II. Organizational Beginnings:

(1873-1912) Charles Taze Russell

Since 1873 we have been living in the seventh millennium . . . the lease of Gentile dominion. "The Times of the Gentiles" will expire with the year 1914; and ... the advent of him whose right it is to take the dominion was due in 1874.... 1874 is the exact date of Our Lord's return.... Only twenty-four years of the harvest period remain, the close of which will witness the end of the reign of evil and the ushering in of the glorious Millennial day; and within this period the dark night of the world's greatest tribulation must find place. Charles Taze Russell, Studies in the Scriptures, Volume III, Thy Kingdom Come (1891), pp. 211, 305-06

SCIENCE AND SECULARISM, industrialism and invention flourished.

Everyone believed in progress. In the period of Jacksonian democracy, worship of the aristocratic Calvinist God did not flourish. The masses-farmers and workers-were exalted. The doctrine of a favored few was irreconcilable with the mythologyzing of the masses. The 1840s, '50s, and '60s in America were

an age of mass movements-an age of lectures, public schools, circuses, museums, penny newspapers, varied propaganda, political caucuses, woman suffrage conventions, temperance reform, proletarian unrest, labor organization, Mormonism, Millerism.... mesmerism, phrenology ... Madmen and women, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-Day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Unitarians....

At every corner critical thought and economic change were eating away the foundations of the traditional family system ... the factory system and the rise of public schools were offering women wider opportunities; easier divorce laws were giving them a new sense of independence.... girls [were] more defiant of parental authority and more determined to exercise their own pleasure both in the choice of work and of husbands....

The revolution in technology, the reconstruction of the social order under the impact of the machine industry, the advance of science into the domain of cosmogony, the economic independence brought to the nation by increased wealth, the ferment of political equality, the changing status of women, the clash of parties over domestic issues, and the new contacts with foreign countries reset the intellectual stage for speculation about life and for all forms of imaginative literature. [Beard, Charles A. and Mary R., The Rise of American Civilization, Vol. 1, pp. 728, 757, 761, (New York: Macmillan, 1927)]

In 1859, Darwin, disregarding accepted biblical chronology, asserted the antiquity of man and the earth. Rejecting the belief that each species was the result of an original divine act, he proclaimed the mutability of the species and the survival of the fittest. Cornerstones of Christian faith--original sin, the Virgin Birth, salvation by faith, the resurrection of the dead were challenged by the new rationalism. The intellectual life of America was stirred by fresh currents of inquiry and criticism. [See Beard, p. 733.]

"Higher criticism" threatened the established churches. Established Protestant sects were thrown into turmoil. As the frontier expanded, new sects proliferated. Enthusiastic evangelical revival meetings became boisterously expressive of strange dreams and wondrous portents. Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists fought with Free-Will Baptists. Schisms tore the churches apart. Presbyterians split into four or five divisions.

In 1843, William Miller had confidently announced the second coming of Christ, and his followers earnestly awaited their salvation and the end of the world. The world did not end; but second-adventists continued to flourish. American adventist evangelists took their message as far as Korea. Apocalyptic adventist sects (such as those founded and led by Elliott and Cummings in 1866, Brewer and Decker in 1867, Seiss in 1870, and the Russian Mennonites, in J889) proliferated.

Protestantism was splintering, becoming free-wheeling, effervescent, drunk on the wine of individualism. Only in the industrial cities, among new immigrants, did the center hold: Roman Catholics continued to acknowledge the ecclesiastical authority of their Church.

In 1860, the U.S. census reported that one-third of the population was sustained by "manufacturing industry." Workers had left the soil for the cities (villages had become cities; cities had become railway and industrial centers). By the middle of the 19th century, the old planting aristocracy had been replaced by Abbots, Laurences, Astors, and Vanderbilts. The 1860s saw the rise of labor unions. During the 1870s, the Rockefellers assumed command of their oil empire. The immense concentration of wealth and power, the consolidation of industry and railways, and the shift of economic power of financiers led to bloody fights between labor and employers.

In 1872 a million American voters approved a Populist platform which declared that America was ruled by a plutocracy, that impoverished labor was tyrannized by "a hireling army," that the ballot box was rendered worthless by corruption, "that the fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few unprecedented in the history mankind; and the possessors of these in turn despise the republic and endanger liberty."

In 1873, as the post-Civil War inflationary boom went bust, a devastating panic hit the United States, leaving unemployment and poverty in its wake; the country sank into an industrial depression which lasted for five years.

In 1874, the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania-including Allegheny (now a part of Pittsburgh), the home of Charles Taze Russell-were terrorized by violence that threatened the social order. A secret society known as the Molly Maguires, fierce avengers of cruelty in the mines, beat and murdered mine owners and foremen, and they, in turn, sent their goons to beat and murder the Molly Maguires. Fear of anarchists and anarchism was widespread; and social utopians preached a dispensation of human grace.

The "Time of the End," a period of one hundred aifd fifteen years, from A.D. 1799 to A.D. 1914, is particularly marked in the Scriptures…discoveries, inventions,. etc., pave the way to the coming Millennium of favor, making ready the mechanical devices which will economize labor, and provide the world in general with time and conveniences ... the increase of knowledge among the masses [will give] to all a taste of liberty and luxury, before Christ's rule is established ... class-power ... will result in the uprising of the masses and the overthrow of corporative Trusts, etc., with which will fall also all the present dominions of earth, civil, and ecclesiastical.... All the discoveries, inventions and advantages which make our day the superior of every other day are but so many elements working together in this day of preparation for the incoming millennial age, when true and healthful reform, and actual progress in every direction, will be the order, to all and for all. [SS, Vol. 111, Thy Kingdom Come, pp. 23, 59)

Charles Taze Russell, founder and first president of the Watchtower Bi- .Ale and Tract Society, was a child of his time. He believed in progress. He looked around him, saw class warfare on the horizon, and declared that "the old order of things must pass away, and the new must supersede it . . . the change," he predicted, "will be violently opposed by those advantaged by the present order." In his second volume of Studies in the Scriptures (consisting of seven volumes, which achieved a

circulation of 10 million copies in thirty-four languages), Russell wrote that "revolution world-wide [would] be the outcome, resulting in the final destruction of the old order and the introduction and establishment of the new." His feeling that a wonderful new world order was at hand was reinforced by what he perceived to be the fulfillment of Daniel 12:4: "But thou, 0 Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."

Impassioned as a child contemplating his first toy railroad, Russell wrote:

"The predicted running to and fro-much rapid travelling-also confirms it. [The] steamboat, steam-car, telegraph . . . all belong to the Time of the End. . . . Today thousands of mammoth cars and steamships are carrying multitudes hither and thither, 'to and fro.' " [p. 63]

A fevered visionary who would not allow the world to confound him, who wished above all to have everything cohere, and who sought to impose logic and a pattern on the disparate elements of his time, Russell looked at class conflict and steam cars; fertilized what he saw with the rich products of his imaginings, an idiosyncratic reading of Bible chronology that was inventive and convoluted, a gorgeously eccentric interpretation of history, and some borrowings from Madame Blavatsky's heady mystical theories on the "inner meaning" of the Great Pyramid of Egypt-and came up with a fancy new religion.

Russell was to become notorious for various lurid scandals in which he was accused, in and out of court, of being money-mad, power-mad, and sex-mad. He is still regarded by Jehovah's Witnesses as a modern-day "Elias," perhaps the first true Christian since "apostasy came to full bloom ... during the centuries of spiritual darkness" that began "in the fourth century." [Yearbook, 1975, p. 33]

The Witnesses say they are "the most ancient religious group of worshipers of the true God . . . Abel was . . . the first." Abel sacrificed the firstlings of his flock to Jehovah; Russell sacrificed a haberdashery business.

Charles Taze Russell-later known as "Pastor" Russell-was born on February 16, 1852. The second son of Scotch-Irish parents, Joseph L. Russell and Ann Eliza Birney Russell, he was raised a Presbyterian; at an unspecified later date he joined the Congregational Church because of its "more liberal views." His mother died when he was 9, the year the Civil War began.

In 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, 11-year-old Russell, according to Watchtower sources, entered a business partnership with his father, for which he himself drew up the contract under which the business was brought into being and managed. By the time he was 15, he and his father had succeeded in establishing a chain of men's-clothing stores radiating out from Pittsburgh. According to the Witnesses, Russell eventually closed out his business for a quarter of a million dollars. [JWDP) According to the American Encyclopedia of Biography, 1968, Russell "sold shirts to make a living until he got his first congregation."

It is said that Ann Russell dedicated Charles Taze to God when he was born. (Of Mrs. Russell's firstborn, nothing is known.) It is also said that Pastor Russell's father frequently found his son, when Charles was as young as 12, poring over a Bible concordance in the family store in the hours of the morning.

It is a strange picture: young Russell keeping the business books by day and reading The Book by gaslight in the small hours of the morning--but not so strange, after all, when one considers the Mellons, Carnegies, and Rockefellers of Russell's time, millionaires who regarded the Deity as the great Paymaster who kept all His good children (good equaling rich) on His dole.

