Chapter 3: The Trial — Finis Dake's 1937 Federal Case

Church libraries are quiet places. Most of the books came from somebody's parent's house. People pass away, families clean out the shelves, and the study Bibles end up donated. One of them has a gold name stamped on the cover.

I have watched a young man pick up that Bible. He was maybe twenty. He turned the pages the way people do when a book feels older than they are. Then he found something in another book on the same shelf, some old reference work with small print, and he went to the woman at the desk.

She had been the church librarian for eleven years. Nobody had ever asked her that question. She did not know. Her pastor did not know. I would guess most of the people reading this page right now do not know either.

So here is the answer. In 1936, a federal grand jury in Milwaukee indicted Finis Jennings Dake. In February 1937, he pleaded guilty in federal court to violating the Mann Act. He was sentenced to six months. He served five and came home to his pulpit in July.¹

Those are not rumors. They are not Internet gossip that traveled from one discernment blog to another until nobody could say where it started. They are the plain content of dozens of daily newspapers, printed at the time, in cities from Wisconsin to Texas to Florida. I have read them. You can read them too. Every one of them is posted on this site, and Appendix A lists them all.²

I want to say something before we go any further, because I think you deserve to know the spirit in which I am writing. I take no pleasure in this chapter. I am a minister. I have sat with men whose lives fell apart, and I have prayed with their wives, and I know that a public record is a hard thing to leave behind. If I could tell this story without telling it, I would.

But I cannot. I will explain why in a few pages. For now, one promise: I will not tell you a single thing the documents do not show.

The Record and Its Sources

The record behind this chapter is roughly four dozen newspaper articles. They run from May 1936 to July 1937, with two more from 1987. Some come from big city dailies, others from small town weeklies. The Chicago Tribune covered the case closely because Zion was in its circulation area. The Kenosha News covered it because the young woman was from Kenosha.³

Most of the rest is wire copy. Two press services covered the arrest, and their stories ran all over the country. That matters for two reasons. First, the same sentences show up in many papers, so one reporter's phrasing can look like ten separate witnesses when it is really one. Second, when a line in one paper is garbled, I can check it against a cleaner printing of the same wire story in another paper. I have done that throughout.⁴

Here is my standing rule for this chapter: every factual claim is tied to a specific article, by paper, date, and page. Where the papers disagree, I print both versions and say so. I do not smooth over a conflict to make a cleaner story. Where the record is silent, I say it is silent rather than filling the gap with a guess.

A newspaper is not a court record. I want to be clear about that. A reporter can mishear a name. A wire editor can trim a sentence until it changes. But newspapers are good at dates, places, official actions, and quoted speech taken down in the room. Those are the things this chapter relies on. I have not tried to read anyone's heart from a headline.

The Story in the Evidence

1. The Rule Before the Story

There was a sixteen year old girl in this case. Most of the papers printed her name. One did not. I want you to see how that paper explained its decision:

That was her hometown paper, writing about a neighbor's daughter, in 1936. I am going to follow their lead. In this book she is "the young woman" or "the Kenosha girl." Her name is in the articles. The articles are linked. Nothing is hidden from anyone who wants to check the record. But I am not going to print a minor's name in my own prose ninety years later just to make a paragraph feel more documented. It would add nothing to the argument.⁵

I will also leave out details that the record includes but the argument does not need. Some of the 1937 coverage is lurid. The headline writers of that year had a phrase for Dake that I will not repeat more than once. I repeat it once only so you can see the tone of what was printed about him.⁶ This chapter is a record, not a spectacle.

2. The Charge

The law involved was the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910. Almost nobody called it that. Everybody called it the Mann Act, after the congressman who wrote it.⁷

Congress passed it to attack organized prostitution across state lines. But the words of the statute reached further than that. It made it a federal crime to transport a woman or girl across a state line for prostitution, for debauchery, or for "any other immoral purpose." Those last words did a great deal of work in the courts over the next fifty years. A man could be convicted under the Mann Act without any money changing hands and without any organized vice at all.⁸

So the charge here is a federal charge, and it is a serious one. It is not a morals charge under a city ordinance. It is not a church tribunal. This is the United States government, in a United States district court.

