John V. Dittemore
| John Valentine Dittemore | |
|---|---|
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| Born | September 30, 1876 Indianapolis |
| Died | May 10, 1937 New York |
| Occupation | Christian Science director, writer |
John Valentine Dittemore (September 30, 1876 - May 10, 1937) was an American biographer and writer. He was a director of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, the Christian Science church, in Boston from 1909 until 1919. Before that he was head of the church's Committee on Publication in New York, and a trustee for ten years of the estate of Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), the founder of Christian Science.
Dittemore is best known as the co-author, with Ernest Sutherland Bates, of Mary Baker Eddy, the Truth and the Tradition (1932). Historian Ralph Henry Gabriel wrote in 1933 that, because of the amount of primary-source material to which Dittemore had access, the book "comes very close to being a definitive history of a strangely paradoxical woman".
Dittemore was born in Indianapolis. He attended Ohio Military Institute and Phillips Academy Andover. He was president of the Federal Packing Company and Vice-President of Van Camp Packing Company. He married Edith L. Bingham in 1898, they had one daughter, Louise.
As head of the Christian Science church's Committee on Publication, Dittemore commissioned the first church-authorized biography of Eddy, The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (1907) by Sibyl Wilbur, which he later said 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.
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1928 that Eddy's work, much of it in the religion's textbook Science and Health (1875), had borrowed heavily from the unpublished manuscripts of New England "mental healer" Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866).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). 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."
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