As a youth Russell seems to have been obsessed with hellfire and torment; he also apparently saw himself as the instrument of men's salvation. An early associate of Russell's tells us that 14-year-old Charles Taze would go out Saturday nights "to where men gathered. . .to loaf, and would write Bible texts on the sidewalk with colored chalk . . . .He hoped to attract their attention, so that they might accept Christ and avoid being lost and going to eternal torment." [Faith, p. 17]

I find this image of an adolescent God-obsessed fanatic both irritating and touching. It was a time when men were given over to wild hyperbole and extravagant behavior; nevertheless, there is something disquieting about it. Most men and women had other things on their minds: the nation was entering the Reconstruction period; the Ku Klux Klan was formed; the Suffrage Movement, which was to culminate in 1869 with Wyoming's giving women the vote, was going strong; slavery had been abolished. Abraham Lincoln had delivered the Gettysburg Address not more that 120 miles from Allegheny. These events seem not to have interested Russell at all; nothing interested Russell more than his own spiritual seesawing between certainty and despair. He was firmly planted in the center of his own universe.

When Russell was 17, he suffered a revulsion against the concept eternal punishment and against the doctrine of predestination. He deserted the sidewalks and immersed himself in a study of Oriental religions (his later infatuation with the Pyramids may have been a holdover from this time). But Eastern religion did not satisfy him. Never a man to do things by halves, he renounced religion at the age of 17. One detects more than a hint of megalomania in his renunciation, which, as he saw it, would necessarily affect not only himself, but all of "suffering humanity": "I'm just going to forget the whole thing and give all my attention to business. If I make some money I can use that to help suffering humanity, even though I cannot help do them any good spiritually." [Yearbook, 1975, p. 35]

Russell's crisis of faith lasted a year. In 1870, when he was 18, "shaken in faith regarding many long-accepted doctrines ... a ready prey to the logic of infidelity" [Ibid.], Russell entered a dim meeting hall in Allegheny where Second Adventists congregated to find out what this small group believed that would be more convincing than the teachings of the established churches. The sermon he heard was enough to bring him around to a belief that Jehovah had truly inspired the Scriptures and to prove to him the link between the Apostles and Prophets.

From 1870 to 1875, Russell, together with six young men of his acquaintance, studied the Bible. Russell's small schismatic band was soon convinced that Jehovah had blessed them with increasing light and truth. [Yearbook, 1975, p. 36] They had come to believe that the second coming of Christ would be invisible; Russell pronounced himself deeply disappointed in the teaching of the Second Adventists, who believed in the visible return of Christ and the destruction of the earth and its inhabitants in 1873 or1874. To Russell these predictions seemed naive, not to say crude, and he felt they could only bring scorn on the faithful who awaited the Kingdom. Russell-who seems always to have regarded himself as the cynosure of all eyes and never to have doubted that his spiritual odyssey was of compelling significance to all of mankind-promptly acted to remove the reflected reproach he felt contaminated him and to set the record straight. In 1873, when he was 21, Russell wrote a booklet called "The Object and Manner of the Lord's Return"; he published 50,000 copies at his own expense.

This was the year of the great industrial panic, the year Carnegie embarked on his steel mergers in Russell's native Allegheny. In 1870, Rockefeller founded his dynasty with Standard Oil. In 1872, Victoria Woodhull ran for President as the candidate of the People's Party.

None of these events is alluded to in the Witnesses' biographical references to Russell. (The Civil War might not have taken place.) As far as the Witnesses are concerned, all of these events are the detritus of human history. What was significant about the last half of the 19th century is that "as the conclusion of the system of things approached, the Most High God, Jehovah, acted to identify the 'wheat' [the sons of God--them] in a pronounced way." [Ibid., p. 33)

In January, 1876, Russell came across a periodical called The Herald of the Morning, published by N. H. Barbour of Rochester, New York. Barbour, like Russell, believed that the object of Christ's return was not to destroy the physical earth, but to "bless all families of the earth." [Ibid., p. 36) Barbour and Russell shared the belief that Christ would come invisibly, like "a thief in the night," and that Adventists erred when they expected to see the Lord in the flesh. When he found this kindred soul, Russell affiliated his Pittsburgh Bible Class-which by this time had grown to 30 members with Barbour's slightly larger Rochester group. He contributed money to the Herald and became its coeditor. In 1877, when he was 25, Russell sold out his business interests and began to travel from city to city, delivering sermons. (The same year, eleven leaders of the Molly Maguires were hanged in Pennsylvania. This put an end to the secret society, but not to violence in the mines.) Charles Taze Russell was thereafter known as Pastor Russell.

Pastor Russell prohibited collections at his meetings and depended, according to the Witnesses, on unsolicited contributions after all his money was exhausted. How Russell managed to "exhaust" a quarter of a million dollars-if indeed he did, or if he'd had it in the first place-was to become a matter of fierce contention between him and the woman he later married and a subject for speculation during the lawsuits and counter-lawsuits that kept him in the public eye during the last quarter of the 19th century.

In 1877, Russell and Barbour jointly wrote and published Three Worlds, and the Harvest of This World. The Biblical chronology set forth in that volume, and in Russell's subsequent books, is labyrinthine. One despairs of making it explicable. Indeed, I feel justified in conjecturing that many of Russell's followers must have accepted his sanguine conclusions without comprehending his premises.

Russell preached that the 6,000 years of man's existence on earth had ended in 1872-Victoria Woodhull also foresaw an end to "man's" rule in 1872, but she meant by that something quite different-and that the seventh millennium had begun in 1873. The glorified Christ became invisibly present in 1874. Shortly after 1874 had begun the "antitypical jubilee," an event "foreshadowed" by the ancient jubilees observed under the Mosaic Law. For forty years, the "saints," God's consecrated ones, would be "harvested," until, on October 1, 1914, the Gentile Times would end. On October 1, 1914, the evil worldly system would collapse, God would have His everlasting day, and there would be a general "Restitution" for all mankind-but not before the "living saints" (Russell and his followers) would be suddenly and miraculously caught away bodily to be with their Lord, in 1878.

In October, 1914, of course, the world was three months into the bloodiest war of its history-and Russell, not having been "caught away," was very much alive and in the flesh. As a recent publication of Jehovah's Witnesses remarks, somewhat laconically, "Something must have been miscalculated." [God's Kingdom of a Thousand Years Has Approached, 1973, p. 188]

It is interesting that Russell himself wrote [SS, Vol. III, The Time Is at Hand, 1905, p. 243]: "For it be distinctly noticed that if the Chronology, or any of these time-periods, be changed but one year, the beauty and force of this parallelism [with the Jewish jubilee cycles] are destroyed.... If the Chronology be altered but one year, more or less-it would spoil the parallelism."

As we have seen, the parallelism has been destroyed with a vengeance. Russell, playing with exactly the same Scriptures (Daniel, Ezekiel, Matthew, Luke, Revelation) as current Witnesses, came up with totally different dates. Only 1914 remains a fixed date, and it has been assigned a different meaning.

The established churches of Russell's day called his calculations ridiculous, as, in the event, they proved to be. The Witnesses, however, do not hesitate to complain that the clergy, who dismissed Russell as a fringe lunatic, "were really being used by Satan." [JWDP) That the major sects of his day were right and Russell wrong does not, in so brazen a tautology, count for anything. And the Witnesses continue to juggle Scripture with the abandon of those who are able to brush away empirical evidence as if it were a gnat on the countenance of their Lord.

Russell's calculations are not easy to unravel; they are, however, not without a certain quaint interest. (New dates, previously unmentioned, spring up like weeds in Russell's writings, which defy synopsis. How that man loved numbers and charts! It is fruitless to speculate, perhaps, but what if he hadn't been a child-whiz bookkeeper?) Russell wasn't the first, or the last, man to snow people with numbers.