The grand jury in Milwaukee returned the indictment in February 1936. It charged that on a day in April 1935, Dake took the Kenosha girl from her home town across the state line to East St. Louis, Illinois, for immoral purposes. The papers give the date as April 23. The Chicago Tribune once printed April 21. I do not know which is right, and I will not pretend that I do.⁹

The Tribune reporter was in the room when the charging language was read aloud, and he wrote it down:

The same paragraph adds four words that tell you what the room was like. "At times the Rev. Mr. Dake wept."¹⁰

3. The Arrest

Federal agents came to his house in Zion, Illinois, on the evening of Tuesday, May 26, 1936. He was about to leave for church. His wife and their eight year old daughter were with him.¹¹

He asked to be released on his own word so he could preach that evening. The Tribune printed the exchange:

Read that first sentence again. It is a young pastor's instinct under sudden pressure. I do not think it is fair to load it with more weight than it can bear. But it is what he said, and a reporter wrote it down.

He spent the night in the county jail. His wife, Dorothy, an ordained minister herself, took the service in his place and told a reporter what she believed:

The next day he waived a hearing and agreed to be transferred to Milwaukee for trial. Bond was set at two thousand dollars. He could not raise it that day, so he went back to jail. The papers said so in their headlines.¹²

Then he spoke to reporters. This is the sentence that matters most in the whole 1936 file. It was carried in at least four papers:

Notice what that admits and what it denies. He admits the trip. He denies the immorality. From May 1936 through his release in 1937, that is his position. It never changes.

The government's account was different. Investigators told reporters he and the girl had registered at hotels in three cities under the name of Christian Anderson and wife. Prosecutors said he explained his interest in her as a wish to help her escape an unhappy home and bring her into church work.¹³

His church stood with him. A director of the church and Bible school told the Tribune, "It's a frameup. Mr. Dake is a fine man and we are all going to stand behind him." On May 28 his bond was posted and he went home. Before he left the jail he preached to twenty-two fellow prisoners on the subject of life. Then he sent word to his congregation.¹⁴

Trial was set for September 14, 1936. It did not happen then. The record does not explain the delay, and I will not invent one.¹⁵

4. The Plea and the Sentence

The case came before Federal Judge F. A. Geiger in Milwaukee. On Tuesday, February 9, 1937, Finis Dake pleaded guilty.¹⁶

He did not plead guilty to everything the government said about him. Through his lawyer he admitted the interstate trip and denied any intimate relations with the girl. The Kenosha News reported it that way, and so did the Tribune. His attorney told the court there was no actual moral offense involved.¹⁷

The prosecutor said more. The assistant United States attorney told the court that Dake had become acquainted with a group of Kenosha high school girls and that he had left his parish to go on parties with them. He described hotel rooms in three cities.¹⁸

I need to be careful here, because this is exactly the place where a writer can slide into saying more than the record shows. Those were the government's allegations at sentencing. A guilty plea to the Mann Act count is not a guilty plea to every sentence a prosecutor speaks afterward. Dake answered them in open court. He said his interest in the young woman was purely platonic, that he took her at her own request, and that he was trying to help her find work.¹⁹

Two people sat in that courtroom whom I cannot stop thinking about. The young woman was there. So was his wife, the mother of his daughter. The Tribune reporter watched him stand in front of the judge and used one word for how he looked. Shamefaced.²⁰

The sentence was six months in the Milwaukee house of correction. He was given a few days before he had to report.²¹

5. His Own Account

He used those days to speak, and because he did, we know a great deal about how he understood what was happening to him.

That same night, two hundred members of his church gathered for what the papers called a vindication service. What follows is long, and I am printing it at length on purpose, because a summary would become an editorial and the exact wording matters.

The same reporter recorded two more things from that night. I find them harder to read than anything else in the file.

