Chapter 3

The Trial

What the newspapers of 1936 and 1937 reported, and the silence that came after

On Wednesday, May 27, 1936, readers of the Chicago Tribune found a minister from Zion, Illinois, on the front page. The headline read “Zion Minister Jailed by U.S. on Mann Act.” The same day the Kenosha News, published just across the state line in Wisconsin, ran its own front-page story under the headline “Accuse Pastor of Zion Church in Moral Code.” The minister was Finis Jennings Dake. He was thirty-three years old and the pastor of a church in Zion, and he was the man who would later write the notes of the Dake Annotated Reference Bible.¹

What happened next is not in doubt. A federal grand jury in Milwaukee had indicted him in February 1936 under the Mann Act, the federal law against taking a woman or girl across a state line for an immoral purpose. In February 1937 he pleaded guilty in federal court and was sentenced to six months in the Milwaukee house of correction. The next month the Assemblies of God revoked his ministerial credentials. He served five months and was back in his pulpit in July 1937.²

That record later dropped out of the story told about him. His publishers and admirers held up his life as a reason to trust his notes. They spoke of his tens of thousands of hours of study and pictured a teacher set apart by God. In the story they told, 1936 and 1937 were left out or passed over in a paragraph. Leaving that record out was wrong. A man’s life cannot be offered as a reference for his teaching and then told with its hardest part removed. So here is that record, in the words of the newspapers that reported it, with nothing added to what they say.

Reading the newspapers of 1936 and 1937

The record is about four dozen newspaper pages printed between May 1936 and July 1937, along with the notices that ran when Dake and his wife died in 1987. Appendix A lists every one of them with a link to the page itself.³ The Chicago Tribune followed the case closely because Zion was in its circulation area, and the Kenosha News followed it because the girl at the center of the case lived in Kenosha. Most of the other stories came over the wire services. That means the same sentences turn up in papers from Wisconsin to Texas and Florida, and one reporter’s words printed in ten papers are still one witness. It also means a garbled line in one paper can be checked against a clean printing of the same story in another.⁴

A newspaper is not a court record. A reporter can mishear a name, and an editor can trim a sentence until its meaning shifts. But the papers are reliable on the things this record depends on: dates, places, official actions, and words spoken aloud in a courtroom or a church. Where the papers disagree, I give both readings.

The girl in the case was sixteen. Most of the papers printed her name. Her hometown paper did not, and it told its readers why.

The girl’s name is withheld from publication under a state law, with which this newspaper is entirely in accord. Kenosha News, May 27, 1936, p. 1

I follow that paper’s lead. Her name appears in the articles that Appendix A links, and so does the name of a second girl in the 1936 reports, but neither name appears here. I have also left out the lurid details that some of the coverage dwelt on, because they add nothing to what the record shows.⁵

The charge

Congress passed the White-Slave Traffic Act in 1910, and nearly everyone called it the Mann Act, after its sponsor, Representative James Robert Mann of Illinois.⁶ It was meant as a weapon against organized prostitution across state lines, but its words reached further. It made it a federal crime to take a woman or girl across a state line for prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose, and the courts read that last phrase broadly. A man could be convicted under the Act with no money changing hands and no organized vice involved at all.⁷ Dake faced a federal charge in a United States district court.

The federal grand jury at Milwaukee returned its indictment in February 1936. It charged that Dake had taken the Kenosha girl from her hometown across the state line to East St. Louis, Illinois, for immoral purposes. Most papers dated the trip April 23, 1935, and one Tribune story gave April 21.⁸

The arrest

Federal agents came to Dake’s home in Zion on the evening of Tuesday, May 26, 1936, as he was about to take his wife and their eight-year-old daughter to the church for a service.⁹ He was taken before the United States commissioner, Edwin K. Walker, and he asked to be released on his own word so that he could preach that night. The Tribune printed the exchange.

“I am holding services at my church tonight and I would like to be there so my parishioners won’t know about this affair,” stated the Rev. Dake as he pleaded not guilty. “May I be freed on my own bond?”
“This is too bad,” said Walker. “But it can’t be done.” Chicago Tribune, May 27, 1936, p. 1. Edwin K. Walker was the United States Commissioner.

