ARMAGEDDON, INC.
By Stanley High
The Saturday
Evening Post, September 14, 1940
Scans of the original article can be found
here:
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of Rutherford & Knorr closeup
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Jehovah's Witnesses Make Hate a Religion
For conscientious cussedness on the grand
scale, no other aggregation of Americans is a match for Jehovah's Witnesses. Defiance
of what others cherish and revere is their daily meat. They hate all religions
and say so from the housetops. They hate all governments with an enthusiasm
that is equally unconcealed. On phonograph records, sound trucks, the radio and
in a Noah's flood of literature, they admit, without conscious blasphemy, that
they hold a prior lien on the Almighty. On the rest of us the Great Unwashed
they look down their spiritual noses. We, they say, have got" it"
coming to us, and "if as they can triumphantly prove by the Scriptures is
due almost any time now.
For being generally offensive, they have been
getting their heads cracked, their meetings broken up, their meeting houses
pillaged and themselves thrown into jail. Six thousand of them are in German concentration
camps. In Canada, to be one of them is a prison offence. In Australia, a demand
for their suppression is growing. Their lawyers' briefs for their run-ins with
mobs or the law in the United States during the single month from June
fourteenth to July fourteenth cover thirty-nine cases in twenty states. Those
are only samples. The grand total would be several times that.
Before this rising wave of ill will they never retreat. On the contrary fortified again by the Scriptures they welcome it. Their chief regret seems to be that their martyrdoms, to date, have been only minor ones. The times, they confidently predict, will yet require some major martyring.
Jehovah's Witnesses look like average
Americans as, in fact, they are. Twenty-five thousand of them came to Detroit
in mid-July after Columbus, Ohio, had banned them. At the same time there were
similar, though somewhat smaller, meetings in nineteen other cities. East,
South and West.
Those in Detroit came on foot, by bus and
train, in first-rate automobiles and in jalopies, the like and number of which
the motor city had never seen before. Their assorted vehicles, from most of the
states in the Union, jammed Detroit's parking lots. The city's third, fourth
and fifth rate hotels and rooming houses did a business better than any that
had come their way in ten years.
The heat in Detroit's best shade was near a
hundred. Convention Hall has a flat roof and is not in the shade. The Witnesses
rigged up a hospital in a nearby hotel, manned it with their own doctors, and
with orthodox ministrations took care of the scores who were felled by the sun.
Inside the hall they set up their own kitchen and cafeteria and, through the
steam, served boiled beef, boiled potatoes, heat-shrivelled peas and wilted lettuce
to the shirt-sleeved, cotton-gowned multitude. For four days, the 25,000 milled
and sweated, prayed, sang and witnessed and, to the sighing accompaniment of
thousands of palm-leaf fans, listened over the public-address system to
speakers most of them could not see.
The police said they had never seen so large a
crowd so orderly. More than 1000 Witness ushers, armed with canes, kept the
throngs on the move, with much "brothering" and
"sistering." Gently manoeuvred canes barred the way to the offices where
the men behind the gathering did business. When the canes came down, the
reception was all that any reporter could ask for. Even the photographers were
welcomed. Judging from all outward appearances, this might have been a
midsummer gathering of Kansas Methodists.
But it wasn't. The Witnesses had come to town
not merely, to meet but to witness. Every morning, near the entrance to the
hall, one of the brethren with a good voice and a technique like that of an
evangelist turned auctioneer drummed up Witnesses by the dozens of carloads to
carry the message to Detroit. They carried it not only block by block to
Detroit but to Flint and Pontiac and scores of towns within a fifty-mile
radius. They distributed more than 1,000,000 pieces of literature, played their
phonographs on thousands of front porches, set up their loud-speaker trucks on
hundreds of street corners.