First, a plan. Dake told the room he intended to spend most of his jail time writing a book, a commentary on the Bible. After his release, he said, he would write a second book about his time in a cell.²³

Second, a claim. When the meeting was over, all the nonmembers were asked to leave. Then, to his own people, Dake read a formal statement. He said that it had been proved in court that he had no illicit relations with the girl.²⁴

I have read that paragraph many times, and I want to be fair about it. In a narrow sense he had a point. He had pleaded guilty to a transportation charge. No court had made a finding about what happened in those hotel rooms. But a guilty plea is not a proof of innocence. A court that never reached a question has not answered it. And a room emptied of outsiders is not the same room where the reporters were.

Six days later he preached his farewell. His wife delivered the sermon. He played his slide trombone. He wept. She wept. The congregation wept. Twenty people came forward at the close and announced their conversion.²⁵

He turned to his wife and said, "God bless this little woman. She has set an example for all to follow." Then he told the reporters he was the happiest man this side of heaven, because he had renewed his contact with divine authority. One paper adds that he blamed all his troubles on the ill will of the devil.²⁶

Not everyone in Zion was sympathetic. Wilbur Glenn Voliva ran the rival church across town, and he had no kindness to spare. He told an interviewer it would be more fitting if the devil wrapped Dake around a tree. On his Sunday broadcast he said there were people in the house of correction who ought to be in the federal penitentiary.²⁷

I quote Voliva only to show the town was divided. I am not adopting his judgment. He was a bitter rival with motives of his own, and a man's enemies are not his jury.

6. Jail, Release, and Return

Dake reported to the Milwaukee house of correction on Monday, February 15, 1937.²⁸

In March a wire reporter asked the jail how he was doing. The answer ran in papers in at least three states. He had been put to work as a shipping clerk. He wrapped parcels seven hours a day. The guards called him a good workman. He kept to himself, stayed away from the other inmates, and gave most of his spare time to theological study. A deputy inspector quoted him in five words: "I am perfectly content here."²⁹

He walked out on July 16, 1937. He had served five months of the six. One month was taken off for good behavior. A reporter asked whether he would go back to his church. He would not say.³⁰

Two days later he was back in his pulpit. The saxophone trio played a hymn about grace being greater than our sins. The church was comfortably full.

He warned them against human weaknesses and told them to forget the past. The Associated Press noted that he made no direct mention of his imprisonment. A police lieutenant who belonged to the church stood at the door and searched everyone who came in. "We don't want any cameras," he said.³¹

As the people left, one elderly woman said he was the most lovable man in the world. An old man put it differently. "Verily, the new Elijah."³²

7. The Silence

Finis Dake died on July 7, 1987, at his home in Lawrenceville, Georgia. He was eighty-four. The Atlanta Constitution ran a full obituary four days later. It named the Bible, the publishing company, the 1963 publication date, his four other books, his birth in Miller County, Missouri, and his surviving family. It quoted a company biography about the hours of study behind the work.³³

I do not fault the obituary writer. A death notice is not the place for that, and the family had just buried a husband and father who had also buried his wife five months before.³⁴ But lay those two documents side by side, the 1937 wire story and the 1987 obituary, and you can see how a public fact turns into a private one. Nobody lied. The story simply stopped being told.

I should be careful about what I claim here, so let me mark the edge of my knowledge clearly. This chapter rests on newspapers. What his denomination did about his ministerial credentials, I cannot tell you from these documents. One 1936 item seems to report that a Pentecostal council was standing behind him, but that line is damaged on the page I have, and I will not build anything on a word I cannot read.³⁵ If a credential record exists, it belongs in Appendix A when someone produces it. Until then the honest answer is: I do not know.

What It Means, and What It Does Not

It proves less than his critics want and more than his defenders admit. Let me draw three lines, and draw them clearly.

First line: this chapter does not touch his doctrine. Not one page of it. Whether Dake was right that the Godhead is three separate beings, each with his own body, soul, and spirit, is a question about the Bible. It gets settled by opening the Bible. That is exactly what Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 do. A man can be a sinner and still be right about a text. King David was an adulterer and a murderer, and Psalm 51 is Scripture. If someone ever tells you Dake's notes are false because of 1937, correct them. That argument is bad, and this book does not make it.

