch overseer in 1937 with the inexperienced young American Albert Darger Schroeder, though Hemery stayed IBSA vice president and in 1939 incorporated the London Company of Kingdom Witnesses with Schroeder. After beginning an independent study of Revelation, Daniel and Job with Frank L. Brown in 1940, Hemery was confronted by N.H. Knorr at the 1947 London convention and forced to resign as vice president, then evicted from London Bethel and branded an “evil servant” in 1951, his name dropped from the 1952 Yearbook; his Goshen Fellowship and its publications, beginning with Revelation unfolded in December 1951, rejected all the chronological calculations while keeping the substance of The Plan of the Ages. Hemery died in 1963 aged, as Frank L. Brown wrote to Persson in 1976, “99½ years,” the Goshen Fellowship having faded so completely that Albert Hudson’s 1989 history of the British Bible Students does not mention it. The chunk closes with the opening of the life of Robert Henry Hirsh, whom Persson calls perhaps the most outspoken opponent of Rutherford in the spring and summer of 1917: born May 6, 1868 in Tamaqua, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania to Peter Hirsh, of a family that had emigrated from Lorraine about 1830, and Elizabeth (Lizzie) Mackay of Irish parentage, and baptized at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tamaqua on September 6, 1868. Hirsh trained as a printer on the Tamaqua Courier and worked as a compositor for the Philadelphia Times, Record and Ledger and as a proofreader before returning home in May 1892 to found and edit the democratic Tamaqua Recorder, which ran until 1909; he married the schoolteacher Annie M. Levering at Reading, Berks County on November 24, 1897, and their son Robert Levering Hirsh was born in 1899 before, as the chunk breaks off, tragedy struck.
Biographies [part 4]
Persson’s life of Robert Henry Hirsh continues through a double bereavement: the infant son born in 1899 died on December 28 of that year, and on July 18, 1900 Hirsh’s wife Annie died of “consumption” at twenty-six, after which the 1900 census suggests the widower moved back in with his parents. Formerly a member of the First Presbyterian Church in Tamaqua, Hirsh took his stand with the Bible Students in 1905, was among the elders and deacons of the Bible House congregation in Pittsburgh by May 1906, entered pilgrim service in 1907 and went on record for “the vow” in 1908. His printing trade proved useful at headquarters, where he took the Watch Tower literature through the press, corrected galleys and made page proofs, and Charles Taze Russell appointed him editor of the Yiddish paper Der Stimme; by 1912 he was a director of the Peoples Pulpit Association, and on the morning of December 25, 1915 Russell married him to Rosa Mary Leffler in the Bethel dining room. Russell’s will put Hirsh only on the reserve list for the editorial committee of The Watch Tower, but when Brenneisen and Page resigned after Russell’s death in 1916 he and Joseph F. Rutherford took their places, Hirsh becoming managing editor, keeper of Russell’s unpublished articles and handler of the letters chosen for publication. Hirsh backed Rutherford at first, which is why Rutherford secured his election to the Society’s board on March 29, 1917 in place of the resigned H. Clay Rockwell; within weeks, however, he reversed his judgement entirely and became the fiercest of the opposing directors, moving at the board meeting of June 20, 1917, on behalf of all four, that the by-laws adopted on January 29 be cancelled. Rutherford deferred the question to a board meeting set for July 20, but on July 17, 1917 told the Bethel family that his four opponents were not legal directors and had been replaced, circulated an official statement to the ecclesias on July 19, and on July 31, with A. H. Macmillan’s help, removed Hirsh and Isaac F. Hoskins from the Peoples Pulpit Association; Hirsh answered at the Boston convention with the Open Letter to Boston Conventioners, signed also by vice president Andrew N. Pierson, and left Bethel with his wife shortly after the other directors’ departure on August 8. Named among Francis H. McGee’s seven nominees for the board at the annual meeting of January 5, 1918, Hirsh lost, was asked by the victorious meeting to resign from the editorial committee — a request Persson thinks he ignored — withdrew that evening to the Hotel Fort Pitt in Pittsburgh, was elected vice chairman of the Fort Pitt Committee of seven on January 6, and saw his name replaced by W. E. Page in the February 1, 1918 Watch Tower. Colporteur work with Rose ended when the Watch Tower leaders were arrested in May 1918 and books became hard to get, and Hirsh was himself arrested for alleged treason in connection with the draft; advised by McGee and Paul S. L. Johnson he pleaded not guilty on May 14, his only connection with the case being that his name had stood on the editorial committee when the objectionable article appeared, though he had by then ceased to function as an editor. The court transcript, Persson notes, shows the prosecution moving on June 4, 1918 to dismiss the indictment against Hirsh and Rutherford and his co-defendants trying through their attorney to prevent his release, which he says leaves Rutherford’s 1936 charge that Hirsh “conspired with the enemy” and escaped trial by serving the enemy against his brethren wholly without factual basis. Back at journalism, Hirsh with Johnson’s support edited a sample issue of The Bible Standard and Herald of Christ’s Kingdom for the Asbury Park convention of July 26-29, 1918, but when the Fort Pitt committee resigned on July 27 and a new one was chosen he withdrew in sympathy with the unnominated Johnson, leaving the Asbury Park men to found the Pastoral Bible Institute, chartered November 23, 1918; he and R. G. Jolly followed Johnson into the Laymen’s Home Missionary Movement, founded at Philadelphia on July 19, 1919, until Hirsh reassessed Johnson as he had Rutherford and publicly renounced him at a Jersey City convention on the night of July 11, 1920, thereafter practising chiropractic in Philadelphia with Rose from 1927 until his death on May 31, 1949, while Rose, who wrote to Persson in 1974 affirming his faithfulness, worked until she was 92 and died in 1984 at 106. Isaac Francis Hoskins, sixth of the ten children of the farmer Henry Hoskins and the Irish immigrant Bridget Carney, was born on February 4, 1878 at Pittsfield, Pike County, Illinois, had eight years of schooling, associated with the Bible Students in 1893 while living in California, joined the Bible House staff at Allegheny in 1906, and was married there by Russell on January 16, 1908 to Estella Whitehouse, a worker at the house since 1895. A pilgrim from 1907 and an early taker of “the vow,” Hoskins was elected to the Society’s board in late summer 1908 at only thirty, was placed on the reserve list of five for the future editorship in Russell’s will, and became one of the seven directors of the Peoples Pulpit Association when it was chartered in 1909; at Russell’s funeral on November 6, 1916 Macmillan told him to resign or be “kicked out,” and pneumonia then kept him from the decisive board and shareholders’ meetings of January 1917. With Hirsh he became the board’s most determined opponent of Rutherford’s assumption of headship, consulting the fellow Bible Student Francis H. McGee, assistant to the Attorney General of New Jersey, on the legal questions; McGee judged both the July 17 announcement and the July 27 and 31 removals from the Peoples Pulpit Association illegal, and on August 8, 1917 Hoskins and Estella left Bethel with $300 compensation negotiated by Pierson, the same sum paid to the other ousted couples. Defeated as one of McGee’s nominees at the Pittsburgh election of January 5, 1918 and elected that evening to the Fort Pitt committee of seven, Hoskins joined Rockwell in a plan, rejected by the committee, to recover control of the Society through a New York law firm after the leaders’ arrest in May 1918; at Asbury Park in July he kept his directorship and became secretary, and the group’s work led to the Pastoral Bible Institute chartered in New York on November 23, 1918 and to The Herald of Christ’s Kingdom, whose first issue of December 1, 1918 he helped edit. No one was more prominent in the Institute: reelected director and secretary at the first annual election on June 6, 1919, he stayed on board and editorial committee until June 1936, travelled repeatedly to Europe, Egypt and Palestine for it between 1926 and 1934, and figured largely in the Pittsburgh Reunion Conventions from 1929, but as doctrinal rigour loosened after 1928 he fought the trend and was beaten with his nominees at the election of June 6, 1936, taking only 44 per cent of the vote and losing his editorial place. He then founded The Watchers of the Morning, first issued in April 1937, to uphold historic Bible Student doctrine; he testified in the 1943 Moyle trial that he did not hate the by then dead Rutherford and called his break with the Institute merely “a disagreement”; and after moving from Brooklyn to Pasadena and in 1955 to Ojai, he wandered from home on September 11, 1957 and was found dead in a ravine by two boys on September 15, a death Persson dates from the Ventura County Star rather than from genealogical sites. William Franklyn Hudgings, born October 24, 1889 at Ash Grove, Greene County, Missouri to Nancy Cordelia Hudgings, who was excommunicated by the Baptists after taking up the Watch Tower in 1894, joined the Bible Students in 1908, was billed as “the boy preacher,” became a pilgrim in 1913, edited the Bible Students’ Monthly and took charge of the Society’s printing. Secretary and thereby a director of the Peoples Pulpit Association from 1916, married on February 8, 1917 to the Bethel stenographer Agnes Hassett, whose health broke down within months, Hudgings stood firmly with Rutherford in the succession crisis, publicly endorsed Harvest Siftings on its page 24, carried copies to Boston on July 29, 1917 to be read to the elders before the convention, and had helped proofread The Finished Mystery with its author C. J. Woodworth. Both Hudgings and Agnes were government witnesses in the 1918 sedition trial, and his failure to identify Macmillan’s signature brought a contempt conviction and imprisonment from June 11, 1918 — ten days before his prosecuted friends — until his release on bail on December 12, three months in Brooklyn’s Raymond Street jail and three in the Nassau county jail at Minola, ending in acquittal on April 14, 1919. At the Society’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh on January 4, 1919 he relayed the imprisoned Rutherford’s wish that the election be postponed, moved a six-month delay, disparaged the men who had kept the Society running as “weaklings” with Dr. Spill particularly in view, was contradicted by C. E. Stewart of St. Paul, withdrew the motion once defeat was obvious, and was himself elected a director for the first time. He served as secretary and treasurer of The Golden Age from its launch in October 1919, advertised his own book on Einstein in its issue of December 7, 1921, and was tied to the Abrams diagnostic method and the “Radio Disease Killer” machine — practices Persson calls later-denounced quackery — which he announced in 1926 he had given up; meanwhile Agnes left him and Bethel in August 1924 and sued for divorce from Reno, and he married the Swedish immigrant Thyra Eleonore Lundberg on August 29, 1925. Persson cannot fix when or why Hudgings broke with the Society — he vanished from the Yearbook after the 1927 edition and from The Golden Age masthead in February 1928, replaced by N. H. Knorr — but by the Pittsburgh Reunion Convention of October 30-November 1, 1931 he was speaking among those who had left, and from 1932 until his death of a heart attack on October 17, 1937 he edited The Dawn for the Dawn Publishers, also writing on marriage law and Zionism and helping edit the Pro-Palestine Herald. Paul Samuel Leo Johnson was born Paul Samuel Leo Janowitz on October 4, 1873 at Titusville, Crawford County, Pennsylvania, the first American-born child of the Polish Jewish immigrants Henry and Essay Janowitz; his mother died in January 1886, he resented his father’s swift remarriage, was Bar Mitzvah nonetheless on October 15, 1886, ran away repeatedly in 1887 and became a believer in Jesus on December 25 of that year. Declared incorrigible, he was committed to the Morganza Reformatory on February 8, 1889 and released on July 1 through the friendship of an official; because his father had forfeited guardianship the State appointed a guardian, and after his baptism on July 14, 1889 his father ridiculed him, disowned him the next day and held a mock funeral for him. Johnson entered Capital University in Columbus on September 8, 1890, graduated on June 19, 1895 with the valedictory and the highest honour in the institution’s history, went on to the Evangelical Lutheran Seminary of the Ohio Synod, served as pastor of the new St. John Lutheran Church at Mars, Pennsylvania from 1897 for $25 a month, graduated on May 25, 1898 and took charge of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church in Columbus, about which time the surname Janowitz became Johnson. Private study begun in 1903, prompted by R. A. Torrey’s booklet on the baptism of the Spirit and shaken loose by J. A. Seiss’s The Last Times, brought him to a set of conclusions — rejection of the Trinity, of the immortality of the soul and of eternal torment, a millennial judgement day with probation for the non-elect, the Papacy as the Beast, and 1914 as the end of the Age — that were Bible Student tenets but which he claimed to have reached unaided; preaching them cost him his pulpit in the spring of 1903, and he renounced the Lutheran Church on May 1, 1903 amid nationwide newspaper coverage. Reading the Millennial Dawn volumes and The Watch Tower through the Columbus ecclesia, he preached his first sermon as an unofficial pilgrim on June 14, 1903, was summoned to Allegheny in early spring 1904, tested by Russell and appointed a regular pilgrim on May 1, 1904, paid his own expenses in nearly every year and gave thousands of dollars to the Society; on January 3, 1905 Russell married him at the Bible House to Emma B. McCloud, who long shared the pilgrim work. Johnson supplied Russell in 1905 with the view that the New Covenant would operate only after the Gospel Age, defended Russell through the doctrinal troubles of 1908-1911 and debated M. L. McPhail before the Chicago ecclesia on April 19, 1909, but the strain broke him: he collapsed at a public meeting on May 22, 1910 while living at Ashland, Oregon, was rumoured in the northwest to be demonized and insane, and recovered only through three months of manual labour — and, Persson observes, it was in that same year that he privately began to see himself as the antitypical Medad beside Russell as Eldad, a grandiose self-conception that would obstruct the post-Russell fellowship. Persson nonetheless grants Johnson’s brilliance — his Greek, Hebrew and Yiddish were at Russell’s service, Rutherford called him in Harvest Siftings “the ablest brother in all the land,” and in 1916 he was second only to Russell as a convention speaker and was to be sent to London in November to settle the office and Tabernacle troubles — while noting that at Russell’s funeral he addressed the corpse as “Eldad,” hinting at his own Medad role, and that he declined Rockwell’s offer to resign his directorship so that Johnson might become eligible for the presidency, preferring the British trip.
