The Ross Libel Trial - The Case of the Missing Transcript

 

     One of the historical documents researchers have long wanted to see is the transcript of the Ross libel trial.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…