He spent the night in the county jail, and his wife, Dorothy, took the service in his place. That day’s Belleville Daily Advocate called her “herself an ordained minister” when it reported her defense of her husband, and she told a United Press reporter what she believed.¹⁰

“There is no truth to this charge about my husband,” Mrs. Dorothy Dake said. “The girl was leaving home as a hitchhiker and hailed a ride from my husband. His enemies learned of this and pressed the charges.” United Press wire story, Baraboo News-Republic, May 27, 1936, p. 1

The next day he came before the commissioner again. The prosecutor, Raymond Drymalski, read the charge aloud in open court, and the Tribune’s reporter took down its language.¹¹

willfully and feloniously did transport and cause to be transported in interstate commerce from Kenosha [Wisconsin, to East St. Louis, Illinois, for the purpose of prostitution,] debauchery and other immoral practices. Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1936, p. 17. Bracketed words are the paper’s summary of a passage it did not print in full.

The same report says, “At times the Rev. Mr. Dake wept.” He waived a hearing and agreed to be taken to Milwaukee for trial. Bond was set at two thousand dollars, and when he could not raise it that day, he went back to jail.¹² After the hearing he spoke to reporters, and his words were printed in at least four papers.

“I did take her there,” he admitted to interviewers after the hearing. “But there was no immorality involved. I wanted to get her a job.” Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1936, p. 17

He admitted the trip and denied any immorality, and he held to that position from the day of his arrest until his release in 1937. The government told a different story. Investigators said that he and the girl had registered at hotels in Waukegan, Bloomington, and East St. Louis under the name of Christian Anderson and wife. The prosecutor said Dake 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 by him. John Erickson, a director of the church and its Bible school, told the Tribune, “It’s a frameup. Mr. Dake is a fine man and we are all going to stand behind him.” The board of deacons passed a resolution declaring their belief in his innocence. His bond was posted on May 28, and before he left the jail he spoke to twenty-two of his fellow prisoners on the subject of life. Then he sent a message to his congregation.¹⁴

There is not a thing in that indictment against me that is true. Message from Dake to his church, Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1936, p. 1

The trial was set for September 14, 1936. It did not take place then, and no paper in the record explains why. The case did not return to the papers until February 1937.¹⁵

The plea and the sentence

On Tuesday, February 9, 1937, the case came before Federal Judge F. A. Geiger in Milwaukee, and Dake pleaded guilty.¹⁶ Through his lawyer, Eugene Sullivan, he admitted that he had taken the girl from Wisconsin into Illinois, and he denied any intimate relations with her. Sullivan told the court that no actual moral offense was involved.¹⁷

The prosecutor, Assistant United States Attorney E. J. Koelzer, told the court more. He said that Dake had become acquainted with a group of Kenosha high school girls and had left his parish to go to parties with them, and he described hotel rooms in three cities.¹⁸ Those were the government’s statements at sentencing. A guilty plea admits the charge, and it does not admit everything a prosecutor says afterward. Dake answered in court that his interest in the young woman was purely platonic, that he had taken her at her own request, and that he had been trying to help her find work.¹⁹

The young woman was in the courtroom, and so was Dake’s wife. The Tribune’s reporter wrote that Dake stood “shamefaced and silent before the judge.”²⁰ The next morning’s headline over that story read “FLOCK ABSOLVES PETTING PARSON, BUT JAIL WAITS.” Papers in Indiana and Florida used the same phrase in their own headlines, and it shows the tone in which much of the press told the story.²¹

The sentence was six months in the Milwaukee house of correction. The judge let him remain free until the following Monday, when the sentence would begin.²²

His own account

That night two hundred members of his church gathered for what the papers called a vindication service. The Tribune’s reporter was there, and his story is the fullest record of how Dake spoke about what had happened to him.

The International News Service carried the same speech, but in its version Dake speaks of the devil’s soul where the Tribune has the devil’s tail. The papers do not settle which reporter heard him right.²⁴

Dorothy Dake stood with him through that week. The Kenosha News described her part on the day of the sentence.

