Here is an article I found in the Scottsdale Tribune of Arizona about Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was located in the Editorials section. I think you will find it fascinating. By the way, if you would like to send a reply to the Newspaper that printed the article please send it to [email protected]
The following article was written by Bill Underwood.
I just love those calendars that tell you what things have happened in earlier years, “On this day in history …” As July 4 approaches, of course, everyone’s thoughts turn to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But other important events mark this date as well.
President Calvin Coolidge was born on July 4 (1872). The deaths of Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (both July 4, 1826). Isn’t that weird? I think they were on the same plane that crashed, but I could be mistaken. And President James Monroe (July 4, 1831).
While the presidents presumably didn’t plan the dates of their births or deaths, “This Date in History” pages list many events that fell on July 4 because they were planned to do so. Among these would be the retiring of Lou Gehrig’s uniform number (1939), the start of construction on the Erie Canal (1817), the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (1828) and the Oakland Bay Bridge (1933).
If you don’t have a day off, hopefully it is some consolation to think about the construction workers on those earlier projects.
And item that is all but overlooked that, I think, falls into this later category was on July 4, 1918: the shipping off to federal prison of eight officers of a corporation known as the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, to begin 20-year sentences. I have no proof it was planned to occur on that most patriotic of days, but I can’t believe that the judge in the case was unaware of the details of how his sentence was going to be enacted.
The “crime” with which these men were charged was the publishing of books that said, in effect, that someday God would overthrow all governments of Earth and set up his own. The government labeled such writings sedition.
According to my dictionary, sedition is “actions or words intended to provoke or incite rebellion against government authority.” By that definition, the Declaration of Independence was seditious.
But the clarification of the freedoms of speech and press embodied in the Bill of Rights wasn’t to happen until the 1940’s. Ironically, that clarification came at the urging of the same group of Bible students who brought some 30 cases before the supreme court between 1938 and 1943.
An article in the May 30, 2000, issue of USA Today stated, ”So frequently did the Witnesses raise core First Amendment issues that Justice Harlan Fiske Stone wrote, ‘The Jehovah’s Witnesses ought to have an endowment in view of the aid which they give in solving the legal problems of civil liberties.’”
Back in 1919 there were no protections. However, cooler heads prevailed and it all worked out. The eight officers were released after nine months and completely exonerated.
Speaking of irony, one of the judges in the 1918 case, Martin T. Manton, who had been instrumental in denying bail to the eight, was later found guilty of accepting $186,000 in bribes and sentenced to two years in prison – on June 3, 1939.
Now, obviously, someone failed to look at a calendar. They should have waited a month, ‘til July 4.
(end of article)
statements in bold are mine