The Biggest Source of Conscientious
Objectors
When, on Sunday evening, the last fervent word
was spoken in Convention Hall and the first of the dusty motor caravans turned
homeward, some hundreds of the Witnesses could boast that they had had minor
brushes with the law. Some fifty of them were left behind in its clutches. And
the thousands who were still foot-loose undoubtedly went their separate ways
confident that treatment of the same sort, or worse, was in store for them. In
that, they are probably right.
The Witnesses keep no rolls of membership, the
scriptural ground on which such records are eschewed is one of the few of their
innumerable Biblical quotations which I failed to note. Some idea of the size
of the movement can be gathered from the fact that last year it employed, full
and part time, 44,000 workers. That is 10,000 more than there were in the
previous year. There are no churches in the usual sense. Groups of followers
are called Company Organizations, their meeting places, Kingdom Halls. In 1939,
according to the official yearbook, there were 2425 Company Organizations. That
is an increase of 639 over 1938. This growth has gone on at so fast a pace that
recently, for greater ease of administration, the United States has been
divided into six major regions and 153 zones. These sectors, large and small,
are looked after by regional and zone servants. A rough idea of the size of the
spiritual empire over which these servants preside is indicated by the fact
that last year they travelled more than 2,150,000 miles.
Thus, even in the absence of exact figures, it
seems likely that the United States harbours no other out-of-step and
out-of-sympathy minority of anything like their size and militancy. In the
event of war, they are sure to furnish the largest quota of conscientious
objectors, and, perhaps, the most troublesome. In this near-war period, no
other group so boldly condemns not only the current patriotic trend but
patriotism, specifically and in general. No other, for good measure, condemns
so many other things by which Americans lay store. In our democratic flesh they
are, in short, a thorn of painful proportions all the more troublesome a thorn
because its watering is scriptural and its soil the conscience.
A good deal of mystery surrounds the history
and spectacular growth of this amazing movement. A similar cloak covers some of
the story of its current operations. The history part is dismissed in the 1940
yearbook with a sketchy paragraph. This recounts that in 1872 " a few
Christian persons met together in a little town in Pennsylvania to consider the
Scriptures relative to the coming of Christ Jesus and His kingdom." There
is very little else save that by 1884 this group had waxed sufficiently to
organize a corporation under the name of Zion's Watch Tower Society, later
changed to Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. That was in Pennsylvania. When,
in New York State, the harvest began to ripen, another corporation was set up
to garner it, The People's Pulpit Association. That later metamorphosed into
the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society under which corporate banner it continues
to operate. In 1914, in the British vineyard, the International Bible Students'
Association, Inc., was set up.
The purpose of these corporate bodies is
simple "to wit: the dissemination of Bible truths by means of publication,
in printed form and other lawful means."
This official outline history is the only one
extant. It is important chiefly for what it omits. The most important of its
omissions is Charles Taze (Pastor) Russell. For him there is not so much as a
parenthesis or an obituary. And yet the "few Christian persons" who
forgathered in 1872 were chiefly Charles Taze Russell. Whatever revelation
descended on that modest assembly was relayed through him. From then until his
death which had not been counted on in 1916, he continued to do the relaying.
The various corporations mentioned above were the material means for the
dissemination of his revelations. The body of his beliefs came to be known as
Russellism; those who espoused them, as Russellites. That his name is now
erased from the tablets of the law does not alter the fact that, but for him,
Jehovah's Witnesses would be back, religiously, where they came from.
"Pastor" Russell, in his early
career, ran a haberdashery in Pittsburgh. It prospered and he came to own a
small chain of such establishments. His religion such as it was, was
Congregationalist.
One day, young Russell, so the story goes,
dropped in at a Pittsburgh poolroom. An atheistic hanger-on was in the midst of
a denial of heaven and hell. Russell wasn't so sure. But he decided to find
out. He bought a Bible and settled down to it. He found out plenty about heaven
and hell, and a lot that he had not figured on. The force of what he found out
drove him out of the haberdashery business and into the company of the
prophets.
He began to preach in 1878. His title of
"Pastor "was won, not by the laying on of hands but by leg work. His
zeal, so his followers boasted, took him farther than the journeying of St.