Biographies [part 5]
The chunk opens in mid-course through Persson’s life of Paul S. L. Johnson, at the point where an absent shareholder assigned Johnson’s 416 votes, worth 4,160 dollars in earlier contributions, to be cast for Joseph F. Rutherford; the executive committee set up on November 7, 1916 then carried out Charles Taze Russell’s intention of sending Johnson to Britain with credentials to act for the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society; he sailed from New York on November 11, reached Liverpool on November 19, and quickly fastened blame for the London trouble on two of the Society’s three managers there, William Crawford and Henry Shearn, dismissing them on February 3, 1917 and cabling the news to Rutherford the same day. Johnson then publicly claimed to be the “Steward” of Matthew 20:8, expecting Rutherford’s backing, toured congregations across England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland until exhaustion and sleeplessness convinced many observers he was breaking down, and was recalled to America before he could visit Switzerland and Scandinavia, leaving Liverpool on April 1 and landing in New York on April 9, 1917. After Menta Sturgeon persuaded him later that April that Russell had been the “Steward”, Johnson retracted the claim before the Bethel family on his own initiative, recovered enough to take Sunday pilgrim appointments from May 6 to June 24, 1917, and in the management crisis sided with the board majority against Rutherford and W. E. Van Amburgh. When Rutherford announced on July 17, 1917 that he had appointed four new directors, Johnson tried to mediate between president and ousted directors from July 18 to 25, only to be evicted from Bethel on July 27 with his belongings put out on the street, and to become the principal target of Rutherford’s pamphlet Harvest Siftings of August 1, 1917, which went to every Watch Tower subscriber. Johnson answered with Harvest Siftings Reviewed of November 1, 1917, and Jesse Hemery in London countered that with his own review dated November 7, 1917; at the Pittsburgh shareholders’ meeting of January 5, 1918 Johnson was one of Francis H. McGee’s nominees for an opposition board but withdrew before the vote, and that evening joined the dissatisfied Bible Students who met at the Hotel Fort Pitt and elected a “Committee of Seven” including himself. Persson records that Johnson was almost immediately felt to be dominating the committee, that he was the main reason Sturgeon as chairman and Alfred Ritchie as secretary and treasurer resigned abruptly on January 24, 1918, and that unlike his colleagues he kept visiting congregations still tied to the Society until The Watch Tower of March 1, 1918 warned that neither he nor R. G. Jolly represented the Society in any way. Polarisation over doctrine and direction ended at the Asbury Park, New Jersey convention of July 26-29, 1918, where the committee was reconstituted without Johnson or his supporters Hirsh and Jolly; Johnson replied with Another Harvest Siftings Reviewed of August 22, 1918 and the New Committee with A Brief Review of Brother Johnson’s Charges and A Timely Letter of Importance to All the Brethren before incorporating The Pastoral Bible Institute in November 1918. Johnson launched The Present Truth and Herald of Christ’s Epiphany with the issue of December 9, 1918, settled in Philadelphia as pastor of the Epiphany Tabernacle with his Bible House there, and from July 16, 1920 added a public-facing paper, The Herald of the Epiphany. Persson describes how Johnson’s habit of pronouncing prominent Bible Students “crown-losers” demoted from Priests to Levites, and thus into the Great Company rather than the Little Flock, repelled many, and how the Laymen’s Home Missionary Movement’s teaching came to revolve around the Little Flock, the Great Company and the Youthful Worthies, between whom Johnson forbade intermarriage in 1923. He lists Johnson’s failed predictions – that Rutherford would be driven out of all official relations with the Society, that there would be no second world war, and once war came in 1939 that it would not become a world war – before recording that Johnson’s health failed from 1946, that Raymond G. Jolly was designated his successor on May 29, 1948, and that Johnson died on October 22, 1950 aged 77 and was buried at Whitemarsh Memorial Park in Philadelphia, his older wife following him in February 1951. At his death Johnson was General Pastor of more than 300 churches in some 40 countries, Poland having proved especially fertile with over 6,000 adherents reported in 1933; Persson closes the sketch by calling him a tall, goateed, learned and eloquent man obsessed with his own importance, and quotes the English Bible Student Albert Hudson, who knew him in 1916-17, on how he could turn in an instant from charm to dictatorial condemnation. Persson then opens his life of Alexander Hugh Macmillan by arguing that hardly anyone was more central to the 1917 crisis, and that by outliving every other participant and publishing Faith on the March in 1957 Macmillan shaped Jehovah’s Witnesses’ view of the affair more than any other man. Born on July 2, 1877 at Mabou, Inverness County, Nova Scotia, of Highland Scottish stock and raised by authoritarian Presbyterian parents, he set out to be a preacher at 16, broke down after a year of preparatory study, and in May 1895 moved on his father’s money to Boston, where he worked in a commission house and joined the Baptist Tremont Temple. Reading Russell’s The Plan of the Ages in 1900 and meeting the author at a Philadelphia convention on June 17 of that year turned him from the Moody School at Northfield to the Bible Students; he was baptised by immersion that September, became a full-time colporteur in July 1901, was invited to the Bible House at Allegheny that September, and on October 6, 1902 married Mary Goodwin of Brandonville, Preston County, West Virginia during a convention in Washington, D.C. Persson uses convention reports and Zion’s Watch Tower to correct Macmillan’s own 1966 claim that he baptised 144 people at St. Paul, Minnesota on August 16, 1906, when the contemporary sources say 118 – among them J. F. Rutherford – and he tracks the family through the birth of Albert Edmund Macmillan in 1907, a pilgrim appointment in 1908 broken by spells of outside work including auditing trains for a Texas railway, and the death in 1912 of a second son, Charles Goodwin. He also documents Macmillan’s repeated friction with Russell: refusing “the vow” in 1908, joining A. E. Williamson’s attack on Russell that year according to Johnson, and campaigning through 1914 against Russell’s retreat from expecting the Church’s glorification in October, culminating in a sharp address at Saratoga Springs on September 30, 1914 which Russell answered by making him speak publicly again on October 4 – a reproof that sent him home to Brandonville. Persson traces the drift back into favour – assisting Rutherford at his Los Angeles debate with the Baptist John H. Troy in April 1915, being cut from Bethel in the retrenchment of 70 workers that spring, writing on August 6, 1915 that the Society was “about broke”, being relisted as a pilgrim that October, and accepting on August 2, 1916 Russell’s invitation to become his assistant at Bethel and the Tabernacle – and finds Russell’s trust surprising given Macmillan’s bluntness and his quarrel with the director H. Clay Rockwell. Against recent claims, Persson insists Russell never intended Macmillan as his successor, since he was not a director and could not be elected president, and Russell wanted no single leader at all; yet from Russell’s death on a train on October 31, 1916 Macmillan moved to the centre, intercepting Sturgeon’s telegram to Florence Sturgeon, calling a board meeting on November 1 at which he pushed aside vice president A. I. Ritchie in favour of Van Amburgh, and shutting down the Angelophone project. At Russell’s funeral in Pittsburgh on November 6, 1916 he warned Isaac F. Hoskins that every director but Rutherford and Van Amburgh should resign or be “kicked out”, a disclosure Persson credits to the pamphlet Light after Darkness; he was then made representative and assistant of the executive committee formed on November 7, and with Van Amburgh and Rutherford devised the scheme that at the Pittsburgh election of January 6, 1917 – where Macmillan chaired, allowed only Rutherford to be nominated and never had the votes counted – produced a declared unanimous election and resolutions giving the three men control irrespective of the board. Persson catalogues Macmillan’s part in the year that followed: approving The Finished Mystery on June 6, 1917 without reading it, a failure he still admitted at the 1918 trial; trying on July 5 to have a policeman evict the four dissident directors from the Brooklyn Tabernacle; joining the board by Rutherford’s appointment on July 17; threatening on July 27 that Johnson would leave Bethel or “be bruised or be in jail”; and being one of only four men to endorse Harvest Siftings outright. Re-elected to the board on January 5, 1918, Macmillan was arrested with the other Watch Tower officials that May on a charge of conspiracy under the Espionage Law of June 15, 1917, and although the case against him looked weak he told his lawyer he would not go free while his colleagues were convicted, signed a statement accepting his share of responsibility, was sentenced with them on June 21, 1918, and was released on March 26, 1919 before the charges were dropped; by June 1, 1919 he was back on a Brooklyn platform announcing the millennium for 1925. The later record Persson assembles from censuses, a draft card and the Society’s own publications shows a man absorbed by the movement and absent from his family – travelling to Europe with Rutherford in 1920, naturalised in 1923, sent to Palestine in 1925, prominent at the 1931 Columbus convention that adopted the name “Jehovah’s Witnesses”, living apart from his wife in 1930 and again by 1942, and visiting 21 prisons twice a year during the Second World War – until his son Albert Edmund entered the military in 1946 and eventually became a US Air Force major. Persson judges Faith on the March, published in 1957, interesting but unreliable, listing its errors on 607 versus 606 B.C., on the date of Christ’s second presence, and on what Judge Howe said at the 1918 trial, and faults Macmillan for calling the 1917 events “a matter of actual record” while citing none of the contemporary material, for confusing a board meeting with an extended session of the Peoples Pulpit Association’s 1917 annual meeting, and for never mentioning his wife after 1904 or his son at all; Macmillan died on August 26, 1966 and was buried on Staten Island. The chunk ends with the opening of Persson’s life of Francis Harris McGee, the New Jersey lawyer he calls one of the most significant figures of the 1917 crisis and more than Rutherford’s equal, born in Jersey City on April 29, 1872 to the prominent lawyer John Flavel McGee and Frances Eureka Harris McGee, who died five days after the birth. Persson follows McGee from the Pingry school and Princeton’s class of 1895 – it is not clear he graduated – through travel in the United States, France and England, into his father’s Jersey City firm, admission to the New Jersey bar in February 1903, appointment as an Assistant to the state Attorney General with an office in Trenton, and his marriage on April 30, 1903 to Laura Frank Van Keuren, with whom he had three children.
