Glad Assembly

Cleveland had rarely seen such concerted concern for the uplift of its soul. Evangelists cried out on street corners; windrows of leaflets clogged the city's gutters. Defiant placards atop caravans of clanking autos proclaimed the doom of Satan.

All this, including the fair warning to Satan, was the work of an extraordinary army of 75,000 invading and noisy militants--from Finland, Argentina, Scotland, Mexico and every corner of the U.S. They were encamped on the shores of Lake Erie for the Glad Nations Theocratic Assembly of Jehovah's Witnesses.

At their first triumphant postwar conclave, the Witnesses cast off wartime tribulations. In Germany, their disdain for human authority had tumbled 6,000 of them into concentration camps. In the U.S., their religious scruples against saluting the flag had vexed mobs to tar & feather them and burn their homes. Over 4,000 had gone to jail for refusing either to serve in the armed forces or to be classified as conscientious objectors; Witnesses claimed they were all ministers of the gospel. But the Witnesses had thrived and multiplied a bit on a diet of rough treatment.

The Locusts. They brought wives and children and grandmothers with them. In Cleveland's western outskirts, on a treeless sunbaked flat of weeds and dust, 20,000 of them made a tidy camp. There they parked their trailers, pitched tents, built their own privies and slept like Spartans on mats of straw.

Nearby filling-station attendants complained that their washrooms were clogged with naked Witnesses taking sponge baths. Mechanics sweated without charge over the creaking chariots of fellow zealots. Free haircuts were dispensed by an amateur barber who was thoughtful enough to bring along an electric clipper. Payless chefs, cooking in tin-plated oil drums and 600-gallon kettles, ladled out 75,000 meals a day.

At central headquarters, Witnesses methodically divided the city into 11,773 four-block sectors. Then, like locusts, they swarmed out, haranguing pedestrians, charging up doorsteps with portable phonographs (message: let Roman Catholics change their ways), hawking the limitless output of the Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society.

When fire broke out in an elevator shaft of the downtown Leader Building, the canvassers stopped firemen rushing in to quench the flames, handed them pamphlets describing the coming destruction of the world by fire which is part of the Witnesses' dogma.

The Fireballs. Having thus tried Cleveland's spirit of hospitality, Witnesses turned to their own affairs. More than 2,500 of them, togged out in bathing suits, playsuits, pajamas or long underwear, waded hip deep into Lake Erie to be immersed backwards in its waters. (Baptizers, chilled by the four-hour ceremony, swigged from a bottle of port wine.)

Attentive throngs of Witnesses turned out faithfully for lecture after lecture in mammoth Municipal Stadium. From a platform in the infield, speakers hurled Biblical fireballs into the packed stands. The joyous climax of the Glad Assembly came on Universal Peace Day. There Watch Tower President Nathan H. Knorr, successor to the late, mellifluous "Judge" J. F. Rutherford, denounced most human institutions, especially the United Nations. Cried he: "Display outright fearlessness of this world conspiracy. . . . God's vengeance is speedily coming against all conspirators."

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