In Thy Kingdom Come (Volume III of Studies in the Scriptures, 1891), Russell calls attention to the 2,300 days of Daniel's prophecy and, by legerdemain, comes up with 1846 as

the time when God's sanctuary would be cleansed of the defiling errors and principles of Papacy.... We have noted the fulfillment of the 1,260 days, or the time, times, and half a time of Papacy's power to persecute, and the beginning, in 1799, of the Time of the End. We have seen how 1,290 days marked the beginning of an understanding of the mysteries of prophecy in the year 1829, culminating in the great movement of 1844 known as the Second-Advent movement when ... the wise Virgins went forth to meet the Bridegroom, thirty years prior to his actual coming .... We have remarked, with special delight, the 1,335 days, pointing ... to 1874 as the exact date of our Lord's return. [pp. 305-06]

Eighteen forty-six . . . 1799 . 1829 . . . 1844 . . . 1874; 1,260 days …1,290 days . . . 1,335 days . . . No wonder the Witnesses won't allow "outsiders" access to the Studies in the Scriptures (which are very hard indeed to come by). Even they, who justify all past error on the ground that Biblical dates are "ingeniously hidden" and cannot be ascertained until God sees fit to shed His light on the "mathematically precise" meaning of prophecy--which is usually after their prophecy has failed-must prefer not to have to expose to ridicule all of Russell's peculiar reckonings. They certainly prefer to forget that their founder dragged Napoleon Bonaparte into his calculations:

... the exact date of the beginning of the "Time of the End" …is shown to be Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, which covered a period of a year and five months. He sailed May, 1798, and, returning, landed in France October 9, 1799.... Napoleon's work, together with the French Revolution, broke the spell of religious superstition, ... awakened the world to a fuller sense of the powers and prerogatives of manhood and broke the Papal dominion.... The era closing with A.D. 1799, marked by Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, scaled and defined the limit of Papal dominion over the nations.... The time appointed [1,260 years of power] having expired, the predicted judgment against the system began, which must finally "consume and destroy all into the end." Napoleon took away the Papacy's civil jurisdiction in the city of Rome, which was recognized nominally from the promulgation of Justinian's decree, A.D. 533, but actually from the overthrow of the Ostrogoth monarchy, A.D. 539-just 1,260 years before 1799. [pp. 44--58]

This idiosyncratic reading of history would be greeted with incredulity by most scholars. (But since "worldly scientists" are engaged in a conspiracy with Satan the Devil to deceive mankind, this is an obstacle Witnesses take in stride.) Russell was eclectic. Having convinced himself that Napoleon was clearly portrayed in prophecy as "the man of destiny," he revised history to bend it to his theological will. (One must be forgiven for wondering if Russell did not see himself as just such another man as Napoleon-a man of destiny who dealt the Papacy mortal wounds. Speaking of himself in the third person, Russell once wrote, only "the author, and, so far as he knows, no one else, had noticed ... the opportunity for restitution of human perfection and all that was lost in Adam, due at the close of the Gospel High-calling." Only the author . . . If one were inclined to indulge in a bit of psyco-historical speculation, one might easily conclude that Pastor Russell was suffering from an Elias-Napoleon complex.)

The Witnesses today no longer read the French Revolution into the Book of Revelation; and the meaning of the Book of Daniel, into which Russell read the fanciful interpretation that the King of the North pictured "the Roman Empire's representative," and the King of the South pictured "a representative of Egypt's kingdom," has been amended. In current Witness theology, the King of the North "pictures" "the Communist bloc of nations," and the King of the South is "manifestly the Anglo-American World Power." [TW, Feb. 1, 1976, p. 94]

But the Witnesses still hold that Russell's writings were the vehicle God used to reveal His divine will and to separate the peoples of the earth into the sheep and the goats.

Russell, according to his successor, J. F. Rutherford, "made no claim of a special revelation from God, but held that it was God's due time for the Bible to be understood; and that, being fully consecrated to the Lord and to his service, he was permitted to understand it." There was no special revelation granted from God, but he was permitted to understand what nobody else understood. (JWDP)

Some things have not changed. The Witnesses are still ferociously antiPapist, and the appeal to the disenfranchised that characterized Russell's work (Russell believed that there would be a conflict between "the classes and the masses") underlines the work of his successors, although it has taken different form; and the peculiarly American flavor of this religion, which translated American technology and class struggle into quasi-mystical terms, remains.

"The revolution and independence of the American colonies-the successful establishment of a prosperous Republic, a government by the people and for the people, without interference of either royalty or priestcraft," Russell wrote, "set a new lesson before the now-awakening people, who for so many centuries had slumbered in ignorance." [SS, Vol. 111, pp. 51-52]

America gave birth to this religion; and it remains in essence American. The law-and-order God of the Witnesses is Middle American. The Witnesses are international and claim not to be chauvinistic; the American Revolution is now dismissed, as is the French Revolution, as irrelevant to God's purposes. Still, one wonders. Witness workers in British headquarters were forbidden, in the 1950s, to take their ritual morning tea break on the grounds that it was "untheocratic" and counterproductive; I can't help feeling that what was being objected to was that it was un-American. "My God," a friend once said to me, "I've just seen fifty thousand Witnesses at a convention-and they all look alike!" They do all like alike; they all look Midwestern. Even when they are clad in saris and loincloths, muu-muus and kimonos, there is something ineffably missionary-Midwestern about the aura they project. And Paradise restored, if the illustrations in Watchtower publications are to be taken literally, will look exactly like an endless Kansas picnic-or a Texas barbecue. Most of the survivors of Armageddon will be attired in clothes from Montgomery Ward; and they will have crew cuts and bouffant hairdos, and skirts decorously short. (Innocence, to the Witnesses, suggests a shirt and tie.) The Witness dream of Eden is a dream of American suburbia-with a few people in exotic foreign dress to lend exoticism to the proceedings.

Russell fortified his chronology with cranky evidence from "God's Stone Witness-the Pyramid." "The Great Pyramid [is] a part of [God's] instrumentality for convincing the world of his wisdom, foreknowledge and grace. . . . located in the geographical center of the land surface of the world, the measurements of the Great Pyramid represent the earth and God's plan for the earth's salvation. . . . in it are contained prophetical and chronological teachings." Can Russell have believed the earth was flat? There can be no center of the surface of 'a sphere. [SS, Vol. 111, pp. 317,326)

Russell believed that the measurements of the Pyramid proved that 1914 would be the end of the world order. He read more things into the Entrance Passage of the Pyramid than an art critic might read into an Abstract Expressionist painting. The Entrance Passage, he believed, validated his view that "the Day of the Lord induces the spirit of liberty; and the spirit of liberty, coming in contact with the pride, wealth and power of those still in control, will be the cause of the trouble which the Scriptures assure us will be very great. Capitalists, and all men, see it coming, and ’men's hearts are failing them for fear, and for looking after the things coming.' " The “Pit" of the Pyramid, he believed, symbolized that "the evil systems-civil, social and religious--of the 'present evil world' will there sink into oblivion, into destruction." [SS, Vol. VI, The New Creation, p. 343)

"The Great Pyramid witnesses, not only the downward course of man in sin, but also the various steps in the divine plan by which preparation is made for his full recovery from the fall, through the way of life, opened up by the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus." [Ibid., p 356]

Among the more extravagant claims Russell made for the Great Pyramid were that the Pit of the Pyramid symbolized the descent of the nations into anarchism and that the ventilating tubes or air passages of the Queen's Chambers suggested that "the condition of human perfection, when reached (after the Restitution], may be made an everlasting state." [Ibid., p. 370] (The Witnesses had not yet fixed on the doctrine of everlasting life on earth; Russell's followers believed that they would be lifted up to heaven. The everlasting-life-on-a-perfect-earth doctrine grew as they grew in numbers.) How ventilating tubes and air passages suggested an everlasting state of perfection is unclear. The Pyramid, Russell further asserted, was absolute proof that the theory of evolution was untrue.

Pittsburgh newspapers reported that on the night of the Memorial of Christ's death in 1878, Russell was found on the Sixth Street Bridge dressed in a white robe, waiting to be wafted to heaven.

Russell told reporters that on that night of glory-be that was not to be, he was home in bed. "However, some of the more radical ones might have been there," he said, "but I was not." [Faith, p. 27] (Parenthetically, it's worth noting that the only holiday Witnesses celebrate is the Memorial of Christ's death-and they "celebrate" it by listening to a speech. Neither Christ's birth nor His resurrection is marked on their gloomy calendars.)

Many of the "saints," who had been instructed to believe that Russell's interpretation of Biblical chronology was impeccable, were disappointed when the expected miracle did not come off. Russell, we are told, did not for a moment feel cast down; he "realized that what God so plainly declared must some time have a fulfillment," and he "wanted to have it just in God's time and way." [Ibid., pp. 26-27)

After the saints were stranded on the Sixth Street Bridge, Russell "re-examined" Scripture and decided that the true significance of the year 1878 was that from that time on, none of the saints would "sleep in death," (Ibid., p. 27] but would, upon death, immediately be resurrected, to life in heaven with Christ.

Russell's colleague Barbour was not satisfied. In a bitter article written for Herald of the Morning, Barbour argued that "Christ's death was no more a settlement of the penalty of man's sins than would the sticking of a pin through the body of a fly and causing it suffering and death be considered by an earthly parent as a just settlement for misdemeanor in his child." [Ibid., p. 28] So, Barbour and Russell split. This was to be the first of many schisms. None of the schismatic sects has flourished.

Russell, who saw the Lord's hand in everything that pertained to him, including his finances, withdrew financial support from Herald of the Morning, understanding it to be the Lord's will for him to start another journal. In 1879, together with five other contributors, he funded Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence. Russell was editor and publisher of the Watch Tower, which had a first-issue printing of 6,000 copies. [Ibid., p. 281

(In 1976, over 279 million magazines were distributed by the Watchtower Society worldwide. [Yearbook, 1977, pp. 30-3 1])

Between 1879 and 1880, Russell and his associates founded thirty congregations-called "ecclesias”-in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Delaware, Ohio, and Michigan.

