Posts by em1913

23

Stroup's "The Jehovah's Witnesses."

by em1913 in

a book that doesn't get a lot of talk these days is herbert h. stroup's 1945 study "the jehovah's witnesses.

" which is too bad, because in the field of jw studies it pretty much stands on its own as a serious, scholarly look at the rutherford era of the movement -- one written with no theological or doctrinal axes to grind, but rather with the impartial eye of a professional sociologist.. stroup received no cooperation whatever from brooklyn in writing this book, but he spent a great deal of time among rank-and-file witnesses of the late 1930s and early 1940s, attending their meetings, joining them in field service, and eating at their homes, and what emerges is a picture of an overwhelmingly working-class movement which overlapped in its hopes and ultimate goals the ambitions of other radical social movements of the 1930s.

the witnesses were not marching in labor parades or participating in sit-down strikes or engaging in other forms of street-level radicalism, but stroup finds that, in their individual views on the social and economic structures of the time, they were largely in harmony with those who were, even in spite of their religion's supposed disavowal of politics, and he sees them as much as a political movement in that sense as a religious one.

em1913

A figure that often jars a lot of people is that, according to the 1940 census, only 25 percent of the adult population of the US had finished high school. It was much more common for 1920s and 1930s kids to graduate than it had been for their parents, but the general American adult population of the time had seen no education beyond the sixth, seventh, or at most eighth grade. And the quality of that education varied according to where you lived -- a kid growing up in a city in the 1910s and 20s had a decent chance of getting a good elementary education,albeit one based more on the rote memorization of facts than on understanding of the theory underlying those facts, but a child growing up in the rurals would likely be taught to read and write, after a fashion, and perhaps recite a bit, but they would have little awareness of much else beyond their own circumstances. Rural folk often had a deep and abiding prejudice against "book larnin'", which continues to manifest itself right down to our own time -- witness the deep strain of anti-intellectualism that dominated the 19th Century populist movement and continues to dominate the current populist movement.

I think the old Judge offers an interesting blend of attitudes. On the one hand, he did make a lawyer out of himself instead of living out his life as just another rawboned Missouri dirt farmer, but on the other, you can hear the venom spitting out of his mouth whenever he talks about those "haaaaagher critics and their eddddjahcations." I think that's a perfect reflection of the two-minded attitude working-class Americans of the early 20th Century had about education.

I was trying to remember the name of the guy who wrote that "Proletarian" piece -- I read that years ago and thought he was pretty much on the ball. That was still early on in the Knorr era, but the two-fisted rolled-sleeve Witness was already an endangered species by the mid-fifties, giving way to the Organization Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. Nothing could better mirror the change in America itself -- from an overwhelmingly working-class, left-leaning country before the war to an increasingly status-conscious middle-class right-leaning country during the postwar era.

As far as the Cohn piece on race goes, I don't know the exact percentage, but there was a very heavy proportion of black witnesses at the time when Stroup was writing, at least in the New York City-area congregations he investigated, but he pointed out, as Cohn did, that "Negroes" were generally not given leadership roles in mixed congregations. It's interesting to read the 1930s yearbooks and see how the Society dances around the race question, with a lot of mealy-mouthed talk about how "of course in Jehovah's eye there are no race differences, but due to the prejudices of man it was thought best to specially organize the work amongst our colored brethren." Segregated assemblies were being advertised, even into the North, well into the 1940s.

23

Stroup's "The Jehovah's Witnesses."

by em1913 in

a book that doesn't get a lot of talk these days is herbert h. stroup's 1945 study "the jehovah's witnesses.

" which is too bad, because in the field of jw studies it pretty much stands on its own as a serious, scholarly look at the rutherford era of the movement -- one written with no theological or doctrinal axes to grind, but rather with the impartial eye of a professional sociologist.. stroup received no cooperation whatever from brooklyn in writing this book, but he spent a great deal of time among rank-and-file witnesses of the late 1930s and early 1940s, attending their meetings, joining them in field service, and eating at their homes, and what emerges is a picture of an overwhelmingly working-class movement which overlapped in its hopes and ultimate goals the ambitions of other radical social movements of the 1930s.

the witnesses were not marching in labor parades or participating in sit-down strikes or engaging in other forms of street-level radicalism, but stroup finds that, in their individual views on the social and economic structures of the time, they were largely in harmony with those who were, even in spite of their religion's supposed disavowal of politics, and he sees them as much as a political movement in that sense as a religious one.

em1913

Excellent, I'll be looking forward to that chapter.

It's interesting to look at the difference in tone between letters featured in the Tower during Russell's time, and the tone of correspondence presented in the Rutherford era. The Bible Students seemed to have a strong element of "nice middle-class people," whereas the tone of the letters under Rutherford takes on a much more pugnacious, working-class quality. Certainly some of this has to do with the elimination of "character development" under Rutherford, but I suspect that Rutherford's ascendency in general pushed out nearly all these "nice middle class people" in favor of the rough-and-ready working-class folk who dominated the movement by the time of Stroup's study.

