Chapter IV.

Accumulating Wealth While the World Refuses to Die

I sought a prophet and I found a businessman! Instead of a humble seeker after truth, I found the cleverest propagandist of the age, a man before whom Mary Baker Eddy, Madame Blavatsky, . . . and Joseph Smith pale into puerile ineffectiveness.... I found not a blazing zealot ... but a shrewd old man . . . When it comes to raising money, most pastors, board secretaries and financial representatives of benevolent causes can sit at Russell's feet. Russell may know nothing theoretically about the science of psychology, but he is a past master of the thing itself. He might say, if he were utterly candid, The longest way round is often the shortest way home: It is better to put an idea into people's heads that will constrain them to give of what they suppose is their own volition, than to extract money by urgency. William T. Ellis, The Continent (National Presbyterian weekly), week of Sept. 30, 1912.

We have no church organization in the ordinary sense of the word, no bondage of any kind, no obligation to pay, either to the parent society or anybody else, either ten per cent or any other sum.... No solicitations for money in any way are authorized by this Society; ... every amount, therefore, that has come into our hands, and been used, has been a voluntary donation from a willing heart.... It is true of the Lord's people in general . . . that among them are not many rich, not many wise, not many learned, not many noble, but chiefly the poor of this world.... One million dollars have been spent in the service of present truth this year.--Charles Taze Russell, 1914 Annual Report, The Watch Tower, December 1, 1914, Vol. XXXV, No. 24, p. 5591 (371-72)

It is not uncommon to find a charismatic leader being sued for sexual, financial, or legal breaches which he feels are his due right as a superior being-E. Mansell Pattison, "Faith Healing and Glossalia," Z&L, p. 432

IN 1911, the market price for wheat was 59 cents to $1 a bushel. In Charles Taze Russell's Hicks Street Tabernacle, "miracle wheat" was being sold for $60 a bushel, or $1 a pound.

In 1904, K. B. Stoner, a 70-year-old veteran of the Confederate Army, farming in Fincastle, Virginia, discovered an unusual strain of wheat growing in a little garden patch in back of his house. Stoner's experimentations led him to the conclusion that the uncommonly heavy wheat, when planted thinly, in Virginia soil, yielded as much as 1 1/2 to 2 times as much grain as ordinary wheat. It was bruited about that the "miracle wheat" had appeared in Stoner's garden as a result of Stoner's asking the Lord for a miracle. Stoner later laconically denied that he and the Lord were in collusion to increase the yield of grain.

Stoner sold his wheat for $5 a bushel-five times the market price of regular wheat.

Russell's Tabernacle sold "miracle wheat" for $55 more a bushel than Stoner.

The "miracle wheat" came into the hands of the Watch Tower Society when the president of the United Cemeteries Corporation of Pittsburgh gave J. A. Bohnet, a director of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, “permission" to plant the Stoner wheat on his land and expressed his willingness to donate the crop to the Watch Tower Society. Inasmuch as the United Cemeteries Corporation---of which Russell was a trustee-was later found to be a dummy corporation for Watch Tower assets, this was hardly an act of disinterested charity. It was a very carefully nurtured "miracle" indeed.

The Brooklyn Eagle charged Russell with exploitation, taking raucous delight in his "bunco game." The Eagle’s investigative reporters' diligence led to an examination of the $60-a-bushel wheat by the Department of Postal Inspection, the Polytechnic Institute, and the Department of Agriculture. The consensus of chemical analysts was that the Stoner-brand "miracle wheat" was better than some and not so good as others. An official of the Department of Agriculture, in a letter published by the Rural New Yorker, declared that the "miracle wheat" did not merit the extravagant claims made for it:

This variety… is closely related to the soft winter wheats of the Atlantic Coast, of which Fultz, Fulcaster, etc., are leading types. From our experiments with Mr. Stoner's Variety we have found it to be satisfactory, but particularly for the region where it was first grown: It does not merit the extravagant claims made for it. It is a little better, perhaps, than the varieties grown in Virginia and vicinity only because it was a carefully selected strain.

Tests showed, in fact, that Fultz wheat-which was selling for $I a bushel-yielded, under ordinary circumstances, twice as much as the $60 miracle wheat: Fultz seed yielded 66 bushels to Stoner's 33.

Russell once again sang his persecution song: The pastors of the city are jealous of me, he said. "Other people than my own," said Russell, “wouldn't believe that this wheat contains extraordinary qualities. It is too much of a miracle for them to comprehend." Russell cited the prophet Ezekiel-"I will call for corn and increase it"-and delivered himself of the opinion that the "miracle wheat" was "a sign" that the Lord was fulfilling the prophecy that the desert would bloom like a rose. Directors of the Watch Tower Society, possibly with a view to litigious trouble ahead, sought to temper Russell's extravagant claims. The original advertisement in The Watch Tower had stated that the yield of "miracle wheat" ought to be from 10 to 15 times that of ordinary wheat; but one "Brother" Dockey informed an Eagle reporter that "no guarantee is offered that 'miracle wheat' possesses powers of extraordinary yield." As things heated up and the Eagle continued, scarcely containing its glee, to deride Russell (who very carefully allowed his fellow directors to act as agents for the sale of the wheat, promoting the picture of himself as an objective, non-profit-making observer of God's bounty), Watch Tower spokesmen issued slithery disclaimers: "The advertisement in The Watch Tower does not say that miracle wheat is worth $1 a pound," said the general counsel for the Watch Tower Society. "It says simply that Brother Bohnet is willing to sell it at that price. It is purely a donation sale, for the benefit of the society, and those who buy at the price quoted do so with the understanding and the idea that they are voluntarily giving aid to the society. I might place high value upon worthless furniture if I wished to, and if people wanted to buy at the price I named they could do so, if they wished, though I made no claims that the furniture had any real value beyond that of ordinary furniture."

Clearly, two, sets of messages were being communicated-one to the “worldly” and one to the believers.

Russell offered to return money to anyone who was dissatisfied. But the damage had been done. Russell knew how to sell wheat to credulous believers; the Eagle knew how to sell newspapers to people eager for diversion.

On September 23, 1912, the Eagle ran a cartoon called "Easy Money Puzzle." It showed a fat gilded banker standing on the steps of the "Onion Bank" calling to a sinister, sloppy old peddler with a top hat and a scraggly beard sneakily carrying off a parcel of loot. "You're wasting your time," the banker said. "Come on in here!" The cartoon's caption read, "If Pastor Russell can get a dollar a pound for Miracle Wheat, what could he get for Miracle stocks and bonds in the old Union Bank?" (The Union-"Onion"- bank was liquidated in 1912; the bank was unable to pay more than half of what it had held in trust for its depositors. The Eagle had been in large measure responsible for the exposure of "ill-smelling" securities which led to the bank's downfall.)

Russell sued the Eagle for libel, demanding $100,000 in damages for "injury to his reputation, good name, fame and standing." The complaint alleged that Russell-who was on holiday in Europe when suit was brought on his behalf against the Eagle-had been "brought into scandal and reproach and has been held up to odium, scandal, disgrace and contempt among his neighbors, friends, and the readers of his Journal, books and other writings and among parishioners and members of his congregation."

The Eagle’s defense was that the sale of "miracle wheat" was a scheme intended to benefit the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, of which Pastor Russell had complete control, and that its articles and cartoons were justified by the facts: "This plaintiff has held himself out to be a teacher of other people, a public leader, and the public press has a right to criticize him or his doctrines."

The case was brought before Justice Charles H. Kelby and a jury in the Kings County Supreme Court.

Several farmers testified-their testimony avidly received by Russell's followers, who jammed the courtroom-that "miracle wheat" produced up to twice the yield of ordinary wheat when planted thin.

It was thin testimony, and skimpy cause for rejoicing. The Eagle, in its defense, called a government agronomist, who testified that the Department of Agriculture had tested "miracle wheat" under carefully checked conditions and found it to be a good-yielding wheat, but no better than other varieties. In competitive testing, he said-bolstering his testimony with certified copies of the public records of the Department of Agriculture-it had ranked eighteenth in one test, tenth in another, and third in a test when it was thinly sown.

There were several bizarre aspects to the trial. One amusing grace note was that Russell's vanity prompted him to have his attorney protest that Russell's beard was not, as in the cartoon, scraggly at all, but kempt. Russell's doctrines-held, by the Court, to be relevant to the libel-were held up for ridicule. One dogma, in particular, brought delight to the pastor's antaganists. This was the Pastor's conceit that "old worthies" such as King David, Moses, Solomon, et al., were due for resurrection before 1914 to rule as princes in the earth. One of the juicier allegations made against the Watch Tower Society was that it had coerced an insane man, Hope Hay, into contributing $10,000 to its funds. William E. Van Amburgh (the newspapers frequently misspelled his name Van Amberg), secretary-treasurer of' the Watch Tower Society, acknowledged that Mr. Hay was in an “insane asylum" and that the Watch Tower Society was footing his bills, but denied that Mr. Hay had not given his money of his own free will.

Russell did not take the stand; he conveyed all his messages through attorney J. F. Rutherford who was to become the second president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, after Russell's death). "What the character of the plaintiff is," the Eagle's attorney told the jury, "you can infer from the fact that he did not take the witness stand and let you look in his eyes as he told of his past life. He did not give you and me the chance to question him as to . . . why he left Pittsburgh, why he came here, and what he intends to do when he leaves here."

The burden of Justice Kelby's charge to the jury was that as a matter of law, the cartoon was libelous in itself unless justified by the evidence. The burden of proof, Kelby charged, was upon the Eagle: "Truth is always a defense in a libel suit, but the defendant must prove the truth is as broad as the charge."

The jury of twelve men was out for less than forty-five minutes before it returned a verdict of not guilty in the Eagle's favor.

The evidence that weighed most heavily with the jury was that of Mr. Van Amburgh.

Van Amburgh was an ingenuous, unresponsive witness; he acted more like a junior bookkeeper than like the financial officer of a corporation that had spent millions of dollars in a decade. He was, however, rigorously cross-examined; his grudging testimony, together with the subpoenaed financial records of the Society, gave weight to the Eagle's claim that the Watch Tower Society, under Russell's control, had flourished financially in spite of the newspaper's expose’s and

could therefore lay no claim to having been "damaged":

"How much in donations did the Watch Tower Society get in 1912?"

"$202,000," Van Amburgh replied.

"How much in 1911?"

"$169,000."

"How much in 1910?"

“$139,000."