Today, the 40,155 congregations of Jehovah's Witnesses are governed from the Brooklyn headquarters of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. [Ibid. ] The Witnesses describe their structure as "theocratic"; it is more accurate to call it totalitarian. During the 1880s, ecclesias of Russellite Bible Students voted congregationally on some matters and elected a board of elders who were responsible for directing congregational matters. Today elders of congregations are appointed by the eighteen-man governing body in Brooklyn (an all-white, all-male group with a median age of 60); elders and governors form a self-perpetuating elite. Early ecclesias were "linked together by accepting the pattern of activity in Pittsburgh, where Charles Taze Russell and other Watchtower writers were elders." [Yearbook, 1975, p. 3 9]

There were, in 1976, 2,248,390 Jehovah's Witnesses, all active proselytizers, in 210 countries. [Yearbook, 1977, pp. 30-31] In 1881, when Zion's Watch Tower Tract Society was established as an unincorporated body, with Russell as its manager, there were 100 proselytizing Russellite known as "colporteurs." By 1885, the number had grown to 300 colporteurs. [Yearbook, 1975, pp. 39-40] By 1914, there were 1,200 congregations of Russellites.

The unincorporated Zion's Watch Tower Tract Society, the printing organization to which Russell ("with others") is supposed to have contributed $35,000 of his fortune, was incorporated as Zion's Watch Tower Tract Society in 1884. [Yearbook, 1975, p. 40]

Russell was the president of the organization that is today known as the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania. Mrs. Russell was a director of the Society and served as its secretary and treasurer for some years. [Yearbook, 1975, p. 66) According to its charter, "The purpose for which the corporation is formed is, the dissemination of Bible Truths in various languages by means of the publication of tracts, pamphlets, papers and other religious documents and by the use of all other lawful means which its Board of Directors, duly constituted, shall deem expedient for the furtherance of the purpose stated." (JWDP, p. 27)

By 1889, the Watch Tower Society had begun to amass property. A four-story brick building in Allegheny, known as the Bible House, was built and legally held in title by the Tower Publishing Company. [Yearbook, 1975, p. 42] A holding company for his private interests, the Tower Publishing Company (which Russell used, at one time, to publish literature for the Watch Tower Society at a price agreed upon by the board of directors-of which he was president), built the Bible House "at a cost of 34,000." (JWDP, p. 27; Yearbook, 1975, p. 421 In 1898, ownership of the Tower Publishing plant and real estate was transferred by donation to the Watch Tower Society. The board of the Watch Tower Society evaluated the Allegheny property and equipment at $164,033.65. [Yearbook, 1975, p.42] (There were at this time 400 preachers associated with the Watch Tower Society.) The Allegheny building remained the Society's headquarters for twenty years.

Russell's critics charged him with financial flim-flammery, arguing, on circumstantial evidence, that he was manipulating publishing houses and property to assure himself of an outlet for his prolific writings for his personal enrichment. The Pastor was beset with troubles, assailed from within and without his organization. His wife became his bitterest and most outspoken enemy. Lawsuits and civil investigations brought him notoriety-- welcome notoriety; he wore it like a mantle of righteousness. The more trouble, the more he was able to insist that the Devil was out to crush him; is scandalous behavior was transformed, by his followers, into proof of his holiness. Every time new litigation was brought against him, each time he as reviled, each time something horrible befell him as a result of his own conduct-things humiliating enough to send most men fleeing to obscurity-he puffed himself up and offered it as proof that, like Jesus, he as persecuted as a Messenger of Truth.

Russell's associate Hugh Macmillan writes, in Faith on the March, of the Pastor's flamboyant behavior, "Even Jesus was called a 'devil,' 'gluttonous,' and a 'winebibber.' And Jesus said they would treat his followers in the same way."

I can show you a thousand women that would be glad to be in your place and that would know my wishes and do them.... I can show you a thousand women that if would say, “I want sweet potatoes, " sweet potatoes would be there. If I wanted pumpkin pie, pumpkin pie would be there. -Attributed to Charles Taze Russell by Mrs. Maria Frances Ackley Russell [Court transcript, Superior Court of Pennsylvania]

I am like a jellyfish; I float around here and there. I touch this one and that one, and if she responds I take her to me, and if not I float on to others. -Attributed to Charles Taze Russell by Mrs. Russell [Court transcript, Court of Common Pleas, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania]

In 1894 Maria Frances Russell was-as far as the world could see-her beleaguered husband's staunchest ally. In 1897, Mrs. Russell fled from her husband, later declaring, "Even a dog has more rights than I had." For years the Russells' marital difficulties were grist for the mills of the tabloids, providing entertainment for the masses and ammunition for Russell's religious antagonists. Mrs. Russell was not amused.

In the early 1890s, some of Russell's associates attempted to wrest control of the Watch Tower Society from him. They charged him with financial dishonesty and with aberrant, autocratic behavior. The Pastor, they asserted, not content to lay down doctrinal law for his followers, was so greatly intruding upon the private lives of the Bible Students as to tell them whom they might or might not marry. Russell, it was stated, was "in a deplorably sinful state-dishonest, a traitor, a liar." [ZWT, June 11, 1894]

Russell issued a countercharge that there was a "conspiracy" in his own office and in his own household-a "special and cunning attack made by the great enemy"-"to shatter the body of Christ." [Ibid.]

Matters came to a head in 1894. There were rumors of marital discord between the Pastor and his wife, who was a regular contributor to Zion's Watch Tower and an associate editor of that magazine. Mrs. Russell, it was stated, together with all of Russell's household and office workers, was under compulsion to lie for him. According to one of Russell's closest associates, a Mr. Rogers, Mrs. Russell was often observed "weeping bitter tears over Brother Russell's sins." [Ibid.)

Maria Russell undertook to speak in her husband's behalf. For eighteen days she visited congregations in ten cities to stanch the flow of rumors and to defend her husband. She represented her husband as a just, noble, and generous man, maligned by "false teachers" of "damnable heresies," wolves in sheep's clothing.

This is a partial account of her vindication of the man she was later to charge with extreme cruelty:

[A Bible Student] told that my husband forbids people to marry, and as proof of this related how he once sent Mr. Bryan a three day's journey into the country at an expense of twelve dollars, in order to prevent a wedding. I answered ... that Mr. Russell never forbade anyone to marry, and that not a living being could truthfully say that he or she had been forbidden; but that I knew that when his opinion was specially asked he gave the Apostle Paul's advice (I Cor. 7:2 5-3 5). ... It was to my husband's credit that he spared neither trouble nor expense in order to let a sister in Christ know something of what he knew of the character of the man she was about to marry; that, thus informed, she might the better judge for herself whether or not he would make a desirable husband. [Ibid. ]

This ambiguous statement, which might just as easily have led Bible Students to conclude that Russell did indeed seek to influence the personal decisions of the "sisters," served to convince the majority of Russell's followers that he was acting in the best interests of his flock. (One wonders just how much prompting Russell needed to offer the Apostle Paul's advice: Concerning virgins . . . I say that it is good for a man so to be./Art thou loosed from a wife? seek not a wife/But if thou marry, thou hast not sinned; and if a virgin marry, she hath not sinned. Nevertheless such shall have trouble in the flesh./ But this I say, brethren, the time is short; it remaineth, that both they that have wives be as though they had none;/I would have you without carefulness. He that is unmarried careth for the things hat belong to the Lord,/But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife./There is a difference also bewteen a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband/ ... attend upon the Lord without distraction.")

Mrs. Russell had also to contend with the charge that her husband had written a Mr. Adamson, shortly after Adamson married, to "make his Will so as to give what money he had to the Tract Fund, and to be sure not to let Mrs. Adamson see that letter." What the Pastor had in fact written, Mrs. Russell steadfastly maintained, was that Mrs. Adamson deserved consideration "on general principles . . . even if [she was] out of harmony on religious subjects. . . . [Pastor Russell] advised that if Mr. Adamson decided to will any portion of his effects to the Tract Fund, it would be

wise, under the circumstances. . . . and to the interest of his domestic happiness, not to inform Mrs. Adamson respecting it." (Ibid.]

Maria Russell's arguments in defense of her beleaguered husband may have been impassioned; they were hardly conclusive. They were, however, successful. Women in Russell's ecclesias all over the country reported having dreams in which their beloved Pastor Russell was scourged and flagellated, but shielded by a protecting angel. Female Russellites seemed to be in the grip of hysteria: one Bible Student reported that she had had a “prophetic" dream in which "someone in the congregation hurled a stone at the head of the preacher, which struck him in the mouth, from whence the blood flowed profusely." In her dream, she "ran to his aid and tried to wipe away the blood, which only flowed the more."

It is doubtful that Mrs. Russell's rebuttals of the charges brought against her husband were, in themselves, enough to persuade anyone that the Pastor was blameless. It would seem, rather, that anything Mrs. Russell said in Russell's defense would suffice for those whose investment in their religion was so great that to leave it would cause a gaping hole in the fabric of their lives. The "persecution" the faithful endured served to reinforce their conviction that they were a tiny band of comradely brothers and sisters united in a common cause against the wolves howling at the gates of their belief.

