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Blessed With a Special HeritageThe Watchtower—2000 | October 1
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Grandpa’s Trial and Prison Life
In the Patterson lobby, Paul and I also came across the exhibit with the picture seen on the next page. I immediately recognized the picture, since Grandpa sent me a copy of it well over 50 years ago. He is the one standing on the far right.
During the patriotic hysteria surrounding World War I, these eight Bible Students—including Joseph F. Rutherford (seated in center), president of the Watch Tower Society—were wrongfully imprisoned and held without bail. The charges against them centered on statements in the seventh volume of Studies in the Scriptures, entitled The Finished Mystery. The statements were incorrectly perceived as discouraging the participation of the United States in World War I.
Over a period of many years, Charles Taze Russell had written the first six volumes of Studies in the Scriptures, but he died before he could write the seventh. So his notes were given to Grandpa and another Bible Student, and they wrote the seventh volume. This was released in 1917, before the end of the war. At the trial, Grandpa and most of the others were sentenced to four concurrent terms of 20 years each.
The caption to the picture in the Patterson lobby explains: “Nine months after Rutherford and his associates were sentenced—and with the war past—on March 21, 1919, the appeals court ordered bail for all eight defendants, and on March 26, they were released in Brooklyn on bail of $10,000 each. On May 5, 1920, J. F. Rutherford and the others were exonerated.”
After being sentenced, but before being sent to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, the eight spent their first few days of incarceration in the Raymond Street jail in Brooklyn, New York. From there Grandpa wrote a description of being placed in a six-by-eight-foot [1.8 by 2.4 m] cell “in the midst of unspeakable filth and disorder.” He observed: “You have a pile of newspapers, and if inclined to think lightly of them at first, you soon come to realize that in these papers and in soap and a wash-rag, lies your one chance of cleanliness and self-respect.”
Yet, Grandpa kept his sense of humor, referring to the jail as “Hôtel de Raymondie,” noting, “I shall leave here the moment my board is up.” He also described his courtyard walks. Once when he stopped for a moment to have his hair combed, a pickpocket snatched his pocket watch, but as he wrote, “The chain broke and I saved it.” When I was visiting Brooklyn Bethel in 1958, Grant Suiter, then secretary-treasurer of the Watch Tower Society, called me into his office and gave me that watch. I still treasure it.
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Blessed With a Special HeritageThe Watchtower—2000 | October 1
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[Picture on page 27]
The eight Bible students who were wrongly imprisoned in 1918 (Grandpa standing at far right)
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