"So that since this alleged libel was published your income has increased?"

"Yes, the work of the society is growing very fast, but it might have grown faster if it had not been for the libel."

"But your annual report of the Watch Tower does not show that your society gets anything from its affiliated corporations?"

"No, sir. It is not a detailed report."

Persistent prodding by the Eagle's attorneys revealed the existence of two dummy corporations, the United States Investment Co., Ltd., and the United Cemeteries Corporation.- (The president of the Cemeteries Corp. was a doctor-a nice little incongruity that tickled the fancy of the unbelievers in the courtroom.)

"And you say you do not know who the stockholders of the Investment Company are?"

"No, sir," said the secretary-treasurer. "I could not say."

"Did you ever hear any complaints from the directors of the Investment Company that they

did not get ... interest?"

"No, sir."

“Are not the owners of the companies the same persons?"

"I do not know as an absolute certainty."

"And did you not take title to property as a dummy for the Watch Tower Society?”

"Yes, sir. I took title to a farm near Pittsburgh some years ago. The money was that of the Watch Tower Society. I deeded it to the United States Society, which, in turn, signed it over to the United Cemetaries Company."

…

"Why do you not do all your business in the name of the Watch Tower Society; that is why do you need the dummy corporations?”

”Some people seem to think that a religious corporation should do no so-called secular business whatever," said Van Amburgh, who had compounded his troubles by saying that the reason he held the title to substantial properties used by the Watch Tower Society was that the Investment Company did not deal in mortgages. "They do not see the propriety of it-No, let me change that answer-I mean that the United States Investment Company and the United Cemeteries were in existence before I ever came to Pittsburgh, and we have continued to use those companies for their convenience ever since.”

The Watch Tower Society has, from time to time, advised "children of light" to act as cunningly as serpents when they deal with "children of darkness." Van Amburgh was a singularly unwily serpent; every time he opened his mouth, the Eagle's attorneys milked him of information that destroyed the credibility of Russell's organization. Every word he said contributed to the jury's impression that the Watch Tower Society was a sophisticated financial corporation masquerading as primitive Christianity on a non-profit-making crusade.

Russell, for example, had not just "growed," like Topsy, into a "latter day Elias." He had a press agent and a public relations man, to enhance his image and to act as an advance man on his world tours. (The man whose dying words were "Bring me a toga" may have believed that Jehovah had chosen him among the earth's billions; but he wasn't taking any chances that Jehovah's choice would go unnoticed.) Van Amburgh's testimony further revealed that while any donor contributing $10 to the Watch Tower Society was entitled to a voting share, in fact only 50,000 voting certificates had been issued; 47,000 of those had been issued to Charles Taze Russell, whose yearly reelection was thus secure. Four hundred to five hundred thousand donors might have availed themselves of voting shares; only fifty or sixty donors did so. Clearly, this was a tribute to Russell's manipulative genius and to the intensity of his followers' belief. It was at this time that Russell was pleading financial impoverishment as justification for not paying Maria Russell increased alimony.

It is not surprising that although Russell's attorneys pleaded that a finding in favor of the Eagle would be tantamount to calling a simple man of God "a crook," the finding went against Russell. Once out of the courtroom, true to form, Russell flung his reticence away as if it were a cloak of rags and tried, once again, to cover himself with glory. He had been "smitten," he said, like Our Lord and like St. Paul. “I, like them," he proclaimed, "have been refused the law's protection. I murmur not."

Indeed he did not murmur. He bellowed and bawled and contrived to turn his disgrace to his advantage. Maintaining the pose of injured innocence, he said, flatly, that he had had "nothing whatever to do" with "miracle wheat." It seems unbelievable that his followers should have swallowed that; but Russell took care to frost his bald statement with the anticlerical declarations they loved: The Eagle, he said, had in reality been "the champion of certain clerical enemies of mine." "All manner of evil" had been spoken against" him "for the sake of the doctrines of Christ." Anyone who turned against him, therefore, would be repudiating not a crooked old man, but Christ Himself.

Once again, Russell cried wolf; and once again the hungry wolf in his elaborate fairy tale was the Catholic Church, against which the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society was the only protection.

"Presumably because there were seven Catholics on the jury," Russell said, "the Eagle's attorney was prompted to refer to the Sisters of Charity and their noble work as nurses without referring to the fact that those nurses are well paid and that the hospitals, in large measure, are supported by state taxation." Russell's organization was pure, according to his arguments-which also took into consideration the Church's wealth-precisely because it did not engage in acts of charity; the Church, he implied, used charity as a cover for sneaky thievery:

The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society was held up to scorn because it did not have any hospital work, nor draw any revenue from taxations, and because the female members of the Society do not visit the workshops of the land weekly or monthly on pay day and exact donations to its work. Our society was held up to scorn because we do not send a wagon around the city collecting groceries and provisions for the upkeep of our work; because we do not take up collections, even on Sunday; because we have never solicited a penny or a dollar from anybody; and because we never have fairs, grab-bags, "chances," or "raffles." Our society was held up to ridicule because it offers its literature free to the poor while other similar societies charge both rich and poor alike for their tracts and other publications.

Nor did the Protestants escape: For defending the Eagle, he said, "the Protestants on the jury were led to hope for escape from eternal torment through the 'pearly gates of heaven,' welcomed with the words, 'Well done,' for giving the Eagle the verdict. Neither I nor my attorneys could offer such inducements conscientiously.”

Our home, "Bethel." where some of our society's workers reside, was held up to scorn-likened to a harem, etc. This surely did cut me deeply to the heart. I am quite willing to suffer if need be, for my faithfulness to the Lord and His Word; but it gave me great pain that the arrows intended for me did not all center upon myself-that the more than a hundred saintly earnest men, women, and children, co-laborers with me in the Lord's work, should thus be made to unjustly suffer. I can only urge upon them to apply to themselves the words of the apostle: "Cast not away, therefore, your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward;.. Ye shall receive the promise; ye endured a great fight of afflictions; partly, whilst ye were made a gazing stock and partly whilst ye became companions of them that were so used."

"I am the more encouraged," said the man who implied that Protestants on the jury had voted against him because of the Eagle's attorneys' enticing them with the promise of entry into the "pearly gates of heaven," "because I realize that the great Day of Blessing, the great Thousand Year of Messiah's Kingdom, is near at hand, is dawning now. Soon Satan, the 'Prince of Darkness,' will be bound…No longer will darkness be permitted to masquerade as light, and the light be slandered as darkness."

Ministry to the poor, visitation of the sick, care for the orphaned, these are outside of the pale of Russellite activities. The limit of his benevolence is to send his literature to "the Lord's poor. --William T. Ellis, The Continent [op. cit. 1913]

Likely you have noted that Jehovah's Witnesses try to maintain exemplary conduct and show love for one another. But you may feel that they should be more concerned about the problems people are facing now-hunger, sickness, poverty and the like. You may feel that they should undertake extensive charity drives. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not solicit money and other material things from people and then take credit for the good deeds such contributions make possible. As was true of Jesus Christ, their main concern is to give spiritual aid to all whom they possibly can. . . While material giving may bring temporary relief, spiritual spiritual giving can aid people to enjoy the… permanent solution to man’s problems that only God's kingdom provide. (Aw, April 8, 1975, p 18)

The Witnesses view organized charity as a scheme to draw men's attention away from the salvation that lies only in the coming Kingdom of God; they are self-congratulatory because they are not engaged in charity, as normally (but not necessarily legally) defined. (They excoriate those whose consciences "become sensitive in an exaggerated or unbalanced way"-those, that is, who refuse to pay war taxes; they honor Caesar by paying their taxes, "leaving with the government the responsibility of how money is used.” (TW, April 1, 1975) Witnesses are taught to believe that all forms of charity are corrupt (charities line the pockets of bureaucrats or the clergy) and redundant (God, not the American Cancer Society, will cure cancer).

The Watchtower Society comes to the aid of congregations that have been struck by natural calamities-earthquakes, hurricanes, floods; it is not, however, in favor or “promiscuous charity.”

After World War II, Witnesses in America, Canada, Switzerland, and Sweden contributed clothing and money to Witnesses in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippine Republic, Poland, and Rumania. Clothing shipments amounted to1,056,247 pounds; food shipments totaled 718,873 pounds; the monetary value of the shipments was estimated by the Watchtower Society at $1,322,406. The Society has no regular, ongoing funds set aside for relief; these were individual contributions. [Yearbook, 1975, p. 209) American Witnesses gave out of pocket $140,000 to supply CARE packages to Germany alone, and contributed 220 tons of clothing to their German counterparts. [Yearbook, 1974, p. 217) [I remember sorting out clothing with dozens of other young girls and women in an old warehouse near the Watchtower printing plant. (Proximity to Bethel-and to Bethelites--was always desirable.) We all skimmed off the best of the lot for ourselves. This is not to denigrate the volunteer work of the Witnesses, who really did see this work as an act of solidarity and love (enlivened by mild flirtations with male Bethelites). The beneficiaries of this largesse were not those who were interested only in obtaining a CARE package, but those who had been active in the field for at least six months.] [Yearbook, 1974, p. 217)

The Witnesses pride themselves on not gathering in "rice Christians." To be a relief recipient one must have impeccable credentials as a Witness. In the United States and overseas, the Watchtower Society has no funds for hospitals, shelters, clinics, or rehabilitation services. The deserving poor get fed. Years after I ceased being a Witness, I lived, for eight years, in India and in Guatemala. I was overwhelmed by the beauty and generosity of Mother Teresa in Calcutta-to her, all the dying belong to God-and by the untiring efforts of Maryknoll priests and nuns to keep babies from dying of roundworms; I was in awe of priests and missionaries, who, unheralded, in isolated poverty holes, kept people alive, regardless of their religious beliefs. (I had had an incredibly parochial view of the Church, and of churches, still: I believed what I had been taught to believe-that all religious emissaries were venal.)

I have a clear memory (which, unfortunately, I cannot document) of the excommunication of two Witness missionaries, in the late 1940s, who had taken it upon themselves, without a directive from the Watchtower Society, to introduce to starving agrarian workers in Southeast Asia better ways of growing rice. Their actions were construed as a dereliction of duty-their duty was to preach the gospel. The Witnesses have consistently taken the position that the greatest act of charity is the preaching of the gospel; they have no mandate to engage in "social reform."

