Visions of Glory , A history and a memory of Jehovahs Witnesses .

423 Pages·2.138 MB·English

by  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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. 568], until much later.)
So, having confessed to a sin I hadn't known existed, I was advised of the
necessity for keeping one's body pure from sin; cold baths were recommended.
I couldn't see the connection, but one never questioned the imperatives of an
elder, so I subjected my impure body to so many icy baths in midwinter that I
began to look like a bleached prune. My mother thought I was demented. But I
couldn't tell her that I'd been biting my cuticles, because to have incurred God's
wrath-and to see the beady eye of the elder steadfastly upon me at every
religious meeting I went to-was torment enough.
I used to preach, from door to door, that an increase in the number of rapes
was one of the signs heralding the end of the world; but I didn't know what rape
was. I knew that good Christians didn't commit "unnatural acts"; but I didn't
know what "unnatural acts" were. (And I couldn't ask anybody, because all the
Witnesses I knew began immediately to resemble Edith Sitwell eating an unripe
persimmon when these abominations were spoken of.) Consequently, I spent a
lot of time praying that I was not committing unnatural acts or rape.
Once, having heard that Hitler had a mistress, I asked my mother what a
mistress was, (I had an inkling that it might be some kind of sinister super-
housekeeper, like Judith Anderson in Rebecca.) I knew from my mother's
silence, and from her cold, hard, and frightened face, that the question was
somehow a grievous offense. I knew that I had done something wrong, but as
usual, I didn't know what.
The fact was that I never knew how to buy God's-or my mother's-approval.
There were sins I consciously and knowingly committed. That was bad, but it
was bearable. I could always pray to God to forgive me, say, for reading the
Bible for its "dirty parts"; for preferring the Song of Solomon to all the begats
of Genesis. But the offenses that made me most
horribly guilty were those I had committed unconsciously; as an imperfect
being descended from the wretched Eve, I was bound, so I had been taught, to
offend Jehovah seventy-seven times a day, without my even knowing what I
was doing wrong.
There was guilt, and there was glory: I walked a spiritual tightrope.
I feel now that for the twelve years I spent as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, three
of them as a member of the Watchtower Society's headquarters staff, I was
living out a vivid dream, hallucinating within the closed system of logic and
private reality of a religion that relished disaster; rejoiced in the evil of human
nature; lusted for certitude; ordered its members to disdain the painful present
in exchange for the glorious future; corrupted ritual, ethics, and doctrine into
ritualism, legalism, and dogmatism.
I was convinced that 1914 marked "the beginning of the times of the end." So
firmly did Jehovah's Witnesses believe this to be true that there were those
who, in 1944, refused to get their teeth filled, postponing all care of their bodies
until God saw to their regeneration in His New World. (One zealous Witness I
knew carried a supply of cloves to alleviate the pain of an aching molar which
she did not wish to have treated by her dentist, since the time was so short till
Jehovah would provide a new and perfect one. To this day, I associate the
fragrance of cloves with the imminence of disaster.)
More than thirty years have passed, but though their hopes have not been
fulfilled, the Witnesses have persevered with increased fervor and
conviction. Their attitude toward the world remains the same: because all their
longing is for the future, they are bound to hate the present-the material, the
sexual, the fleshly. It’s impossible to savor and enjoy the present, or to bend
ones energies to shape and mold the world into the form of goodness, if you are
waiting only for it to be smashed by God. There is a kind of ruthless glee in the
way Jehovah's Witnesses point to earthquakes, race riots, heroin addiction, the
failure of the United Nations, divorce, famine (and liberalized abortion laws) as
proof of the nearness of Armageddon.
