Joseph Rutherford Is Elected President of the Watch Tower Society

On 6 January 1917, at the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society's annual corporate meeting in Brooklyn, New York, Joseph Franklin Rutherford was elected the Society's second president, succeeding founder Charles Taze Russell, who had led the movement since Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence began in 1879, already recorded here. Russell had died two months earlier, on 31 October 1916, aboard a train in Texas, leaving no named successor. Rutherford, the Society's legal counsel since 1907, was elected without opposition alongside two other officers, but four of the seven sitting directors were not reelected, and the ousted men soon challenged Rutherford's authority, accusing him of concentrating control in his own hands. Rutherford held his office through the dispute, appointing four replacement directors that July, and went on to centralize the Society's organization and expand its public preaching work through the following decade, laying the administrative groundwork for the formal adoption of the name Jehovah's Witnesses at a Columbus, Ohio convention in 1931, already recorded here.