I have a copy of a speech delivered by a Witness twenty years ago that might just as well have been given yesterday. In it, he quotes a New York Times article of 1951 which reports that women in parts of India "were feeding their children cakes of soft mud to keep them from starving. Thousands of persons too poor even to buy the scanty Government grain rations are keeping themselves alive by eating grass, snails, lotus roots and herbs." The man who gave this speech cited the famine as an analogy for spiritual famine: "There was plenty of mud," he said, "but this is not life-giving, and therefore is a famine. The same is true of spiritual food." The horrible fact of starvation is used, but he did not say how he felt. Compassion is derailed. Television and the papers bombard all of us with others' pain-Bangladesh, the South Bronx insinuate themselves into the cocktail hour with the 6-o'clock news. Unless we cauterize our senses, it is too much for our minds to encompass. The Witnesses, reacting, perhaps as do many of us, to this saturation, sanitize pain.

Through individual acts of charity, Witnesses sometimes proffer assistance to members of the congregation who are in financial need. Because the Watchtower Society itself sets aside no funds for charity, giving is spontaneous and always the responsibility of the individual. It is truly impressive to watch the Witnesses come to the aid of a member of "the family" who is in need. Sick or elderly Witnesses get their shopping and cooking done for them. The Witnesses put themselves at one another's service (and place themselves in one another's debt). Whatever skills they have,

they use to one another's advantage.

But some people get more help than others. A subtle caste system obtains. It is human to wish to select one's own company. But, taught to love one another diffusely, the Witnesses cannot consciously admit that they find some of their brothers and sisters more attractive than others. So they judge people on the basis of how "theocratic"-how active and effective in the field ministry-they are. And they tend to exclude those who seem slightly "off."

One disaffected ex-Witnesses describes the mechanism of this rejection and discrimination:

There was an old lady with horrible garlic breath and a retarded son. The Witnesses avoided her. But since they were taught that we are all equal in God's sight, and equally lovable, they couldn't take the responsibility for disliking her. They'd say, "What will people of goodwill think about her? She'll turn people away from The Truth.” So they felt justified in ignoring her. She was poor and unattractive, and she had an even more grossly unattractive son. She had a dogged determination to be a Witness, but an imperfect grasp of Witness theology. It was a deadly combination.

No one, to my knowledge, ever suggested to her ways in which she could better her condition or alleviate her burdens. The Witnesses had no facilities to help her son, and for her to have solicited help from other sources would have been interpreted as a defection.

You'd keep running into this bind: The Witnesses had no support facilities; but if you turned elsewhere, you were denying God's organization. My own son, for example, really suffered, because I was always fighting with my husband, who was not a believer. I thought, one summer, I'd send him to camp, to get him away from all the tension. The Witnesses didn't have camps; they told me that to send him to a worldly camp would damage his chances for everlasting life. And an elder told me that if I had managed my domestic life right, the tension wouldn't have arisen.

Neither my sister-who was also a Witness-nor I ever felt really embraced by the Witnesses. Both of us were shy; we couldn't participate in meetings, and we were scared and nervous, about going from door to door. There was one kind woman who'd take me from door to door and do all the talking; she really loved me, I think; and she'd plead with me, for my soul's sake, to do the talking. I couldn't. I remember her with great affection. We'd sneak cigarettes together-Witnesses aren't allowed to smoke-and play Scrabble and do frivolous things. But she was the only one who could tolerate my weaknesses. The others excluded me.... I think the fact that I was Jewish made me suspect too. We were always hearing about how "stiffnecked" and proud and mercenary the Jews were-and that Jehovah chose them precisely because they were such unpromising material so how could there not be residual anti-Semitism?

All my doubts came home to roost when my sister had major surgery. All the Witnesses called me. Not to ask how she was, but to inquire about whether she'd taken a blood transfusion. When I got angry-I said, "Where's your love? Don't you care how she is?"-they said I was behaving badly because of course they loved my sister: they wanted her to live in the New World; that was why they were asking. They kept hectoring me, and her, about whether she had had a blood transfusion and about when she was going to go from door to door again. The first time she tried to go from door to door, she sat on a stoop and cried. She didn't stop crying for three months. Then (this may seem like too small a thing to break the back of a religious commitment, but that's how it was) my sister's surgeon-she wouldn't, of course, go to a psychiatrist for help-told her to take dance classes for therapy. She went to the Jewish Community House on the corner where free classes were given; and the Witnesses said that if she were "spiritually healthy" she wouldn't need to do that. And they construed her turning to the JCH as a turning away from them. But what did they have to offer?

The Witnesses come to one another's aid, I'm saying, if you pass their tests. I'm not denying that they are capable of being incredibly helpful to one another; I'm saying that some people-like my sister and me-fall through the cracks. The more you need help, the more you're regarded as being undeserving of help. I don't know which is cause and which is effect: are their no-charity financial policies a result of their theology, or vice versa? I do know that since the organization doesn't believe in “promiscuous charity," the burden falls on individuals to be charitable-and charity comes to those who are acceptable, to those who arc deemed worthy. We were not.

When I lived at Bethel, I saw, or heard of, these failures of charity.

A young woman who had been a full-time field worker (a "pioneer") came to Bethel headquarters after her husband had died of a sudden heart attack and her son had, accidentally it was supposed, hanged himself. She was put to work in the laundry room, operating a giant press. She was a perpetually smiling, sweet, singularly unassertive woman who seemed to have put her personal tragedies behind her. One day, her glasses slipped off and were smashed in the press. She began to howl and scream and cry that immemorial cry-"Why me?" Her roommate reported that she cried (“Why me?”) in her sleep. She was judged unstable. She was given a Greyhound ticket to her parents' home in the Northwest. (I do not know what has become of her.)

An old man, who had been at Bethel for thirty years, grew senile. His senility took the form of his muttering obscenities at the dining-room table. He was given two "warnings,” which his hardened arteries obviously couldn't assimilate, and then ordered to leave. He had no resources, financial or emotional. He was last seen begging in downtown Brooklyn.

In both these cases two factors are at work: The Watchtower Society has no charitable institutions to handle emotionally disturbed or mentally ill persons; and disturbance and illness are seen as evidence of the Lord's displeasure. There is no place for people in terrible trouble to go.

Fred Franz, at that time the Society's vice-president, told me once that he had been on board ship with a young Japanese missionary who was manifestly disturbed--babbling and incoherent. "I thought," Franz said, "I could cast the demons out of her, but Jesus said that his apostles should not practice that gift after His death; so I didn't presume." The missionary jumped overboard and died.

Needless to say, Jehovah's Witnesses have no lock on arbitrariness, arrogance, or unkindness. Every religious order has its horror stories. But because there is no institutionalized charity among the Witnesses, giving is individual, and not giving may be justified on theological grounds. (I am blurring definitions purposefully: I mean giving in the sense of spontaneous goodness, Christian love; and I mean giving financially. The two are not unrelated.) Misfits, the unattractive, the aberrant can be regarded as waste products of the Devil's world, not as fellow sufferers.

The publishing endeavors of the Jehovah [sic] Witnesses seem to be the most prosperous among . . . religious organizations in the U.S. . . . A spokesman for the Society would not reveal the revenues generated through publishing nor what the Society spends on its publishing activity. He would as soon give praise to the Prince of Darkness as reveal such intimate details. -Media Industry Newsletter, November 23, 1973.

The final smash had not come, as predicted, in 1914.

In 1890, there were, according to the Witnesses' current estimates, 400 "Bible Students." By 1914, according to an estimate of the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, there were 50,000 Russellites. In 1976, according to the Witnesses' Yearbook, there were 2,248,390 Witnesses in 210 countries. In 1976 alone, 196,656 new Witnesses symbolized their dedication by water baptism. [Yearbook, 1977, pp. 30-31] In addition to growing in number, the Witnesses have managed, in the intervening years, to amass millions of dollars' worth of real estate.

Russell's early world tours served to convince him that there was no market for his message in the "Papal countries." He expressed most hope for Nordic and/or WASP countries like Norway, Switzerland, England, Ireland, Scotland. Perhaps he was seeing with the eye of the tourist who is drawn to the "clean," nonexotic lands. Because later, on the eve of what he assumed to be "the end of the time which God set apart for gathering," he voiced the opinion that the "heathen will probably fall in line more readily." [TW, #5980, 1914, pp. 326-27) As it happens, there are now, by latest count, 102,044 active Witnesses in West Germany and over 114,029 in Nigeria. (Yearbook, 1977, pp. 26, 28: Figures for 1976 Peak Publishers)

The Watchtower Society, as of November, 1975, had thirty-seven printeries-in Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Japan, Nigeria, the Philippines, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States....

Every two weeks, an average printing of 8,700,000 copies of The Watchtower magazine (in 79 languages) rolls off the 64 rotary presses contained in all those factories-an abundance that Russell whose first edition of Zion's Watch Tower had a printing of 6,000 copies, could hardly have foreseen. From these factories comes the book the Watchtower Society claims has outsold all other books written in the 20th century. The Truth That Leads to Everlasting Life (1968), a 190-page hardbound book that sells for 25 cents a copy, has sold 74,000,000 copies in 91 languages-exceeding Dr. Spock's baby book by 50,000,000 copies. [Yearbook, 1975, p. 240] In Brooklyn alone, where the bulk of Watchtower property is located, 100,000 books and 800,000 magazines are printed daily. From these presses also comes Awake! (a kind of spiritually flavored Reader's Digest), a 32-page semimonthly published in 39 languages, with an average printing of 7,500,000. Until very recently, the publishers of Awake! blurbed it as a magazine with "no fetters”. It features penetrating articles on social conditions.... Awake! pledges itself to ... exposing hidden foes and subtle dangers." Featured articles in 1973 issues of the magazine that "recognizes facts, faces facts, is free to publish facts" were "Snail Fever-Slow Death for Millions"; "My Life as a Gypsy"; "Bamboo-Asia's Towering Grass"; “Twilight Years Can Be Useful Years” ("The aged [may) make bags, repair shoes and raise rabbits").

In the United States, in addition to an office building in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Society owns factory buildings, interconnected by bridges spanning the streets, covering four city blocks in Brooklyn, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge-close to 1,265,000 square feet of highly desirable urban property.

