Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah’s Witnesses by BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON (September 14, 1934 – April 24, 2002), SIMON AND SHUSTER NEW YORK ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Without the support and generosity of friends and colleagues, and without the gift of time and space provided by the MacDowell Colony, I could not have written this book. For trusting me enough to share intimate details of their lives, I thank David Maslanka, Walter Szykitka--and others who are unnamed, but not unloved. My debt to them is very great. For the invaluable information and advice they gave so freely, I thank Bernard and Charlotte Atkins, Leon Friedman, Ralph deGia, Father Robert Kennedy, Jim Peck. For their creative research and editorial assistance, I thank Tonia Foster and Paul Kelly-and the librarians at the Brooklyn Public Library, who eased their task. For their perceptive insights and criticism, which helped me to understand not only my subject, but myself and my past, I thank Sheila Lehman, Tom Wilson, Sol Yurick, L. L. Zeiger, and David Zeiger. No words can express my gratitude to the members of my family who always listened, even when their patience was sorely tried, and who were emotional bulkwarks when I was sorely tried: Carol Grizzuti, Dominick Grizzuti, Richard Grizzuti; and my children (who managed, with grace, to live with my obsessions), Anna and Joshua Harrison. For Father Michael Crimmins, Alice Hagen, and Rose Moss, who gave me a very special kind of encouragement at a very crucial time, I have love and regard. And finally, I thank and esteem my editor, Alice E. Mayhew, for her good counsel and her good work. (Throughout this book, I have changed names and identities to protect the privacy of those concerned.) This book is for Arnold Horowitz. 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 Chapter I Personal Beginnings: 1944 JEH0VAH'S WITNESSES are believers in a fundamentalist, apocalyptic, prophetic religion which has been proclaiming, since the 1930s, that "Millions Now Living Will Never Die." The world will end, they say, with the destruction of the wicked at Armageddon, in our lifetime. Only the chosen will survive. They intensify their preaching efforts in order to increase the number of survivors (there are now more than two million Jehovah's Witnesses in 210 countries). They are also increasing their property holdings. [Yearbook, 1977,* p. 30] The Witnesses are a widely varied group of individuals who subject themselves to total conformity in practice, outlook, and belief. To the extent to which they are knovvn-their notoriety follows from their refusal to receive blood transfusions, salute the flag, or serve in the army of any country, as well as from their aggressive proselytizing--they are perceived as rather drab, somewhat eccentric people and dismissed as an irrelevant joke. Little is known of their motives, their anguish, their glorious surges of communal happiness, and little thought is given to the comment their existence makes on the larger society. In February, 1944, the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed the conviction of Mrs. Sarah Prince of Brockton, Massachusetts, who had been fined for allowing her 9-year-old niece Betty Simmons to distribute the literature of Jehovah's Witnesses on the streets. The Court, by a 5-4 decision, upheld the Massachusetts Child Labor Law under which no girl under18 (and no boy under 12) could sell magazines or newspapers in a public place; the law could be validly enforced, the Court ruled, against those who allow young children under their care to sell religious literature on the streets. Hayden C. Covington, legal counsel for the Witnesses, who had, since1939, come before the Court with sixteen major constitutional issues involving religious liberty, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, contended that the Massachusetts law was in violation of both the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom and the basic rights of parenthood. On the basis of past decisions, Covington might reasonably have expected to win his case. The Witnesses’ bitterly controversial cases had produced twenty- seven Court opinions [See American Political Science Review, 1944, 1945], almost all of them ultimately favorable to the Witnesses and many of them strengthening the First and Fourteenth Amendments (and, therefore, the cause of civil liberties in the United States). In the Prince case, however, Covington's arguments did not prevail. Justice Wiley Rutledge voiced the majority opinion that "neither rights of religion nor rights of parenthood are beyond limitation." "Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves," he said, "but it does not follow that they are free ... to make martyrs of their children before they have reached the age ... when they can make that choice for themselves." Ironically, the Witnesses, bitter foes of the Catholic Church-which they refer to now, as they did then, as "the scarlet whore of Babylon"-found support from the only Catholic on the bench, Justice Frank Murphy. In a separate dissent, justice Murphy insisted that the sidewalk "as well as the cathedral or the evangelist's tent is a proper place, under the Constitution, to worship." [Prince v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 351 U.S. 158 (1944)] In 1944, in a small town in the Southwest, a jury returned a verdict of not guilty in the trial of Mary Lou Smith, a 15-year-old girl who had pumped seventeen bullets into her father and brother, killing them both. She had had, defense counsel said, periodic vivid dreams since the onset of menstruation; she was adjudged temporarily not responsible for her acts because she had committed her murders while hallucinating. These events are unrelated, except in my mind. I have never met Betty Simmons or Mary Lou Smith, nor do I know what has become of them. But I feel, somehow, as if we are siblings. They wander, like ghosts, in the baggage of my mind. In 1944, when I, like Betty Simmons, was 9 years old, I became one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Whatever effects the Supreme Court's ruling may have had on children of Jehovah's Witnesses in Brockton, Massachusetts, it is certain that nobody thought to enforce the Court's ruling in Brooklyn, New York. After my baptism at a national convention of 25,000 Witnesses in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1944, I became an ardent proselytizer, distributing The Watchtower and Awake! magazines on street corners and from door to door, spending as much as 150 hours a month in the service of my newly found God- under the directives of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the legal and corporate arm of Jehovah's Witnesses. I As I had been immersed in water to symbolize my "dedication to do God's will," I became, also, drenched in the dark blood-poetry of a religion whose adherents drew joy from the prospect of the imminent end of the world. I preached sweet doom; I believed that Armageddon would come in my lifetime, with a great shaking and rending and tearing of unbelieving flesh, with unsanctified babies swimming in blood, torrents of blood. I believed also that after the slaughter Jehovah had arranged for His enemies at Armageddon, this quintessentially masculine God-vengeful in battle and benevolent to survivors- would turn the earth into an Eden for true believers. Coincidentally with my conversion, I got my first period. We used to sing this hymn: "Here is He who comes from Eden/ All His raiments stained with blood." My raiments were stained with blood too. But the blood of the Son of Man was purifying, redemptive, cleansing, sacrificial. Mine was proof of my having inherited the curse placed upon the seductress Eve. Mine was filthy. I examined my discharges with horror and fascination, as if the secret of life-or a harbinger of death-were to be found in that dull, mysterious effluence. I was, in equal measure, guilt-ridden and-supposing myself to be in on secrets of the cosmos-self-righteous and smug. I grew up awaiting the final, orgasmic burst of violence after which all things would come together in a cosmic ecstasy of joy-this in a religion that was totally anti-erotic, that expressed disgust and contempt for the world. My ignorance of sexual matters was so profound that it frequently led to comedies of error. Nothing I've ever read has inclined me to believe that Jehovah has a sense of humor; and I must say that I consider it a strike against Him that He wouldn't find this story funny: One night shortly after my conversion, a visiting elder of the congregation, as he was avuncularly tucking me into bed, asked me if I was guilty of performing evil practices with my hands under the covers at night. I was puzzled. He was persistent. Finally, I thought I understood. And I burst into wild tears of self- recrimination. Under the covers at night, I bit my cuticles-a practice which, in fact, did afford me a kind of sensual pleasure. (I didn't learn about masturbation-which the Witnesses call "idolatry, "because "the masturbator's affection is diverted away from the Creator and is bestowed upon a coveted object" [TW, Sept. 15, 1973, p.