Paul and Bishop Asbury combined. His writings were "more extensive than the
combined works of St. Paul, St. John, Arius, Waldo, Wycliffe and Martin Luther
the six messengers to the Church who preceded him." Up to the time of his
death, his six major books had had a total distribution of nearly 15,000,000
copies.
A Candidate for the Place Next to St. Paul
THE doctrine he preached was millennial. But
there was very little millennial about his own earthly interlude. He was
frequently involved in lawsuits and controversy. He once declared, with what
must have been autobiographical insight, that "many of the Lord's most
faithful children live in a matrimonial furnace of affliction." After many
years of life in such a furnace, he escaped via a divorce the court holding,
contrariwise, that his attitude of "insistent egotism," "extravagant
self praise" and "continual domination" were such as to
"render the life of any sensitive Christian woman a burden and make her
life intolerable."
There were hints of a much shadier sort. But
these never shook the faith from his followers. "When the history of the
Church of Christ is fully written," said the official panegyric that
followed his death, "it will be found that' the place next to St. Paul in
the gallery of fame as expounder of the Gospel of the Great Master will be
occupied by Charles Taze Russell."
Those words were penned in the first flush of
grief. They reckoned without the all-too-human certainty that others, who once
had been satisfied to touch the hem of Pastor Russell's garment, would aspire
to wear it. The one on whose shoulders it finally came to rest was Joseph
Franklin Rutherford" Judge" Rutherford to his following; plain
"J. F." by his own signature.
The story of Judge Rutherford's rise to
prophetic stature is not part of the literature of the movement. By birth he is
a Missourian. He studied law. As a young man, in several small Missouri towns,
he practiced it. His judicial handle, like Pastor Russell's ordination, appears
to be synthetic. On an occasion or two so one of his associates told me he was
called to sit in something which approximated a judicial capacity. That was a
long time ago, and, (Continued on Page 50) so I was told, he never uses the
title when speaking of himself. Among his multitude, however, he is always
Judge Rutherford, or just "the Judge."
Just how or when Judge Rutherford felt the
first stirrings toward religious leadership is not very precisely revealed. The
accepted story seems to be that a Russellite, armed with literature and
scriptural quotations, called one day at his Missouri home. The quotations were
delivered, the literature left, and Rutherford looked into them. He, reputedly,
was as astonished by what he found as the inquiring Charles T. Russell had
been. He became, as Russell had, a Bible student and, eventually, a Russellite.
Converts in Rutherford's profession were rare.
Moreover, the law courts being what they were, a Russellite with legal talent
was needed. As a result, he was singled out for more than ordinary attention.
Pastor Russell looked on him with favour. Eventually he turned up in Brooklyn
as attorney for the movement.
That was in 1909. Pastor Russell, when he died
in 1916, left no word as to his successor. But because of his frequent legal
appearances in defence of Russell, and his directive hand in the business management
of the vast Russell establishment, Rutherford was all set to move in.
He moved in at about the time that the United
States entered the first World War. He did not approve of war. With a
forthrightness which seems to characterize many religious leaders only in times
of peace, he boldly said so. When troubled young men of his flock sought his
advice, he called their attention to the section of the Draft Act which
provided exemption on grounds of conscience. When the military authorities
besought him to be, if not more co-operative, a little more quiet, he loudly
refused. The story of his subsequent hounding particularly at the hands of
blood-thirsty clergymen makes unpleasant reading. He and seven of his followers
were eventually sentenced to the Federal prison in Atlanta.
Rutherford spent nine months in Atlanta. He
put the time to good use. By the end of nine months, more than 100 fellow
prisoners were enrolled in his Bible class. His eventual release came through
the reversal by the United States Court of Appeals of the original decision.
Rutherford, however, gives no credit to the court. His followers had been heard
from. In his behalf, thousands of letters of protest poured into the Department
of Justice. One petition for his release with 700,000 names, on it was
presented at Washington.