Mrs. Dorothy Dake, his wife, who is also an ordained minister and who has remained loyal to her husband during his difficulties, sang a hymn of her own composition. Kenosha News, February 9, 1937, p. 1²⁵

The Tribune’s reporter recorded two more things from the vindication service. Dake told the room that he meant to spend most of his time in jail writing a book, a commentary on the Bible. After his release, he said, he would write another book about his time in a cell.²⁶ Then everyone who was not a member was asked to leave, and Dake read a formal statement to his own people. In it he said that it had been proved in court that he had no illicit relations with the girl.²⁷

The court had proved no such thing. He had pleaded guilty to taking her across a state line for an immoral purpose, and the court made no finding beyond the plea. A plea of guilty is not proof of innocence, and a court that never reached a question has not answered it.

In his last service before he reported to the house of correction, his wife preached the sermon. He played his slide trombone, and he, his wife, and the congregation all wept. At the close, twenty people came forward and announced their conversion.²⁸

“Does any one here think that God has deserted me?” he asked in a ringing voice.
“No!” the congregation roared. Chicago Tribune, February 15, 1937, p. 1

He turned to his wife and said, “God bless this little woman. She has set an example for all to follow.” He told reporters he was the happiest man this side of heaven, because he had renewed his contact with divine authority. One printing of the Associated Press story adds that he blamed all his troubles on the ill will of the devil.²⁹

Not everyone in Zion was on his side. Wilbur Glenn Voliva, the overseer of the rival church in town, told an interviewer it would be more fitting if the devil wrapped Dake around a tree. On his Sunday broadcast Voliva said there were people in the house of correction who ought to be in the federal penitentiary.³⁰ He was a bitter rival with reasons of his own. His remarks show how divided the town was, and they settle nothing about the case.

The house of correction, release, and return

Dake reported to the Milwaukee house of correction on Monday, February 15, 1937.³¹ In March an Associated Press reporter asked how he was doing, and the answer ran in several Illinois papers. He had been put to work as a shipping clerk and 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 as saying, “I am perfectly content here.” The commentary he had announced in February did not appear for many years, since his annotated Bible was copyrighted in 1963. The papers do not say whether he wrote any of it during his sentence.³²

That same March, while he was in the house of correction, the Assemblies of God revoked his ministerial credentials. No newspaper in the record mentions it, but I hold copies of the records that show it. He later joined the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), which ordained him in 1948, as Chapter 2 tells.³³

He walked out of the house of correction on Friday, July 16, 1937. He had served five months of the six, with one month taken off for good behavior. When a reporter asked whether he would go back to his congregation, he would not say.³⁴

On Sunday, July 18, he was back in his pulpit. A saxophone trio played a hymn about grace being greater than our sins, and the church was comfortably full.

“I’m not going to preach a sermon,” the pastor said when he faced his flock. “I’m just going to make a few remarks. We’ll have an old-fashioned love feast.” The Daily Review (Clifton Forge, Virginia), July 19, 1937, p. 1

He warned the congregation 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.³⁵ As the people left, an elderly woman said Dake was the most lovable man in the world, and an old man put it another way: “Verily, the new Elijah.”³⁶ There the newspaper record of the case ends.

The silence that followed

Dorothy Dake died on February 19, 1987. Finis Dake died at his home in Lawrenceville, Georgia, on Tuesday, July 7, 1987, at the age of eighty-four.³⁷ Four days later the Atlanta Constitution ran a full obituary. It named the reference Bible and the year it appeared, the publishing company, his other books, his birthplace in Miller County, Missouri, and his family. It also quoted a company biography on the “100,000 hours” of Bible study behind the work. It said nothing about 1936 or 1937.³⁸

An obituary is not the place for a court record, and I do not fault the family or the reporter for that. But the same silence runs through the account of his life that his family’s publishing house issued later. Leon Bible’s biography, Finis Jennings Dake: His Life and Ministry, published by Dake Publishing in 2006, gives the federal case about a paragraph. It leaves out the prosecutor’s account in court, and it does not mention that the Assemblies of God revoked his credentials.³⁹ In the 1950 advertising for his course, he is the teacher of seventy-five thousand hours of study whose course left nothing to human reasoning. In the publisher’s foreword of 1977 and in the company biography the obituary quoted, the hours have grown to a hundred thousand. Chapter 2 traces how that picture was built.

