Religion: Witnesses in Detroit

Jehovah’s Witnesses thrive on trouble. Last week, after the most harried season in their 62-year history, 35,000 Witnesses took over Detroit for five days, had themselves a rousing time.

Mornings Witnesses spread themselves through the city according to prearranged plans. So efficiently did they space their posses that dazed Detroiters thought the city had been taken by storm. Witnesses wore sandwich signs, brandished placards, sowed handbills and pamphlets everywhere. Phonograph-toting canvassers claimed “hundreds of converts.”

Afternoons Witnesses hustled back to Convention Hall, where they had set up everything from a cafeteria to a hospital, sat on hard chairs in 117° heat and were harangued by their rafter-rattling leader, “Judge” Joseph Frederick Rutherford. Twenty lesser gatherings of Witnesses, from Boston and Honolulu, to Seattle and El Paso, heard Rutherford over loudspeakers and leased telephone wires.

Sunday morning the Witnesses climaxed their convention with a mass baptism for 2,500 in the pool of a Detroit amusement park. Candidates arrived in a mile-long caravan of cars, were garbed in backless swimming suits, trunks, nightgowns, house dresses and play suits. When the Witnesses were still cluttering the pool at noon, the park’s regulars grew impatient. The Witnesses obligingly speeded the remaining baptisms to a six-second dunking apiece.