The general assumption seemed to be that,
after Atlanta, Rutherford and his cause would languish. Quite the opposite
happened. He had skirted the fringe of martyrdom and, snatched back, he was
acclaimed. Today, at seventy, his only rival to the title of the nation's most
potent religious leader is Father Coughlin. But Coughlin is a voice. Rutherford
is both a voice and a movement.
Officially, he is president of the three
bodies which constitute the earthly structure of the organization: the Watch
Tower Bible and Tract Society, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Inc.,
and the International Bible Students' Association. Actually, he is much more
than that. He fell heir to Russell's enterprise and his disciples. He has
modernized the first and increased the second. But he never made Russell's
mistake of entering any supernatural claims for himself.
But it is not likely that the appearance of
more than human characteristics would surprise his followers. His words are not
accepted as the law and the prophets. They are accepted as more than that. The
Witnesses rely on what the Bible says. But they count on Judge Rutherford to
tell them what it means by what it says. The latter role is obviously more
important.
A Complete Senatorial Bearing
For such a super prophetic status, the Judge
is humanly well equipped. He is more than six feet tall, and portly. He walks
with the same measured and solemn dignity that one sees at its best on the
floor of the United States Senate. In fact, he looks more like a senator than
most senators. He wears stand-up collars of the Champ dark era, black string
bow ties, and a long black ribbon for his glasses. Senator like, the glasses
are handy props. He uses them for minor gesticulations which go with profound
deliverances. His voice is a match for his frame heavy, rounded and, on
occasion, booming.
But Judge Rutherford is shielded from the
world as no senator ever was. In Detroit he lived incommunicado at an unnamed
hotel. During the four days, his 25,000 had two opportunities to see him at the
opening and at the closing sessions. He was scheduled to make one appearance in
between. But when the heat passed ninety-nine, it was cancelled.
His associates are as loath to talk about him
as they are to open the way to his presence. The movement, they say, is not of
man but of God, and the less said about personalities the better.
One or two personal items were unearthed.
Apparently there is a Mrs. Rutherford. There is also a son. Whether they are
Witnesses, no one seemed prepared to say.
A Big-Time Business
In any event, the amount of time which Judge
Rutherford could give to domestic occupations would be limited. His other responsibilities
are enormous. He has written seventeen books and seventy-seven pamphlets. He
edits The Watchtower - the semi-monthly magazine "Announcing Jehovah's
Kingdom." Most of the sixteen pages of Biblical interpretations which it
contains are written by him. He has a hand in all the other periodicals of the
movement. He speaks regularly over WBBR, the Brooklyn station owned by the
Witnesses. For ten years he had a weekly radio program on more than 200
stations. His recordings have been in use on 294 stations. For phonographic
purposes, his voice has been recorded on 109 different disks. Until the war, he
travelled widely. He has addressed gatherings of Witnesses in most of the
thirty-six countries in which they are organized.
In addition to these heavy labours on the
creative side, he runs the business. The business of Jehovah's Witnesses is
big-time stuff. Its brick-and-mortar headquarters are two modern buildings,
seven and eight stories respectively, in Brooklyn. One of them, facing
pleasantly on East River, is the office quarters. Here, also, the Judge is
housed. Housed with him are the several hundred employees. They, like all
full-time Witness workers, are not hirelings. They get their board and keep and
ten dollars a month for incidentals. The board part is provided chiefly from
two Witness-owned farms. The second building houses the printing plant and
factory. The corporation owns property in other parts of the United States. One
of these is a commodious edifice, built in a style that might be called
Southern California Moslem, located in San Diego It is called Beth-Sarim-the
House of the Princes. Currently it provides the West Coast quarters for Judge
Rutherford and his associates. Its long-time purpose and it is built to last is
to serve as a habitation for the prophets David, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, to
name only a few, when they return to earth. To spare them trouble with the
courts, the deed is drawn in their names.