Second line: his doctrine does not settle this either. The reverse move is just as bad, and I hear it more often. It goes like this: the man wrote a magnificent Bible, so leave his life alone. But a body of work is not a character reference. Industry is not innocence. If the argument from his life to his doctrine is invalid, then the argument from his doctrine to his life is invalid too.

Third line, and this is the one that makes the chapter necessary. A story is a claim, and claims meet records.

Here is what I mean. Nobody would need this chapter if the Dake Bible were simply a set of study notes by a hard-working man. Notes get tested on their merits. But that is not the only thing many readers have been handed. Alongside the notes comes a picture: the unfaltering man of God, the seventy-five thousand hours, the anointing so powerful that the notes carry something close to the weight of the text they surround. I have heard that picture used in an argument. I have heard a Sunday school teacher answer a question about a note by describing the man instead of addressing the note.

The moment the man is offered as the reason to trust the notes, the man becomes evidence. And evidence has to be complete. You cannot put a life on the scale and then decide which parts of it count.

So this chapter is not an attack on Finis Dake. It is a correction to a story about him, and it is aimed at the halo, not the grave.

Some of you have loved this Bible for thirty years. Your grandmother's handwriting is in the margins. You have just learned something about the man who wrote the notes, and it landed in your chest. You feel a little sick. Maybe a little foolish, as though you should have known.

You should not have known. There was no way to know. The information was not kept from you by you.

And hear this. Your grandmother's faith was not built on Finis Dake. It was built on Jesus Christ, who never failed her once. The tears she cried over that Bible were real, and God received them. Nothing in this chapter reaches back and touches her. Nothing in this chapter reaches back and touches you.

Answering the Objections

The second objection is that this is an ad hominem argument, an attack on the man in place of an answer to his ideas.

I agree completely, and that is why I have not made one. The argument "he was convicted, therefore he was wrong about the Trinity" is a fallacy. I will not use it. You will not find it in this book. What I have done is separate two claims that had gotten tangled together. Claim one is about the notes, and it is settled in Part II from Scripture. Claim two is about the man, and it is settled here from documents. Keeping them apart is not a trick. It is the whole point.

The third objection is the sharpest, and it is about the sources. The papers of that era were sensational. They sold copies. They invented nicknames. Why should we trust them?

We should not trust them the way we trust a court transcript. I said that at the top. But look at what the sensationalism actually affects. It affects the adjectives. It does not affect the indictment date, the name of the judge, the plea, the sentence, the commitment date, or the release date. Those are checkable facts, reported the same way across papers in different states. And where two papers do disagree, I have shown you the disagreement instead of picking the version I liked.

There are four such conflicts in this file. His age is thirty-three in one wire service and thirty-five in the other. The trip is dated April 21 in one Tribune story and April 23 everywhere else. The sentencing is placed on February 9 by the papers that covered it and on February 16 by an Associated Press item five months later. And the devil's tail in one account is the devil's soul in another. I have printed all four instead of choosing.³⁶

That is what honest use of an imperfect source looks like. Not blind trust. Not blanket dismissal. Cross-checking, and open reporting of what will not line up.

Conclusion

Yes. In February 1937, Finis Jennings Dake pleaded guilty in a United States district court to violating the Mann Act. He served five months in the Milwaukee house of correction. He admitted the trip and denied the immorality, from the first day to the last. His wife stood by him. His church stood by him. He came home in July, preached again, and told his people to forget the past.

And then, across fifty years, the church at large did forget it. That is a different thing from forgiving it.

Carry two things forward from here. The first is a boundary. Nothing you have read on this page tells you whether the notes in your Bible are true. Not one word of it. That question is answered in Chapter 6 through Chapter 19, where we read his own pages and hold them up to Scripture. I would ask you to judge this book by those chapters, not this one.