(In 1927, the Society moved into 117 Adams Street, Brooklyn, which contained 70,000 square feet of floor space. By 1950, additions to the original factory covered the entire city block. In 1956, a new factory, containing 192,000 square feet of floor space, was constructed at 77 Sands Street and linked by over-street bridge to the Adams Street buildings. In 1958, the Society purchased a nine-story factory on an adjoining block. In 1968 it completed an eleven-story structure which added 226,000 square feet of floor space to the complex. In 1969, the Squibb Pharmaceutical plant in Brooklyn was purchased by the Society, adding 63 2,792 square feet of floor space.) [Yearbook, 1975, pp. 242-43)

The spanking-clean, beige-and-green Watchtower factories dominate the urban landscape at the foot of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. The flashing electric signs that used to advertise Squibb pharmaceutical products now ask us to READ THE BIBLE GOD’S HOLY WORD DAILY. READ THE WATCHTOWER ANNOUNCING GOD'S KINGDOM.

In 1974, when I last visited the No. I Factory Building at I17 Adams Street-announcing myself, not untruthfully, as a reporter from More, the media magazine-I was tempted, as I waited in the lobby for my host and tour guide, to scrawl graffiti on the spotless walls of what is surely the cleanest lav this side of the New World. I restrained myself, however, and concentrated on the three diesel generators that provide DC power for most of the factory's presses and machinery. The generators, the largest of which produces 550 horsepower, are framed by a squeaky-clean plate-glass window in the lobby, looking rather like the Ark of the Covenant in their splendid isolation, and eliciting a commensurate amount of awe from visiting Witnesses, to whom the place is a kind of Mecca. (I used, as a child, crossing the Manhattan Bridge by train, to announce, “There is the most important building in the world." To say things like that loudly enough for everyone to hear is known as "giving a witness.”) I was intrigued by a flagged map in the lobby-like a battle map-that indicated the locations of Jehovah's Witnesses in 90 foreign countries. It was out of date, still showing the Belgian Congo. My tour guide, who did not then know that I had once worked as a proofreader in that factory, explained, "We have our eyes fixed on the New World of God's Kingdom. We are not interested in the things of this world." He had never heard of More: "We don't digest secular literature. The Watchtower and Awake! are our spiritual food."

(It may be of interest to fact-lovers-and to those who doubt that the Watchtower Society is as self-contained as it purports to be-that the glue and ink used in the Brooklyn plants are manufactured there; 16 Watchtower-owned freight-car loads of paper are used each week; 32 Linotype machines and 39 rotary presses are manned, as are flatbed and job presses and magazine-wrapping machines.* There are Graphotype and Addressograph machines too; for the most part, these are run by women. (My tour guide told me that women, being "weaker vessels," were "assigned un-

strenuous work. If any sister has expressed a desire to work presses, I'm not aware of it." I am, however, aware of the fact that women work heavy, steam shirt-and-sheet presses and operate industrial floor-waxing machines in the Watchtower residence laundry.) [These statistics are as of June 1973]

Many factory operations are technologically sophisticated; many others, which in commercial plants might be mechanized or computerized, are designed to require manual labor. This makes economic sense, because Witness labor is so cheap. All members of the Bethel headquarters "family" editorial and administrative staff as well as factory workers-receive the same small monthly stipend.

The Watchtower Society operates a small fruit farm in Washington, New Jersey, and a grain farm in South Lansing, New York.

A 1,698-acre farm near Newburgh, New York, provides food for the1,400 headquarters workers.

Wheat, corn, oats, lettuce, tomatoes, squash, potatoes, onions, turnips, spinach, beets, kale, beans, carrots, apples, peaches, pears, strawberries, blackberries grow on this mini-conglomerate. And there are herds of beef cattle-about 800 head of Hereford, Angus, and Charolais-and dairy cattle; and hogs; and thousands of chickens bred for eating and thousands of Leghorns that lay close to 3,000 eggs a day. Beef is dressed here, bacon smoked, hog jowls are steamed in enormous kettles to be used as liverwurst. Fruit is frozen, canned, preserved; relishes, sauerkraut and horseradish are prepared; from the 420 gallons of milk produced each day, the Watchtower Society manufactures butter, ice cream, cheese-Swiss, Cheddar, Monterey, and Limburger. Everything the self-sustaining headquarters workers consume comes from Watchtower Farm, according to George Couch, the manager-with the exception of fish, condiments, spices, and some flour. The farm, one observer commented, "Exemplifies communal agriculture refined by technological sophistication ... with the aid of machines, 92 cows are milked in two hours, but pears are still peeled by hand." [The New York Times, Jan. 2, 1973)

Couch estimates the cost of operating the Farm at $430,000 per year. From this cornucopia come approximately 2 million meals a year for headquarters workers. Each meal, Couch estimated in 1973, costs 30 cents. Depression prices; but also, depression wages: farm workers, like Brooklyn factory and office workers (who are not, officially, wage earners, but minister-volunteers), receive $20 a month for expenses such as transportation, and a modest allowance for clothing and other expenses, never exceeding $360, each year. (This is what makes it possible to sell books such as The Truth That Leads to Everlasting Life for "a contribution" of 25 cents.)

It takes, Couch told a Times reporter, 1,000 pounds of beef for a rib-roast meal, 60 hogs for a pork-chop meal. The meals are hearty, nutritionally balanced, and, on the whole, better than one would expect institutional food to be.

Five hundred workers live in dormitory residences on Watchtower Farm, which also accommodates two factories that provide 400,000 square feet of floor space.

These are the arterial properties. The heart of the religious body is in Brooklyn Heights-a lovely residential area not unlike Washington's Georgetown and Boston's Beacon Hill. The Watchtower Society's headquarters staff has grown from 355 men and women in 1950, to 607 in 1960, to 1,449 (approximately 200 of whom are women) in 1970, and its property holdings have grown commensurately. The Society has bought and built to provide offices and residences for factory workers and editorial and administrative staff and to accommodate the missionary school of Gilead, which, as part of a thrust toward centralization, was shifted, in the 1960s, from South Lansing, New York. The Watchtower community (or commune) in Brooklyn Heights is served by its own carpentry shop, laundry, tailor shop, and bakery (approximately 25 chefs and assistants labor to prepare three meals a day for headquarters workers).

Since the "miracle wheat" scandal, the Watchtower Society has maintained a discreetly low financial profile. Federal courts have ruled that the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, Inc. (New York corporation), and the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society (Pennsylvania corporation) are entitled to exemption from the filing of income-tax returns under the Federal Internal Revenue Act because the Societies are charitable corporations engaged in religious activity. Similar rulings have been made in Britain and in Canada. The Watchtower Society has not, however, succeeded in silencing speculation about its method of acquiring properties and about the extent of its holdings. Financial reports are never published. Calls from reporters, researchers, state senators inquiring into the finances of the Society go unanswered. Outsiders would need a guided tour through the property holdings of the Society, and the Society provides no tour guides. The Society's attorneys-Koozman and Hartman of New York City-refuse to answer requests for information. The Society's bank of record, Chase Manhattan, likewise gives away no secrets. Rank-and-file Witnesses believe absolutely that the Society's stewardship is beyond reproach; they ask no questions. To question the Lord's "governing body" they are told, is to doubt the Lord Himself. These explanations are offered to them:

The Society has reached its present world-wide extent, owning property worth millions of dollars paid for and maintained completely by voluntary contributions. . . . For years now, the Society has put a notice in The Watchtower once a year requesting each one who wishes to contribute during the year to state how much he wants to contribute and how the contributions would be sent, whether all at once or a certain amount at a time . . . in order that we might know how to lay out the work for the year to come; and the work is planned or expanded on the basis of what is indicated by these expressions. This would indicate the leading of the Lord in spreading the work. .. The work progresses only to the extent of voluntary contributions. [The Witnesses] have managed to pay as they go. [Faith, pp.205, 207-08)

On July 6, 1975, in a certified letter, I asked the following questions of Jerry Molohan, public relations officer of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, and of George Hartman of Koozman and Hartman (1133 Avenue of the Americas, New York):

In order to make [a book about Jehovah's Witnesses] as objective as possible, and not to rely merely on rumor or conjecture, I should like, from primary and internal sources, information that is available from you.

Repeated calls to Mr. George Hartman . . . have proved unavailing. As you must know, when a journalist is denied access to information, the assumption he or she must make is that there is something to be hidden. I should like, therefore, to allow you to speak for yourselves; and I request, therefore, the following information: . . .

…Are financial records of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (Pennsylvania and New York corporations) available? If so, to whom are they made available? May I have a record of your finances for the year 1974? . . . .

…Are meetings of the Pittsburgh (Penna.) corporation open to the public; and are financial reports there made public?. . …Are moneys contributed to you invested in corporations other than your own?

…Who owns extranational branch buildings and properties?

…How is the . . . governing body chosen? How are the members of the boards of directors of your corporations chosen? What is the difference between the governing body and the boards of directors?

…How are new buildings financed?

…May I know what architect and what construction firm you have employed for your buildings on Columbia Heights?

…Does the money contributed to the U.S. corporations get funneled to other countries in which you operate ? What is the vehicle for the transfer of funds?…

This letter went unanswered. Other writers have encountered the same indifference: Lee R. Cooper, who has written a brilliant paper on black Witnesses' adaptation in the ghetto, reports that "The Society's suspicion of outside investigators was a problem to consider in my approach to the West View [Philadelphia] congregation. . . . I made no effort to contact supervisory personnel or the Society’s headquarters because past experiences indicated that requests for information would be unanswered and might have adverse repercussions for research.” [Z&L, p. 706)

Financing of Watchtower properties in 1926, 1946, and 1955 is explained:

Instead of borrowing money from a bank, we had borrowed it from our own people and the Society gave them a note at the regular rate of interest. It was understood by those receiving notes that they could request their money in full at any time if they might unexpectedly have need for it. These received their money at once and the rest were paid off as the regular voluntary contributions made it possible. Before the notes had matured, all had been settled. [Ibid., p. 2 10]

In order to arrive at some idea of the financial base of the Society's publishing operation, Cooper [Z&L, p. 717] made some calculations from a Society statistical report for November, 1968.

In November, 1968 (according to Kingdom Ministry, the Watchtower Society's monthly newsletter), 817,776 copies of The Truth That Leads to Everlasting Life were sold at 25 cents per copy. This "would amount," Cooper calculates, "to over two hundred thousand dollars ($204,444). Added to this would be the income from six million weekly copies of the bi-monthly magazines Awake! and The Watchtower, a monthly sum approximating one million two hundred thousand dollars, an equal amount resting in the hands of the 338,663 'publishers' who had 'placed' the magazines for ten cents a copy. On these two published items alone, the Society would well have grossed one million four hundred thousand dollars in one month."