There are properties in a number of foreign
countries. These include printing establishments of some size in Great Britain,
Switzerland and, until the Nazis took over, in Germany.
The collective output is astronomical. Since
1920, according to the official figures, the movement has produced and
distributed a grand total of 309,500,000 books and pamphlets. That yearly
average of 15,000,000 is being stepped up. The total for 1939 was 27,000,000.
In addition to English, this literature has been printed in eighty-eight
languages and dialects.
During 1939, 4,500,000 copies of The
Watchtower were printed, 5,000,000 copies of Consolation, another semi-monthly
publication, and 2,000,000 copies of Kingdom News.
How fast and in what quantity Judge
Rutherford's words are spread abroad can be gathered from the sale of his two
latest productions. His most recent book is Salvation. It was published in
1939. Within three months it had sold more than 1,000,000 copies. At present it
is rounding the 3,000,000 mark. His latest pamphlet is Judge Rutherford
Uncovers the Fifth Column. The "column," when the shades are pulled
back, appears to be the Roman Catholic hierarchy. This thirty-two-page nickel
pamphlet was printed in late June. By the end of July it had been sown in good
or stony ground to the amount of 4,000,000 copies.
The Brooklyn factory produces more than
literature. It also produces phonographs. Last year, just short of 10,000
Witness-made phonographs were sold at ten dollars each. With each instrument,
like sample blades with a razor, went three Rutherford recordings. In all, more
than 30,000 such machines are in current use. In addition, there are probably
1000 Witness sound trucks in the United States. During 1939, the Brooklyn
offices shipped out 310,000 records.
This equipment is being constantly improved
on, and new gadgets sold. One of the high spots at Detroit was the
demonstration of a new phonograph, Witness-built and streamlined. It was
compact and light. Inside, there was space for several records. An additional
"surprise" compartment contained room for a dozen Watchtowers and
Consolations, three Rutherford books and an airtight corner big enough for two
sandwiches. Only Judge Rutherford received louder applause than the
demonstrator of this machine when, a perspiring Jack Horner, he stuck in his
thumb and pulled out a sandwich.
On the financial side of this extensive
picture, very little is revealed. "For the past few years," says the
yearbook, "the detailed statement of the money received and paid out has
not been published, for the obvious reason that the enemy would use these facts
to further hinder, if possible, the work of the Society." Supporters, if
driven by sufficient curiosity, can make their own examination of the books.
"But they are not open to the enemy, who work against the Lord and his
Kingdom."
A Profitable Outfit
The business, however, is obviously
profitable. The Judge's books sell for twenty-five cents each; the pamphlets
for a nickel. Many of them are given away but not by the publisher. The
publisher collects from the individual Witnesses. The Witnesses, when they
leave a packet at a house, take whatever they are offered. The bag, thus, is
held by those in the field, not by those in Brooklyn.
Brooklyn, apparently, keeps well ahead of the
sheriff. A writer for the New York Evening Post recently took samples of the
Rutherford books and pamphlets to a New York publisher. The publisher reported
he could sell the twenty-five-cent books for eleven cents, the pamphlets for
two cents, and make a normal profit on both.
There appears to be no shadow on Judge
Rutherford's use of this money-secretive though he is about it. Some of it
undoubtedly goes to the aid of indigent Witnesses abroad. Some of it goes for
promotion. Occasionally, there is a large-scale layout in the interests of
high-class drama. In 1938, when the Judge was in England, the Witnesses hired
Albert Hall and packed it for his speech. In addition, they hired halls in
twenty-three cities in the United States, ten in Canada, ten in Australia and
four in New Zealand. All these centres were tied in by wire and wireless
through the hired and highly expensive facilities of the American Telephone and
Telegraph Company, and on this improvised world hook-up more than 100,000
Witnesses heard the Judge at his expense. The nineteen cities where meetings were
held simultaneously with the convention in Detroit were similarly tied in.
