The pennant of baseball's 1949 world champions was missing from the Yankee Stadium last week. A speakers' stand stretched across the infield, and huge posters plastered the stadium, bearing messages like Saarnaa Sanaa and Pregetha y gair. They all meant the same thing: "Preach the Word" (II Tim. 4:2). Beneath this slogan, spelled out in 77 tongues, some 77,000 hot, hungry and happy Jehovah's Witnesses had gathered together from 48 states and 68 nations.
For eight days they packed the ballpark, protecting their heads from the sun with handkerchiefs and folded newspapers while they listened to reports and speeches, prayed and sang hymns. They kept 7,000 of their brethren busy cooking and serving meals in batches of 20,000, giving first aid to the heat-prostrated, returning lost children, painting signs, running a post office and arranging transportation. At night hundreds of them trekked back across the Hudson River to a 90-acre tent and trailer camp at New Market, N.J., where another 9,000 had listened in over loudspeakers. And in between times, they managed to give New Yorkers the impression that there was a Witness on nearly every street corner, cheerfully hawking his sect's two periodicals, The Watchtower and Awake.
The most surprising thing about them was the quiet orderliness of a sect whose best-known trait is getting thrown into jail. A day &. night cleanup squad of 500 Witnesses kept the stadium spotless with brooms, buckets and dustpans; pop bottles were banned from the stands. Exclaimed one police sergeant in astonishment: "That's the best-behaved crowd I've ever seen in my life!"
The Decisive Battle. Unconventional as its members are, Jehovah's Witnesses is one of the three major worldwide sects (with the Mormons and the Christian Scientists) that can be properly labeled "Made in the U.S.A." Its founder was a thin, smallish Pittsburgh Congregationalist named Charles Taze Russell, who began preaching the second coming of Christ in the 18703, and organized his followers into the Zion's Watch Tower Society. When Russell died, a pontifical, organ-voiced lawyer, Joseph Franklin Rutherford, took over, built the organization into more or less its present form (estimated membership: 300,000), and called it Jehovah's Witnesses.*
The faith held by the Bible-centered Witnesses is concrete and uncompromising. Jehovah's first Witness, they believe, was Abel. Noah, Abraham, Moses, et al. continued the line to the "Chief Witness" —Jesus Christ. According to Witness calculations, Christ did not establish His Kingdom until 1914. Since the Bible says that some who are alive when Christ enters His Kingdom will see the end of this world, it is clear to Witnesses that it is likely to happen any day now. Obviously then, the most important thing that a man can do is scramble onto the right side of the fence before Armageddon—the last and decisive battle between Satan and Jehovah.