There's an excellent picture article in Life magazine around the time of the 1940 Detroit convention where you get a good clear look at the people in the crowd - and many look to be people who very obviously work in tough, blue-collar jobs, and who have the accompanying tough blue-collar attitude. I think that's the kind of people Rutherford wanted in his movement -- he didn't think much of the refined Olin Moyle type, who he dismissed as "sissies." And in the 1930s, most -- not all certainly, but if the 1936 and 1940 elections were any indication, most Americans in that social class -- tended to lean leftward politically.

85

“Monkey this up”...

by minimus in

jw
friends

that expression is a no-no now.

it is racist and hateful.

some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..

em1913

"Extreme liberal" to me is like "military intelligence." To me, a "liberal" is a Clintonite, who's all for Wall Street and all for illegal wars, as long as they can live in a neighborhood where there's a nice place to get focaccia. "Liberals" in today's world are incapable of anything at all meaningfully extreme except to the kind of people who feel threatened because they heard somebody speaking Spanish on the bus.

23

Stroup's "The Jehovah's Witnesses."

by em1913 in

a book that doesn't get a lot of talk these days is herbert h. stroup's 1945 study "the jehovah's witnesses.

" which is too bad, because in the field of jw studies it pretty much stands on its own as a serious, scholarly look at the rutherford era of the movement -- one written with no theological or doctrinal axes to grind, but rather with the impartial eye of a professional sociologist.. stroup received no cooperation whatever from brooklyn in writing this book, but he spent a great deal of time among rank-and-file witnesses of the late 1930s and early 1940s, attending their meetings, joining them in field service, and eating at their homes, and what emerges is a picture of an overwhelmingly working-class movement which overlapped in its hopes and ultimate goals the ambitions of other radical social movements of the 1930s.

the witnesses were not marching in labor parades or participating in sit-down strikes or engaging in other forms of street-level radicalism, but stroup finds that, in their individual views on the social and economic structures of the time, they were largely in harmony with those who were, even in spite of their religion's supposed disavowal of politics, and he sees them as much as a political movement in that sense as a religious one.

em1913

Being a pinko myself, I've got kind of a vested interest in 1930s radical politics, I think there's a lot we can learn from the period that got erased from the received-history of the post-McCarthy era.

I was raised a Methodist myself, but am a product of the "Social Creed" Methodism that came out of the Progressive Era -- if you go back and look at old editions of the Book of Discipline, you'll see that that the Social Creed a hundred years ago was far more lefty-radical than it is today, with specific clauses endorsing the right of labor to organize, wage-hour laws, the abolition of child labor, and all such as that. Quite a few thirties lefties came out of that era -- Genora Johnson, the "Joan of Arc of Labor," who helped mastermind the Flint sit-down strikes of 1936, was once a Methodist Sunday School teacher. So there was a strong tinge of radicalism in Methodism by the early 20th Century, which was very much at odds with the older, more rural sort of Methodism.

Rutherford's personal political trajectory fascinates me. He seems pretty obviously a product of late 19th Century populism, which although it had nativist aspects that in today's context would be considered right-wing, the whole Farmer-Labor movement echoed quite solidly down thru Fighting Bob LaFollete in the 1910s to the 1930s in the form of Floyd B. Olson, the Farmers' Holiday Association, and finally the CPUSA-led movement for a new "Farmer Labor Party" in 1936-37. If you approached the typical Witness of that era and handed them some CP pamphlets with the covers torn off, I think that they'd most likely approve of more than they'd disagree with. If anything, Earl Browder -- who was also raised a Midwestern farm boy -- was far more moderate in at least the presentation of his views than the Judge ever was.

As far as Russell is concerned, from my own political perspective I found a lot that was interesting in "The Battle of Armageddon." I read it a long time ago, so I can't quote you specific passages, but I remember being left with an overall impression that he wasn't unsympathetic to the basic concept of socialism.

23

Stroup's "The Jehovah's Witnesses."

by em1913 in

a book that doesn't get a lot of talk these days is herbert h. stroup's 1945 study "the jehovah's witnesses.

