John V. Dittemore

Dittemore became known for his involvement with The First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston, the mother church and administrative headquarters of the Christian Science religion. As head of the church's Committee on Publication, Dittemore commissioned The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (1907) by Sibyl Wilbur, the first church-authorized biography of the religion's founder, Mary Baker Eddy. He later said the book was unreliable. Over the next 20 years he collected primary-source material about the church and Eddy. As his research progressed, he began to find material, including thousands of letters Eddy had written, that in his view contradicted the church's account of its own history and Eddy's life. The church at first supported his research, then tried to dissuade him from continuing with it.[4]

He became disillusioned with the church after coming to the view in 1928 that Eddy's work, much of it in the religion's textbook Science and Health (1875), had borrowed heavily from the unpublished manuscripts of New England "mental healer" Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866). He was also concerned that the church had attempted to boycott Charles Scribner's Sons for publishing a critical biography of Eddy, Edwin Dakin's Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind (1929).[4][2] The publisher took out an ad in the Los Angeles Times in December 1929 saying that booksellers across America were returning Dakin's book under pressure. It said: "The result is a situation almost incredible in a free country."[5]

Dittemore went on to write his own biography of Eddy and history of the church, Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition (1932), with the historian Ernest Sutherland Bates. That he collaborate with Bates was suggested by Allen Johnson, Professor of American History at Yale University.[4]

The book is largely based on three trunks full of primary sources that Dittemore collected, including 1,500 unpublished letters from Eddy; rare excerpts from the diary of Eddy's personal assistant Calvin Frye; the diary of James F. Gilman, who illustrated her work; letters from her brother and first two husbands; 500 letters from her students; and reminiscences from her close contacts.[4] Gillian Gill writes that Dittemore, on behalf of the church, gained access to Frye's rooms after his death and removed sections of his diary, which Dittemore transcribed, photographed, then burned. He included extracts in his book.[6]

The work also makes use of two books that Dittemore says were suppressed by the church: Mrs. Eddy as I Knew Her in 1870 (1923) by Samuel Putnam Bancroft, a student of Eddy's, and Mrs. Eddy and the Late Suit in Equity (1908) by Michael Meehan. The latter is about a lawsuit in which Eddy was involved toward the end of her life, when her relatives sought unsuccessfully to have her declared unable to manage her affairs.[4] Meehan was a supporter of Eddy's, and she initially approved the publication but later asked the author not to release it.[4][7]

Just as the church had suppressed other works critical of Eddy, it also suppressed the Truth and the Tradition by buying the copyright and publisher's plates from A. A. Knopf.[8]