That picture of his life has been used for decades to recommend his teaching, with the record of 1936 and 1937 left out or reduced to a paragraph. When a man’s life is held up as a reason to trust his notes, the life becomes part of the case for the notes, and a life offered that way has to be told whole. Leaving the conviction out of his story, and then using that story to recommend his teaching, was not forgiveness but promotion, and it was wrong.

What the record means, and what it does not

The conviction refutes none of his doctrines. Whether the Father has a body, and whether the Godhead is three separate beings, are questions about the Bible. Chapter 6 through Chapter 19 answer them from Scripture, one page of his at a time. A man can sin gravely and still read a text correctly. David was an adulterer and a murderer, and Psalm 51 is Scripture.

The reverse holds as well. A large body of work does not vouch for a man’s life. The study and industry that Chapter 2 credits to Dake are real, and they do not cancel what the papers recorded in 1937.

Grace and restoration are real, and nothing in this record limits them. If Dake repented, God forgave him completely. Scripture also shows what restoring a fallen brother looks like. Galatians 6:1 places him in the hands of spiritual people who restore him gently, and Psalm 51 shows the posture of a man who confesses his sin openly and offers no excuses. The record falls short of that. The newspapers show a man who told his own people, behind closed doors, that the court had proved his innocence. Years later his family’s publishing house told his life with the conviction reduced to a paragraph and the revocation left out.

Isn’t forgiven sin buried sin?

Some readers will say that God has forgiven and forgotten whatever Dake did, and that Christians should leave it buried. I believe God forgives completely. But His forgiveness does not require the rest of us to forget a public record. Paul was forgiven, and he kept telling the churches that he had persecuted them (1 Corinthians 15:9; Galatians 1:13). Peter was forgiven, and his denial is told in all four Gospels. Scripture keeps a forgiven man’s history and lets it become his testimony. The record of 1937 was handled another way. It dropped out of the story or shrank to a paragraph, and the story told that way was used to commend his teaching.

Isn’t this an attack on the man instead of his teaching?

Others will call this chapter an ad hominem argument, an attack on the man in place of an answer to his ideas. That argument would run like this: he was convicted, so he was wrong about the Trinity. It is a fallacy, and I do not make it anywhere in these pages. The question here is about the man himself, because his life was offered as a reason to trust his notes. When a life is offered that way, the life is open to examination, and the newspapers are the evidence. His notes are tested on other ground, in Part II, against Scripture.

Can the newspapers of the 1930s be trusted?

The papers of that era were sensational, and they sold copies with nicknames like the one in the Tribune’s headline. That shaped their adjectives. It did not change the date of the indictment, the name of the judge, the plea, the sentence, or the days he entered and left the house of correction. Those facts appear the same way in papers in different states, carried by rival wire services.

Where the papers disagree, the differences are small. The wire services gave his age in May 1936 as thirty-three and as thirty-five, and he was thirty-three. One Tribune story dates the trip April 21, while every other paper says April 23. An Associated Press item in July 1937 dates his sentence February 16, while the papers that covered the hearing put it on February 9. In the vindication speech the Tribune has the devil’s tail and the International News Service has his soul. One 1937 story gives him two children, while the rest give one daughter. None of these differences touches the plea, the sentence, or his own account of what he did.⁴⁰

The test every teacher faces

In February 1937 Finis Jennings Dake pleaded guilty in a United States district court to violating the Mann Act, and he served five months in the Milwaukee house of correction. He admitted the trip and denied any immorality from the first day to the last. His wife and his church stood by him, and he came home in July and told his people to forget the past. The later story of his life did forget it, and that silence was wrong.

There is good news for the believer in this record. You do not have to decide whether a teacher was a good man before you can tell whether he was right. The Bereans tested the apostle Paul himself by the Scriptures (Acts 17:11), and no one who has written notes in the margin of a Bible stands above that test. You only need to open the Book he wrote about and read it for yourself.

“For we can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth.” 2 Corinthians 13:8 (NKJV)

The truth of God’s Word does not rest on any teacher’s reputation, and no teacher’s failure can harm it. Chapter 4 turns from the man to his method, the rule for reading the Bible that shaped almost everything in his notes.