Cooper was working with 1968 statistics for the United States alone. If we look at worldwide statistics for 1974, the suggested gross is larger: in 1974, according to the 1975 Yearbook, 27,581,852 bound books were distributed, and 273,238,018 magazines, in addition to 12,409,287 booklets.

Most of these publications were sold for a nominal amount; some were distributed free. The Society gives a 10- to 20-percent rebate on all literature-sold by local congregations; Witnesses buy the literature they distribute for less than the "contribution" they solicit. They keep, on the average, 10 cents out of every $1 contribution they receive.

A spokesperson for the Society explains the process: "Today, much of the money that is used to carry on the work is spent out of the pocket of the individual minister of Jehovah's witnesses as he engages in the work himself. . . . They pay the printing cost of books they receive from the Society and contributions they receive for them are used to obtain more. If they give literature away, this money is out of their own pocket. . . .The contribution is figured to cover little more than printing cost." [Faith, p. 206,207]

No money is ever solicited at meetings of Jehovah's Witnesses; there is, however, a "Contribution Box" in every Kingdom Hall. Local congregations buy, rent, renovate, or erect their meeting places, "Kingdom Halls," with their own funds; often free labor is provided by the Witnesses, who are proud that they do not have to borrow from worldly commercial organizations, but are able to use the funds set aside for the benefit of the chosen of Jehovah.

An idea of the magnitude of Watchtower operations is suggested by the fact that in 1971, according to the 1972 Yearbook (p. 255), $7,042,020.01 was contributed toward "expansion" and toward the care and feeding of foreign missionaries (who are now provided with room and board and $40 a month).

The public financial facts have not been sufficient to still conjectures in Brooklyn Heights, where the bulk of Watchtower property holdings is concentrated. The Society has been tangling with Heights residents since 1913.

In that year, angry residents of Brooklyn Heights hired a lawyer and brought Russell's financial officers before the City's Board of Tax Commissioners, demanding to know why properties held by the People's Pulpit Association and the Watch Tower Society should be tax-exempt. Treasurer Van Amburgh steered a course through the labyrinth of interlocking corporations and private individuals who held mortgages on property used by the Watch Tower Society, arguing that the properties were used solely and wholly for religious purposes. The Heights residents contended that all Watch Tower premises were used and occupied solely for business purposes and that the Watch Tower Society should be obliged to pay taxes on the property at 122-124 Columbia Heights (assessed, then, at $ 100,000) and on the Tabernacle at Hicks Street (assessed, in 1912, for $20,000). The ruling went against Russell (who was vacationing in Bermuda) and against the Watch Tower Society. The ruling, however, was overturned by the New York Supreme Court; and tax exemption was again affirmed in a 1915 ruling of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court.

In 1971, real estate held in the name of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society in New York City was valued by the City Tax Commission at $14 million. The city ended the tax exemption the Society had enjoyed for most of its history under a 1971 law that permitted taxation of nonprofit organizations that were "not organized or conducted exclusively for religious" purposes. The State Legislature had permitted cities to restore to tax rolls all property except that "used exclusively for religious, charitable, hospital, educational, moral or mental improvement of men, women and children." Under protest, the Society paid $2 million to the city.

On July 11, 1974, in a unanimous opinion written by Associate Judge Hugh Jones, the Court of Appeals ruled that the Witnesses were "organized and conducted exclusively for religious purposes within the meaning of the statute.” Tax exemption was ordered restored. "Administration of the religious organization of Jehovah's Witnesses," the Court ruled, "stems from the governing body 'at the international headquarters in Brooklyn, New York. The doctrines and beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses are first promulgated by this governing body and then published either in The Watchtower or some of the other official publications of the society."

In a previous decision, in May, 1973, the Court of Appeals, New York State's highest court, had ruled against continuing tax exemption for the Association of the Bar of the City of New York and the Explorers Club, holding unanimously that neither was primarily charitable or educational. The Court said that tax-exempt property had increased to a third of the city's assessed valuation and 30 percent throughout the state. It pointed, in its decision, to estimates that half of all properties would be exempt by 1981 unless trends were reversed.

Early on the morning of Monday, November 18, 1974, a pipe-bomb explosion ripped open an 1ron gate and shattered windows in the Watchtower Society's printing complex. The police could suggest no motive for the crime. No one was willing to believe the bombing was a reaction to the Court’s ruling; but the Heights' usually civic-minded residents, while deploring the violent act, exhibited no surge of neighborly goodwill. A community leader expressed the majority sentiment:

"While they're smiling and peddling sweet salvation, they're acting like Godzilla, gobbling up property, evicting people as if we were squatters on land which will eventually belong to them anyhow-when Jehovah gets rid of us. They don't mug anybody, they maintain their property well . . . but they don't pay taxes, and they don't contribute to communal life. How can you preach everlasting life and at the same time not care about people who have lived here all their lives? There are 1500 Witnesses living among us in their headquarters buildings, but they might as well be surrounded by a moat. It's as if we were living with a medieval commune in our midst."

In the aftermath of the explosion, Jerry Molohan, the Society's public relations officer, said that the Witnesses did not work with community groups because "Witnesses stay out of political affairs . . . . .They don't get involved in our activities, and we don't get involved in theirs." [New York Post, Nov 19, 1974)

But the Witnesses are not seen as passive. Dealing in some of the most lucrative urban property in the world has social consequences which involve them-no matter how they protest-in the affairs of the community as landlords. They are, calculatedly or not, involved.

1n 1965, Brooklyn Heights, with its early-19th-century frame houses, its Gothic Revival structures, its imposing churches and Federal buildings and Victorian brownstones and carriage houses, was designated a National Landmark Area. The 50-block National Landmark boasted 663 pre-Civil War structures. But the Heights was more than a chaste and classical aesthetic oasis in the decaying city. Within its confines lived not only the genteel, elegant rich, but a large number of

middle-class families in rent-controlled apartments, and working-class Irish and Italian families. The Heights managed to be both stuffy and flamboyant: Young Junior League matrons dressed in bright yellow coats from Bergdorf s watched their toddlers play in sandboxes, and homosexuals strolled hand in hand along the Heights Promenade. It was a community that was justly proud of its tolerant diversity.

In July, 1968, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society went before the City's Landmarks Preservation Commission to obtain a "certificate of appropriateness" for a proposed $4-million dormitory and classroom building-a terraced structure with overhanging gardens and a slender, graceful stair tower-at Pineapple Street and Columbia Heights. The Society had at first proposed a twelve-story building; Heights residents, who tend to avert their eyes from the tall Watchtower dormitory and office buildings that are a jarring interruption to the generally uniform cornice line of Columbia Heights (the neighborhood's most noble and elegant street), protested ardently. The Brooklyn Heights Association threw itself passionately into a course of action designed to forestall the erection of what one architect called another "dead-and-stranded ocean-liner-type building." Acceding to community pressure, the Society scaled its building down to six stories and agreed to wrap its new structure around the front of three existing town houses. The capitulation did not silence the critics.

(The late Nathan Homer Knorr, the Society's third president-a steak and-potatoes man who was as small-town-American as rhubarb pie--once, in a private talk to members of the Bethel family, described the whole of Europe as a junk shop fit to be leveled by a wrecker's ball. Knorr had no affection for classical architecture- it collects dirt and one gets lost in it. He was proud of the pastel sprays of flowers on each bedroom wall of the 122 Columbia Heights residence, painted, he said, by a lady who used to "decorate for Hollywood stars," and of the Cecil B. De Mille Biblical murals the lady executed for the headquarters meeting hall. There are no paintings in the public quarters of that building. It isn't surprising that the "terraced gardens" of the 1968 blueprint now have an abundance of plastic philodendron.)

In 1969, according to deeds and tax-exemption records, the Watchtower Society owned, in addition to its printing complex, three prime residential blocks, from Orange Street to Clark Street, on Columbia Heights. According to a Daily News reporter, Sylvia Carter, "Residents suspect . . . that the Society has, in fact, bought up adjoining property in private names. [Max] Larson [overseer in charge of printing operations] says individual names are listed on property records so officials have someone to contact about a building. All buildings are legal Witnesses property, they insist. Property questioned by tenants could not be traced, through deeds and tax-exemption records, to the Watchtower Society. But several owner corporations for buildings in the area could not be located at addresses listed on city records." [Daily News, March 9, 1969]

Heights merchant and realtor Bernard Atkins, who papers the windows of his florist shop on Montague Street, the main shopping artery for Brooklyn Heights, with Magic Marker manifestoes about the state of the nation and of the world, said, in one of his weekly position papers, "The Jehovah's Witnesses . . . embark upon a program of using their tax-free millions to swallow up building after building until they own a major portion of the Heights, a portion on which they pay almost no taxes and contribute nothing to the life of the community except for destroying lovely old brownstone houses and erecting ugly, modern structures." His wife, Charlotte Atkins, well known in the Heights for her support of community causes, was less formal and considerably more bitter. She suggests that the Watchtower Society "hits people with offers of cold cash ... they're blockbusting, buying buildings for more than they're worth, making offers that can't be refused. They're eating us up in a silent, deathly way." Her wrath is compounded by the fact that a Watchtower proselytizer once told her husband, Bernard, "I see only death in your eyes." Charlotte Atkins, the kind of noisy busybody no neighborhood can survive without, says, "Next to the Witnesses, Burger King and McDonald's and Kentucky Fried are aesthetic geniuses and angels of light." Charlotte's charge of blockbusting pressure tactics cannot be supported by the known facts, but her bitterness is shared by many merchants.

In local Irish bars, working-class men (who have an imperfect knowledge of the way the Witnesses train their own people to be sophisticated mechanics, craftsmen, and artisans in the Watchtower printery) excoriate the Witnesses for using nonunion labor. They circulate ugly, unproved rumors to the effect that licensed plumbers and electricians have been approached and asked to say they have done jobs in fact done by nonlicensed Witness workers, in contravention of city building codes.

Former State Senator (now City Council President) Carol Bellamy, who, along with Assemblyman Mike Pesce, has worked with tenant groups threatened with eviction by the Watchtower Society, says, "We had a sense of dubious property holdings; we couldn't prove it." Bellamy also says, with no little amazement, that during all the time she has been in office she has never been called on for help by the Society: "Every other religious group, every other corporate entity has had occasion to call on me.... And every time my office has called them, on behalf of tenants, they yielded nothing. They have made themselves totally inaccessible. They were acting within their legal rights; what we construed to be the social and human rights of our constituents was of no concern to them."