Those who continued to follow Russell-and they were in the majority-could conclude, self-importantly, that they were the focus of Satan's ire; they regarded their "fiery ordeal" as evidence that Jehovah had allowed a “sifting" to take place in his organization, in order to cleanse it of those whose "jealousy, envy and malice had eaten as doth a canker into their hearts." It was proof, furthermore, that they were living in the time of the end, when " 'dogs' of quarrelsome, snappish dispositions, always seeking their own advance," would engender contention among the Lord's people. [Ibid.)

Mrs. Russell, implicitly acknowledging that her husband was not entirely without fault, wrote that the truth was contained "in imperfect earthen vessels; but . . . the very frailness of the vessels only manifests the more clearly that the excellency of power is of God and not of us." She adamantly denied, however, that Russell, that frail vessel whose honor she preserved, had enlisted her "enforced cooperation" as had been rumored; she fiercely denied that she was "in absolute opposition to [her] husband's course." [Ibid.; see Yearbook, 1975]

Three years later, in 1897, after eighteen years of marriage, Maria Frances Ackley Russell made a public about-face. She left her "imperfect earthen vessel," fleeing to relatives in Chicago to gain protection from the man who she claimed was committing gross improprieties with other women and who, furthermore, was trying to have her incarcerated in a lunatic asylum.

In 1903, Mrs. Russell filed for legal separation in the Court of Common Pleas at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The case came up for trial in 1906 before Justice Collier and a jury; it was a sensational case-a Victorian gothic, with intimations of perversions, imprisonments, madness; and it was resolved in Mrs. Russell's favor. Pastor Russell fought Mrs. Russell's demands for separation and alimony for five years, initiating libel suits against newspapers and a minister along the way. On March 4, 1908, Mrs. Russell was granted a divorce. In 1909, she appealed for an increase in alimony, and Russell moved out of the jurisdiction of the Pittsburgh courts, transferred all his assets to the Watch Tower Society so that he could declare himself penniless, and moved his staff and his operations to Brooklyn, New York, to

avoid being jailed for failure to pay alimony. Finally, in 1911, the courts, on appeal, ruled conclusively in behalf of Mrs. Russell, justice Or- lady of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania stating, with barely concealed anger, that Pastor Russell's "course of conduct toward his wife evidenced such insistent egotism and extravagant self-praise that it would be manifest to the jury that his conduct toward her was one of continual arrogant domination that would necessarily render the life of any sensitive Christian 'Woman a burden and make her life intolerable."

The Witnesses contend, in order to protect Russell's claim that he was never sullied by divorce, that the decree-styled "In Divorce"-was "a partial or qualified divorce," in effect a legal separation. In 1913, Mrs. Russell, appearing before the (New York) Board of Tax Commissioners, which was investigating Russell's financial affairs, agreed that she had secured a "limited divorce" from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: "I asked for a limited divorce because it carries with it support, while absolute divorce does not, though I could have secured an absolute divorce on the same evidence."

The Witnesses have in recent years published an expurgated version of Pastor and Mrs. Russell's difficulties-a story which for many years they kept scrupulously shrouded. (In all my years as a Witness-including the three years I spent at Watchtower headquarters-no one ever mentioned the Russells, least of all the old-timers, who, when past presidents of the Watchtower Society were mentioned, discoursed on the fact that they didn't follow "personalities" or "any man," but only God's organization.) It pleases the Witnesses now-perhaps we have the resurgence of feminism to thank for it-to hold up Maria Frances Ackley Russell as an object lesson: Vanity, thy name is woman. Their interpretation of events [Yearbook, 1975; pp. 65-75; see also WT, June 15, 1972, and JWDP, p. 45) is that shortly after her tour in defense of her husband, Mrs. Russell, "an educated, intelligent woman" (the adjectives are pejorative), attempted to usurp the Pastor's rightful place and asserted herself concerning the material intended for publication in The Watch Tower. For this she was compared to Moses' sister Miriam, who tried to usurp her brother's place as the leader of the Israelites but who was prevented because of Jehovah's displeasure.

In a letter to a friend written on December 27, 1899, less than five years after his wife had acted to preserve his reputation, Russell added Mrs. Russell to his Enemies List: "Our dear Sister Russell became afflicted with the same malady which has smitten others-ambition." For thirteen years "a noble, true helpmate," Mrs. Russell allowed her "ambitious spirit" to be “fanned" when she received warm receptions at congregations. She seemed to forget that she was received, not merely for herself, but . . . as the representative of her husband." She began to "strike for the gratification of her own ambition," insisting upon her liberty to use her talents to write and speak what she pleased. "I told her, kindly but plainly," Russell wrote, that I could not think it to be the Lord's will to encourage her to take any part of the work so long as she manifested so ambitious a spirit." Complaining of a "female conspiracy" against the Lord's organization, Russell wrote, "The result was a considerable slander and misrepresentation, for of course it would not suit [the women's] purposes to tell the plain unvarnished truth, that Sister Russell was ambitious. . . . When she desired to come back, I totally refused, except upon a promise that she should make reasonable acknowledgement of the wrong course she had been pursuing." [TW, June 15, 1972]

The man whose financial treatment of Mrs. Russell Justice Orlady characterized as "radically different from the standard imposed upon him by the law, and recognized by all the courts of this country" wrote in 1906,

I was not aware of it at the time, but learned subsequently that the conspirators [of 1894) endeavored to sow seeds of discord in my wife's heart by flattery, "woman's rights" arguments, etc. However, I was spared the humiliation of seeing my wife amongst those conspirators.... As matters began to settle down, the "woman's rights" ideas and personal ambition began again to come to the top, and I perceived that Mrs. Russell's active campaign in my defense, and the very cordial reception given her by the dear friends at that time ... had done her injury by increasing her self-appreciation.... I was continually harassed with suggestions of alterations of my writings. I was pained to note this growing disposition so foreign to the humble mind which characterized her for the first thirteen happy years.

For the past three years you have been gradually forcing upon me the evidence that we both erred in judgment when we married--that we are not adaptable to each other. . . . I conclude that no one is adapted to me---except the Lord. I am glad that He and I understand each other and have confidence in each other." Letter of July 8, 1896, from Pastor Russell to his wife, Exhibit No. 3, Court Transcript, Superior Court of Pennsylvania.

In an undated letter, Pastor Russell wrote her of his pleasure in the memory of her devotion-her inability to live without him, her longing to die first. And, indeed, he tells her, he feels the same, but it is her "fall," her “everlasting loss," that gives him the greatest pain rather than the thought of his own lonely future.

Pastor Russell was determined to brand his wife as a blazing "suffragette." In People's Pulpit, the Pastor wrote: "She came under the influence of what is popularly known as 'Women's Rights,' and, because she could not have her own way and write what she chose for the columns of my journal [of which, it is to be remembered, Mrs. Russell was associate editor], she endeavored to coerce me and took one step after another, apparently determined that if she could not coerce, she would crush and destroy my life and influence." [See Brooklyn Eagle, Oct. 3 1, 1911.)

The official Watchtower version has it that Mrs. Russell became ill in 1897, and her husband gave her much cheerful and kind attention to "touch her heart and restore it to its former loving and tender condition." [Yearbook,1975] Having thus applied balm to her wayward spirit, Russell, in the presence of an official Bible Students Committee, gained his wife's agreement not to interfere in his management of Zion's Watch Tower. "I then asked her in their presence if she would shake hands. She hesitated, but finally gave me her hand. I then said, 'Now, will you kiss me, dear, as a token of the change of mind which you have indicated?' Again she hesitated, but finally did kiss me and otherwise manifested a renewal of affection in the presence of the Committee." Russell was so good as to allow his wife to lead a weekly meeting of the "Sisters of the Allegheny Church." His amplitude of spirit was to no avail. Mrs. Russell left her long-suffering husband in 1897, after her illness; and he dutifully made arrangements for her financial support, providing her with a separate home and all that a reasonable woman could ask.

The court transcripts (as published by the Brooklyn Eagle) tell a different story.

The court records tell the story of a woman sick and afraid, abandoned in an empty four-story mansion, bewildered, agitated, cut off from help. It is a penny-dreadful story, full of Victorian vapors and horrors; but the pain of a woman being pushed into insanity, tormented by vindictive messages sent to her in the guise of husbandly love through her husband's intimate, is undisguised in the purple prose of her defense lawyer and the majestic prose of a judge splendid in his wrath. There is something impressive about the peculiar genius of a man who could inspire adoration and worship-particularly among women-while judges and courts threatened him with jail sentences and exposed him as a sophist and a fraud.

Pastor Russell stood ready to take on the whole world; he loved to be hated equally as he loved to be loved. He always had to stand stage center, whether the audience threw eggs or roses. Only indifference was terrible to him.

From the brief by Congressman Stephen Porter, attorney for Mrs. Russell, which Justice Orlady of the Superior Court reviewed after Pastor Russell appealed the separation verdict handed down by the Court of Common Pleas, we read of the "kind and loving attention" Russell tendered his wife during her illness:

The apartments in which the Russells lived were on the fourth floor of a business house on Arch Street, Allegheny, Pa. There was no neighbor within calling distance at night, and although for a number of years the building had been occupied by the employees of the Watch Tower at night; yet shortly after respondent had started ... reports about his wife's sanity, all of the employees were removed from the building, leaving Mrs. Russell, in case her husband was absent, alone.