Biographies [part 6]
Persson completes his life of the New Jersey attorney Francis Harris McGee, who came to accept Bible Student teaching in 1903, was baptized at Philadelphia during the Passover season of March 1905, adopted “the vow” in 1908, and served for years as senior elder of the Trenton ecclesia while publishing signed articles on his faith in the Trenton Evening Times. McGee was already a legal resource to the movement before the crisis: at Rutherford’s request he testified for Charles T. Russell in the 1913 Brooklyn Daily Eagle case, and in early 1917 Rutherford, Andrew N. Pierson, Alfred I. Ritchie and Clayton J. Woodworth spent a full day consulting him on a project. Persson stresses that McGee’s role in the 1917 board dispute was unpaid and disinterested, that he advised the four dissident directors as a friend, and that he twice bested Joseph F. Rutherford in open argument — in the Bethel dining room on July 17, 1917, when Rutherford announced his four new appointees, and before the Philadelphia ecclesia on July 19, 1917, where Rutherford answered none of his points and wept. Rutherford never replied to McGee’s two published legal statements of autumn 1917 and, in neither edition of Harvest Siftings, named him, dismissing him instead as “a lawyer who is not too friendly toward the Truth” — which Persson calls a plain lie — while A. H. Macmillan belittled him decades later in a talk of the early 1950s. McGee pressed the ousted directors to sue Rutherford, but Ritchie in particular resisted and outside criticism was heavy, so the directors abandoned legal proceedings in early August 1917. At the Pittsburgh shareholders meeting of January 5, 1918, McGee nominated a complete rival slate of directors including the four men Rutherford had ousted; when Rutherford’s ticket was declared the winner, McGee and others withdrew that evening to the Hotel Fort Pitt, and on January 6, 1918, he was chosen for the Fort Pitt committee of seven. He went on to the Asbury Park committee that superseded it in July 1918 and was one of the seven charter directors of the Pastoral Bible Institute registered on November 23, 1918, having himself drafted the charter, while The Watch Tower of March 15, 1918 carried his resignation as a Society shareholder with the statement that he did not approve of how it was run after Russell’s death. After the Watch Tower leaders were arrested in May 1918, McGee gave legal advice to the likewise arrested Robert H. Hirsh, whose charges were dropped; McGee then served as a Pastoral Bible Institute director from 1919 to June 7, 1924, being replaced by B. Boulder before the 1925 election, having accepted office reluctantly because of chronic ill health. An appendicitis operation at the State Hospital in early July 1926 was followed by peritonitis, and McGee died on July 10, 1926, aged 54, buried at Belvidere, New Jersey on July 14 with Isaac Hoskins officiating and the New Jersey Attorney General and three assistants bearing the casket; his front-page obituary in the Trenton Sunday Times Advertiser of July 11, 1926 records a career that included New Jersey vs. Lovell before the United States Supreme Court, filed January 6, 1911, and, as Chief Legal Assistant to the state Attorney General in 1920, the drafting in February that year of New Jersey’s bill of equity challenging the constitutionality of the Volstead Act. Turning to William Egbert Page, Persson traces him from his birth on February 23, 1855 at Carlinville, Illinois, second child of the fire insurance adjuster Egbert S. Page and Caroline Morton, through the family’s move to Des Moines, Iowa, a lapse into agnosticism, his 1880 marriage to May Helen Soule, and his acceptance of Russell’s message about 1887, after which his letters and articles began appearing in Zion’s Watch Tower in 1889. Page followed his father into fire insurance adjusting, served at the Bible House in Allegheny, Pennsylvania in the early 1890s but returned to business to support the Milwaukee household of relatives recorded in the 1900 US census, backed “the vow” in a long letter printed in Zion’s Watch Tower of July 1, 1908, and by 1909 was free to return to headquarters, moving with it to Brooklyn, becoming an original director of the Peoples Pulpit Association and a Society director, a pilgrim, and in 1910 vice president — all briefly, before he went back to insurance. Named in Russell’s will of November 1916 as one of five suggestions for the Watch Tower editorial committee, Page resigned on the ground that he could not live in Brooklyn, then supported Rutherford wholeheartedly through 1917-1918: he organised the Society convention at Des Moines on September 27-30, 1917, and publicly rejected Paul S. L. Johnson’s proposal that he replace Rutherford in a letter in The Watch Tower of December 1, 1917. Page reconsidered the editorial committee and replaced R. H. Hirsh as editor in the issue of February 1, 1918, and it was he who nominated Rutherford for president at the annual meeting of January 5, 1918; disliking Rutherford’s later doctrinal shifts, he resigned from the committee in the autumn of 1920, his name vanishing from the December 1, 1920 issue and being replaced by E. W. Brenisen in that of January 15, 1921. He nonetheless stayed with the Society, wrote on insurance in The Golden Age of September 12, 1923, and was named in The Watch Tower of January 1, 1924 to a committee meant to produce a book on Russell that never appeared; he died at Hinsdale Village, DuPage, Illinois on January 31, 1927, was buried at Rose Hill Cemetery, Chicago on February 2, received a short obituary in The Golden Age of July 13, 1927, and was survived by his wife until October 20, 1943. Persson finds it odd that Andrew Nils Pierson became vice president in 1917 at all, since he had never lived at Bethel, never been a pilgrim, was no speaker and belonged to no prominent ecclesia — but he was one of the wealthiest and most generous men in the movement, running one of the largest flower businesses in America from the small town of Cromwell, Connecticut. Born Anders Nilsson on September 1, 1850 at Håstad north of Lund in southern Sweden, second of eight children of the schoolteacher and cabinet maker Nils Persson (1822-1906) and Hanna Andersdotter (1821-1900), he left school at ten, worked as a shepherd boy, moved in October 1868 to Lund’s country parish as a gardener’s apprentice, declared his emigration on April 20, 1869, sailed from Copenhagen on the Ocean Queen on Whit Sunday May 16, 1869 with more than a thousand Swedes, and landed at Castle Gardens in Manhattan at noon on June 2, taking the name Andrew Nils Pierson, which the rest of the emigrating clan then adopted. Recorded as a farm laborer at Southington, Connecticut in the census of June 13, 1870, Pierson moved to Cromwell in 1871 to work for the nurseryman Benoni Barber, married the widow Margaret Stewart Allison Budde on March 29, 1876, was naturalized on October 25, 1876, and rebuilt from the Barber partnership’s bankruptcy on three acres of his wife’s estate until by 1881 the debts were paid and five greenhouses stood on nineteen acres. Persson names his main sources for the family and firm — Robert Owen Decker and Margaret A. Harris’s Cromwell Connecticut 1650-1990 (1991) and Anne Abbott Pierson’s chapter “A.N. Pierson, The Rose King” in The Will to Succeed (1948) — while warning that neither is reliable on the emigration dates. The Cromwell Garden Nursery dropped vegetables in 1885, the family built a Queen Anne house at 423 Main Street in 1892, and the Killarney rose Pierson developed with an English grafting expert won the gold medal at the New York Flower Show of 1895, making him the Rose King; The Hartford Courant of September 6, 1906 credited him with up to sixty greenhouses, 250 acres, 25 horses, about 100 cows and some 200 employees, and in 1908 the firm was incorporated as A. N. Pierson Incorporated with his son Wallace as secretary. A Congregational deacon who had pledged $1,000 a year to a Swedish mission in Mongolia that sent four missionaries in 1897, Pierson joined the Bible Students in 1901 after the Society’s vice president and fellow florist Henry Weber (1835-1904) wrote to him and met him in Baltimore; he attended his first convention at Weber’s place in Oakland, Maryland, met Russell there, and wrote asking his church to strike his name, though none of his family followed him. After the death in 1905 of his eldest son Frank Allison Pierson, the youngest man ever elected to the Connecticut General Assembly, and the 1908 incorporation that let Wallace take over more of the business, Pierson travelled with Russell’s party to Europe, Egypt and Palestine in April-May 1910, leaving Berlin with Rutherford for Sweden and Norway; he joined Russell’s American tour of 1911, speaking at Wichita, Kansas on love “along the line of flowers”, and returned with Russell to England in 1913 before touring Scandinavia and Finland with Rutherford. Pierson supplied and designed the vast floral display for the Hippodrome welcome of Russell’s world-tour committee on March 31, 1912, as pilgrim William M. Wisdom recorded, and after Russell’s death on October 31, 1916 he took charge of all the funeral flowers and superintended the interment; elected to the board on November 2, 1916, he nominated Rutherford for president at the annual meeting of January 6, 1917 and was himself made vice president. Persson notes that Rutherford excluded his own vice president from the making of The Finished Mystery, which Pierson evidently learned of only at its release on July 17, 1917; hearing McGee that afternoon changed Pierson’s initial acquiescence in Rutherford’s replacement of four directors, as he told Ritchie in a letter of July 26, 1917, and he signed the Letter to Boston Conventioners of August 4, 1917 and negotiated compensation for the ousted men before withdrawing into the role of peacemaker. Pierson signed neither Light after Darkness (September 1, 1917) nor Facts for Shareholders (November 15, 1917), and complained in his VICE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT in The Watch Tower of January 1, 1918 that his name had been used without his consent; with his business crippled by wartime labour shortage and coal rationing and his health failing, he went to his brothers in Florida and, as the transcript of Rutherford et al vs. the United States shows, missed the board meeting of October 2, 1917. Though the ousted directors wanted him kept on the board and he polled seventh in Rutherford’s advisory referendum of November 21, 1917, Pierson did not attend the annual meeting of January 5, 1918; Rutherford’s faction nominated him but simultaneously threw a large vote to the unnominated C. H. Anderson, which Persson reads as a deliberate manoeuvre to be rid of a vice president who had not backed Rutherford fully, and the published report recorded Pierson as failing election. Pierson remained with the Society for some years — August Lundborg, the Swedish branch manager, reported in Vakt-Tornet of October 1 and 15, 1921 that he was “first elder” at Cromwell and had gathered nearly fifty Bible Students for a Swedish meeting — while the firm recovered strongly, the Spanish flu having driven up demand for flowers, and became the largest flower grower in America in the 1920s. Personal blows followed: his younger brother John R. Pierson, a retired Chicago undertaker, killed himself in 1922, and his wife Margaret died on February 10, 1923; Pierson drifted quietly toward the Pastoral Bible Institute, subscribed to and funded The Herald of Christ’s Kingdom, and drove a truckload of flowers a hundred miles in bad weather to the funeral of its editor R. E. Streeter on December 23, 1924, sharing the service with Isaac F. Hoskins. A diabetic in poor health since 1917, Pierson worked almost to the last and died at home on October 29, 1925, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporting that day that George H. Fisher — a co-author of The Finished Mystery now openly opposed to the Watch Tower leadership — would conduct the service, with an appreciative obituary appearing in The Herald of Christ’s Kingdom of December 1, 1925. He had given away most of his fortune, leaving $100,000 of pledges for his son Wallace to pay; Cromwell’s West Green had been renamed Pierson Park a few months before his death, and a speaker at the 1929 reunion convention in Pittsburgh publicly wished him present. Persson closes the Pierson entry with the family: his daughter Emily, a Vassar graduate of 1907 and Connecticut suffragist who took her Yale M.D. in 1924 as the only woman in her class and practised in Cromwell for over forty years until her death in 1971, was her father’s doctor; Wallace led the firm from 1925 until his death in 1946, and it passed to Andrew Allison Pierson (died 1981) and then Douglas B. Pierson, receiving a longevity award in April 1990 only to file for Chapter 11 the next month and cease operating on January 14, 1991. The chunk ends with the opening of the life of Alfred Isaac Ritchie, vice president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society when Russell died on October 31, 1916: born October 8, 1871 at Monmouth, Ontario, eldest of eight sons of Samuel Stanley Ritchie (1845-1914) and Isabella Robertson (Kidd) Ritchie (1845-1932), he resisted his dry-goods-merchant father’s new faith as a young Baptist but was convinced when he read The Plan of the Ages in 1888. Farming at Nipissing, Ontario in 1901 and meeting Russell in 1905, Ritchie married the former Salvation Army officer and War Cry assistant editor Nina Grace Maitland — born April 3, 1875 at Minnigaff in southern Scotland and arrived in New York on April 14, 1888 — at Vancouver, British Columbia on July 11, 1908, and the childless couple moved to Brooklyn in July 1910, where Alfred became one of Russell’s private secretaries and acting manager of the correspondence department and Nina a stenographer.