Biblical Arithmetic
Although Judge Rutherford, by virtue of his
spiritual status, is the master in this vast material domain, its government,
technically, is in the hands of a board of seven directors. A board election is
held every three years. Since there is no scroll of membership in the
organization, there are likewise no dues. At kingdom meetings no plate is
passed. Each Witness, however, gives what he is able to the local work and
nationally. In elections to the board of trustees, all Witnesses are eligible
to vote whose names are recorded in Brooklyn as having contributed ten dollars
or more for the preceding year.
The basic doctrine which Judge Rutherford expounds,
on which his growing kingdom rests and in support of which tens of thousands of
his followers cheerfully offer their heads to be cracked and their bodies
beaten, is that of the Second Coming of Christ.
That idea is not particularly new among the
theologians. In forms adapted to the age, it has been preached, off and on, in
almost every Christian century since the third or fourth. During the nineteenth
century it was one of the moving ideas behind the trek of the Mormons in search
of a fit place for their Zion. It was the central dogma of the Adventists. Many
so-called fundamentalists in various 'evangelical churches have preached it.
But never has it been more elaborately embroidered than by Messrs. Russell and
Rutherford.
To go into the maze of scriptural and
expository detail with which, to the satisfaction of their followers, they
buttressed this belief would require a high order of imagination and no little
mathematical skill. Mathematically, Russell worked by addition, Ruther-ford by
multiplication. The former, by adding together all the available ages of the
patriarchs, the reigns of the kings and judges, and two dates from the New
Testament, arrived at the conclusion that the advent had actually occurred in
1874. It was an "invisible" advent. Rutherford, by an even more
devious system, which he "explained" in a book now out of print,
multiplied and got the year 1914.
Rutherford, however, was the smarter of the
two. Russell set definite dates for the "coming." When, on each
successive occasion, the event failed to materialize, he was driven back to his
pencil and paper to show to his somewhat shaken following that he had
miscalculated. Rutherford does riot go in for times and seasons. The nearest he
comes to the calendar is in such phrases as "soon," "at
hand," not long delayed." In regard to the year 1914, however, he is
specific. Up to that year the world was Satan's and he ruled it. Everything
made by man, from that date back to Noah, was not God's but Satan's handiwork.
But 1914 ushered in a new era. Christ in that year returned invisibly to earth.
Satan, for the first time since the flood, was challenged. To date, to be sure,
he has not been dislodged. But his ousting is "at hand." There are
two reasons why he has not been routed before this. For one thing, this
"transition period" gives an opportunity for those who have
apprehended the truth to publish it, so that, at the final cataclysm, no one
will have the excuse that he has not been warned. The second reason, earnestly
advanced by one of Rutherford's spokesmen, is that "Jehovah is setting the
stage to make sure that in the final conflict His superior powers will be shown
to the greatest advantage against the hosts of Satan." Once these two
purposes are accomplished, then at Armageddon (Revelation xvi) the final battle
will be fought. Armageddon, it should be pointed out, is Jehovah's battle, not
man's. Even those who have heard and witnessed will be on the side lines. But
in its wake will come the great dividing (Matthew xxv, 31-34). Those who have
not previously repented will be destroyed. The saved will be gathered from the
ends of the earth (Matthew xxiv, 31). Jehovah's eternal kingdom will be built
upon the ruins (Daniel ii, 44).
The Judge's Theocracy
Around this doctrine of Armageddon, pre and
post, Jehovah's Witnesses are organized. Even the small children among them are
Armageddon-conscious. "We don't know when it will come," they told me
brightly, "but it ought to be mighty soon now."
The reasons the doctrine takes hold are not
all scriptural. Some of them are psychological. To many of the Witnesses, the
real world is an unrelieved burden; a place of inequalities and frustrations.
Armageddon and the Second Coming are the promise that Jehovah will turn the
tables for their benefit; that, for them, all things will be made new. The
exalted of the earth will be brought low and they, who have been humbled, will,
at long last, be exalted.