The conditions were those of utter desolation with respect to her. What must have been the feelings of this woman after . . . years of indignities? She, no doubt, was crushed, humiliated, and brokenhearted, and would naturally have apprehensions of the absence of her husband to take some sort of proceedings founded upon his alleged pretense of her mental unsoundness, and there is no doubt that her husband at this time was seriously considering the advisability of inquiring into his wife's mental condition by an expert examination, and notwithstanding the fact that when asked the question on the witness stand he denied [it], his letter to Judge Breedon (Exhibit No. 15) contains this statement:

"Indeed, had it not been for my dislike of publicity on the lady's account as well as my own, I would have felt it only a reasonable duty to have asked the court to appoint a competent expert examination respecting the lady’s mental condition."

While living alone with his wife in this large building, he prepares a cunningly worded letter to the effect that they have reconciled their differences, and then on Friday evening of that week he presents it to his wife for her signature, and all night long he follows her about from room to room, urging, coaxing, pleading and threatening until her mind is in a whirl of doubts and fears, and thus forces her to sign the letter under protest. This is undenied by the respondent, and although the defense vas based on the fact that a reconciliation had occurred between the libellant and respondent, the remarkable fact exists that this letter, which was in possession of the respondent, was never even offered into evidence.

The insulting letters to her relatives and friends, warning them not to harbor the libellant or communicate with her were repeated on November 8, 1897, and a copy given to the libellant (Exhibit No. 11). A few days after this the respondent telephoned a message to his wife that he was out of the city, he did not say where or what for.

The wife drew her own conclusions about his intentions. He then wittily circulated false reports of her mental derangement, and all this maneuvering to completely isolate her from all society and that of her own family, the withdrawal at night of all employees of the Watch Tower from the building in which she lived, and the utter desolation of her home and the withdrawal of all support, to her mind pointed to one conclusion, namely, that he proposed to deal with her upon the pretext of insanity, and that his unrevealed errand that night might be for such purpose. The libellant left the building and took a train for Chicago to seek the protection and counsel of her brother, who is a member of the bar in that city.

Mrs. Russell's testimony on cross-examination by Attorney Porter (Court of Common Pleas) :

Q. Did [Mr. Russell] say anything to you . . . while you were sick, as to what was the nature of your sickness?

A. He said it was a judgment on me from God.

Q. For what?

A. I wasn't in harmony with him.

Pastor Russell's testimony under cross-examination by Attorney Porter:

Q. Did you or did you not tell her that her sickness was the judgment of God on her for her failure to obey you?

A. I did not.

Q. You didn't do that?

A. No.

Q. Nothing of that kind?

A. No, sir. I did say some things like that.

Q. What did you say?

A. Miss. Ball, who was her special friend, and who I knew would tell her, I told her in my opinion, this was a judgment from the Lord on her.

Q. And you intended Miss. Ball to tell her that?

A. Yes, sir. I wished her to. I thought she ought to know it.

Q. (By the Court): Was that the time she had erysipelas?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. Did you believe that was the judgment of the Almighty?

A. I think so.

Q. Where did you get that authority?

A. Well, whether my judgment is good or not-

Mrs. Russell testified that the Pastor frequently "kissed and fondled" Rose Ball, the "special friend" who was used to convey her husband's messages to her sickroom. She testified that being informed, in this way, and by this messenger, that her sickness was "a judgment" caused her to have a serious relapse.

Q. (By the Court): That is your idea of good treatment?

A. That was my idea. I was treating the lady the very best, there couldn't have been a kinder treatment given to anybody in the world, and I know I couldn't say this to herself, she wouldn't take it from me, and I thought that it might prove beneficial to her, and I prayed at the time that this sickness might result to her advantage, and I hoped it would.

Finally, however, [Mrs. Russell] did recover after about nine weeks' illness. She was again about the duties of her home in the spring and summer of 1897, when one day, in the presence of this same Rose Ball, he demands of his wife an itemized statement of her outlays. Something he had never required before, probably because he realized that she had more of his money than he did. Such a demand at any time would be inexressedly humiliating to her, and when made in the presence of Rose Ball mould be inexcusably and utterly intolerable. (Attorney Porter's brief, Court of Common Pleas, reviewed by Justice Orlady of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania)

The Witnesses today use the same defense that Pastor Russell proffered and Justice Orlady discredited, that the Russells kissed and made up in the presence of a committee convened to witness Mrs. Russell's capitulation to her husband's demands that she cease "interfering” in his management of Zion's Watch Tower.

The court records tell a different story:

(Pastor Russell) called an assembly of his followers to this city for a secret meeting at the so-called tabernacle and another similar meeting on Sabbath evening, the fifth instance. These meetings were attended by about sixty people, a number of whom were from a distance. The respondent confesses that at the meeting he stated that his wife was weak-minded and under the spell of a Satanic influence which proceeded from her sisters. This statement was nothing more or less than a genteel way of stating that his wife's mind was unbalanced, and notwithstanding the fact that Mrs. Russell was within the building at the time this meeting was held, she was locked out under the direction of the respondent.

In addition to this statement, which he made to this assembly, Mrs. Helen Brace testified, and it was not denied, that his wife was suffering from mental aberration. We find also in a letter to Mr. Brown (Exhibit No. 5), just three days after that meeting of September 5, 1897, a similar statement, as in his letter he tells Mr. Brown that his wife's mind is poisoned and that she is semi-hypnotized by his sister. “weak-minded,” "mind-poisoned," under "Satanic hypnotic influence” “mind unbalanced” were the expressions that he used to many people concerning his wife. The only charitable excuse he could find for her is that she was passing through a critical time of life, which was not true, but which, had it been true, would have made his conduct toward her only the more brutal. Bear in mind the fact that those people of the Russell organization knew Mrs. Russell through her writings and hearing these reports from the lips of her husband, of course would think that he was putting it in the mildest possible language, owing to the fact that he was her husband and wanted to shield her, and would naturally conclude that she was insane.

But this is not all, the very next day after that meeting ot September 5, 1897, respondent sent insulting and threatening letters to libellant's relatives and intimate friends, warning them under threats of legal proceedings and suits for damage, not to harbor libellant or have any communications whatever with her. He had already turned his whole congregation against her by the meetings of September 4 and 5,1897, from which she was excluded, and now, September 6, 1897, is endeavoring to cut her off from the last natural ties, her own relatives and a few loyal friends, among them the respondent's own father and his wife, who is the sister of the libellant. The conduct of the respondent in proclaiming in the little world in which he and his wife lived that his wife was mentally unbalanced was, as was well said by the Court [of Common Pleas] in its charge to the jury, a great indignity, in fact, it would be almost impossible to conceive of one which would be greater: and surely was such an indignity, as when coupled with other matters heretofore referred to as "to render the condition of any woman of ordinary sensibility and delicacy of feeling intolerable and her life a burden."

It is painful to imagine Maria Russell before that Committee--obliged to kiss the smiling, smarmy man who held her up to shame. Furthermore, as in any witch trial, there are strange sexual overtones in Charles Taze Russell's behavior. An intriguing Freudian puzzle is contained in Attorney Porter's brief:

Pastor Russell "went about among her associates and told them she was under the hypnotic influence of Satan in the form of her sister, who was his father's second wife." [Italics mine.)

Russell had married his stepmother's sister and then accused his father's wife of being a manifestation of the Devil. Whatever the pathology that led Russell to such stunning abuse of Mrs. Russell, his contention (which is perpetuated by the Watchtower Society today) that their difficulties stemmed from her militant desire to take over his publications was given little credence by the Court:

It will be noted [said Congressman Porter] ... that Mr. Russell in [his] letter of July 8, 1896, [stated] his conviction that they made a mistake in getting married, and that that conviction had been growing on him for three years, which would make it begin in 1893 [one year before Mrs. Russell's defense tour-which she had sworn, before the "Church," she had not been under external compulsion to undertake]. The dispute about the editorship of the paper began in 1896; therefore it could not have been the dispute about the same that forced the conviction upon Mrs. Russell that their marriage was a mistake, and which conviction he says had been growing on him for three years. [Italics mine.]

There seems no doubt that Pastor Russell would brook no interference with his management of religious affairs. There is little doubt in my mind that the Russells' disagreements over editorial policies were not the cause of their breakup, but a symptom of Pastor Russell's spiritual malaise. In the letter of July 8, 1896, which was crucial to the divorce case, Russell stated his anti-woman views, which repelled Justice Orlady and which would have condemned strong women to spinsterhood: "I am convinced that our difficulty is a growing one generally; that it is a great mistake for strong-minded men and women to marry. If they will marry, the strong-minded had far better marry such as are not too intellectual and high-spirited, for there never can, in the nature of things, be peace under present-time conditions where the two are on an equality."

Mrs. Russell, according to testimony not contradicted by her husband, was so far removed from a status of equality that she complained, "Even a dog has more rights than I have." "You have no rights at all that I am bound to respect," replied Mr. Russell.

Another part of the testimony which Russell did not trouble to contradict makes it very hard indeed to think of Maria Russell as a Castrating Suffragette.