" which is too bad, because in the field of jw studies it pretty much stands on its own as a serious, scholarly look at the rutherford era of the movement -- one written with no theological or doctrinal axes to grind, but rather with the impartial eye of a professional sociologist.. stroup received no cooperation whatever from brooklyn in writing this book, but he spent a great deal of time among rank-and-file witnesses of the late 1930s and early 1940s, attending their meetings, joining them in field service, and eating at their homes, and what emerges is a picture of an overwhelmingly working-class movement which overlapped in its hopes and ultimate goals the ambitions of other radical social movements of the 1930s.

the witnesses were not marching in labor parades or participating in sit-down strikes or engaging in other forms of street-level radicalism, but stroup finds that, in their individual views on the social and economic structures of the time, they were largely in harmony with those who were, even in spite of their religion's supposed disavowal of politics, and he sees them as much as a political movement in that sense as a religious one.

em1913

I get that from a close reading of Rutherford's own pronouncements in his various major speeches of the time, as well as the overall thrust of the content in "Consolation" between 1937 and 1941. The constant attacks on "big business, the clergy, and politics" heard at the time would have been very familiar and would have appealed very much to the same audiences who were reading pamphlets and books by such figures as Earl Browder, John Spivak, and George Seldes, all of whom had strong credentials on the left. Both Spivak and Seldes wrote extensively on the Catholic church's role in right-wing/fascist movements in the US during the middle and late 1930s, and both were quoted with approval in Consolation at various times.

That's not to say that the JWs followed the CPUSA line, or anything that specific -- although you'll find some interesting positive mentions of the Soviet Union showing up in Consolation from time to time, even as the Judge was careful to condemn "Communism and Naziism" in the same breath -- but I think, from my own readings of Communist and Socialist publications of the period that a "Daily Worker" reader could easily have tuned in on the broadcast of, say, "Fascism or Freedom" and would have nodded in agreement at frequent points thru the speech. And although there's a strong thread of isolationist thought in Consolation once the war broke out in Europe, it's important to note that the CP line in 1940-41 also opposed US involvement in the war -- and was thus as much a "leftist" position as "rightist" one.

Now, there were certainly points of convergence between true right-wing movements like that of Father Coughlin (his vision of "Social Justice" was essentially constructed on the Fascist-corporate state model) and some of the things that came out of the Judge's mouth, especially in his condemnations of FDR -- which I think stemmed more from his unsatisfactory dealings with the Roosevelt appointees on the FRC/FCC in 1934-35 than any thing else -- but the substance of Rutherford's message strikes me as rather militantly and explicitly anti-capitalist at its core, and that tracks quite closely with the main thrust of 1930s left-radical thought boiling around the working-class activists of Brooklyn and Detroit. For that matter, the CP itself was strongly anti-FDR up until the emergence of the Popular Front period in 1936.

Incidentally, I had no idea until recently that H. H. Stroup lived until 2011 -- and he lived his last years not far from me. I'd have enjoyed a conversation with him. (And while he was raised a Presbyterian, he became, pastored, and died a Congregationalist, a denomination which we New Englanders sometimes call "dishwater Christians.")

85

“Monkey this up”...

by minimus in

jw
friends

that expression is a no-no now.

it is racist and hateful.

some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..

em1913

I think you miss my point. I don't think there *is* a "left" in the sense that you're using the word, except in the minds of those who need there to be one to use as a rhetorical strawman. It's just cheap talk-show jargon. Leftist political thought runs a very broad gamut and many left factions take very different approaches to the same issues. My own views are far removed from those of any Clintonite, either of the Bill stripe or the Hillary stripe -- I consider Clintonism to be reactionary -- and yet to the Fox News crowd we're all "the left." As if.

I don't think there's a unified, monolithic "right" either, in that sense -- the current Trumpie populist right has no more in common with the neocon right than I have in common with a deep-fried cantaloupe. There's the populist right, the neocon right, the paleocon right, the Randite right, the religious right, the corporate/"New Democrat" right, the identiarian right, the fascist right, and on and on, and they have very little in common other than a fanned-up loathing of this supposed sinister monolithic "Left." And that's why most of the American political discourse operates on the intellectual level of a 4chan meme."OMG look what those libtards done now!"

23

Stroup's "The Jehovah's Witnesses."

by em1913 in

a book that doesn't get a lot of talk these days is herbert h. stroup's 1945 study "the jehovah's witnesses.

" which is too bad, because in the field of jw studies it pretty much stands on its own as a serious, scholarly look at the rutherford era of the movement -- one written with no theological or doctrinal axes to grind, but rather with the impartial eye of a professional sociologist.. stroup received no cooperation whatever from brooklyn in writing this book, but he spent a great deal of time among rank-and-file witnesses of the late 1930s and early 1940s, attending their meetings, joining them in field service, and eating at their homes, and what emerges is a picture of an overwhelmingly working-class movement which overlapped in its hopes and ultimate goals the ambitions of other radical social movements of the 1930s.

the witnesses were not marching in labor parades or participating in sit-down strikes or engaging in other forms of street-level radicalism, but stroup finds that, in their individual views on the social and economic structures of the time, they were largely in harmony with those who were, even in spite of their religion's supposed disavowal of politics, and he sees them as much as a political movement in that sense as a religious one.

em1913

Whatever his shortcomings on fine points of Witness history, I think you'll find that his sociological conclusions are quite sound in the context of 1930s left-wing social movements. They certainly jibe with the old-time Witnesses I knew during my own days in the movement, who were very much a two-fisted blue-collar crowd. I lived in Maine, where memories of the sacking of the Kennebunkport hall were still very vivid during my time in the movement, and the working-class alignment of many of these old-timers survived the Knorr-era attempts at eradicating that consciousness. I also find very little polemicism in Stroup when compared to others who wrote about the Witnesses in that era, especially "journalists" like Stanley HIgh and others who wrote about the movement for the popular magazines of the period. If anything I found Stroup a bit on the sympathetic side compared to the general trend of public thinking at the time.