Deliberately or otherwise, the literature of
the movement never misses a chance to emphasize this pot of spiritual gold at
the end of the millennial rainbow. That, plus a great deal of Scripture, was
behind the slogan: "Millions Now Living Will Never Die." It accounts
for the arrogance with which Judge Rutherford assumes that, in the day of the
sheep and the goats, he and his followers will be first, or thereabouts, among
the chosen. It explains, also, the Judge's more recent doctrine of Theocracy.
Theocracy is a product of the regrettable
necessity that the Witnesses, pending Armageddon, have to get along somehow
with real people in a hard world. Most of the people and all of the world are
of the devil-thanks to the fact that he has reigned since Noah. That goes for
all governments and all their works. From the corner schoolhouse to the Capitol
dome, they and their transactions are hell-spawned. It goes, also, for all
business. It covers organized religion and the churches. With special venom, it
covers the Roman Catholic Church.
Such wholesale elimination leaves the
Witnesses with very little territory to play around in and none to call their
own. Theocracy provides some in the theocratic government. The theocratic
government is Jehovah's state, within but apart from the world the nucleus of
the Kingdom whose ultimate supremacy will be established by the Second Coming.
The laws for this government come straight from the Scriptures, as interpreted
by Judge Rutherford. To it, the Witnesses own not only their first but their
sole allegiance. And queer, misled, fanatical though they may be, when they own
an allegiance they own it. .Their yeas are yea and their nays nay, unmixed with
ifs or buts.
Because the only citizenship which they
acknowledge is 'in a heavenly country, they do not vote or hold public office.
They do not salute the flag. The Scripture for that is Exodus xx, 4, 5:
"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any
thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in
the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve
them."
Man's earthly creations being tee-totally
polluted, some of them refuse to send their children to public schools. They
transact only such business as is necessary for bodily survival. They will have
no part or parcel in the work of the churches.
Soldiers Only of the Lord
Most discommoding of their eschewals things
being in the shape they are they refuse to fight. That is, they refuse to fight
for the powers of this world. In their own spiritual precincts, as Judge
Rutherford has recently pointed out, they are no more pacifistic than the Old
Testament's Jehovah was. For-Jehovah and his people they would fight, as
Jehovah did. That is all they would fight for. Someone recently put to Judge
Rutherford the hoary hypothesis as to whether, if his mother were attacked, he
would defend her. The Judge had a (Continued on Page 58) (Continued from Page
54) scriptural comeback on his tongue's end: "' Who is my mother?'"
he asked. "'Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven.'
The fact," said the Judge, "that one has a brother and sister and
mother after the flesh, but who are against the Theocracy, does not mean at all
that the Christian is under any obligation whatsoever to care for or protect
any such opponent of the kingdom."
It is in behalf of these manifold beliefs that
the Witnesses do their witnessing. All of them put in time at it. Those who,
because of unshakable worldly obligations, can give only their spare time are
called Publishers. Full-time workers are Called Pioneers. A Pioneer is expected
to put in a minimum of 150 witnessing hours every month. Special Pioneers have
a 200-hour minimum.
The usual technique is to map out a city or a
rural community and cover it singly or in pairs, porch by porch.
Most active workers carry a phonograph, which
is set up, needle poised, before the doorbell is rung. The house-holder, before
he has had a chance to turn tail, is met with Judge Rutherford's resonant voice
and uncanonical phrases. That, plus the element of surprise, is generally
better than a foot inside the door. If, hearing the Judge's declamation, the
heart of the resident is hardened, then the Witness politely leaves and moves
next door. If, however, anything remotely resembling an opening appears, literature
is passed out and a few warning words are spoken. If the reception is better
than that, the householder is promised another visit and his name goes down in
the notebook for a "back call."
The zeal, devotion and downright courage of
the Witnesses in this pursuit are very great. It is doubtful if any other
Americans, save postmen, pound more pavements. Last year, back calls alone
totalled 1,866,382. No one looking for trouble could find fault with the
Witnesses' demeanour. They go about their business quietly and with a good deal
of politeness. It is only when their Scripture-guided consciences are run afoul
of that they turn to stone.