Biographies [part 7]
Persson finishes his sketch of Alfred Isaac Ritchie, the Canadian pilgrim who was elected to the Watch Tower Society’s board in 1911 and made vice president that September, a step notable enough to be reported in the Philadelphia secular press, and who chaired a Bible Student convention in Toronto in 1913. Against Rutherford’s insinuation in Harvest Siftings that Russell had demoted Ritchie by installing Robert J. Martin as Tabernacle office manager shortly before his death, Persson argues the shift was part of a general reorganisation and that Ritchie was in fact promoted, since Rutherford’s own pamphlet shows Martin was appointed precisely because Ritchie’s new duties over the Library Office, the Parlor and Russell’s correspondence would keep him away. He notes that Marley Cole, writing with the Society’s backing in 1955, took Rutherford’s version at face value, and he treats Russell’s pre-departure arrangements of October 1916 as evidence of continuing confidence in Ritchie. In Persson’s reading Russell valued Ritchie not as an orator but as a capable administrator schooled by daily conference, the natural chairman of the board once Russell was gone. Press coverage after Russell’s death registered a general expectation that Ritchie would be elected president, and A.H. Macmillan admitted the sentiment to a newspaper even while he and secretary-treasurer W.E. Van Amburgh worked to place the Society’s lawyer, Joseph F. Rutherford, in the office. The executive committee formed in November 1916 made Ritchie chairman on paper, but Rutherford and Van Amburgh sidestepped him with Macmillan’s encouragement. At the January 1917 annual meeting Macmillan chaired, permitted only Rutherford to be nominated, had votes cast for Ritchie recorded for Rutherford, left the proxies uncounted, and then helped displace Ritchie from the vice presidency in favour of the newest director, Andrew N. Pierson. As the board majority concluded through the first half of 1917 that Rutherford was governing without them and contrary to the charter, Ritchie became one of the four directors ousted in July, and he and his wife Nina left Bethel a few weeks later. The opposition wanted Ritchie back as director and vice president in January 1918 but advanced Menta Sturgeon for president, Persson suspects because Sturgeon’s report of Russell’s last days made him popular with shareholders; after the election went to Rutherford, Ritchie joined the Committee of Seven formed at the Hotel Fort Pitt in Pittsburgh. Days later Ritchie lost election as an elder of the Brooklyn ecclesia after refusing to accept The Finished Mystery as the book Russell had foretold, and within weeks he resigned from the Fort Pitt committee, apparently fearing Paul S.L. Johnson’s dominance, which also kept him out of the Pastoral Bible Institute’s founding board. Subpoenaed at the June 1918 trial of Watch Tower leaders, Ritchie was the only witness from the opposition and did no more than identify signatures that Van Amburgh himself also identified. Census and naturalisation records trace Ritchie afterwards to Chicago as a salesman and then a naturopath, to Monterey Park and Alhambra in California as a masseur, and to eldership in the independent Los Angeles ecclesia tied to the Dawn publishing work, until his death in 1946; Nina died the following year. Henry Clay Rockwell, born in Michigan as the son of Irwin James Hatch and Henrietta G. Pegan and named for the politician Henry Clay, took his stepfather’s surname, married the much older Henrietta Frances Duke in 1904, and that same year began pilgrim work, joining the board in 1908 and the charter directorate of the People’s Pulpit Association in 1909. A serious quarrel set Rockwell against Macmillan and Rutherford in the autumn of 1916, and on the day Russell left Bethel for the last time Rockwell announced he was leaving, prompting Russell to plead publicly with him and spend hours attempting a reconciliation. At Russell’s funeral Rockwell offered to resign his directorship so that Johnson could take the seat and stand for president, but Johnson refused; Rockwell was one of the five editors named in Russell’s will, vanished from the pilgrim schedules in early 1917, resigned from the board in February and left Bethel in January. Rockwell sided with the opposition, was among Judge J.A. McGee’s nominees for the board in January 1918, and after the May 1918 arrests joined Isaac F. Hoskins in urging the Fort Pitt committee to seek recovery of the Society through a New York law firm, a plan the committee rejected. He was elected to the successor committee at Asbury Park, became a charter director of the Pastoral Bible Institute and an editor of its Herald of Christ’s Kingdom, then dropped out of both in 1926, which Persson tentatively links to his wife being twenty years his senior; he remarried in 1930 after her death and died in 1950. Gertrude W. Seibert, born Gertrude Antonette Woodcock, was in Persson’s judgement one of the most influential women in the movement’s history: a Wellesley graduate married to the wealthy president of the East Broad Top Railroad & Coal Co., she took up the Bible Student faith about 1894 while her husband never did. Russell printed her poems from 1899, endorsed her Daily Heavenly Manna in 1905, published her letters supporting his “vow” and the Berean studies, and issued her compilation Poems of Dawn anonymously; Persson infers from Women’s Who’s Who of America that Seibert wrote her own entry, including its statement that she opposed woman suffrage on scriptural grounds. Her access to Russell was such that British branch manager Jesse Hemery appealed through her over the London Tabernacle troubles, though the letter arrived too late and she showed it to Johnson in November 1916; weeks later she acted as go-between for the executive committee and the seventh volume’s writers, correspondence that was put in evidence at the 1918 trial. Seibert backed Rutherford publicly through the 1917 crisis in Watch Tower letters, funded the Photo-Drama work in Britain, published a volume of poems in 1926, saw her offer to revise the Manna book refused, and died in Miami in 1928 with Macmillan conducting the funeral. Walter Edgar Spill, a Maryland-born osteopath practising in Pittsburgh and chairman of its large ecclesia, had lived next door to Charles T. and Maria Russell’s former home, testified to Russell’s character in Rutherford’s 1915 defence pamphlet, and directed Russell’s Pittsburgh funeral service as an honorary pallbearer. Rutherford chose Spill as one of the four replacement directors in July 1917, and Spill accepted, sat in the Bethel dining room for the announcement, hosted a board meeting at his Pittsburgh house that October, and was re-elected in January 1918, but he disappointed Rutherford as a member of the wartime emergency executive and editorial committees when that committee refused to print Rutherford’s prison article on Elijah and Elisha. Persson traces the consequences: Spill was numbered among the “weaklings” at the January 1919 annual meeting though still elected, was dropped as an editor, was pointedly snubbed by Rutherford at the 1919 welcome meeting according to Johnson, lost his seat in 1920, yet stayed with the Society and left it a bequest before his death in 1953. Menta Sturgeon, orphaned in Missouri in 1870 and raised by grandparents, worked his way through school, graduated from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1895 and pastored Tower Grove Baptist Church in St. Louis until 1904, leaving the denomination after correspondence with Russell persuaded him that the traditional doctrine of hell was false. Joining the Bible Students, Sturgeon received his first pilgrim appointments in 1909, moved his family to Bethel, became one of the most celebrated speakers in the movement, and by 1916 headed the pilgrim department and accompanied Russell on his fatal last tour. Under Rutherford he was given temporary oversight of the Pastoral work and took Rockwell’s place on the editorial committee, but after telling Johnson in April 1917 about Rutherford’s “power grasping acts” and persuading him that Russell had been “the steward” of Matthew 20:8, he refused to sign the pro-Rutherford petitions, resigned his boards and editorship by autumn, publicly exposed Rutherford’s handling of the Brooklyn elder elections in October 1917, and then withdrew from cooperation with the Society altogether.
