Joseph F. Rutherford

The temperance movement was founded and promoted by Christians, but not all Christians supported Prohibition. Judge Joseph F. Rutherford, the second president of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (which became known as Jehovah's Witnesses in 1931), ardently opposed the Eighteenth Amendment. Rutherford, despite being a heavy drinker, supported temperance in theory. It was the hypocrisy of the dry prohibitionists that infuriated him. In an article that appeared in a 1924 issue of his organization's official publication, The Watchtower, Rutherford explains how prohibitionists have been deceived. Rutherford believed any law that inspired that kind of deceit in decent people was a scheme concocted by the devil. This statement drew a lot of protest from some other religious organizations that already considered the Watchtower Society as heretical.

Since the time of Abel there have been some good men who desire to eliminate...