That, of late, has been happening with
increasing frequency. Their invitation to trouble is generally due, not to any
personal offensiveness, but to what they preach and what they refuse to do. In
particular, their attacks on the Catholic Church have been something less than
peace-provoking.
With Supreme Court Backing
This, in fact, came to an issue last year in
New Haven, Connecticut, and was carried to the United States Supreme Court.
Three Witnesses, a father and two sons, were engaged in their witnessing on
Cassius Street in that city a street populated 90 per cent by Roman Catholics.
The records played by the three itinerants included one vicious attack on the
Catholic Church. Two men, both Catholics, who heard it, advised the Witnesses
that, if they wanted to keep their skins intact, they had better move on. The
Witnesses took the matter to court. The case was lost in both the Common Pleas
Court in New Haven and the State Supreme Court. The United States Supreme
Court, however, reversed these decisions and upheld the Witnesses. Mr. Justice
Roberts, who delivered the unanimous opinion, declared that "in the realm
of religious faith and in that of political belief sharp differences arise. In
both fields the tenets of one man may seem the rankest error to his neighbor.
To persuade others to his point of view, the pleader, as we know, may at times
resort to exaggeration, to vilification of men who have been or are prominent
in church or state, and even to false statement. But the people of this nation
have ordained in the light of history that, in spite of the probability of
excesses and abuses, these liberties are, in the long view, essential to
enlightened opinion and right conduct on the part of the citizens of a
democracy."
The Flag Riots
Another thing which involves the Witnesses in
frequent run-ins, legal and otherwise, is their unwillingness to salute the flag.
For this shortcoming they have been assaulted by rampant patriots in scores of
communities all the way from Del Rio, Texas, to Kennebunk, Maine. This issue
they also carried to the Supreme Court. The court, in this case, held that
school authorities had the right to enforce the flag salute. Fortified by that
decision, gangs of self-styled patriots and self-anointed up rooters of spies,
saboteurs and Fifth Columnists have redoubled their hounding of the Witnesses.
The attacks at Del Rio took place two days
after the flag decision. Del Rio happens to be located on the Mexican border
and, doubtless, is jumpier than many inland communities. At any rate, when
Witnesses appeared with pamphlets and phonographs, and set about their
visitations, "an angry crowd of 400 persons," according to the United
Press version, "escorted three Nazi agents to the city limits... and
warned them not to return... The three agents had been distributing Nazi
literature in this Mexican border town for three days. Police said that yesterday
they began forcing housewives to listen to pro-Nazi phonograph recordings and
leaving copies of a pamphlet entitled 'The Watchtower' and bearing a swastika
on the cover."
Into what a jittery state the country's nerves
had fallen can be judged from the fact that this story was printed by the
meticulous New York Times. When the truth, belatedly, was run to earth, both
the Times and the U.P. published a correction. The truth was that the
"Fascist" literature on which Del Rio pounced was a Witness pamphlet
entitled Fascism or Freedom a document which was only a little less violently
anti-Fascist than anti-Catholic. The "swastika" was a small drawing
of a ball and chain which was aimed to depict fascist slavery.
Despite these attacks, the Witnesses go
steadfastly forward, still witnessing, still not saluting. Asked specifically
about the flag question, they quote Exodus and inquire, with some reason, which
is greater disrespect to the flag: their failure to salute it or the illegal
violence of their enemies?
They do not expect that such a reason, however
good, will be listened to. They do not appear particularly to care. The times
are out of hand. It is scriptural that they should be. The going is tough.
That, too, is scriptural. Armageddon was due to come that way. After that, the
glory. Lest there be any uncertainty about that, they take out their pocket
Testaments and turn to the well-marked thirty-second verse of the twelfth
chapter of St. Luke: "Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good
pleasure to give you the kingdom.
Historical
Publications Relating to Jehovah's Witnesses