The second is a caution, and it is the reason the chapter had to come this early. When you are told to trust a note because of the man who wrote it, something has already gone wrong. The Bereans were praised for testing an apostle (Acts 17:11). Not a Bible teacher. An apostle. If Paul's teaching was to be checked against the Scriptures by ordinary people with open scrolls, then no annotator who ever lived is above the same test.

That test is the whole method of this book, and it is a mercy, not an insult. It means you do not have to decide whether a teacher is a good man before you can tell whether he is right. You only have to open the book he was writing about.

There is a man in this chapter who wept in a courtroom, wrapped parcels for seven hours a day, and spent his evenings in a jail studying the Bible he would one day annotate. I do not know his heart. God does. I hope with everything in me that the grace he preached to twenty-two prisoners in a county jail in May of 1936 was grace he received himself.

But hope is not evidence, and a halo is not a verdict. In the next chapter we leave the man and go to the method, because the method is where the doctrine comes from. Dake had a rule for reading the Bible. He stated it plainly. And almost everything strange in his notes grows out of it.

Notes

↑ 1. The four events in this paragraph are documented, in order, at notes 9, 16, 21, and 30 below. The full annotated document list, with links to every article, is Appendix A.

↑ 2. The contemporary articles are hosted in the trial document folder at https://dakebible.org/trial/, and each is listed individually with paper, date, headline, and description in Appendix A. Citations below give paper, date, and page so that any reader can independently retrieve the same articles from a newspaper archive without relying on this site.

↑ 3. The working file for this chapter comprises approximately forty-eight distinct articles across sixty-seven archived image files (several articles are held in duplicate copies). Papers represented include the Chicago Tribune, Kenosha News, Baraboo News-Republic, Beaver Dam Daily Citizen, Oshkosh Northwestern, Journal Times (Racine), Waukesha County Freeman, La Crosse Tribune, Belleville Daily Advocate, Belleville News-Democrat, Dixon Evening Telegraph, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Des Moines Register, Lincoln Journal Star, Baltimore Sun, Kansas City Star, South Bend Tribune, The Times (Hammond, Ind.), Tipton Daily Tribune, Owensboro Messenger, Birmingham News, Daytona Beach News-Journal, The Record (Stockton, Calif.), The News-Review (Roseburg, Ore.), The Daily Review (Clifton Forge, Va.), Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Iberia Sentinel (Iberia, Mo.), Atlanta Journal, and Atlanta Constitution.

↑ 4. The two services are the Associated Press and the United Press; International News Service also moved a story on the February 1937 vindication service. The Oshkosh Northwestern of May 27, 1936, p. 5, is unusually useful because it prints the AP and UP versions of the arrest one above the other in a single column, allowing a direct comparison of the two accounts.

↑ 5. "Accuse Pastor of Zion Church in Moral Code," Kenosha News, May 27, 1936, 1. The Wisconsin statute protected the identity of juveniles in delinquency proceedings. The young woman's name is printed in most of the wire coverage and is visible to any reader who follows the links in Appendix A; the decision not to reproduce it in this book's own prose is editorial, taken under the restraint rule governing this chapter, and does not conceal anything from a reader who wishes to verify the record.

↑ 6. The phrase, which appears in headlines in the Chicago Tribune (February 10, 1937, 3), The Record (February 10, 1937, 4), Daytona Beach News-Journal (February 10, 1937, 10), and The Times of Hammond, Indiana (February 11, 1937, 22 and 24), is "petting parson." It is quoted here once as evidence of the tone of the 1937 coverage and is not adopted in this book's voice.

↑ 7. White-Slave Traffic Act, ch. 395, 36 Stat. 825 (1910), commonly the Mann Act after its sponsor, Rep. James Robert Mann of Illinois; codified as amended at 18 U.S.C. sec. 2421 et seq.

↑ 8. The operative phrase of the 1910 statute was "for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose." The Supreme Court construed the "any other immoral purpose" language broadly in Caminetti v. United States, 242 U.S. 470 (1917), holding that noncommercial conduct fell within the Act. Congress narrowed the statute in 1986. The point for this chapter is limited: a Mann Act conviction in 1937 establishes an interstate transportation for a purpose the law called immoral, and does not by itself establish anything about commerce or organized vice.