Biographies [part 8]
Persson closes his sketch of Menta Sturgeon by noting that the four ousted directors proposed him as both director and president in their pamphlet Facts for Shareholders of November 15, 1917, and that a New England trip before the election left him still more hostile to the Society’s management, convinced that its leaders belonged to the “second death class” and that the seventh volume issued in July 1917 was wholly diabolical. After the Pittsburgh election of January 5, 1918 Sturgeon joined the defeated party at the Hotel Fort Pitt, was put on the Fort Pitt committee of seven the next day and made its chairman on Paul S. L. Johnson’s motion, but resigned on January 24, 1918, as Alfred I. Ritchie did, both men resenting Johnson’s dominance. Sturgeon then moved to Minneapolis, issued his stenographic record of Russell’s final talk as The Last Message to the Church by That Faithful Servant through “The Final Truth Message Society,” worked as a stenographer and later a bank clerk, abandoned his Bible Student faith for A. E. Knoch’s universalism, and died a semi-invalid on August 17, 1935. Turning to William Edwin Van Amburgh, Persson presents him as the man with perhaps the longest career at the top of the movement and as one of Rutherford’s most valuable allies after Russell’s death, taking his full name from the 1943-1947 Yearbooks of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Van Amburgh was born in Minnesota on August 28, 1863 while his father Daniel Stafford Van Amburgh was serving in the Second Minnesota Infantry, grew up in a devout Methodist farming family, joined the Methodist Church at Northfield in the 1870s, finished high school in 1880 and studied two years at Carlton College before entering railroad service in 1884. Persson traces his conversion to February 1895, when he borrowed Russell’s The Plan of the Ages from a friend in Huron, South Dakota; he withdrew from Methodism in 1896, lost his first wife Ada May Wood to consumption on March 25, 1897, and moved permanently into the Allegheny Bible House in 1900, where his height and goatee earned him the nickname “Brother Van.” Elected a director in 1901 and secretary-treasurer in March 1903, Van Amburgh held that office continuously until 1947, served as one of the best-known pilgrims, took “the vow” in 1908, was a charter director of the Peoples Pulpit Association in 1909, and was named in Russell’s will as a possible future editor of The Watch Tower. Persson is careful to record his setbacks too: he lost the office manager’s post for failing to defend Russell against A. E. Williamson’s attacks, his forced testimony in 1913 helped lose the “miracle wheat” libel case, and in June 1914 he had to accept correction after laying criticisms of Russell before a long evening board meeting. Russell performed Van Amburgh’s second marriage, to Luie T. Taft, in the Bethel dining room on December 25, 1915; after Russell’s death Van Amburgh spoke at the funeral, chaired the November 1, 1916 board meeting at Alexander H. Macmillan’s urging in place of Vice President Ritchie, and joined the executive committee of three formed on November 7, 1916. He carried Rutherford’s draft by-laws to the January 6, 1917 election and pressed them on the committee handling them, by-laws that guaranteed the secretary-treasurer a permanent seat on the president’s advisory committee of three. Persson faults him for refusing throughout the 1917 crisis, as treasurer, to disclose the Society’s finances to five directors including Vice President Andrew N. Pierson who were legally entitled to that information, attributing the refusal simply to his wish to please Rutherford, though Pierson was eventually given some enlightenment after the crisis peaked. Van Amburgh was among the very few shown the Seventh Volume manuscript in advance in May 1917 and approved publication on a partial reading, backed the July 1917 replacement of the four directors, and put his public endorsement in Rutherford’s Harvest Siftings of August 1, 1917. Arrested in May 1918 with seven other prominent Bible Students under the Espionage Act, he was sentenced to twenty years but served nine months, leaving the Atlanta penitentiary on March 25, 1919 and being released on bail with the others the next day. Persson cites a letter from his fellow prisoner George H. Fisher, printed in Johnson’s The Present Truth of February 1, 1929, that Van Amburgh had “spoke contemptuously” of Russell’s “so-called will” in a board meeting in the early 1920s, evidence of how far his deference to Rutherford went, even while The Watch Tower of January 1, 1924 named him to a committee for a never-published book about Russell. His 1924 children’s book The Way to Paradise, issued by the International Bible Students Association in London with an introduction by Rutherford, was quickly discarded because it leaned on 1925 as a prophetic date, and his December 1924 Golden Age article “A Bible for the Scientist,” written with help from Morton Edgar of Glasgow, defended the great pyramid, a belief he privately kept until Rutherford’s public repudiation in 1928 forced him to drop it. Persson reports second-hand accounts that Van Amburgh privately complained about Bethel under Rutherford but felt too old to find other work and spoke as one held captive, while publicly remaining a fixture at conventions, introducing Nathan H. Knorr to the Bethel family on January 13, 1942, testifying in the Moyle libel suit in May 1943, and travelling to Cuba with Knorr, F. W. Franz and M. G. Henschel in early 1944 before resigning on February 5, 1947 and dying two days later. Short notices follow for his parents, both buried at Retsil, Washington, and for his brother George Curtis Van Amburgh, who drifted out of the Society while staying a Bible Student and died of pneumonia in Seattle in 1930. Clayton James Woodworth, born at Pitcher, New York on May 9, 1870 to a one-armed Civil War veteran blacksmith and a devout Methodist mother, met the Bible Students at Scranton late in 1894 through literature his wife Emma bought at the door, was baptised in 1896 and became a pilgrim in 1903. Persson stresses his two years of open opposition to “the vow” from 1908, when he wrote and printed a thirty-six-page pamphlet against it and only burned the whole edition after Russell called at his house and pointed out an error; his surrender was published in The Watch Tower of September 1, 1910, and he later blamed evil spirits for the episode. After Russell’s death Gertrude W. Seibert helped secure executive committee approval for a Revelation and Ezekiel manuscript by Woodworth and George H. Fisher of Scranton, planned for October 1917 but rushed out on July 17, 1917 as The Finished Mystery, released at headquarters immediately after the announcement that four directors had been replaced. Woodworth’s convention talk “The Parable of the Penny,” delivered at Boston on August 4 and at Aurora, Illinois on August 11, 1917, cast Rutherford as “the Steward,” the ousted directors as the “murmurers” and the new book as the “penny,” a development of Rutherford’s own line in Harvest Siftings that Persson judges tremendous and well-timed support; it was printed as a six-page tract and translated into Swedish in Vakt-Tornet of November 15, 1917. He polled the eighth largest vote in Rutherford’s straw ballot of November 21, 1917, ahead of every prominent oppositionist except Pierson, yet neither side nominated him at the actual election of January 5, 1918. Because The Finished Mystery carried Russell’s pacifism further with a radical twist of Woodworth’s own, he was arrested with other Scranton Bible Students on March 4, 1918 on a conspiracy charge, arrested again in May 1918 under the Espionage Act of June 15, 1917, and sentenced on June 21, 1918 to four concurrent twenty-year terms, serving nine months at Atlanta before release on March 26, 1919 and the eventual dropping of all charges. Restored to favour, Woodworth joined the Bethel family in August 1919 and edited The Golden Age from its first issue of October 1, 1919 through its renaming as Consolation in 1937 until he stepped down at seventy-six when it became Awake! in August 1946; Persson describes him as an extremist who campaigned against aluminium cookware, vaccination and the germ theory, had to discredit his own Finished Mystery in 1929, and saw his self-researched calendar of 1935 rejected by Rutherford. Persson closes the family account with Woodworth’s disowning of his daughter Elizabeth after she and her husband George Fitchette Herde went over to the Pastoral Bible Institute, and with his son Clayton Jr., traumatised by his father’s imprisonment, who came late to the faith and conducted convention orchestras. James Dennis Wright, born in Jefferson County, Ohio on August 20, 1867 to a farmer and later coal miner, had only six years of schooling and had been a pastor for nine months before accepting the Bible Student faith, marrying in Georgia in 1896 a Presbyterian minister’s daughter twenty-one years his senior. Wright travelled as a pilgrim from 1901, was elected a director and vice president in 1904, took “the vow” in 1908, ran the “comfort department” at headquarters, and with three fellow directors resisted Rutherford in the spring of 1917 on the strength of Russell’s will and the corporation’s charter, for which he was ousted in July 1917. He stood for the board on January 5, 1918, withdrew to the Hotel Fort Pitt, was elected to the committee of seven the next day, chaired the successor committee formed at Asbury Park on July 28, 1918, and was a charter director of the Pastoral Bible Institute registered on November 23, 1918, becoming its board chairman at the first annual election of June 6, 1919. Wright then vanished from the directorate and from Bible Student life altogether; Persson finds no obituary in any Bible Student paper, notes that Johnson in The Present Truth of April 1, 1932 called him “a ransom and Church-sin-offering denier,” and observes that a brief death notice in The Evening Review of East Liverpool, Ohio, March 26, 1946, describes him as a Methodist, which Persson thinks would explain the total silence about his departure.
Biographies [part 9]
This closing stretch of Part Two is the footnote apparatus to the biographies, running from note 2 to note 115, and it lays bare the documentary base on which Persson built the life-sketches, above all that of Joseph F. Rutherford. The Society’s own serials carry most of the weight: the December 1, 1916 Watch Tower issued as the “Memorial Number” for Charles Taze Russell, who had died on October 31, 1916, and its second edition, which kept the original date although it was actually printed in the spring of 1917 and, as the April 1, 1917 Watch Tower announced, added “a short biography of Brother Rutherford”; alongside these Persson works from The Watch Tower Reprints, The Golden Age, Consolation, later Watchtower volumes, the 1975 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Rutherford’s own Harvest Siftings. Court and government records recur throughout, chiefly the 1918 transcript of Rutherford et al. vs. the United States and the 1943 transcript of Moyle vs. Franz et al., supplemented by county court books in Morgan and Cooper Counties, Missouri, for Rutherford’s Missouri years. Persson leans heavily on the contemporary press, citing the St. Paul Enterprise, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, The Oklahoma City Times, The Ogden Standard, The Tampa Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union and the San Diego Sun, and on opposition and ex-Bible Student literature such as Paul S.L. Johnson’s Epiphany Studies in the Scriptures, The Present Truth and The Herald of Christ’s Kingdom. Secondary historians are used sparingly and sometimes critically: M. James Penton’s Apocalypse Delayed, Tony Wills’s A People for His Name, A.H. Macmillan’s Faith on the March, and Poul Bregninge’s Judgment Day Must Wait, of which Persson notes that the claim he is citing was dropped from the 2021 edition. A number of notes are private research materials or Persson’s own comment rather than published sources: emails from Jeff Mezera in April 2019 and from James Parkinson in May 2013, a photocopy of a handwritten letter Persson judges to be unquestionably in Rutherford’s hand, cross-references to Appendices 10, 11 and 13, an observation that Rutherford was still not a director when the Peoples Pulpit Association charter was amended in 1912, and a digression on the history of distillation appended to the discussion of Rutherford’s drinking.