In recent years, most of the community's animosity has focused on the Watchtower Society's ownership of two properties: a rent-controlled apartment house at One Clark Street and the once-fashionable Towers Hotel at 25 Clark Street.

The Society bought One Clark Street in 1967. Proceeding under the 1969 rent regulations which permitted landlords to evict tenants when apartments were required for the landlord's use, the Society served eviction notices on the building's 42 middle-class families, many of whom were paying a monthly rent of only $150. The Society offered to pay relocation expenses required under law; but the tenants' response was "Where are we going to move to?" Many of the tenants-some of whom had children enrolled in local public schools-felt that they were being pushed out of reasonable city housing into the suburbs by a vast, impersonal force. They grouped together to form the One Clark Street Tenants Association. At one point, three hundred residents of the Heights, most of them elderly women, staged a "flower promenade" protest against the evictions. They carried daffodils.

Flower power proved unavailing. By 1971 only 12 of the original tenants remained-the rest had departed because of constant harassment, according to the testimony of one resident before the Brooklyn Supreme Court. Dr. Harlow Fischman, a biologist, testified that he had complained to city agencies and the Watchtower Society about loud noises, filth, and lack of services.

As tenants moved out, young male headquarters workers moved in, converting apartments into dorms. Doors of apartments undergoing conversion remained open, according to the tenants; the halls were liberally coated with plaster dust. From time to time there were electricity blackouts, the tenants alleged, and no heat or hot water. One young mother remarked, as she departed for the suburbs, "These are the people who are going to transform the earth into a paradise, right? So far they've succeeded in turning a lot of people-some of them old and sick-out of their apartments. They've transformed city families into suburban families."

To such charges, the Watchtower spokesmen replied that the Witnesses too were really one large family. "How many families," retorted one householder, "do you find who don't have the gas turned on or use a stove, who take ten baths at once so the ceiling leaks, who have their beds made and laundry done each day by a sort of central housekeeping service, or who conduct wrestling matches at midnight?" Most tenants of One Clark Street recited a ritualistic liberal litany: "The Witnesses are good people, they're dedicated to their faith, we don't oppose their religious views. We just don't think they're considering the moral rights of the tenants of the buildings they buy." The Witnesses did not publicly interpret the resistance to their actions as an act of Satanic opposition to the message of the children of light, as they have sometimes done in the past. Heights community leaders have complained about title-abstract companies, insurance firms, trade associations, and other nonresidential users for converting brownstones into offices in the face of a citywide housing emergency. It was the Witnesses' role as businessmen that was being objected to, not their vocation as preachers.

The remaining tenants won what community leaders regard as a pyrrhic victory: they secured in the courts the right to stay in their apartments until they chose to move of their own accord. Nothing in law obliged the Watchtower Society to keep the building on the rental market. “I feel as if I'm living on a movie set in my own apartment,” one tenant said. "All these earnest young men with briefcases and crewcuts and white socks marching in and out of the halls . . . .My son said to me, 'Daddy, when are we going to live in a real house again?’”

Still smarting from what one tenant called "an invasion of people who think we're aliens," the residents of the Heights began again to organize when, in 1974-five years after a Watchtower spokesman assured the press that further expansion plans were not under "current consideration--rumors began to circulate that the Witnesses were about to buy the sixteen-story Towers Hotel. On August 10, 1974, 100 tenants of the 480-room hotel at 25 Clark Street, most of them middle-aged and elderly working people, were served eviction notices so that the owner-operator of the residential hotel could rent five additional floors to the Watchtower society, which already occupied five floors of the shabby but still elegant hotel. Some of the tenants uneasily speculated that the management of the hotel wanted them out so that the property could be sold to the Watchtower Society. Bellamy and Assemblyman Pesce exhorted the tenants not to panic. The Watchtower Society would not respond to Carol Bellamy’s phone calls. The Society's spokesman, Jerry Molohan, denied that the Witnesses were planning to buy the Towers. On November 19, 1974 he Said, "I know of no plans to do so. What the future holds I don't know. At the moment it's the hotel's problem, not ours."

Early in 1975, the Watchtower Society bought the Towers Hotel.

(There is now speculation, among those who are close to the inner workings of the Watchtower Society, that the Towers has been bought as a residence for those of the Witnesses who expect, after Armageddon, to be part of the 144,000-member ruling class that will oversee the earthly paradise from thrones approximate to Jesus' in the heavens. If this seems too quaint to credit, it is to be remembered that, in 1929 the Witnesses built a palatial home in San Diego, California, in order to accommodate David, Moses, Isaac, Abraham, and the Hebrew prophets, whom they expected, then, to make a pre-Armageddon appearance in order to prepare earthlings for the apocalypse. Beth-Sarim, the California property, was used "in fact" as the residence of J. F. Rutherford, second president of the Watchtower Society. Claiming ill health, "Judge" Rutherford occupied the twenty-room Spanish mansion, valued at $1 million, as a "caretaker." The 1975 Yearbook of Jehovah's Witnesses states that this watering place cum resurrection waiting room was financed by "a direct contribution. . . . not at the expense of the Watchtower Society." [p. 194] One wonders why this disclaimer is necessary if indeed it was believed that this home was intended not as a kind of miniature San Simeon for Rutherford, but as a dormitory for "ancient worthies. " [p. 146) According to Current Biography, 1940, "to avoid legal trouble the deed [to Beth-Sarim was] drawn in the prophets' name." The Witnesses' combination of acute business acumen and eccentric, picturesque doctrine is mind-boggling. While the Witnesses prepare to inherit the earth, their leaders are not prepared to accept second-class accommodations under the existing order. (If the meek are going to inherit the earth, they might as well start off in good neighborhoods.)

It is a sign of the frightened times that contrapuntal voices are now being raised against the chorus of bitterness in Brooklyn Heights. It is still safe to say that most Heights residents deplore the Watchtower Society's tactics. Preservationists for whom the architectural integrity of the Heights is a passion react with snobbish venom to the Witnesses' version of architecture. Small merchants are resentful of a financially self-contained community in their midst. Workers deplore the Witnesses' use of nonunion labor. People who are concerned with the flight of the middle

class from the city-and those who are concerned with the old, sick, and socially dislocated-are enraged. However, there are those who are now inclined to tolerate their massive presence. The Witnesses may wake them up on Sunday mornings with their less-than-glad tidings; but they are safe neighbors. The Witnesses are now seen, among many Heights residents, as "a buffer against decay."

An insurance-trade newspaper called The Search, noting that hotels have become havens for addicts and "derelicts," praises the new ownership of the Towers: It has "infused a new quality. . . . Premises have been . . . repaired and maintained by expert workmen, with cleanliness, order and dignity." The new residents, Witnesses, have "added a new dimension to the safety and well-being of the community. The public press and other spokesmen have commented upon the presence of ‘these clean-cut, decent, moral, high-value persons' as a buffer to the negative changing conditions in the neighborhood. Elderly people, as well, have indicated a feeling of safe-being because of their presence." [See TW, Oct. 15, 1975.]

(Each time the Watchtower Society annexes more Heights property, however, the residents of the Heights revert to a siege mentality-as they did when it was rumored that the Consolidated Edison Company was planning "to sell or give [as a tax write-off] the Empire Stores warehouse and nine acres of prime Fulton Ferry waterfront land" to the Witnesses. [Phoenix, Brooklyn, March 24, 1977) Con Ed-which has fought Landmark status for this property-advertised the sale of the land and property in The New York Times (March 20 and 27, 1977); minimum asking price was $1 million. The Witnesses have been "renting" a part of the property as a parking lot. According to one official of Con Ed, however, "no money has changed hands between us-and the Witnesses have improved the property, installing fences and lighting." New York Landmarks Commission Chairperson Beverly Moss, who insists that the property "belongs in the public domain," said she was "confused and upset" by Con Ed's move to dispose of the property, which has been called one of the most important historical areas in Brooklyn, if not the most important. Watchtower representative Robert Jankowski told one reporter, "It's Con Ed's property. You can draw any conclusions you wish, but there won't be anything said about it." It's remarks like that which make Heights residents nervous.)

The Witnesses are a bastion of law and order in Brooklyn Heights; they irritate people, but they are beginning less and less to frighten them. They commend themselves to the bewildered, terrified elderly residents of the Heights, and to large segments of the middle class, which is convinced of its impotence.

As I was writing this, a friend told me this story: In a fit of absentmindedness, she had left her Gucci handbag (credit cards, keys, money, airline tickets) on a crosstown bus. An hour later, she received a phone call frorn a young black man who said that he'd found her handbag and would be glad to go out of his way to deliver it to her. As she waited, she received another phone call, this one from the man's mother: A want you to know," the woman said, "that the reason my son is returning your pocketbook is that we are Jehovah's Witnesses. We don't steal. We are honest people." The Watchtower and Awake! magazines are full of such testimonials to the Witnesses' personal honesty; they are true.

Testimony of Maria Russell, questioned by the Chairman of the City Board of Tax Commissioners, 1913:

CHAIRMAN: Does your husband get any return from the corporation beyond his expenses and a fair compensation for his work?

MRS. R: I don't know that he gets any money, but he seems to get everything that a man of wealth could desire. He travels in the best style whenever he wants to; goes round the world, to California or Europe, on occasions, and all his expenses are paid out of the funds of the Watch Tower Society. CHAIRMAN: Does he hold any property in his own name?

MRS. R.: No, I don't think so. He wouldn't dare do that, because then I might have a claim on it through my dower rights.

There is nothing to support a notion that any official of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society is amassing personal wealth. Some officials of the Society have lived and do five as if they were wealthy.

Control of the total organization is concentrated in a self-perpetuating group of officers, who appoint all supervisors and local congregational leaders; they "make reproofs and corrections and direct the conduct of the organization." [JWDP] All decisions and appointments handed down from the Society's headquarters are thought to have Jehovah's imprimatur.