↑ 9. For the February 1936 indictment and the April 23, 1935 date: "Zion Minister Jailed by U.S. on Mann Act," Chicago Tribune, May 27, 1936, 1; "Zion Pastor Faces Charges on Mann Act" (UP), Baraboo News-Republic, May 27, 1936, 1; "Minister Held, Girl Sought in Mann Act Case" (UP), Belleville News-Democrat, May 27, 1936, 2; "Pastor Facing Trial," South Bend Tribune, May 28, 1936, 5. For April 21: "Zion Minister Fails to Post Mann Act Bail," Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1936, 17. The April 23 date is the majority reading and appears in the Tribune's own earlier story; no attempt is made here to resolve the discrepancy.

↑ 10. "Zion Minister Fails to Post Mann Act Bail," Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1936, 17. The indictment language was read in open court by Assistant District Attorney Raymond Drymalski. The bracketed words in the block quotation reproduce the newspaper's own connective summary; the quoted charging language itself is given as the paper printed it.

↑ 11. Chicago Tribune, May 27, 1936, 1, which gives the address as 620 Shiloh Boulevard, Zion; and the UP wire story as printed in Baraboo News-Republic, May 27, 1936, 1, and Beaver Dam Daily Citizen, May 27, 1936, 5, for the detail that the arrest came as he was about to take his wife and daughter to the church for services.

↑ 12. "Clergyman Held for Violation of the Mann Act" (AP), Oshkosh Northwestern, May 27, 1936, 5; "Minister Held for Violation of Federal Act" (AP), Belleville Daily Advocate, May 27, 1936, 3; "Lacks $2,000, Pastor Jailed," Des Moines Register, May 28, 1936, 22; "Pastor Fails to Get Bond," Journal Times (Racine), May 28, 1936, 7; "Minister Faces Hearing" (AP), Lincoln Journal Star, May 27, 1936, 2. The AP story names his attorneys as Louis J. Portner of St. Louis and B. Krohn of Chicago; the Oshkosh Northwestern gives the second name as Stewart B. Krohn.

↑ 13. For the hotel registrations at Waukegan, Bloomington, and East St. Louis under the name of Christian Anderson and wife: UP wire, Baraboo News-Republic, May 27, 1936, 1, and Belleville News-Democrat, May 27, 1936, 2; Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1936, 17. For the prosecutor's account of his stated motive: "Minister Held for Violation of Federal Act," Belleville Daily Advocate, May 27, 1936, 3, and "Pastor Fails to Get Bond," Journal Times, May 28, 1936, 7, both attributing the explanation to Assistant United States Attorney Raymond Drymalski.

↑ 14. Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1936, 17 (John Erickson, a director of the church and Bible school); "Pastor Bailed Out; Faithful Sing Praises," Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1936, 1 (the release on bond, the meeting with twenty-two fellow prisoners, and the subject of his remarks). The same May 29 story records a resolution of the board of deacons declaring belief in his innocence, and reports that photographers and reporters were barred from the jail meeting at his own request.

↑ 15. Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1936, 1, gives the trial date as September 14, 1936. The disposition did not come until February 1937 (note 16). No article in the file explains the interval, and none is asserted here. A "Congregation Prays for Rev. Finis Dake" item in the La Crosse Tribune, June 1, 1936, 6, is the latest 1936 coverage in hand.

↑ 16. "Rev. Dake Gets Six Months in Kenosha Case," Kenosha News, February 9, 1937, 1; "Flock Absolves Petting Parson, but Jail Waits," Chicago Tribune, February 10, 1937, 3; "Bible Marathoner to Prison" (AP), Kansas City Star, February 9, 1937, 2. The judge is named F. A. Geiger in both the Kenosha News and the Tribune.

