I think Fred Franz had a fertile intellect and fell into a "true believer" spell which captivated his talents and ego. By the time he took over as President, he'd wrecked the reputation of JW's as peddler's of Truth--but--his pre-eminant status made him a shoo-in and he probably was someplace high on the nutjob scale.
I think little Charlie Russell having been born after many miscarriages by his mother, was doted on and coddled beyond normal. His mother died of a fever epidemic when he was about 9 and he may have associated burning with fever with burning in hell.
He seemed to be obsessed about hell for awhile even to the point of graffiti on sidewalks marking scriptures as warnings.
He was privately tutored and brought into the men's clothing business and given an adult's responsibilities. Although the family was Presbyterian, there appears to be a streak of insubordination in the genes because they switched to a Congregational church with autonomy of leadership and no organizational oversight.
Why was this a big deal, do you think?
You might suspect Charlie had a feeling of being too special to follow other people's orders. Maybe he was reared like a little Prince destined for greatness.
Charlie must have been spoiling for a debate because an atheist got ahold of him and apparently left him dazed and confused for a while.
It is here where young Charlie probably had to choose whether he was a retail merchant by trade or man of higher principles destined by God to educate the whole earth about God's soon-to-arrive Prince of Peace.
The fact that a young man would seek such an apotheosis is astonishing unless he was a preening Narcissist. I'm no psychiatrist, but I suspect he had delusions and perhaps burgeoning megalomania.
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Russell was living at a time of great unrest. After the War of 1812, a Baptist lay preacher named William Miller had gotten a big reputation from juggling scriptures and dates resulting in a mad dash to escape the downside of Armageddon. The prediction of `1843/1844 must have caused a thrilling sensation in all Christian folks who took such things seriously.
I speculate that young Charlie Russell saw the effect of Miller's predictions on simple church folk to the extent they began leaving their own churches and preparing themselves for Christ's coming. This was truly a Big Moment!
Despite the 'Great Disappointment,' the true believers would not admit defeat or own up to being dead wrong. A great many clever and imaginative Christians had their own unique ideas. Some printed and published those schemes along with charts and dates and all sorts of crackpot speculations.
Keep your eye on these people!
They were stubborn and impervious to reason. If you got them in your corner with just the right kind of razzle-dazzle you would have a strong core of solid gold as a foundation for whatever kind of ego monument you'd care to build.
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Civil War had damaged Christian's Puritan ideals of a shining city on a hill. People were eager for answers and a quick solution to their very human woes. If somebody could convince them of a way out of their problems--that man stood to make a fortune!
This is where Charles Taze Russell emerged as a very wily and ambitious "Seeker" as well as an investor in such ideas.
Two things launched C.T. Russell's career as a future pastor, columnist, author, lecturer and entrepreneur of a worldwide movement. He was able to AFFORD his weird hobby, dabbling, cherry-picking, and eventual invention of a theology.
What if you ran your religious ideology like a business? Not like his competitors in the marketplace of ideas who were on a shoestring--but really put some money behind the marketing and distribution?
He partnered up with men who were high-profile and got in with the crowd of movers and shakers and began competing--not as a businessman selling clothing--but as a purveyor of religious crackpot ideas exemplified with dazzling bullshit.
He hired book salesmen (colporteurs) and publicized his work in a way nobody else could afford to do. He put his money where his mouth was and got in at the right time.
Russell had just the right personality, manners, courtesy and genteel style to win over women (who were the bulk of Christianity as far as becoming followers.)
His weird arrangement with Maria Frances Eckley to have a sexless marriage formed a beneficial partnership (she was a helluva editor and writer) and a terrific "photo op" when the two of them began working for the crowds both in print and in many visits to homestyle Bible Student gatherings. This was a power couple like Jim and Tammy Faye Baker in later years. The glow of success and divine light was irresistible.
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The self-styled Pastor Russell believed his own bullshit up to a certain point when his personal actions and treatment of others (partners and wife) triggered an awakening.
He became shrewd, cowardly, stealthy, litigious, self-aggrandizing, and cruel.
Throwing himself into a whirlwind of predictions, prognostications, pyramid schemings and, above all, churning out a revolutionary method of Bible Study (Studies in the Scriptures) he broke down the barrier for common folk by making study Topical and lending his slant to a pseudo-revelatory tutorial about End Times.
Being half-charlatan and half-assed spellbinder, Russell spent the last years of his life juggling lawsuits, marital scandals, newspaper exposes, and the disintegration of his slapdash prophetic fulfillments which were crashing and burning right and left.
The fact that he edited out all his Wrong predictions and changed the wording in reprints, indicates a guilty state of mind and awareness of his errors.
As he aged and grew frail, he had on staff both a firebrand lawyer with gigantic ego ambitious to outgrow his humble agrarian background and an autodidact with a photographic memory who had had plans to be a theologian.
Rutherford was the lawyer and Franz was the whiz kid with the photographic memory who had an invaluable talent. He could dip into the Bible and pull out anything you wanted him to produce and make it sound like it was prophecy.
When Russell died on a train in Texas on Halloween, Rutherford and his carefully placed minions knew exactly what moves to make both legally and strategically to produce an insurgency with the goal of commandeering Russell's shell of an empire and branding it as his own.
Rutherford was the polar opposite of Russell and he damned near wrecked everything by making enemies out of allies right and left. But, with Franz by his side, a wicked legal mind, and a bellicose temperament, he blazed a scorched earth policy across the entire Bible Student movement.
Rutherford was ruthless, diabolical and hellbent on being a Big Man who could make everybody bow to his unbridled power. He published a book (The Finished Mystery) under false pretenses (Russell's 7th volume) and got himself and the other Directors of the Society prosecuted by the Federal Government for being traitors to their country in a time of war (WWI).
Luckily for Rutherford and the others, the war ended soon after and the unnecessary expense of prosecuting a religious organization's lunatic administrators who had appealed on a "Writ of Error" turned on a whim and the case was dropped. None of these men were exonerated, simply released.
Rutherford went on a holy crusade to punish everybody everywhere and he became a tyrannical monster throwing people of faith into the fire to create martyrs and publicity for his new-fangled religion with the awkward new name: Jehovah's Witnesses. What else would a Lawyer and part-time judge think of but "Witnesses"?
These first two men were larger-than-life and totally driven by inner demons. They surrounded themselves with ardent supporters and cronies who would march into the furnace for them. They built an empire off the volunteer army of true believers by keeping the carrot of heaven or paradise in front and the stick of Armageddon to create fear of ferocious destructions at the hands of an angry, vengeful God.
Every wrong step made, and each faulty explanation given--each silly prognostication and preposterous prediction, drove the weak members out and solidified the cognitive dissonance of the staunch loyalists who remained on.
We all know the rest of the story. One day we joined them and one day we left it all behind with a hole in the center of our life like a festering holocaust in our spirit.
Russell, Rutherford and each who followed, became contaminated with the same cancerous ideology of doom and fealty--an absolute belief based on nothing more than the psychotic ravings of self-centered mandarins full of themselves with ambitions to rule as kings and priests over the earth. This elite band of brothers is a festering pimple on Jehovah's ass admired by one and all.