I've read Separate Identity volume 1, by the way, as well as your blog, and found it quite fascinating. Nice job.

85

“Monkey this up”...

by minimus in

jw
friends

that expression is a no-no now.

it is racist and hateful.

some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..

em1913

Non sequitir. Who is this monolithic "left" you're speaking about? There are many lefts, just as there are many rights. There are many people on the left, like me, who believe in class-based social analysis, and reject identity politics as reactionary.

I don't mean this as an attack, and I hope you won't take it as such, but I get the sense that this {{{LEFT}}} you're talking about is some kind of trumped-up (ha ha) boogeyman that has little real substance outside the Fox News/alt-right bubble. It doesn't bear any resemblance to any actual leftists that I know or interact with.

23

Stroup's "The Jehovah's Witnesses."

by em1913 in

a book that doesn't get a lot of talk these days is herbert h. stroup's 1945 study "the jehovah's witnesses.

" which is too bad, because in the field of jw studies it pretty much stands on its own as a serious, scholarly look at the rutherford era of the movement -- one written with no theological or doctrinal axes to grind, but rather with the impartial eye of a professional sociologist.. stroup received no cooperation whatever from brooklyn in writing this book, but he spent a great deal of time among rank-and-file witnesses of the late 1930s and early 1940s, attending their meetings, joining them in field service, and eating at their homes, and what emerges is a picture of an overwhelmingly working-class movement which overlapped in its hopes and ultimate goals the ambitions of other radical social movements of the 1930s.

the witnesses were not marching in labor parades or participating in sit-down strikes or engaging in other forms of street-level radicalism, but stroup finds that, in their individual views on the social and economic structures of the time, they were largely in harmony with those who were, even in spite of their religion's supposed disavowal of politics, and he sees them as much as a political movement in that sense as a religious one.

em1913

A book that doesn't get a lot of talk these days is Herbert H. Stroup's 1945 study "The Jehovah's Witnesses." Which is too bad, because in the field of JW studies it pretty much stands on its own as a serious, scholarly look at the Rutherford era of the movement -- one written with no theological or doctrinal axes to grind, but rather with the impartial eye of a professional sociologist.

Stroup received no cooperation whatever from Brooklyn in writing this book, but he spent a great deal of time among rank-and-file Witnesses of the late 1930s and early 1940s, attending their meetings, joining them in field service, and eating at their homes, and what emerges is a picture of an overwhelmingly working-class movement which overlapped in its hopes and ultimate goals the ambitions of other radical social movements of the 1930s. The Witnesses were not marching in labor parades or participating in sit-down strikes or engaging in other forms of street-level radicalism, but Stroup finds that, in their individual views on the social and economic structures of the time, they were largely in harmony with those who were, even in spite of their religion's supposed disavowal of politics, and he sees them as much as a political movement in that sense as a religious one. There's a reason why reading "Consolation" from the late 1930s often feels like reading a radical political magazine more than any kind of a religious one

This is a perspective few other authors have addressed in their studies of the Witnesses -- especially authors whose purpose in writing is largely polemical rather than sociological. It also helps to put into perspective exactly what happened to the movement during the Knorr era -- it wasn't just a shift in surface style or in teaching methods, it was an overt and very specific political shift, from the radicalism of the Rutherford era to an extremely bourgeois conservatism that went to great lengths to embrace aspects of the socio-politcal system that it claimed to oppose. Reading Stroup's depiction of the pre-1945 movement really draws that fact into sharp focus, and it makes understanding what happened to the Society in later years that much more obvious.

This is a book well worth reading, and I hope that those who haven't will seek it out. It's a fascinating text.

85

“Monkey this up”...

by minimus in

jw
friends

that expression is a no-no now.

it is racist and hateful.

some people just need to get the monkey off their backs..

em1913

Not at all. And other than perhaps the late Elijah Muhammad with his teaching of old Mr. Yakub and his grafted white devils, I don't think anybody teaches "black supremacy." I've been reading your stuff here for years, Minimus, and to be honest you've always struck me as too intelligent a guy for that kind of cheap strawman argument. I hate to see the Trumpies sucking you into the cult of identitarianism. That way lies madness.