When leaving home for the far West, she helped him get ready, and then putting her hand on his arm, she said: "Husband, you are going far away. There are lots of railroad accidents, and we might never meet again. Surely, you don't want to leave your wife in this cold, indifferent way."

But he did. He pushed her away, slammed the door in her face, and departed.

Perhaps Mrs. Russell's extravagant fear of losing her mate to a railway accident was, in reality, a repressed desire never to see the man again. She can scarcely be blamed for wishing to be rid of the man who dismissed those who were indifferent to his message as "swinish, quarrelsome . . . selfish and wicked." [ZWT, 1914, p. 5980]

In the Watch Tower office, . . . [Russell] took [Mrs. Russell] by the arm and forcibly ejected her, with the statement, "Get out of here, you blasphemer."

"You are my wife only in a legal sense."

"A wife has no rights which a husband is bound to respect."

So did the "kindest of husbands" rail against his "suffragette" wife. Nor as Porter pointed out, did he deny that he did so; "in fact," Porter wrote, "it might be said that the case is somewhat remarkable for the great number of failures to contradict the libellant by respondent when he had ample opportunity to do so."

Outside the courtroom, Russell exercised himself in frenzies of self-justification; inside the courtroom, he assumed a pose of Olympian disdain.

Russell, the evidence shows, refused to extend to his wife even the minimal courtesies. It was to the ultimate good fortune of Maria Russell that her husband was a ceaseless letter writer: maintaining a stony silence in person the man who had once written on sidewalks to inform unbelievers of God’s wrath fired off letters to the poor woman to whom he would not deign to speak. Fortunately for Mrs. Russell, she was not so gaga as to destroy the evidence.

In a letter of July 9, 1896, Russell wrote: "To avoid misunderstanding, let me say, under the circumstances it properly devolves upon you to make the advances on the line of social amenities between us. It would be improper for me to take the initiative in the matter of amenities such as, 'good morning,' 'good night, 'etc." (Exhibit 2, Superior Court)

In view of the evidence, Congressman Porter's summary is remarkably restrained:

The atmosphere of this home from July, 1896, to the time when she withdrew from it in November, 1897, was filled with unbearable silence and utter neglect. This, of itself, was an indignity of such a character as to render the condition of a woman of Mrs. Russell's delicacy of feeling intolerable and her life burdensome.

Reviewing the evidence, Justice Orlady ruled in Mrs. Russell's favor with barely concealed anger:

The indignities offered to [Mrs. Russell] in treating her as a menial in the presence of servants, intimating that she was of unsound mind and that she was under the influence of wicked and designing persons, fully warranted her withdrawal from his house, and fully justified her fear that he intended to further humiliate her, by a threat to resort to legal proceedings to test her sanity. There is not a syllable in the testimony to justify his repeated aspersions on her character and her mental condition, nor does he intimate in any way that there was any difference between them other than that she did not agree with him in his views of life and methods of conducting business. He says himself that she is a woman of high intellectual qualities and perfect moral character. While he denied in a general way that he attempted to belittle his wife as she claimed, the general effect of his own testimony is a strong confirmation of her allegations.

In an analysis of the testimony it is quite difficult to understand the view of the respondent in regard to his duty as a husband to his wife. From his standpoint he doubtless felt that his rights as a husband were radically different from the standard imposed upon him by the law, and recognized by all the courts of this country.... His course of conduct toward his wife evidenced such insistent egotism and extravagant self-praise that it would be manifest to the jury that his conduct toward her was one of continual arrogant domination that would necessarily render the life of any sensitive Christian woman a burden and make her conditions intolerable.

No charge of adultery was brought against Charles Taze Russell by his wife. In the trial of 1906 before the Court of Common Pleas, Maria Russell testified that Rose Ball-the bearer of messages to Mrs. Russell's sickroom-had once told her that Pastor Russell said: "I am like a jellyfish. I float around here and there. I touch this one and that one, and if she responds I take her to me, and if not, I float on to others." Russell denied the story. Judge Collier charged the jury: "This little incident about this girl that was in the family, that is beyond the ground of the libel and has nothing to do with the case because not being put in it or allowed to pass.

The press did not allow the jellyfish story-or Russell's relationship with this girl that was in the family," Miss Ball-to pass. Russell brought suit against The Washington Post and the ChicagoMission Friend for promoting the jellyfish story and for charging him with promiscuity and immorality; he won both cases.

Much has been made of the fact that the jellyfish story was discredited. As did the Pastor then, so do the Witnesses now try to discredit totally all of Mrs. Russell's evidence. It is true that although Maria Russell knew where Rose Ball was living, she made no attempt to procure her as a witness in order to substantiate the Jellyfish story. It is also true that Rose Ball would surely have been a hostile witness- she married a director of the Watch Tower Society and may thus be presumed to have been firmly in Pastor Russell's pocket. If she was not in his pocket, she was quite often (literally) on his knee; this Russell did not deny.

Maria Russell alleged that she had discovered proof of "improprieties" between her husband and Rose Ball. Pastor Russell testified that he had gone into Miss Ball's room at night "to minister to the sick." He admitted that he had kissed Miss Ball, but only to administer "spiritual tonic." He admitted that he fondled Miss Ball and dandled her on his knee, but only because his wife had asked him to display affection to the poor little orphan girl the Russells had taken into their home in 1888. Mrs. Russell, he said, used to kiss her too; and Rose was, after all, as he told a reporter from the Toledo Blade, "an adopted child of the family in short dresses."

No mention at all is made, in current Watchtower accounts, of Miss Ball's message-bearing excursions into Maria Russell's sickroom, visitations which terrified the Pastor's wife and which Justice Orlady admitted as pertinent, persuasive evidence in Mrs. Russell's behalf.

Russell attributed accounts of his improprieties with women to "the jealousy of the clergy." Given as he was to prodigious bouts of self-justification, popping into and out of law courts and entertaining reporters as if he were royalty, it is interesting that he did not choose to dispute the Brooklyn Eagle's account that

trouble arose in Pastor Russell's congregation in Allegheny relative to allegations that Pastor Russell was in the habit of locking himself into a room with female members of his congregation. Following an understanding between himself and his congregation, Pastor Russell took a vow, of which the following is one of seven paragraphs: "So far reasonably possible, I will avoid being in the same room with any of the opposite sex alone, unless the door to the room stands wide open." [Brooklyn Eagle, Oct. 28, 1911)

His followers, it would seem, didn't entirely trust him; but they adored him just the same. Their piety was not affronted by his peccadilloes; they relished, it would seem, the mingled odors of sanctimony and spice.

A dispatch received this morning from Pittsburgh stated that the announcement of the removal of headquarters of the Watch Tower Society to Brooklyn was coincident with the hearing before Judges Brown and Ford of that city to have the preacher jailed, but Mr. Russell denied this morning that the action in court in any way influenced the removal. --Brooklyn Eagle.

When Mrs. Russell applied for an increase of alimony in 1900 in the Pennsylvania courts, Russell divested himself of his personal assets and removed himself and his headquarters staff to Hicks Street in Brooklyn, New York. He purchased Plymouth Church, which had been completed in 1868 for the Plymouth Congregation of which Henry Ward Beecher was pastor. The Watch Tower Society also bought Beecher's four-story brownstone parsonage at 124 Columbia Heights, a building that overlooked what has been called the most glorious urban view in the world-the New York skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge. The Beecher residence became the home of the headquarters staff of 30-odd Russellites; the remodeled Hicks Street building became known as the Brooklyn Tabernacle:

Russell prepared and began to execute an all-out campaign of world-wide proportion as a final testimony to the nations that these few remaining years prior to 1914 would be their last opportunity to make peace with God before he came to execute his judgments.... Russell immediately realized that the four-story Bible house in Allegheny-Pittsburgh ... was now too small to serve as a suitable center for the international work developing throughout the world.

In order to hold title to this property in New York state it was thought advisable for the witnesses to form a new corporation. The Watch Tower Bible Society of Pennsylvania was subject to certain legal restrictions. So, . . . on February 23, 1909, the People's Pulpit Association was given legal identity as decreed by New York Supreme Court justice Isaac N. Miller. (JWDP) *

The charter of the People's Pulpit Association reads, in part, as follows: "Its corporate purposes are, charitable, benevolent, scientific, historical, literary and religious purposes; the moral and mental improvement of men and women, the dissemination of Bible Truths in various languages by means of the publication of tracts, pamphlets, papers and other religious documents, and for religious missionary work."

