One of the historical
documents researchers have long wanted to see is the transcript of the Ross
libel trial.
The subject of this hearing for the charge
of criminal libel has been discussed twice before on this blog. First, the
whole background was dealt with back in 1913.
https://truthhistory.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-ross-libel-case.html
This established that, in British law
(which governed Canada), a charge of criminal
libel had no chance of success in the circumstances. It was a legal point and had
nothing to do with the merits, or otherwise, of the case.
Second, the recent discovery of copies of
an anti-Russell paper, Philip Sidersky’s Searchlight
on Russellism, has finally yielded transcripts from the case that answer
the key question on the oft-repeated perjury charge. This was a real find and
the background is given here.
https://truthhistory.blogspot.com/2022/09/philip-sidersky-and-ross-libel-trial.html
The actual surviving transcript (without
any editorial comment) was published here.
https://truthhistory.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-ross-libel-trial-transcript.html
At the time that last article was written,
two issues of the Searchlight paper
had been examined.A third issue has now been found (Volume 1, number 7) but
this reports on CTR’s death and has no more of the transcript.
In this article we are going to look at the
background to the original transcript’s disappearance.
First, let’s consider those most concerned
with the case at the time. Extensive research showed that the archives of George
Lynch-Staunton (CTR’s interrogator) do not have a copy. John Jacob Ross, CTR’s
accuser, died in 1935 and no modern family can be traced. He obviously had
access to the transcript, because his later flawed quotations come from it, but
whether he had his own copy or simply used the court copy is unknown. Since he
wasn’t even in court for CTR’s cross-examination by Staunton and had no input
on these proceedings, he may have just used the copy from the court file. The
same would be true of Philip Sidersky. If they, or friends or relations, ever had a copy I
think it would have surfaced by now.
That leaves just two remaining sources, the
official court files and of course the copy CTR and the Watch Tower Society might
have once had. All sorts of rumors may
have flown around on this, but we will try to keep strictly to facts that can
be verified (to this writer’s satisfaction at least).
As far as official court files are
concerned, some writers on the subject since the early 1950s present an air of
authority by advising their readers they can always check the material (and
accusations) in the court copy in the files of the Ontario
High Court – Russell vs. Ross – “defamatory libel” – March 17, 1913.
One of
the first, if not the first, to do this was Walter Ralston Martin. Martin spent
some time and effort attacking the witnesses. In covering the Ross case, he
made it appear that he had consulted the original transcript – “Jehovah’s
witnesses cannot deny this documentary evidence” – but then went on to quote, not
from the original transcript at all, but rather from J J Ross’s incorrect
rendering… Had Martin followed his own advice and checked, he would not have
found the transcript. We are going to establish that the court copy went AWOL
many, many years before. And we will come back to Walter Martin again a little
later.
In the mid-1980s this writer spent some
time cooperating with a researcher who has scoured varous official sources in Canada
in an attempting to find what actually happened to the transcript. To make sure
the contacts were being above board, I followed up by sending my own questions as
a separate researcher – and got the same outcome. Here is a general flavor of
the results. From the Records Supervisor of the Hamilton-Wentworth Regional
Police (October 1985):
The 1912 hearing obviously did not end up
on microfilm. The “all that was available” was a thin file dating from 1968.
Signed by a Justice of the Peace, it reads: “The enclosed includes every
particle of information that I have been able to unearth in this matter during
the past forty years.”
Taking “forty years” at face value, from
1968 would take you back to 1928. The actual file (as examined in 1985)
contained just the original indictment and a photocopy of two pages from an
opposition book from the 1950s, which someone – disagreeing with its negative
comments – heavily annotated. This had obviously been donated by an earlier
enquirer. As for the actual trial transcript – that was nowhere to be seen.
Next, from the Court Administrator for the
Ministry of the Attorney General for Ontario (November 1985) came similar
negative results:
The “past 40 years”from 1985 would take
you back to 1945 – not quite as far as 1928 suggested in the previous
enclosure, but far enough to suggest again that the trial transcript was long,
long gone.
The “sorry – goodbye” message was rounded
out by a letter from the Chief Supreme Court Reporter, from the same Ministry
of the Attorney General – this from March 1986:
So any records and transcripts in the
court files prior to 1960 were no more.
So what about the Watch Tower Society’s
own copy?
First, we have to assume that they really
did have a copy. There were no photocopiers back then, or documents on screens
as pdfs. Unless there was a special need, would a court stenographer use carbon
paper throughout to make more than one copy? Some trials – the Brooklyn Eagle (miracle
wheat) trial and the first CTR separation hearing of 1906 were typeset and
printed, but the Ross hearing was never published. It is reported that at one
point CTR sent staff members to Canada to examine the court file and take some
notes. This would not have been necessary if they’d had their own copy.
So we come back to Walter Martin again.
After encouraging his readers to check an empty police file, in a subsequent
work he confidently refers to: “a copy on file in the headquarters of the cult
in Brooklyn.” He does not actually
say he’s seen it personally, but that is the inference.