↑ 17. Kenosha News, February 9, 1937, 1 ("admitted through counsel that he had taken the girl with him from Wisconsin into Illinois, but denied he had intimate relations with her"); Chicago Tribune, February 10, 1937, 3, naming the attorney as Eugene Sullivan and quoting him: "There is no actual moral offense involved here... The girl is unharmed. He acted upon her request." The INS wire carries the same two phrases: Daytona Beach News-Journal, February 10, 1937, 10; The Record (Stockton), February 10, 1937, 4; Birmingham News, February 10, 1937, 7.

↑ 18. Kenosha News, February 9, 1937, 1, attributing the statement to Assistant United States Attorney E. J. Koelzer; Chicago Tribune, February 10, 1937, 3, which reports Koelzer's account of the hotel rooms in Waukegan, Bloomington, and East St. Louis.

↑ 19. Kenosha News, February 9, 1937, 1. The distinction pressed in the text is not a technicality invented for this book: a guilty plea admits the elements of the offense charged, not the additional matter a prosecutor may present in aggravation at sentencing. Some papers blurred this. The Waukesha County Freeman, February 15, 1937, 2, reports that "he pleaded guilty to government charges" that he had slipped away from his parish for parties with Kenosha young people, which conflates the plea with the prosecution's sentencing narrative. The more careful accounts in the Kenosha News and the Chicago Tribune are followed here.

↑ 20. Chicago Tribune, February 10, 1937, 3: the young woman "and his wife, the mother of his daughter, 8 years old, were in court as Dake stood shamefaced and silent before the judge."

↑ 21. Kenosha News, February 9, 1937, 1; Chicago Tribune, February 10, 1937, 3, which notes that the sentence would begin the following Monday, "a stay of execution until then having been allowed by the judge."

↑ 22. "Tail" in Chicago Tribune, February 10, 1937, 3. "Soul" in the INS wire: Daytona Beach News-Journal, February 10, 1937, 10; The Record (Stockton), February 10, 1937, 4; Birmingham News, February 10, 1937, 7. A related consideration favors the Tribune's reading without settling it: when Wilbur Glenn Voliva answered the remark the next day, he answered a version about a tail. See The Times (Hammond, Ind.), February 11, 1937, 22 and 24.

↑ 23. Chicago Tribune, February 10, 1937, 3: "Pastor Dake said he intended to pass most of his time in jail in writing a book, a commentary on the bible. After his release, he said, he would write another book on his experiences in a cell." The INS wire carries the same statement in slightly different words: Daytona Beach News-Journal, February 10, 1937, 10. Whether either book was written during the sentence is not shown by the file; the Dake Annotated Reference Bible was published in 1963 (see note 33), and no book on his jail experiences is known to this author.

↑ 24. Chicago Tribune, February 10, 1937, 3, final paragraph. The characterization is the reporter's summary of a document read aloud; the statement itself is not reproduced in the file, and no claim is made here about its full wording.

↑ 25. "Saves 20 on His Way to Jail," Chicago Tribune, February 15, 1937, 1; Waukesha County Freeman, February 15, 1937, 2; "Pastor, Mann Act Violator, Begins Sentence, After He Converts 20 Adults" (INS), Fort Worth Star-Telegram, February 16, 1937, 1. All three independently report the trombone, the wife preaching, the weeping, and the twenty conversions.

↑ 26. Chicago Tribune, February 15, 1937, 1, and Fort Worth Star-Telegram, February 16, 1937, 1 ("God bless this little woman"); "Pastor Tells Flock Goodby to Serve His Term in Jail" (AP), St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 15, 1937, 23, and "'I'm Happy'," Des Moines Register, February 15, 1937, 1 (the "happiest man this side of heaven" and the renewed contact with divine authority). The sentence blaming his troubles on the ill will of the devil appears in the Des Moines Register printing of the AP story.

↑ 27. The Times (Hammond, Ind.), February 11, 1937, 22 and 24, for the tree remark and for Voliva's descriptions of the rival congregation; Waukesha County Freeman, February 15, 1937, 2, and Fort Worth Star-Telegram, February 16, 1937, 1, for the Sunday broadcast remark about the house of correction and the federal penitentiary. Voliva led the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church and was overseer of Zion; Dake had left that body to found the Christian Assembly Church, a background reported in nearly every article in the 1936 file.