In 1914, the International Bible Students Association--a British corporation-was formed; it had a Brooklyn, New York, address. The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, as parent organization,

represents all the activities ... with which THE WATCH TOWER and its Editor are associated. All of the work done through tile INTERNATIONAL BIBLE STUDENTS ASSOCIATION and PEOPLE'S PULPIT ASSOCIATION, directly and indirectly, is the work of the WATCH TOWER BIBLE AND TRACT SOCIETY [of Pennsylvania), . . . The Editor of THE WATCH TOWER is the President of all three of these Societies. All financial responsibility connected with the work proceeds from the WATCH TOWER BIBLE AND TRACT SOCIETY [of Pennsylvania]. From it the other Societies and all the branches of the work receive their financial support. ..The parent society Charter by the State of Pennsylvania is not by law permitted to hold property in New York State; hence the necessity for organizing a subsidiary society to hold any real estate in New York. Similarly, the laws of Great Britain prevent any foreign society from holding title to real estate there. This necessitated the organization of the INTERNATIONAL BIBLE STUDENTS ASSOCIATION with a British charter. Thus it comes that we use sometimes the one name and sometimes the other in various parts of our work-yet they all in the end mean the WATCH TOWER BIBLE AND TRACT SOCIETY [the Pennsylvania corporation)--to which all donations should be made. [TWT, 1914, p. 371)

All of the Corporations formed by the Society work under the direction of the Pennsylvania corporation.

The certificate of corporation for the People's Pulpit Society was filed and recorded March 4, 1909; the corporation's name was legally changed to Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, Inc. on February 6, 1939; and on January 16,1956, it was changed to its present name, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc.

When the Pennsylvania courts ordered Russell to pay alimony to his wife, he filed a plea that he had nothing with which to pay, as he had transferred all his property, evaluated at $317,000, to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. The courts had answered that the transaction was a fraud upon his wife and that Russell still controlled the Pittsburgh property, inasmuch as he still controlled the Society. (He had, upon transferring his assets, required the issuance to him of one voting share for every $10 contribution. Russell thus acquired enough voting shares to give him control of the annual elections.) Referring to one transaction involving a sheriff's sale of property worth $20,000 for less than $200, the Court of Common Pleas said, "The purpose of this whole transaction was to deprive the wife of her dower interest and was a fraud on her." Evidence was produced in the alimony case to show that Russell had accumulated a fortune through stock speculation and donations from his followers. His substantial properties, it was alleged, were carried in the name of various holding companies -which he controlled. Maria Russell's attorneys, who spent many months investigating Russell's finances, alleged that the United States Investment Company, a holding corporation, had become the owner of Russell properties. The company's charter showed that its capital stock was divided among Russell and two associates-one of whom was Ernest C. Hennings, a director of the Watch Tower Society and the husband of Rose Ball.

Russell remained unruffled throughout these disclosures. For one thing, his loyal followers, who remained convinced that their Pastor was the Messenger of the Millennium and not a Prophet of Mammon, greeted him upon his return from a European trip, with a gift of $9,000 to pay back alimony. For another, Russell had small entertainments to distract him.

If Russell did not drift from woman to woman, they certainly seemed to be drawn to him. One woman was Sophie Hassan, whose infatuation with the Pastor led her, on more than one occasion, to crouch humbly in the vestibule of the Pastor's headquarters in Brooklyn, always removing her shoes so as not to besmirch the ground upon which Russell-her "bridegroom"-had trodden. Sixteen-year-old Sophie made a pest of herself; Russell called the cops, and Sophie was carted off to the Kings Park Asylum for observation. Later Russell mused, in the columns of The Watch Tower, that “fallen angels" have a nasty habit of materializing on earth, assuming the form of some living person, and committing "licentious acts." [TWT, January 1, 1911)

If Russell, who is depicted as a kind of latter-day Job by his successors, ever trembled, ever lost his incredible self-assurance, there is little evidence. He had certainly not on the morning of April 3, 1909, when he granted an interview to a reporter from the Brooklyn Eagle in his office at Bethel:

"All men are more or less influenced by a pretty woman's charms," he said, spreading out his hands in a deprecatory gesture. "Although I do not say this was the reason the court granted my former wife's application for an increase in alimony. I had been paying her $40 a month, and the new order was that it be made $100 a month. I told the court I could not pay it and so they are now trying to put me in jail for contempt. Well, I am not afraid. If they want me back in Pittsburgh, I will go. But I do not intend to pay more than the $40 a month."

Pastor Russell admitted that his wife had secured a decree of separation from him on the ground of cruelty. He said that he had refused to open the columns of a semi-monthly of which he is the editor to the women's suffrage campaign, of which she was and is a disciple. Then, also, he had refused to kiss her face at a railway station.

"The decree was granted in her favor not so much because I was cruel," the preacher explained with a smile. "It was only that the jury believed that we could not live together happily any more anyway. Since then she has been persecuting me in every possible way.... Ah, it is really too bad. Because before she became a suffragist she was an ideal wife. I might say she was as perfect as it is possible for anyone to be....

"I did not leave [Pittsburgh] because I was afraid to be put in jail."

Russell contended, as do the Witnesses today, that the move from Pittsburgh to New York (which Judge MacFarlane called "in bad taste, at the very least") was planned some time before Mrs. Russell's request for increased alimony, as was his transfer of $20,000 to the Watch Tower Society: "We are all working in the interest of the Lord," he told the Eagle's reporter. He declared that it was easier to sell books and pamphlets from Brooklyn than from Pittsburgh, because there were "hundreds of thousands of very very intelligent people in Brooklyn. . . . Believe me, we are doing it all for the Lord."

Brooklyn, so often the butt of bad jokes, has seldom received such oily praise. When I told a resident of Brooklyn Heights, the elegant, moneyed section of Brooklyn where the Watch Toxver Society holds property tax-assessed in 1971 for $14 million, of Russell's panegyric to the very very intelligent people of Brooklyn, he said: "Tell the Witnesses for me that we're at least intelligent enough to know, that any religion that puts plastic flowers in its windows can't possibly be the true religion. . . . Can't the Lord provide fresh flowers- Only the Dead Know Brooklyn, -wrote Thomas Wolfe, a neighbor of the Witnesses. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was written a few blocks away from Watchtower headquarters, too--Brooklyn has always been fertile literary country. But the Witnesses don't respect the brilliant dead: As they have erected building after building, they have knocked down some of the landmarks most revered by the very very intelligent people of Brooklyn Heights. Prior to a Landmarks Commission ruling which militates against that sort of thing, they destroyed, among other landmarks, the house John Roebling lived in when, incapacitated by the bends but with his telescope at the window, he supervised the engineering of the Brooklyn Bridge. The brownstone Roebling used to live in, at 110 Columbia Heights, is now the Watchtower Bible School of Gilead, a missionary school and residence; the architecture can most kindly be described as undistinguished.

If I were to die tomorrow, I think my former wife would soon follow me, for she could not live long unless she had me to nag.-Charles Taze Russell [Brooklyn Eagle, May 4, 1909]

This is a ghoulish, syrupy chocolate bonbon, Who-Is-the-Mysterious-Veiled-Lady-Who-Brings-Roses-to-Rudolph-Valentino's-Grave? anecdote told, deadpan, in the Witnesses' 1975 Yearbook:

At C. T. Russell's funeral at Pittsburgh in 1916 …"an incident occurred just before the services . . . that refuted lies told in the paper about Brother Russell. The hall was filled long before the time for the services to begin and it was very quiet, and then a veiled figure was seen to walk up the aisle to the casket and to lay something on it. Up front one could see what it was-a bunch of lilies of the valley, Brother Russell's favorite flower. There was a ribbon attached, saying, 'To My Beloved Husband.' It was Mrs. Russell. They had never been divorced and this was a public acknowledgment."

If the Veiled Lady was indeed Maria Frances Russell, she'd had a sudden and complete change of heart. In 1913, Mrs. Russell testified against her former husband at a public meeting of the (New York) Board of Tax Commissioners investigating Russell's finances; she testified against him once again in a libel suit he initiated (and lost, on procedural grounds) against a Canadian minister, J. J. Ross; and in 1914-two years before Russell's death in a railway car near Pampa, Texas-she issued a detailed denial that any reconciliation between her and Russell was in process. In a letter addressed to the Rev. DeWitt Cobb of the Second M. E. Church of Ashbury Park, New Jersey, Maria Russell wrote:

For sixteen years we have walked far apart in every sense of the word, and paths so divergent give no assurance of coming together. If Mr. R.'s followers are circulating such a report, they have manufactured it out of their imaginings.

Maria wrote that one of Russell's female followers, "an entire stranger" to her, represented Russell as sick in body and penitent in soul. Maria said that her intention all along had been to oppose unrighteousness, and that she would consider it her Christian duty to save Russell's soul from sin and the consequences of sin; she would go to the dying man, she said, with forgiveness, and with her prayers.

That would be, however, only at his express request and acknowledgment of the wrongs he had done, for the time was (when I was with him) that he did not want my prayers, and said so. [Brooklyn Eagle, July 6, 1914)

Contents

I Personal Beginnings: 1944

11 Organizational Beginnings: (1873-1912) Charles Taze Russell

III Waiting for the World to Die

IV Accumulating Wealth While the World Refuses to Die

V God Can't Kill Arnold

VI In Transition

VII Catholics, Mob Violence, Civil Liberties, and the Draft

VIII The Lure of Certainty

IX The Heroic Opportunity and Adventure: Jehovah's Witnesses Overseas

X Leaving: 1955

Abbreviated Codes for Sources Frequently Cited and Additional Sources

Index

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/26/obituaries/26HARR.html