Appendices [part 1]
Appendix 1 reproduces Charles Taze Russell’s will as printed in The Watch Tower of December 1, 1916; it is less a disposal of property than a set of standing instructions binding the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society’s publishing work after his death. Russell opens by observing that he had already given the Society everything he owned apart from a personal bank account of roughly two hundred dollars in the Exchange National Bank of Pittsburgh, earmarked for his wife, so that what he had left to bequeath was affection rather than money. The clause that gives the document its force is his statement that when he donated Zion’s Watch Tower, the Old Theology Quarterly and the copyrights of the Millennial Dawn / Scripture Studies volumes he did so on the explicit understanding that he would control them while alive and that afterwards they would be conducted according to his wishes. He then directs that editorial charge of the journal pass to a committee of five, every article requiring the approval of at least three, with any article opposed by a member held three months for prayer and discussion. The committee’s names were to be printed in every issue but authorship of individual articles never disclosed, and members were barred from writing for any other publication, the Society itself being pledged to publish no other periodical: Russell’s stated aim was to prevent any spirit of ambition, pride or headship. The five he named were William E. Page, William E. Van Amburgh, Henry Clay Rockwell, E. W. Brenneisen and F. H. Robison; as reserves he said he was naming five men but in fact listed six, A. E. Burgess, Robert Hirsh, Isaac Hoskins, Geo. H. Fisher of Scranton, J. F. Rutherford and Dr. John Edgar, the discrepancy that Appendix 2 exists to examine. The committee was to be self-perpetuating, surviving members electing successors so that no issue of the journal ever appeared without a full five, with the reserve list to be exhausted before looking outside. On pay, Russell held to the Society’s practice of no salaries: food, shelter, ten dollars a month and a modest allowance for dependents as the Board of Directors thought proper, with nothing laid up as savings. The same rules were to govern the German, French, Italian, Danish, Swedish and other foreign-language publications, and the Old Theology Quarterly was to continue as unsigned reprints of old Watch Tower matter and extracts from his discourses. The procedural clause required that on news of his death copies go at once to the named editors, the reserves and every director, and that acceptances or refusals be sent to whoever then held the office of Vice-President, meanwhile leaving at least three of the committee to act as editors: a provision that put the vice-presidency at the centre of the succession machinery. Russell records that he had already placed his voting shares with five women trustees serving for life, Sr. E. Louise Hamilton, Sr. Almeta M. Nation Robinson, Sr. J. G. Herr, Sr. C. Tomlins and Sr. Alice G. James, vacancies among them to be filled by the directors, the editorial committee and the surviving trustees together. For removing an unworthy editor he set a deliberately high bar: three of the board must bring impeachment charges, and a board of judgment of sixteen, made up of the Society’s trustees, the five voting-share trustees and the editorial committee minus the accused, must produce thirteen votes to dismiss. He asked to be buried in the Society’s plot in Rosemount United Cemetery, left the funeral arrangements to his sister Mrs. M. M. Land and her daughters Alice and May, and wanted a plain service of short remarks by several brethren in the Bible House Chapel rather than a funeral discourse. The will closes with a legacy of good wishes to the Bethel family and a request that it be published in the issue of The Watch Tower following his death; it is signed by Russell before the witnesses Mae F. Land, M. Almeta Nation and Laura M. Whitehouse, the printed text being dated at Allegheny, Pa., June twenty-nine, 1907, though Persson elsewhere gives the date as June 22, 1907. Appendix 2 takes up the question whether Rutherford altered the will itself, distinguishing that charge from the one his opponents actually made: from the outbreak of the 1917 management crisis the board majority said he disregarded the will, and by 1931 he had abolished the editorial committee and effectively disposed of the will altogether, but Persson finds no contemporary accusation that the document had been falsified. The tampering theory surfaced only decades later, Poul Bregninge inclining towards it in Judgment Day Must Wait (2013) and George D. Chryssides noting and rejecting a similar claim by another recent writer in his 2016 book. The whole case rests on the mismatch between Russell saying “five” reserves and listing six, from which it is inferred that Rutherford inserted his own name; Persson answers that Bregninge’s premise, that Rutherford as a lawyer drew up the testament, is far from certain, since Russell had written the Society’s charter himself and could equally have written his own will. Persson assembles the chronology against tampering: Edgar died on June 9, 1910, Russell opened the will in 1910 to erase and replace names on the editors’ and sisters’ committees, and, on Paul S. L. Johnson’s account of the reading he gave to the Bethel family on November 3, 1916, resealed it into the Secretary’s keeping in the safe, where Rutherford also said it lay untouched from 1910 until Russell’s death. He suggests Russell may himself have added Rutherford in 1910 while piously leaving the dead Edgar’s name standing, and argues that the retention of Edgar’s name in fact tells against manipulation, since a forger would have tidied the list; W. A. Baker’s letter in The Watch Tower of November 1, 1919 confirms that Russell revised the will when men named in it defected, citing the Henninges and McPhail trouble. The timetable leaves almost no room for fraud, since Rutherford, like Johnson, reached Brooklyn from a long trip only on November 2, 1916 and the will was read the next day, a date Brenneisen independently confirms by his receipt of a copy with Vice-President Ritchie’s letter of November 3; nobody would have risked altering it before Russell died, and if Russell wrote it himself Rutherford may not even have known its contents. The will was read publicly again on November 5, 1916 at the New York Temple, where Rutherford delivered the sermon Russell had been scheduled to preach, as the St. Paul Enterprise reported, and Persson observes that Bethel residents, Ritchie, and above all Robert H. Hirsh, a reserve who became an actual member and the committee’s managing editor and later Rutherford’s fiercest opponent, would have caught any discrepancy. Decisively for Persson, the opposition of 1917-1918 never raised tampering and had no difficulty with six names: their pamphlet Facts for Shareholders of November 15, 1917 complained instead that the “last living one named” among the reserves had made himself first on the acting committee, that is, that Rutherford was using the published will to enhance his own position. Persson then weighs the claims of a lost 1911 will advanced by Bregninge on the authority of Bible Student historian James Parkinson and resting on Kenneth and Carmelita Fernets, and reports that in an email of February 9, 2016 Kenneth Fernets confirmed seeing parts of a copy but not that those parts were dated 1911; two further reports of divergent copies, in the United Israel Bulletin of November 1971 and in a letter to E. T. Lenfest of Acton, Maine, likewise fail to show that Rutherford’s name was the difference. Reasoning that a superseding will would not have left the old one in Russell’s safe, and that Johnson’s printing of the will in The Present Truth on November 1, 1925 matched the 1916 text in every respect, Persson tentatively concludes that Rutherford, though he would have been capable of it, had no chance to tamper with the will, while fairly quoting Parkinson’s email of January 20, 2020 that both Rutherford’s inclusion and the unacknowledged 1911 will remain open questions. Appendix 3 gives the Society’s charter: incorporated in 1884 as Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society and renamed Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society in 1896, its articles first printed by Russell in an extra edition of Zion’s Watch Tower in 1894, later in Light After Darkness in 1917 and in the transcript of Olin R. Moyle vs Fred W. Franz et al of 1943, with Persson’s text taken verbatim from The Watch Tower of December 1, 1917. The articles set the corporate purpose as disseminating Bible truths by publication and any other lawful means, fix the place of business at Allegheny in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, provide for perpetual existence, and, in place of capital stock, make every ten-dollar donation a non-forfeitable, non-dividend-bearing share carrying one vote, certificates being issued by the Secretary and countersigned by the President. Management is vested in a board of seven, the original directors being Charles T. Russell as President, Wm. I. Mann as Vice President, Maria F. Russell as Secretary and Treasurer, with Wm. C. MacMillan, Simon O. Blunden, J. B. Adamson and Joseph F. Smith; a majority is a quorum and the board may make by-laws not repugnant to the charter or to the constitutions and laws of Pennsylvania and the United States. The two articles that decided the 1917 crisis follow: the three officers are chosen from the board annually by ballot on the first Saturday of each year at the Allegheny office, and directors hold office for life unless removed by a two-thirds shareholder vote, vacancies being filled by a majority of the remaining board within twenty days and, on their failure within thirty days, by presidential appointment lasting only until the next annual election. The closing articles give the corporation a common seal, the capacity to sue and be sued in any court in Pennsylvania, and full power to take, hold, sell, lease or mortgage real and personal property; Appendix 4, on the charter of the Peoples Pulpit Association, begins at the end of the chunk.
Appendices [part 2]
Persson opens the second half of the appendices by explaining that he holds a photocopy of the charter of the Peoples Pulpit Association as recorded on 4 March 1909, but that the copy is hard to read, so he prints a transcript instead, together with a transcript of the 1912 “Certificate of Extension of Purposes” and the official approval of it. The charter itself was drawn under New York’s Membership Corporation Law and states the corporation’s purposes as the moral and mental improvement of men and women, the spread of Bible teaching in several languages through tracts, pamphlets, papers and other religious publications, and religious missionary work. It provides for a body with no capital stock whose members are the original subscribers, those admitted by the first board, and anyone afterwards contributing a thousand dollars and admitted under the by-laws, each member receiving a certificate signed by the secretary and countersigned by the president that carries a vote. The corporation was to operate chiefly in New York with its principal office at 13-17 Hicks Street in Brooklyn, and was to exist perpetually. The seven subscribers, who were also named as the first board of directors, were Charles T. Russell, William E. Van Amburgh, William E. Page, Frederick W. Williamson and Isaac F. Hoskins of Pittsburgh, H. Clay Rockwell of New York, and Edward W. Brenneisen of Brooklyn. The provisions that matter for the later succession quarrel are in the eighth and ninth articles: a majority of the board including the president forms a quorum, the board may enact by-laws not repugnant to the charter or to state and federal law, and the president, elected by the board at its first meeting, holds office “for life” and has general supervision, control and management of the corporation’s business. All other officers – a vice-president and a secretary who is also treasurer – and all directors other than the president were to be elected annually by ballot on the first Saturday of each year at the Brooklyn office, holding office until successors were installed. The charter’s machinery for vacancies is the point Persson’s readers will care about: the remaining directors must meet within thirty days to fill a vacancy by majority vote, and only if they fail to do so within that time does the president fill it by appointment, the appointee then serving only until the next annual election. A vacancy in the presidency was to be filled by the board within three months, with the vice-president acting in the interim, while vacancies in any other office fell to the president to fill by appointment. The remaining articles are boilerplate corporate powers – a common seal, capacity to sue and be sued, and the right to acquire, hold and dispose of real and personal property under New York law – and the document was signed and sealed on 12 February 1909 by all seven subscribers, two of the witnesses’ names being illegible in Persson’s copy. The Certificate of Extension of Purposes, dated 19 November 1912, was executed by a majority of the Peoples Pulpit Association’s directors to widen the corporate objects to charitable, benevolent, scientific, historical, literary and religious ends, including free Bible classes on the premises or by mail, the free training and housing of students, teachers, lecturers and preachers, the sending out of missionaries, public worship, and the publishing and distribution of Bibles and religious literature. It was signed by Isaac F. Hoskins, F. H. Robison, H. Clay Rockwell, William E. Van Amburgh, E. W. Brenneisen and Charles T. Russell, recited that the change had been authorised by a majority vote of members at a special meeting, and carries beneath it the approval of a Justice of the New York Supreme Court of the same date, whose signature Persson cannot read. Appendix 5 turns to what Persson calls a major bone of contention in the 1917 crisis: the by-laws adopted by the shareholders on 6 January 1917 and approved by the board on 19 January, of which only parts were published at the time and which the Society, he stresses, has never printed in full. His text comes not from the Society but from the 1943 court case Olin Moyle vs Fred Franz et al, where the resolution and by-laws appear at pages 1526-1528, 1537 and 1538, and he reproduces them from that record. The accompanying resolution recommended to the directors and officers that the work be kept on a footing of “strict efficiency”, that nobody unable or unwilling to render efficient service be kept at headquarters – with an exception for dependent wives and children of full-time workers – and that Russell’s expressed wishes for the conduct of the Society’s affairs be carried out so far as the officers thought possible. The by-laws themselves define voting rights by contribution, one vote for every ten dollars given by a person in full harmony with the Society’s work, with shares issuable to the donor or a like-minded nominee, and strip the vote from anyone whose address has been unknown for two years or who becomes an opponent of the Society or falls out of harmony with its teaching on the Lord’s presence and Kingdom. They also forbid transfer of voting shares by assignment, deed or will, reading the charter’s phrase “or to his assigns” narrowly as a right exercisable only when the contribution is made, and declare the vote a personal right ending at death. The two remaining sections are the ones that bear directly on the succession dispute: an Advisory Committee of three, appointed by the president, replaceable by him every three months and always including the secretary-treasurer, exists only to advise him when he asks, while the president is made permanent executive officer and general manager with charge of the work at home and abroad, obliged merely to consult the advisory board from time to time and to report to the directors when they request it. Appendix 6 prints the short circular of 19 July 1917 which the Society sent to the ecclesias at the direction of the board, enclosing the board’s resolution of 17 July and advising that the president had prepared the statement the resolution called for, a copy of which any class could have on request; a facsimile follows as Figure 16. Appendix 7 gives the 17 July 1917 resolution of Rutherford’s reconstituted board, which recites that the president had that day laid a written account of his acts since Russell’s death before the directors, that opposition to him had arisen, and that the board had heard statements at length from Rutherford, Hirsh, Hoskins, Wright, Ritchie, Macmillan, Van Amburgh, Baeuerlein and others. Its decisive clause asserts as a finding of fact that I. F. Hoskins, R. H. Hirsh, A. I. Ritchie and J. D. Wright had not been legally directors for more than six months past and were not directors now, and that the president had therefore appointed four men to complete the board under the charter and the laws of Pennsylvania. The resolution then endorses Rutherford’s conduct as president, general manager and executive officer, commends him to all who loved Russell, declares him the man the Lord has chosen to carry on the work and better qualified than anyone else in the church, and asks him to prepare and if necessary publish a full statement of the facts behind the Brooklyn situation and of the necessity for his appointments. It was signed at Brooklyn on 17 July 1917 by A. N. Pierson, W. E. Spill, W. E. Van Amburgh, J. A. Bohnet, A. H. Macmillan and George H. Fisher.
