Background
Dittemore was born on September 20, 1876 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of John W. Dittemore, a wholesale shoe dealer, and Mary E. (Cress) Dittemore.
(pp. v, (9), 453, appendices xxxiv, bnding a little shaken...)
pp. v, (9), 453, appendices xxxiv, bnding a little shaken, 4 inch section at upper spine of the dj is missing, largely based on entirely new and unplublished materials, b/w photographs
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biographer writer business executive
Dittemore was born on September 20, 1876 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of John W. Dittemore, a wholesale shoe dealer, and Mary E. (Cress) Dittemore.
Dittemore was educated at the Ohio Military Institute, College Hill, Ohio (later a part of Cincinnati), and at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.
Dittemore entered the business world and had become president of the Federal Packing Company and a vice-president of the Van Camp Packing Company, both of Indianapolis, when, in 1908, he gave up business to devote his time to the work of Christian Science. He had become converted, by his own account, some six years earlier, having been cured "within less than a week" of "a complication of diseases which had incapacitated me most of the time from work. "
In 1909 he was elected as one of the five members of the board of directors of the denomination's "Mother Church, " the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston - the last board member to receive the personal approval of Mary Baker Eddy. The years immediately following the demise of Mrs. Eddy in 1910 were years of difficult adjustment within the Church. There was lacking a clearcut definition of powers among the various bodies Mrs. Eddy had set up, particularly between the board of directors of the Church and the trustees of the Christian Science Publishing Society. This eventually resulted in a long court test, known as the "Great Litigation, " during 1919-1921. Meanwhile trouble had broken out in the board itself. Repeatedly, during the years 1917-1919, Dittemore found himself at odds with his fellow directors over policy matters, and in some instances he carried his side of the case to the public. In 1919 a majority of the directors voted to expel him from the board. This action Dittemore contested in court. In the end the court decided in favor of the directors in both cases: the board was recognized as the final authority within the organization, and Dittemore was effectively removed from the board.
In December 1924 he withdrew from membership in the Christian Science Church. Shortly before this Mrs. Annie C. Bill had organized an opposition movement, first in England and then in America, which followed most of the doctrines of Christian Science while denying the primacy of the Mother Church. Meeting Dittemore, she invited him to share its leadership with her. This he did, and under his aggressive direction the rival movement (called at first the Christian Science Parent Church of the New Generation) seemed for a time to be making headway. But eventually Dittemore withdrew, and the movement gradually disintegrated. While a directorof the Mother Church and while enjoying the prestige of that office, Dittemore collected many valuable documents bearing upon all phases of the Christian Science movement. These he retained when he went out of office, sharing them with Mrs. Bill, who in turn used them directly and indirectly to discredit Mrs. Eddy.
Much of this material was subsequently incorporated in Dittemore's book, Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition (1932), written in collaboration with Ernest Sutherland Bates. The book had only a modest sale, and in 1941 the copyright and the plates were bought outright by the Christian Science board of directors, and the book was retired from circulation.
For some years before his death Dittemore's fortunes appear to have been declining. He lived on a dwindling income from certain Boston properties. During this period he sold the trunkful of documents he had collected to the directors of the Mother Church, for an undisclosed sum. For the last two years of his life Dittemore worked as a statistician. He died on May 10, 1937.
(pp. v, (9), 453, appendices xxxiv, bnding a little shaken...)
Quotations: In his last illness, while under the care of a Christian Science practitioner, Dittemore wrote a letter to the Church's board of directors stating that he now felt he had "made a great mistake in allowing personal differences of opinion and the feelings that developed therefrom, to influence me to the extent which they evidently did after Mrs. Eddy passed on. . I was wrong in letting personal opinion and matters of policy induce me to depart from Principle"
Dittermore was elected as one of the five members of the board of directors of the denomination's "Mother Church, " the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston the last board member to receive the personal approval of Mary Baker Eddy.
On February 15, 1898, Dittemore married Edith L. Bingham, by whom he had one daughter, Louise. The marriage ended in a divorce several years before his death.
