-
Overcoming the Fears of This GenerationThe Watchtower—1955 | August 15
-
-
associate with fearless people and partake of their fearlessness. Yes, face the future confidently with the fearless New World society, never failing to show love for your neighbors by inviting them to join with Jehovah’s witnesses and now “say to those whose hearts beat wildly, ‘Courage, fear not!’”—Isa. 35:4, AT.
-
-
Part 16—Publishing Under a New Name, TheocraticallyThe Watchtower—1955 | August 15
-
-
Modern History of Jehovah’s Witnesses
Part 16—Publishing Under a New Name, Theocratically
UPON Judge Rutherford’s return from Britain to New York city on October 2, 1938, he delivered a timely stinging lecture before an audience of 7,000 on the subject “Fascism or Freedom.” This soon appeared in booklet form and was circulated by the millions to alert the people as to Fascism’s imminent blood bath of war. The following summer, June 23-25, 1939, another multicity convention was successfully held, New York city’s Madison Square Garden being the key center. Twenty-eight conventions all together—several in Australia, ten in Britain including London, one in Honolulu and several in the United States—formed the international audience of 75,000 persons to hear the convention’s climactic public talk “Government and Peace” delivered by the Watch Tower Society’s president. About halfway through this forceful lecture a riot, plotted by Vatican-inspired “Father” Coughlin’s “Christian Front” WMCA (radio station) picket marchers, broke out at the New York key assembly. It required the Garden ushers (all of them Jehovah’s witnesses) about fifteen minutes to quell the mob by overpowering and removing from the Garden the 500 Fascist disturbers.
The disturbance began by booing, hissing and yelling “Heil Hitler” and “Viva Franco,” etc. At the same instant, by wire and wireless communication, thousands in many other places of earth heard the actual riot taking place. Applause after applause by the Garden audience gave the speaker, Rutherford, lusty support as he masterfully continued to speak over the microphone to outride the storm.a Nothing came of the charges that the Society legally pressed against the ringleaders of this Catholic mob. However, in the fall of 1939 the three-judge Special Sessions Court of the City of New York (composed of two Roman Catholics and a Jew) not only exonerated three of the ushers (Jehovah’s witnesses) but commended them for reasonably exercising necessary firmness against the mobsters when the city police wholly failed to do their duty to preserve order when the vast public assembly in the Garden was suddenly threatened with disruption. Those three ushers had been falsely arrested, accused and prosecuted on complaint of several of the Catholic mobsters whom the ushers forcibly removed from the Garden.b
-