Appendices [part 3]
The appendix section opens with a facsimile of the resolution passed by Rutherford’s reconstituted board on July 17, 1917 (Figure 17), and then turns to the statutory material on which the whole dispute over the directorships turns. Appendix 8 reproduces the relevant pages of the Pennsylvania general corporation law as printed in Angelo T. Freedley’s annotated edition of the Act of 29 April 1874 and its supplementary acts, published at Philadelphia by T. & J. W. Johnson & Co. in 1882 – the compilation of the law as it stood when the Watch Tower Society’s charter was approved. The extract begins with the by-law power, which the statute vests in the stockholders or members meeting for that purpose rather than in the board, unless the charter says otherwise, and limits by-law penalties to twenty dollars. Section 5 of the 1874 act, printed here, requires that the business of every such corporation be managed by a president, a board of directors or trustees, a clerk, a treasurer and such further officers as the corporation authorises. The same section is the provision Rutherford leaned on: directors or trustees are to be chosen annually by the stockholders or members at the time fixed by the by-laws. But the clause immediately following – the one Persson wants the reader to notice – adds that directors ‘shall hold their office until others are chosen and qualified in their stead’, so that a lapsed annual election does not by itself empty the seats. The section also sets a minimum of three directors, provides that one of them be chosen president, allows the members to fix or change the number of directors at a meeting called for the purpose, and makes a majority of the whole number a quorum. Short paragraphs on the clerk, who is sworn and keeps the minute book, and on the treasurer, who gives bond and keeps the corporation’s money in a separate account on pain of a fifty-dollar daily penalty, follow. Section 9 of the act governs vacancies: on the death, removal or resignation of the president or any director, treasurer or other officer, it is ‘the remaining directors’ who may supply the vacancy, and only until the next election – a rule that leaves no room for a president to appoint replacements himself. Freedley’s footnotes, also reproduced, gather the Pennsylvania and out-of-state case law on each point, including decisions that a board has no power to make or alter by-laws without charter authority, that mandamus lies to compel the annual election, that officers stand in a quasi-fiduciary relation to the corporation, and that a supplementary act of 19 April 1879 made married women eligible as officers of corporations formed for learning, benevolence, charity or religion. Facsimile pages of the 1882 volume are printed as Figures 18-21. Appendix 9 gives the counter-opinion the four ousted directors obtained from the New York firm of Davies, Auerbach & Cornell, of the Mutual Life Building, 34 Nassau Street, dated July 23, 1917 and addressed to them in answer to Rutherford’s circulated ‘Statements of Facts and Points’. The firm first disposes of Rutherford’s jurisdictional argument, observing that by his own admission the Society had moved its activities to New York in 1909 and held no board meetings in Pennsylvania since, which put its affairs squarely within the reach of the New York courts. It next rejects his claim that the corporation was beyond those courts because unregistered in New York, noting that the registration statutes apply only to foreign stock corporations, citing Demarest v. Flack, and that under Section 3 of the New York General Corporation Law a body issuing mere membership certificates and distributing no profits is not a stock corporation. On the central question, the attorneys treat as an afterthought the discovery that the 1884 charter clause making directors hold office ‘for life’ was void under the Pennsylvania annual-election rule, remarking that a man long connected with the management had not noticed the defect until after Pastor Russell’s death and now used it to justify removing a board majority and filling the seats himself. They point out that the charter carried the certificate of an Associate Judge of the Common Pleas, as Pennsylvania law required, that it was ‘lawful and not injurious to the community’. Their decisive answer is that even granting Rutherford’s reading of the statute, the holdover clause and the identical common-law rule kept the four in office until successors were chosen and qualified by the members of the corporation – and no successors had ever been so chosen, since Rutherford’s appointees were named by him alone. They dismiss the argument that three directors had to reside in Pennsylvania, finding no such requirement for a membership corporation and noting that if it existed it would void the whole board rather than four of its members, Rutherford himself not being a Pennsylvania resident. They also attack the double sense in which he used the word ‘manager’, a recognised corporate office concerned with executive management, whose holder is the servant of the directors and has never been thought to have power to appoint them. On vacancies the opinion turns Rutherford’s own premise against him: if the statute overrides the charter, then the statute equally reserves the filling of vacancies to the remaining directors, and if the charter stands, no vacancies existed at all – and in any case a president cannot acquire the board’s power simply by declining to call the special meeting it was his duty to call. As a fallback the firm argues that men so long in office and so long recognised by the membership and by the late president were at minimum de facto directors even if not de jure. The opinion closes with the sting Persson clearly values: if the annual-election rule really vacated every directorship after a year, Rutherford held no office either, for the charter requires the president to be chosen annually from among the board, and his contention that election as president implied election as a director had already been rejected by the New York Court of Appeals in People ex rel. Nichol v. New York Infant Asylum.
Appendices [part 4]
The chunk opens on the closing lines of the opinion supplied by the New York firm Davies, Auerbach and Cornell, which warned that the legal reasoning Rutherford was advancing would, if carried to its logical end, destroy his own claim to be a director and president, and which was addressed jointly to A.I. Ritchie, J.D. Wright, I.F. Hoskins and R.H. Hirsh. Persson then reproduces, with a facsimile figure, a private letter Joseph Franklin Rutherford sent on 16 December 1914 to J.T. Hoag of 141 West 10th Street, Jacksonville, Florida. In it Rutherford asked Hoag to find reasonably priced furnished rooms with meals in a good Jacksonville neighbourhood where his wife could pass the severe winter months, specifying steam or hot-air heating and bath and toilet facilities, and stating that she had been in poor health for a number of years. He added that he would like their son, Malcolm C. Rutherford, to winter with her if work could be found for him, describing him as a capable stenographer who nonetheless preferred outdoor employment, and suggesting that a Brother King might know of soliciting work for a fruit house or something connected with southern fruit orchards. Persson prints the document as evidence of the Rutherford household’s circumstances at the end of 1914, without editorial comment beyond the heading and the accompanying figure. The next appendix gives a letter of 6 August 1915 written by A.H. Macmillan from Brandonville, West Virginia, to a correspondent addressed only as “Brother Ralph”, again with a facsimile figure. Macmillan wrote that he wanted to attend his correspondent’s convention but that the Society was, in his words, “about broke” and its future uncertain, that he had not yet decided whether to continue in the Pilgrim service, and that several matters were pending. He explained that he was travelling to Brandonville to join his wife and son at their relatives’ home for four or five weeks and would appear at Crooksville only if he could raise the money, a candid glimpse of the Society’s finances and of Macmillan’s own hesitancy in the year before Russell’s death. The longest appendix reprints Paul S.L. Johnson’s article “A Protest against Misrepresentation” from The Present Truth of 1 September 1919, pages 161-162. Johnson was answering the letter Rutherford wrote the night before he was taken to Atlanta, circulated in The Watch Tower, the St. Paul Enterprise and the Labor Tribune and distributed widely as volunteer matter, which implied that the seven leaders who had opposed Rutherford’s control of the Society were present at the trial and had helped the prosecution, a suggestion that had led many Society supporters to cast them as an antitypical Judas; Johnson also cited a report that G.H. Fisher had made the same accusation openly to a congregation. Against this Johnson set out his own conduct: he had been grieved by the arrests, had never communicated with anyone connected with the prosecution beforehand, had publicly urged the brethren to side with and pray for the accused, and when subpoenaed by the prosecutor before the trial had defended them and rebutted the charges rather than supplying information. He claimed that because he was so obviously a hostile witness the prosecutor never called him at the trial, though the ousted directors and several Society supporters were subpoenaed; that he had deliberately stayed away to avoid the stand; and that through the Pilgrim Brother Herr he had warned Rutherford of the prosecution’s intended lines of attack, while Van Amburgh, met on the street with Brother Cole, had refused his offered hand. Johnson argued that the internal Society quarrel had nothing to do with the convictions, and listed four acts he had been reliably told brought them about: the denunciation of patriotism in the seventh volume, letters into the camps telling drafted brethren not to wear the uniform, drill or do menial duties, the supplying of affidavits and instructions for claiming conscientious-objector exemption, and further unpatriotic letters intercepted by the censors together with unpatriotic speeches. In a bracketed aside he faulted Woodworth for departing from “that Servant’s” reading of the frog from the dragon’s mouth as the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, arguing that applying it to the Kaiser instead of attacking patriotism would have kept the volume out of trouble, and he read the imprisonment theologically as Great Company suffering, partly for righteousness and partly for wrongdoing. Turning to the other six, Johnson denied that any of them assisted the prosecution: Ritchie was compelled by subpoena to take the stand but did no more than identify Macmillan’s handwriting, which Macmillan himself acknowledged, and Hirsh had told both Brother Cole and the defendant de Cecca of his sympathy with the accused. Johnson’s sharpest point was that Hirsh had been indicted only because his name still appeared in The Watch Tower as an editor when some of the alleged espionage-act offences occurred, and that when the prosecution moved to set that indictment aside on discovering he had ceased to be an editor beforehand, the convicted men’s own counsel resisted the motion and sought to have Hirsh tried and imprisoned alongside them. He closed by protesting publicly, before God and the whole Church, against Rutherford, whom he accused of “smiting his fellow servants” for two and a half years, and demanded public amends. The final appendix is Persson’s own documentary note: in the 1970s he discussed Rutherford’s regime with his compatriot Carl Olof Jonsson, particularly the allegations of Olin R. Moyle, the lawyer Rutherford expelled from the Society in 1939, and Jonsson agreed to interview an acquaintance who had served at headquarters. Jonsson interviewed Henning Andersson of Birgittagatan 13 in Göteborg, who had worked at the Brooklyn Bethel from 1927 to 1934, wrote up his notes at once, and reported them to Persson in a letter from Åmål dated 1 September 1975; Persson translated it and obtained Jonsson’s permission by email on 3 June 2012 to publish the translation. Andersson, who had known Rutherford, Knorr, Franz and Woodworth in a Bethel family of about a hundred, confirmed that public reprimands in the dining room were frequent and recalled the young Knorr, then about twenty-three or twenty-four, weeping after one, saying that Rutherford ruled “with a rod of iron” but insisting the harsh discipline was necessary and that Rutherford was just to everyone. He flatly denied that vulgar jokes were told at table, confirmed that wine was drunk by everyone including Rutherford but decently and in private rooms, said occasional drunkenness happened rarely, and dismissed as untrue the rumour that Rutherford had once been found intoxicated in a corridor, adding that in seven years he had never seen him tipsy; he could not say whether Rutherford’s room at the top of the building was air-conditioned, having never been in it. Jonsson vouched for Andersson’s honesty, noting that he admitted Bethel’s defects while accepting the regimentation as the price of getting the work done, and observed that the pressure told on everyone, Andersson himself ending up close to a nervous breakdown. The chunk ends with a run of numbered footnotes citing The Watch Tower of 1 December 1916, the Watch Tower Reprints, several issues of The Present Truth, Harvest Siftings of 1 August 1917, the Watchtower of 14 August 1966, Bregninge, and a 1977 letter from E.T. Lenfest to Persson. One footnote qualifies Persson’s use of Jan Haugland’s 2006 master’s thesis on Rutherford by noting that Haugland claimed no more than that it was possible, though he could neither confirm nor reject it, that a name was added to Russell’s list after Russell wrote it; another explains that E.C. Henninges, successively branch manager in England, Germany and Australia, and the prominent Chicago pilgrim M.L. McPhail both left the Society in 1908 over the covenants and the sin offering.