The God I worshiped was not the God before whom one swoons in ecstasy, or
with whom one contends: He was an awesome and awful judge, whom one
approached through his "channel," the "divinely appointed Theocratic
organization"-the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. The Christ in whose
name I prayed was not a social reformer, nor was he God incarnate, the
embodiment of the world's most thrilling mystery, God-made-man. He was,
rather, merely a legal instrument (albeit the most important one) in God's
wrangles with the Devil. All the history of the world is seen, by Jehovah's
Witnesses, as a contest between Jehovah and Satan:
God's primary purpose is the vindication of [His] supremacy. In carrying out
this purpose, God sent Jesus to earth.... The beginning of the end for Satan
came when Christ took power in heaven as King. This happened in 1914.
Christ's first act was casting Satan out of heaven, and this was followed by
great troubles on earth. This will be climaxed in God's battle, Armageddon: the
complete destruction of the Devil and his system of things, his world.... Christ
is now in his second presence. He will always remain invisible to humans, but
his presence is proved by world events since 1914. [Who Are Jehovah's
Witnesses? by Milton G. Henschel, Secretary to Nathan H. Knorr, third
President of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society]
Hayden Covington once described the beginnings of the world in the Garden
of Eden: "It was a legal matter. The [forbidden] tree served as a legal sign, a
guidepost between the God-King and man in their governmental dealings with
each other. Adam and Eve failed to fulfill their contract." It is a contractual, not
an ecstatic, religion.
I rehearse, I jealously preserve preconversion memories; they flash before my
mind like magical slides. I treasure a series of intense, isolated moments. I
hoard happy images that are pure, unsullied by values assigned to them by
others. Afterward, there was nothing in the world to which I was permitted to
give my own meaning; afterward, when the world
began to turn for me on the axis of God’s displeasure, I was obliged to regard
all events as part of God’s plan for the universe as understood only by
Jehovah’s Witnesses. Afterward, meanings were assigned to all things. The
world was flattened out into right and wrong; all experience was sealed into
compartments marked Good and Evil. Before my conversion, each beloved
object and event had the luminosity and impurity of a thing complete in itself, a
thing to which no significance is attributed other than that which it chooses to
reveal.
Images of innocence: dark, cool, sweet rooms and a mulberry bush; fevers,
delirium and clean sheets and chicken soup and mustard plasters; summer dusk
and hide-and-seek; Hershey Kisses in cut-glass bowls; Brooklyn stoops;
sunlight in a large kitchen, the Sunday gravy cooking; the Andrews Sisters
singing "I'll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time."
Saturdays I played with the beautiful twins Barbara and Violet, who mirrored
each other's loveliness, like Snow White and Rose Red. I thought it was
impossible that they should ever be lonely or frightened. I wanted the half of
me that had escaped to come back, so that I could be whole, like Barbara-and-
Violet.
Sunday afternoons I went to my father's mother's house. I sat at Grandma's
vanity table-pink-and-white, muslined and taffeted, skirted and ribboned-and
played with antique Italian jewelry in velvet-lined leather boxes and held small
bottles of perfume with mysterious amber residues. From the trellised grape
arbor of the roof garden Grandpa had built I imagined I saw Coney Island and
the parachute ride. One day, in an attic cupboard, I found a pearl-handled
revolver; it belonged, they said, to the distant cousin who smelled of herbs and
spices and soap-the old lady who cried when Little Augie Stefano was shot in a
barber's chair.
The house of my mother's family, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, always
smelled of fermenting wine and of incense to the saints; its walls and tin
ceilings were poverty-brown and -green; but there was always a store-bought
chocolate cake waiting in the icebox for my visit. And my grandfather sang me
the Italian Fascist Youth Anthem as he hoed his Victory Garden: Mussolini had
made the trains run on time, but the good soil of Brooklyn yielded better
tomatoes than the harsh soil of Calabria.
These are the fragments I jealously preserve like the creche from Italy (sweet
Mary, humble Joseph, and tiny Jesus-always perfect and new) that adorned
each Christmas morning.
After my conversion, I began immediately to have a dream, which recurred
until I released myself from bondage to that religion twelve years later, when I
was 21. In the dream, I am standing in my grandmother's walled garden. At the