↑ 28. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 15, 1937, 23; Des Moines Register, February 15, 1937, 1; Fort Worth Star-Telegram, February 16, 1937, 1 (dateline Zion, February 15). An Associated Press item five months later gives the commitment date as February 16; see note 36.

↑ 29. "Zion Minister in Correction House Model Prisoner" (AP), Dixon Evening Telegraph, March 23, 1937, 2; the same wire story in The Times (Streator, Ill.), March 23, 1937, 1, and "Convicted Minister Is Model Prisoner," Belleville Daily Advocate, March 24, 1937, 3. The deputy inspector is named John Drewniak. Note that two different papers named The Times appear in this file: the Hammond, Indiana, paper of February 11, 1937 (note 27) and the Streator, Illinois, paper of March 23, 1937.

↑ 30. "Minister Out of Prison" (AP), Kansas City Star, July 16, 1937, 20: "Dake, sentenced to six months February 16, 1937, served only five months, obtaining one month off for good behavior. He refused to say whether he would go back to his congregation."

↑ 31. "Pastor Welcomed by Flock After Serving Term in Jail" (AP), St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 19, 1937, 20; "Greeted by Big Crowds," The Daily Review (Clifton Forge, Va.), July 19, 1937, 1; "Preacher, Son of Former Iberian, as 'New Elijah'," Iberia Sentinel (Iberia, Mo.), July 22, 1937, 1, which reprints a Chicago Herald and Examiner account and supplies the detail about the police lieutenant at the door.

↑ 32. Iberia Sentinel, July 22, 1937, 1, reprinting the Chicago Herald and Examiner.

↑ 33. "The Rev. Finis J. Dake Sr., publisher of Dake's Annotated Reference Bible," Atlanta Constitution, July 11, 1987, 57. The obituary gives the death as Tuesday (July 7, 1987) at his home in Lawrenceville, Georgia, his age as 84, his birth as October 18, 1902, in Miller County, Missouri, the reference Bible as the 1963 edition, and the study behind it as "100,000 hours" according to a company biography. A death notice also ran in the Atlanta Journal, July 8, 1987, 61. On the differing labor figures advertised for the work over the years, see Chapter 2.

↑ 34. Death notice for Mrs. Dorothy (Dobbins) Dake, Atlanta Journal, February 20, 1987, 23, giving her death as February 19, 1987, at age 83. The Atlanta Constitution obituary of July 11, 1987, gives her age at death as 84.

↑ 35. "Congregation Prays for Rev. Finis Dake," La Crosse Tribune, June 1, 1936, 6. The clipping in hand is legible in its headline and in the reference to two hundred praying members, but the line naming the body said to be supporting him is damaged and cannot be read with confidence; a reading of "Pentecostal council" is possible but is not relied on here. No conclusion about ministerial credentials is drawn from it. Readers who can supply a cleaner scan, or any denominational record, are invited to do so, and it will be added to Appendix A.

↑ 36. The four conflicts, with sources. Age: thirty-three in the UP wire (Baraboo News-Republic, May 27, 1936, 1) and the Chicago Tribune (May 28, 1936, 17; February 10, 1937, 3); thirty-five in the AP wire (Belleville Daily Advocate, May 27, 1936, 3; Oshkosh Northwestern, May 27, 1936, 5; Baltimore Sun, May 28, 1936, 21; Lincoln Journal Star, May 27, 1936, 2). Given a birth date of October 18, 1902 (note 33), he was thirty-three in May 1936, which favors the UP figure. Trip date: see note 9. Sentencing and commitment: February 9 and February 15 in the papers that covered them (notes 16 and 28), against February 16 in the Kansas City Star of July 16, 1937, 20 (note 30). The devil's tail or soul: note 22. A fifth minor discrepancy may be noted here: most 1936 and 1937 reports describe one child, a daughter of eight, while the Fort Worth Star-Telegram of February 16, 1937, 1, describes him as the father of two children.