Glossary
Persson closes the book with a glossary explaining the specialised vocabulary of the Watch Tower movement for readers who come to the 1917 crisis without any background in it. He defines the “ancient worthies” as the pre-Christian faithful of Hebrews 11, whom Bible Students expected to be resurrected as perfect men and to act as earthly “princes” under the invisible heavenly kingdom during the millennium; Bethel is the name given to the Brooklyn headquarters after the 1909 move from the Pittsburgh “Bible House,” and to the branch offices abroad. “Bible Students,” he stresses, is used throughout the book in a narrow sense: not students of the Bible generally but the movement Charles Taze Russell founded, which from 1910 identified itself as the International Bible Students Association, a name later carried on the Society’s title pages, used for the British branch chartered in 1914 and for the Canadian corporation of 1925, until Joseph Franklin Rutherford replaced it for his own faction with Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1931. The doctrine of “the church’s share in the sin offering” held that the “little flock” would be associated with Christ in his sacrifice without themselves providing any ransom; Persson notes that Russell treated this as a non-essential on which congregations could differ, and that it nevertheless helped split the Pastoral Bible Institute — itself a product of the 1917–1918 management crisis — in 1936. Colporteurs were the full-time door-to-door literature distributors from 1881 onwards, supporting themselves from sales and subscriptions; Persson points out the word was ordinary church usage, not a Bible Student coinage. “Ecclesia” was the movement’s ordinary word for a local congregation, used alongside “class,” “church” and “congregation.” Under “covenants” he sets out Russell’s 1907 reinterpretation, which removed the church from the new covenant of Jeremiah 31 and made Jesus its advocate rather than its mediator — a change that drove prominent Bible Students out even though most accepted it, and which Rutherford himself reversed in his 1934 book Jehovah. The Elijah and Elisha typology mattered directly to the succession fight: Russell had taught that the two prophets prefigured the faithful “little flock” and the lesser “great company,” and that their dramatic separation was imminent, so after his death on 31 October 1916 the rival factions read their own schism through it before Rutherford discarded the scheme in 1919 in favour of two phases of preaching work, dating the change to 1918 — a position the Society itself revised in 1961. Equally central was “the faithful and wise servant” of Matthew 24:45-47: Russell’s Studies in the Scriptures, Vol. IV (1897) applied the phrase to a single individual, and Bible Students generally took that individual to be Russell, a view he shared and Rutherford initially endorsed before rejecting it in 1927 in favour of a collective “remnant,” which the Society narrowed again in 2013 to its governing body. The “Gentile Times” chronology, laid out in The Time is at Hand (1889), ran 2,520 years from the fall of the Davidic kingdom in 606 B.C. to 1914; Persson records Russell’s growing reservations as the date neared, a splinter group’s 1921 recalculation to 587 B.C.–1934, and the Society’s own shift of the starting point to 607 B.C. in 1943. The Golden Age, announced by Rutherford at Cedar Point, Ohio on 5 September 1919 and first issued on 1 October 1919 under the editorship of Clayton J. Woodworth, was contentious because Russell’s will had bound the Society to publish no periodical he had not started; it became Consolation in 1937 and Awake! in 1946, and for many years attacked the Society’s opponents, especially former associates. The “great company” was the demoted, less faithful class of Revelation 7:9 that no Bible Student wished to join, while “the harvest” was the 1874–1914 forty-year ingathering of Matthew 13 — a period Russell extended in The Watch Tower of 1 September 1916 as far as April 1918, leaving a disputed question that fed the divisions after his death. The “little flock” was the fixed body of 144,000 heavenly rulers to which Bible Students believed they belonged; “pilgrims” were the travelling speakers sent to congregations from 1894 until the office was renamed regional service director in 1928; and “present truth” denoted their distinctive end-time teaching, above all Christ’s invisible return in 1874. The “seventh volume” is the disputed sequel to Russell’s six Studies in the Scriptures: Persson emphasises that Russell left no manuscript at all, that C.J. Woodworth and G.H. Fisher wrote the book from late 1916, and that the Society published it on 17 July 1917 as The Finished Mystery, whereupon its errors, speculation and glorification of Russell made it a chief object of contention. “The Society” itself, he adds, means the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, registered in 1896 and chartered in 1884 as Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society, and in practice stands for its American leadership. On “types and antitypes” he observes that Bible Students pushed biblical typology far past its New Testament use by reading their own movement into Old Testament figures, ignoring Russell’s own warning in Studies in the Scriptures, Vol. II (1889); The Finished Mystery made Russell the antitype of Ezekiel and his wife of Ezekiel’s wife, Rutherford’s Preservation (1932) generated “Esther,” “Mordecai,” “Naomi” and “Ruth” classes, and the Society abandoned the method in 2015 while keeping the “seven times” calculation behind 1914. “The Vow” was the solemn oath Russell pressed on pilgrims, headquarters staff, colporteurs and congregation officers from 1908 — renouncing spiritism and forbidding being alone behind a closed door with anyone of the opposite sex outside the immediate family — and it was soon urged on all Bible Students. He ends by explaining his citation practice for the Society’s flagship journal, whose title changed five times between Zion’s Watch Tower and Herald of Christ’s Presence (July 1879) and The Watchtower Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom (March 1939), and by noting that the 1919 reprinting of all issues from July 1879 to 15 June 1919 in seven continuously paginated volumes is what he cites as The Watch Tower Reprints.
Bibliography
Persson opens the bibliography by stating that he lists only sources he actually quotes or refers to in the book. He begins with four academic theses on the Witnesses – Cumberland’s Iowa dissertation of 1958, Zygmunt’s Chicago dissertation of 1967, Rogerson’s Oxford D.Phil. of 1972 and Haugland’s Bergen master’s thesis on Rutherford – which frame the scholarly background rather than supplying his evidence. Two court records stand at the centre of his legal material: the transcript of Rutherford et al. vs. The United States from the 1918 sedition prosecution, and the 1943 Moyle vs. Franz transcript. A substantial run of corporation-law literature follows, covering the Pennsylvania statute of 1874 in Freedley’s editions of 1882 and 1890 and Shockley’s 1933 restatement, plus two manuals of New York corporation law from 1896 and 1906, because the crisis turned on whether Rutherford’s directorial appointments were lawful. To these he adds the contemporary legal opinions the parties themselves commissioned – the Davies, Auerbach & Cornell letter of July 23, 1917 to the four directors, J. Fithiam Tatem’s opinion and Francis H. McGee’s statement in Facts for Shareholders, and the McCaughey opinion Rutherford printed inside Harvest Siftings – together with court record books from Cooper County, Missouri. The Watch Tower Society’s own retrospective accounts are listed separately, from Qualified to Be Ministers and Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Divine Purpose through Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom, several yearbooks and a 2010 DVD history. Among modern independent works he rates Penton’s Apocalypse Delayed and Tony Wills’s A People for His Name as the best treatments of the management crisis, credits Rogerson’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die with starting his research, and calls Redeker’s Russell biography one of the better sources. The heart of his evidence is the contemporary pamphlet war of 1917 and 1918: the July 19, 1917 letter to the ecclesias carrying the board resolution of July 17, the directors’ circular of July 27, Rutherford’s Harvest Siftings and its second part, the opposition’s Light after Darkness and Facts for Shareholders, Johnson’s Harvest Siftings Reviewed, Hemery’s reply from London, Pierson’s vice-presidential statement and the joint letter of March 1, 1918. A long section on the seventh volume traces The Finished Mystery through its 1917 to 1927 editions and the mass ‘ZG’ Watch Tower edition of March 1, 1918, alongside Woodworth’s and Johnson’s later rival accounts of how the book was written and the Society’s own Seventh Volume Corrections of 1920. For the sedition trial he assembles the incriminated literature itself – The Finished Mystery, the Bible Students Monthly of December 1917 and the three 1918 issues of Kingdom News – with Sexton’s contemporary defence and modern studies by Abrams, Shaw and Penton. He then documents each successor body in turn: convention reports from 1906 to 1931, the Fort Pitt Committee’s bulletins and McGee’s circulars of 1918, the Pastoral Bible Institute’s Herald of Christ’s Kingdom from December 1918, Johnson’s Present Truth and the Laymen’s Home Missionary Movement, the British Bible Students Committee of May 1919, and the Stand Fasts of Portland, Oregon under F. McKercher. The closing appraisal section grades six sources: Chryssides’s 2016 book is better than his ‘practically worthless’ 2009 essay but still wrong on the January 1918 election and on the July 17, 1917 dinner-table scene; Marley Cole’s 1955 book is an undisclosed insider work with gross errors; Hudson’s British history is indispensable but mistaken on the sequence of Johnson’s actions in Britain and on Rutherford’s obscurity there. Persson accepts the anonymous 42-page Macmillan transcript found by Michael Castro as a genuine talk from the early 1950s, valuing its confirmation that directors signed resignations in advance and its account of the Soda Lake venture, while warning that Macmillan’s memory and his 1957 book must be used with utmost caution. He identifies the pseudonymous author of Game Over as Henrik Melvang, prizes the book only for its reproductions of the filed 1884 and 1909 charters, and closes with a detailed critique of Bregninge’s fourth edition, rejecting its ‘for life’ claim, its picture of Russell entrusting the work to Macmillan, and its misattribution to Persson of a statement about Paul S.L. Johnson’s parents.
Sources for Biographies
Persson explains that, apart from the sketch of Joseph F. Rutherford, the twenty historical biographies carry no footnotes, and that much of their content rests on public records and genealogical databases such as FamilySearch and Ancestry. For each subject he instead lists the most important additional sources, arranged alphabetically by surname after Rutherford, who is placed first. He concedes that for H. Clay Rockwell and J. Dennis Wright he can list nothing, having assembled only fragments from early Bible Student publications, occasional press notices and public records. The Rutherford list is the most varied, running from Morgan County, Missouri court books through convention souvenir reports and the St. Paul Enterprise announcement of his succession to Russell, to the 1918 federal trial transcript and the 1943 Moyle litigation. Across almost every biography the transcript of record in Rutherford et al vs. The United States, 1918 recurs as Persson’s central government document, supplemented for the later years by Moyle vs. Franz et al, 1943. The movement’s own periodicals do much of the work: The Watch Tower and its 1919 Reprints, The Golden Age, Consolation, The Watchtower and the Society’s yearbooks supply letters, resignation statements, convention addresses and obituaries. Dissident and successor publications carry equal weight, above all Rutherford’s Harvest Siftings, Paul S.L. Johnson’s Harvest Siftings Reviewed and Epiphany Studies in the Scriptures, the ousted directors’ Light after Darkness and Facts for Shareholders, and The Herald of Christ’s Kingdom. Secular newspapers are cited for births, lawsuits, deaths and public controversies, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, The New York Times, The Sun, The Hartford Courant, the Trenton papers, The Pittsburgh Press, the Ventura County Star and the Cincinnati Enquirer. Swedish-language material supports the Pierson and Ritchie sketches: the Westerlund emigrant diary of the 1869 Ocean Queen voyage, Vakt-Tornet, August Lundborg’s I Morgonvakten and a chapter on Pierson as “The Rose King.” Local and reference works fill gaps, among them Wiley’s Portrait Cyclopedia of Schuylkill County, the Cromwell, Connecticut town history and the Woman’s Who’s Who of America. Persson also relies on Internet resources he dates precisely, chiefly WikiTree entries for spouses and children and the Bible Student Archives, which reproduce documents and biographical sketches. Finally he draws on private correspondence gathered over decades: letters from Rose Hirsh in 1974 and Frank Brown in 1976, and emails from Kurt Rubensson, Trey Moss of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the genealogist Skip Higgins.