Under Russell's presidency each $10 contribution to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania (parent organization of New York's Watchtower Bible and Tract Society and the International Bible Students Association) represented one voting share. In 1917, the Society's second president, J. F. Rutherford, moved to democratize the organization--or at least to provide the "Bible Students" with some feeling that they had a voice in corporate proceedings. He wished, inasmuch as "many of the Lord's dear children are poor in . . . worldly goods," to avoid the suggestion that "lucre" was "speaking for the Lord"; he proposed that every ecclesia (congregation) hold a general meeting to "vote upon their choice for members of the Board of Directors and Officers of the Society." The vote would not constitute a legal election, but would be "advisory, or in the nature of instructions to the Shareholders as to what is the will of the church at large." [The Watch Tower, Nov. 1, 1917, pp. 330-32)

During the 1920s and '30s, it became apparent to Rutherford that organizational survival and expansion depended on centralization of all powers in the governing body. In 1932, "elective elders" were replaced in the congregations "by a group of mature brothers called a 'service committee,' who were elected by the congregation to assist the local service director appointed by the Society." [Yearbook, 1975, p. 165] Elections, however, led to divisiveness at a time when it was crucial, in view of external pressures, for the Society to maintain a united front. In 1938 voting powers were removed from local congregations; the power to appoint overseers and their assistants was delivered to the Society. This was an arrangement, according to A. H. MacMillan, that would "continue into the new world and for a thousand years of Christ's reign." [Faith, p. 159] The arrangement was also viewed as analogous to Solomon's building of "the temple, the king's palace, and the house of the forest of Lebanon for judgment." [Ibid.]

The Witnesses reckon that their organization began to be "strengthened in 1918." It took Solomon twenty years to build his empire, and it took them twenty years to build theirs: The " 'twentieth year' ends with the beginning of the spring of 1938, and hence corresponds with the (lunar) year 1937 which ends in the spring of 1938. (JWDP, pp. 127-49) Some Witnesses were unable to swallow the analogy; in 1932 and in 1938 there were mass defections: "Those who opposed or resisted the theocratic arrangement," it was explained, "were not opposing or resisting men; they were striving against the spirit of God." [Faith, pp. 157; see also Yearbook,1975, pp. 164-249.)

Under the leadership of Nathan H. Knorr, the organization was further theocratized"-which is to say, centralized in a self-perpetuating rule.

There are no longer any stockholders in the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. In 1944, the Charter of the Society was amended; fixed membership was no longer contingent upon monetary contributions. Membership was limited to no more than 500 men, "all chosen on the basis of their active service to God." Each corporation has a Board of Directors." In addition to these men, there is a central I8-man religious "governing body." The governing body, which meets weekly in Brooklyn, makes secular and religious decisions (the Witnesses, of course, would not recognize the distinction-the work of the governing body is, to them, by nature all spiritual), which are then implemented by the Boards of Directors. Membership in these bodies frequently overlaps.

The [Pennsylvania] Society has a board of seven directors, for the management of the society’s affairs. According to the Society’s charter, at each annual meeting members of the Board of Directors are elected by all the incumbent members of the Society. After such annual election [held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania] the Board of Directors elects its own officers, such as president of the Society, etc. According to the terms of the Charter the Society acts as the ‘administrative agency' for all of Jehovah's Christian Witnesses earthwide." -TW, Jan. 15, 1976

In 1976, a further change was made in the structure of the governing body: "To facilitate its works, six committees of the Governing Body have been formed. Each will have its Chairman, who will serve for a period of one year. These Committees are supervisory in nature and it is not intended that they will handle all the details and routine work. The various corporations that have been serving the Kingdom interests so well until now will, of course, continue to fulfill their important role as legal agencies of Jehovah's witnesses, their Governing Body and its committees.

“These six committees, which began functioning on January 1, 1976, are as follows: Service Committee; Writing Committee; Publishing Committee; Teaching Committee; Personnel Committee; Chairman's Committee." [TW, Feb. 1, 1976)

This splintering of responsibility gave rise to the conjecture that Knorr-who was then 71 and reputed to be in failing health-had lost his grip on the Society's affairs.

Nathan Homer Knorr, who was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on April 23, 1905, died of a cancerous tumor on June 8, 1977. He was 72; He had been president of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society since January 13, 1942. His wife, Audrey Mock Knorr, once a Bethel housekeeper, survives him.

As a youngster, Knorr attended the Dutch Reformed Church. When he was 16, he read some Watchtower publications, and he later joined a local Bible Study group. When he graduated from high school in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Knorr became a full-time preacher, and he joined the headquarters staff soon thereafter. He rose from a job in the shipping department to become coordinator of all printing operations. In 1932 he was named general manager of the publishing-office plant. Knorr became vice-president of the Watchtower Society in 1935; seven years later, when he was 37 years old, he became the Society's president.

Upon Knorr’s death, Frederick W. Franz, who was 83 years old, became president of the Watchtower Society by unanimous vote of the Board of Directors.

Franz was born in Covington, Kentucky, in 1893 and terminated his studies at the University of Cincinnati to become a full-time preacher in 1914. A member of the headquarters staff since June 2, 1920, he became a director of the Pennsylvania corporation in 1943 and vice-president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania in 1945; he became a director of the New York corporation in 1949.

Franz is a bachelor. He has taught himself several languages, including Hebrew and Greek, and is regarded by the Witnesses as their foremost Bible scholar:

In regard to doctrinal material, for many years Rutherford [Knorr's predecessor] had leaned heavily on the keen Bible brain of Fred Franz. Nathan Knorr had managed the business of the legal corporations for so long that by unanimous quiet consent he automatically slipped into the presidency. [Cole, p. 107)

I remember Franz as an ascetic, kindly man, with an engaging sense of humor and a gift for self-mockery. Much loved by the Witnesses, he is as unworldly as Knorr was businesslike. When I knew him, he was adorably sweet-spirited (though, from my point of view, maddeningly earnest when it came to dogma). A flamboyant orator, he was personally reticent, though not inaccessible. He seemed to have scant regard for his personal appearance; still slim and handsome in his 60s, he was as likely as not to be found shuffling around headquarters in bedroom slippers and mismatched socks. His minor, unselfconscious eccentricities of dress and demeanor, and a nature that was by turns reclusive and gregarious, endeared him to all of the headquarters staff. I have never met a Witness who did not like Franz. He seemed never to have incurred the animosity that Russell, Rutherford, and Knorr, all in their turn, did. It was regarded as an honor to be invited to his Spartan room.

(I think he liked me very much; when I left Bethel, at a time when Franz was secluding himself in one of the Society's country properties, he was reported to have said, "She would never have left if I had been there to help her." I still have a lingering affection for him-and choose to read that remark as one of loving concern rather than of arrogance.)

Franz's great age has necessitated further changes in the Society's structure: each corporation now has not one but, for the first time in Watchtower history, two vice-presidents. Society spokesman Robert Janowski reports "no basic change" in the Society, in spite of death and new appointments. "The organization will continue to be run by a committee arrangement," he said. "Brother Franz was elected president to satisfy legal requirements; spiritual matters will not be affected.” On the next rung of the hierarchical ladder, beneath the Society's officers, are supervisory officials known as district- and circuit-overseers. These men, frequently accompanied by their wives, visit each congregation twice a year, instructing congregational elders and accompanying Witnesses from door to door to help perfect their proselytizing techniques. They inspect and audit local finances, and they file with headquarters confidential progress reports on each congregation as well as a "Personal Qualifications Report" on elders and potential leaders.

Each congregation has a self-perpetuating, non-elected committee that makes recommendations to the Society, for appointing overseers and "ministerial servants." All baptized men over 20 are considered for these positions. Meetings of the committee are characterized by a kind of Maoist self-criticism (in the interest of "honesty and humility"-Yearbook, 1971). Each year congregational elders rotate positions so no one enjoys the position of presiding overseer for an entire year. (Loyalty is thus given to the governing body, rather than to an individual, and power is concentrated in the Society.)

No one-from the Society's president to a presiding overseer in Absalom County, Missouri-Is paid for his services.

The question of whether anyone is amassing personal wealth does not arise at the congregational level, where elders and overseers may be fulltime preachers or have full- or part-time secular work, but receive no remuneration from the Society.

It doesn't arise at the circuit- or district-overseer level either. These men are given modest monthly allowances by the Society, which barely cover transportation costs. Within the Watchtower hierarchy, the come closest to being servi servorum Dei-servants of the servants of God. (The Witnesses refuse to apply the word hierarchy to themselves, reserving it as a pejorative term for the Catholic Church. They are all brothers.) The peripatetic life of these circuit and district emissaries is sometimes grueling, and almost always destructive of marital privacy. They have no homes of their own; they are transients, living out of suitcases in homes of the local congregations they serve.

Depending on the affluence of the territory assigned them, their accommodations may vary from a poolside villa in Southern California to a curtained-off alcove in an Appalachian shack with no plumbing. They are honored guests wherever they stay; but in their role as spiritual exemplars, their public lives and their private lives meld, their private lives subsumed into their public lives.

It is only at the highest echelons of the Society that the question of money and life-style becomes interesting. Nathan Knorr received the same $20 monthly allowance as does the humblest shipping clerk at the Bethel factory, and as F. W. Franz does now.

Leaders of charismatic sects, splashy showmen like the Reverend Ike and the Guru Maharaj-ji, advertise and have fancy rationales for their lavish life-style-a life-style that tends to make the followers of such men feel rich by association. Knorr neither mortified the flesh nor surrounded himself with pomp, purple, and majesty. He lived like a moneyed business executive. He kept a distinctly low profile in a penthouse apartment at 122 Columbia Heights.

Knorr lived, as do a handful of other high officials (and their wives), in a suite of rooms overlooking the East River. (Franz lives rather simply.) Other Bethelites-including married couples-live two to a pleasant room and share communal toilets and baths. Knorr, in a self-contained apartment, had a valet and ate meals prepared for him in his own kitchen. Certainly no more than one would expect for the leader of a 2-million-member sect, this was remarkable only in the face of his protestations that he enjoyed no extraordinary privileges, and the fact that the Witnesses chose to take him at his word.

It is not easy to support leisure, and difficult to support vice, on $20 a month. Fortunate Bethelites occasionally get gifts of money or clothing from family or friends, so that they can live in some degree of comfort. Those who don't sharpen their razor blades on glass to make them last, or darn nylon stockings. Knorr, who regarded such minor deprivations as salutary, accepted the gift of a television set at a time when he was advising the rest of us at Bethel that to buy or watch television was to sell our time to the Devil.

Watchtower-owned cars are used for more than just official purposes. This is standard business procedure; it's just that the Watchtower Society purports to be different.