So Martin is our witness that the Society
had its own transcript. The reality is – do we believe him? We have to ask, if Bethel
did have it why would they show it to him - of all people? It
may be noted that Martin was subject to a whole book attacking his honesty (The
Latter Day Saints’ 320 page volume They
Lie in Wait to Deceive). While one hesitates to focus on character
assassination, the book is highly entertaining. And we return to his original
review of the case, referred to above. In it, Martin did not quote from the
transcript but from J J Ross’s “selective edit.” That covers Martin as far as
this writer is concerned.
A
contemporary of Martin in the first half of the 1950s was Marley Cole.
Researching over 1953-1954 his work
Jehovah’s Witnesses – The New World
Society was published in 1955. Cole
was a witness and was given cooperation and help by the Watchtower Society. In
Cole’s autobiography The Harvest of Our
Lives (1996) he explained: “Headquarters worked with me, page by page on
every chapter throughout the book, furnishing some of the material.” That was
good, because it meant the book had been fact checked. In covering the Ross
trial, Cole does not say he saw the transcript but many years later in a personal
letter he specifically stated that he did not. All he saw was a record about it
from opposers – Ross or Martin? – take your pick! (Letter from Marley Cole
dated February 15, 1989).
Using
secondary sources like the works of Martin and Cole, numerous other
publications thereafter touched on the case.
In 1972, Ditlieb
Felderer wrote a whole 200 page “thesis” on the subject. Those who obtained a
copy were disappointed. The work veers all over the place and spends much of
its time attacking the character of J J Ross. Crucially, it is obvious that
Felderer never saw the original transcript either.
Then the
book Jehovah’s Witnesses in Canada (1976)
covered the case briefly and reconstructed the key section from earlier
accounts, but again there is no indication that the author ever saw the
original transcript. Interestingly, when the Watchtower Society produced its 1979
Yearbook history of.Canada and
covered the case, they had the opportunity to use the transcript if they’d had it,
but instead chose to simply quote from Jehovah’s
Witnesses in Canada. Their subsequent paragraph on page 94 of the Yearbook: “We do not know how the case
was presented to it (the grand jury)” is a good indication they had no
transcript of the full proceedings to consult.
Anyone
contacting the Society would have received a clear answer. Here is one example
from 1985: “We do not have a full official transcript of the trial that took
place in Hamilton, Ontario, involving Brother Russell, Some excepts were taken
from the trial record shortly after the trial took place and you will find one
excerpt on page 19 of the May 15, 1953, issue of The Watchtower.”
So how
could it go missing? The answer is – very easily!
A few
years after the hearing, CTR died in 1916. The new administration faced
difficulties during World War 1, with key officials being put in jail, and the
headaquarters hurriedly being relocated from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh and then
later back to Brooklyn again. No doubt some items were lost then. Materials
from some branches may have been confiscated, and never returned. As evidence
of this, when the plan was announced to reprint the first 40 years of the Watch Tower magazine in the early 1920s,
they did not have a complete file of copies. The headquarters had to appeal to
readers and collectors to lend them a few issues so the project could go ahead.
If that is what happened to the archive of their key magazine, then a
transcript of a hearing that didn’t really work out, and featuring a former
president, now deceased, would hardly be a priority. Again, this all presupposes
that they ever had a copy in the first place.
It may of
course still be there in the bottom of a drawer somewhere and could still be
rediscovered, and that is why unsubstantiated rumor can florish. Or, as
suggested above, for all the claims to the contrary, the original stenographer
only ever made one copy for the court file. Everyone else involved had to
consult that master copy and take notes from it – if they were sufficiently
interested – until it disappeared.
About ten
years ago, a trusted researcher was given three typewritten pages by Watchtower
archives that covered some verbal sparring between CTR and George Lynch-Staunton. When examined more recently these
pages turned out to be the whole of page 2 from Volume 1 number 1 of Sidersky’s
Searchlight on Russellism as preserved in the Harvard Divinity School
library.
But does
it matter? While one might like to see a complete transcript, this writer
believes it doesn’t.
Examining
the newspaper accounts of the day, and what Ross actually wrote, nearly all the
material seems to have been covered in an earlier trial from January 1912: Charles T Russell vs The Brooklyn Daily
Eagle (commonly called the Miracle Wheat trial). This makes sense. Ross had
no personal knowledge of CTR and nothing original to say. He simply rehashed
criticisms that had gone before. However, the transcript of that earlier trial
does still exist.
So, the
only real issue the Ross trial makes “unique” is his claim that CTR committed
perjury. And thanks to the work of a virulent opposer, Philip Sidersky, way
back in 1916, we have that covered. Not that that was Sidersky’s intention of
course. But anyhow, thank you Philip!
With
grateful thanks to fellow researcher RP with whom I made contact again after 35
years. I will try not to leave it another 35 years…