For a time, the Watchtower Society owned a yacht, which was used to carry missionaries to places inaccessible by land. I know that the yacht was used for pleasure purposes, because I've been on it: one night, when the ship was docked in New York Harbor, one of Knorr's aides invited a group of young men and women on board to drink and dance. I remember how carelessly we threw our beer cans overboard. (The destruction of the environment was not then used as one of the indications that we are living in the "last days." The Society, just like you and me learned about the ecological crisis from the media and the scientists it despises, not through divine inspiration, and then turned around and triumphantly said, We told you so.)

We at Bethel used to point with pride to the fact that while missionaries of "false religion" traveled in first-class comfort to their assignments, our missionaries were sent third class and, like a religious Peace Corps, lived like the people among whom they served. It never occurred to us to worry that Knorr traveled first class. We were an adaptive group.

The phenomenon of denying the evidence, and making no connections or faulty connections, is common to all people whose need to believe overcomes their rational judgment. Faced with the fact that some of their leaders have been suspected of hitting the bottle with a passion, confronted with the rumors that a small brothel was once maintained on Willow Street in Columbia Heights for the entertainment of Bethelites around mid-century, Witnesses' eyes glaze, and they will either refuse to countenance the charges or stoutly maintain that God's servants are "imperfect vessels.”

Time speaks softly of the dead. In the case of the Witnesses, it is often mute. The Witnesses have notoriously short and selective memories. The Society smothers unsavory parts of its past under the blanket of its current preoccupations. During the 1940s and early '50s, when I was a Witness and a member of the headquarters staff, it was as if Charles Taze Russell had never existed. This vivid, controversial personality had at best a shadow life; he was seldom, if ever, spoken of. Any discussion of him was likely to be aborted with the phrase "We are not followers of any man." The Society does not talk unkindly of its dead; it doesn't talk of them. It was not until the mid and late '50s that edited accounts of Russell's life and activities began to appear in Watchtower histories. Merciful time (with help from revisionist historians) has blurred Russell's difficulties. In Watchtower histories, the man who died on October 31, 1916, with $200 in a personal bank account-having invested his money in the Society in return for voting shares that gave him complete financial control-goes down as a simple, homey man.

Though I became a Witness in 1944, two years after the death of Judge Joseph F. Rutherford, Russell's successor, I never heard of the scandal that had attached to him. When I was at Bethel, I heard murmurings, from those who had known him, that Rutherford had been a stern and intimidating man. But there was a general silence and lack of specificity. I never learned what longtime residents meant when they alluded to Rutherford's abrasiveness-or to traitors in their midst who had made devilish capital of it. What they had in mind, I now know, was the Moyle case-which has not yet been cosmeticized like the "miracle wheat" and the Jellyfish episodes. The Moyle Case has no place in the Society's official histories.

In 1943, Olin R. Moyle, who had been general counsel under Rutherford, brought a $100,000 libel suit against eleven leaders of the Society and against the Watchtower corporations. The Appellate Division upheld the verdict of the Brooklyn Supreme Court, modifying it to reduce damages from $30,000 to $15,000.

In 1934, Moyle had divested himself of his material possessions and given up a lucrative law practice to live at Bethel with his wife and son and to serve as the Society's general counsel, receiving, like all his fellow volunteers then, $10 a month for his services. Five years later, he wrote a private letter (dated July 21, 1939) to Judge Rutherford in which he charged Rutherford with encouraging lewdness and drunkenness; with being extraordinarily harsh to members of the Bethel staff who incurred his displeasure; and with living like a man of wealth:

"Shortly after our coming to Bethel," Moyle wrote, "we were shocked to witness the spectacle of our brethren receiving a trimming from you. C. J. Woodworth got a tongue lashing and was humiliated and called a jackass for saying that it served the devil to continue the present-day calendar. Knorr and others were similarly treated. Unfair reproaches have been given and your action violated freedom of speech. [You] called the . . . ushers who were at the Madison Square Garden convention sissies."

Earlier in 1939, rowdies who were presumed to be followers of Father Charles Coughlin, a dissident and anti-Semitic Catholic priest who was subsequently silenced, disrupted a rally in Madison Square Garden; Witnesses acting as ushers, armed with canes for the purpose of quelling interference, were arrested and charged with assault. Moyle defended the ushers, who were subsequently acquitted, in court.

We publish that all in the Lord's organization are alike [Moyle wrote]. You know that this is not the case. Take for instance the difference between the accommodations furnished to you and your personal attendants compared to those furnished to some of the brethren. You have many homes- Bethel, Staten Island, California-and even at Kingdom Farm. I am informed one house has been kept for your sole use during the short periods you spend there. And what do the brethren at the farm receive? Small rooms, unheated through the bitter cold winter; they live in their trunks, like campers.

On the question of marriage of those who live at Bethel there is unequal and discriminatory treatment. One brother who left Bethel to get married was refused the privilege of pioneering (preaching full time) in New York as disapproval of his leaving Bethel. On the other hand, when Bonnie Boyd (J.F. R.'s confidential secretary] married she didn't leave Bethel and was permitted to bring in her husband in spite of the rule. . . .

The Biblical injunctions against unclean, filthy speaking and jesting have never been abrogated. It is shocking and nauseating to hear vulgar speaking and smut at Bethel and it is stated by a sister that the loudest laughter at table arises when a filthy joke goes through; and your skirts are not

clean.

Under your tutelage there has grown up a glorification of alcohol…There appears to be a definite Policy of breaking in newcomers in the use of liquor, and resentment is shown against those who do not join them . . . . .Teetotalers are looked on as weaklings.

With the letter of July 21, which he signed "Your brother in the King's service," Moyle tendered his resignation, to take effect September 1. Rutherford read the letter to the Bethel Family; he denounced Moyle when the 100-member staff was assembled for a meal in the Bethel dining room and ordered the Moyles to leave Bethel immediately. Moyle moved to Wisconsin. Following hard on his heels was one of Rutherford's "troubleshooters," Malcolm A. Howlett, a director of the Society. Howlett organized meetings for the purpose of telling Wisconsin Witnesses that Moyle had been excommunicated for "unfaithfulness to the organization." As a result, Moyle's attorney argued in court, Moyle was shunned by friends and clients and fellow Witnesses, and obliged to forsake his law practice. Subsequently, two articles in The Watchtower described Moyle as a "manpleaser," a "murmurer and complainer"; Watchtower articles accused him of not properly defending ushers who had been charged with assault at Madison Square Garden, and called him "a servant of the Evil One," a "Judas."

Moyle’s attorney, Walter Bruchhausen, told Supreme Court Justice Henry L. Ughetta and a jury that Moyle had been "hounded…libeled and pursued because he dared to disagree with the ruthless Rutherford. . . . Rutherford became so obsessed with his power that he rode it ruthlessly, and would not tolerate those who dared to disagree with [him]."

Moyle testified that Judge Rutherford shouted angrily at members of the Bethel Family who disagreed with him or did things he disapproved of: "I was in court as attorney for some of Jehovah's Witnesses and with opposing counsel held a conference. Someone told a story. Everyone laughed and Judge Rutherford heard about it and said I was a manpleaser."

One of the Witnesses for the defense was William J. Heath, a director of the Society and the husband Of Bonnie Boyd, a man who traveled extensively with Rutherford and was on close personal terms with him. Heath, who had gotten punched in the eye in the Madison Square Garden fracas, testified that he had been surprised when Moyle, acting as his attorney, fraternized amiably with the lawyer who was representing his assailant. Later, he said, he complained to Rutherford of Moyle's "strange conduct," and Rutherford put Heath's case in the hands of another lawyer. Rutherford, Heath said, was "always gracious and kindly."

Malcolm Howlett’s wife, Helen, testifying for the defense, said that Moyle was “in wrong” with Rutherford, who was a man of "some emotion”; she acknowledged that when Rutherford reprimanded at mealtime, he talked loudly into the amplifier and "expressed himself forcibly."

Two witnesses for the defense, G. Paulos and C. Hilton Ellison, testified that they had turned against Moyle, their longtime friend, because of having read in The Watchtower that Moyle was unfaithful, "Unscriptural." That their faith in The Watchtower was total was demonstrated when Moyle's attorney called Paulos' attention to two of its past issues. One, in 1938, had expounded the dogma that Christ died to save all mankind, and the second, in 1941, had declared that Christ had died to save "the obedient ones”- Jehovah’s Witnesses. Paulos said he believed that Jehovah's Witnesses were the only earthly organization carrying on God's work, and that Rutherford was "God's representative": "I first learned in The Watchtower that certain people will not be benefited by Christ's sacrifice. I accepted the modern version." Paulos, who evidently regarded The Watchtower as incapable of error, said he had chosen not to investigate the truth of Moyle's charges. Ellison, whose testimony was crucial because he was taken to be representative of all of the Witnesses, testified that he accepted The Watchtower articles and Howlett's statements as undeniable truth. He testified that "evil servants" were those who, like Moyle, "with knowledge of the Truth leave the Society."

Hayden C. Covington, chief defense counsel, replied:

This libel suit is brought against a religious group which covenanted to wholeheartedly serve God and go from house to house and preach the gospel, as Jesus Christ did. Judge Rutherford was not ruthless. He was a kindly man.... Mr. Moyle agreed, as do all others, to abide in Bethel forever or until death or the Lord removed him.

He made vicious, scurrilous charges as a cover for his resignation, but there is no voluntary resignation in our organization. A resolution was properly adopted dismissing him. He criticized the family of God at Bethel, and it is true, as we have stated in The Watchtower, that he became a servant of the Evil One. He acted as Judas, and this $100,000 lawsuit is worth 30 pieces of silver. He has already been well paid by the Evil One.

Judge Ughetta, less metaphysically inclined than Covington, awarded Moyle $30,000 in damages. (Covington, an indisputably brilliant Constitutional lawyer who took First and Fourteenth Amendment cases to the United States Supreme Court for the Witnesses and won, and thus immeasurably protected us all, was later to leave Bethel himself. During the 1960s he acted, for a time, as Muhammad Ali's defense attorney in the fighter's draft case. Covington based his defense of Ali on the fact that Ali was a minister and therefore not subject to the draft-the same defense he had used successfully for thousands of draft-aged Witnesses. A spokesman in the Legal Department of the Watchtower Society, for whom he labored for so many years as a "volunteer," answered me evasively when I asked for information about Covington. I conjecture that Covington chose, for a time at least, not to employ his talents for the organization he had defended with so much passion and energy and brilliance.)

Moyle appears to have made an abortive attempt to set himself up as leader of a rival sect-the Pastoral Bible Institute, to which he hoped to draw straying Witnesses. This enterprise did not prosper. (No spin-off sects have prospered.)

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