Fawn M. Brodie
Encyclopedia
Fawn McKay Brodie was a biographer and professor of history at UCLA, best known for Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, a work of psychobiography
, and No Man Knows My History, an early and still influential non-hagiographic
biography of Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement
.
Raised in Utah
in a respected, if impoverished, Latter-day Saint (LDS Church) family, Fawn McKay drifted away from Mormonism during her years of graduate work at the University of Chicago
and married the ethnically Jewish national defense expert Bernard Brodie, with whom she had three children. Although Fawn Brodie eventually became one of the first tenure
d female professors of history at UCLA, she is best known for her five biographies, four of which aim to incorporate insights from Freudian psychology.
Brodie's depiction of Joseph Smith as a fraudulent "genius of improvisation" has been described as a "beautifully written biography ... the work of a mature scholar [that] represented the first genuine effort to come to grips with the contradictory evidence about Smith's early life." Her psychobiography of Thomas Jefferson
became a best-seller and reintroduced Jefferson's slave and purported mistress Sally Hemings
to popular consciousness before later DNA
evidence increased the possibility of a sexual liaison. Nevertheless, Brodie's study of Richard Nixon
's early career, completed while she was dying of cancer, demonstrated a weakness of psychobiography when written by an author who loathed her subject.
and Fawn Brimhall. Born in Ogden, Utah
, she grew up in Huntsville
, about ten miles (16 km) east. Both her parents descended from families influential in early Mormonism. Her maternal grandfather, George H. Brimhall
, was president of Brigham Young University
. Her father, Thomas Evans McKay, was a bishop, president of the LDS Swiss-Austrian mission, and an Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles
. Brodie's paternal uncle was David O. McKay
, an apostle
in the LDS Church when Brodie was born, who later became the ninth president
of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Despite the religious prominence of her family, the Thomas McKays lived in genteel poverty, their property burdened by unpayable debt. The young Fawn was perpetually embarrassed that their house did not have indoor plumbing.
Fawn early demonstrated precociousness. At three she memorized and recited lengthy poems. When a whooping cough epidemic convinced Brodie's mother to homeschool
Fawn's sister Flora, who was two years older, Fawn more than kept pace. Introduced to school in 1921, the six-year-old Fawn was advanced to the fourth grade; when she lost the school spelling bee to a twelve- year-old, "she cried and cried that this bright boy, twice her age, had spelled her down." At ten she had a poem printed in the LDS youth periodical, The Juvenile Instructor; at fourteen she was salutatorian
of Weber High School.
Although Fawn grew to maturity in a rigorously religious environment that included strict Sabbatarianism and evening prayers on her knees, her mother was a closet skeptic who thought the LDS Church a "wonderful social order" but who doubted its dogma. According to Brodie, in the late 1930s, while her father headed Mormon mission
activities in German-speaking Europe, her mother became a "thoroughgoing heretic."
, a two-year institution in Ogden then owned by the LDS Church, where she became an accomplished public speaker and participated in intercollegiate debate. She then completed her B.A.
in English literature
at the University of Utah
in 1934. There she began to question core Mormon beliefs, such as that the Indians had originated in ancient Palestine. Nevertheless, after graduation, at age nineteen, she returned to teach English at Weber College, where she demonstrated excellent potential as a teacher.
In high school, Fawn had begun dating a classmate, Dilworth Jensen, and they had written faithfully during Jensen's long absence on an LDS mission
in Europe. In June 1935, both Brodie and Jensen were accepted for graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley
, and friends assumed they would be married. But Flora McKay had recently eloped with Jensen's brother, whom the McKays disliked, and they encouraged Fawn to attend the University of Chicago
instead. Fawn herself seemed to have had "growing doubts about marrying" Jensen.
At the University of Chicago, where she earned an M.A.
in 1936, Brodie lost her faith in religion entirely. In 1975, she recalled, "It was like taking a hot coat off in the summertime. The sense of liberation I had at the University of Chicago was exhilarating. I felt very quickly that I could not go back to the old life, and I never did." Nevertheless, she continued to write to Dilworth Jensen until shortly before she married Bernard Brodie on her graduation day, August 28, 1936.
Brodie was a native of Chicago, the son of Latvian Jewish immigrants who was alienated from both his family and his ethnicity. A bright, emotional graduate student in international relations, Brodie eventually became a noted expert in military strategy during the Cold War era. The McKays were horrified at the impending marriage; and not surprisingly, Dilworth Jensen felt betrayed. David O. McKay went to Chicago to warn his niece of the family's strong objections. Out of consideration for her mother, Fawn scheduled the wedding in an LDS chapel, but of the McKays, only Fawn's mother attended. None of Brodie's family came.
. By mid-1939, she confessed to her uncle, Dean R. Brimhall (another ex-Mormon), that she now hoped to write a full scholarly biography of Joseph Smith. Progress toward that goal was slowed by the birth of the Brodies' first child and by three rapid moves, a consequence of her husband's search for a permanent position. Nevertheless, in 1943 she was encouraged enough to enter her 300-page draft in a contest for the Alfred A. Knopf
literary fellowship, and in May her application was judged the best of the 44 entries.
Brodie continued her research at the Library of Congress
in Washington, D.C., where the Brodies now lived, as well as at the headquarters of the Reorganized LDS Church in Independence, Missouri. Eventually she also returned to Utah and managed some discreet research at the LDS Church Archives, gaining access to some highly restricted materials by being introduced as "Brother McKay's daughter," a subterfuge that made her feel "guilty as hell." Her pursuit of little-known documents was not discreet enough, however, and eventually it attracted the attention of David O. McKay. After a "painful, acrimonious encounter" with her uncle, Brodie promised never again to consult materials in the Church Archives.
In partial compensation, Brodie's research was enlarged by other students of Mormonism, most notably Dale L. Morgan (1914–1971), who became a lifelong friend, mentor, and sounding board. Brodie finally completed her biography of Joseph Smith in 1944, and it was published the following year by Alfred A. Knopf
when Brodie was only thirty.
in 1844. In the biography, Brodie presents the young Joseph as a lazy, good-natured, extroverted, and unsuccessful treasure seeker. In an attempt to improve his family's fortunes, he first developed the notion of golden plates
and then the concept of a religious novel, the Book of Mormon
, based in part on an earlier work, View of the Hebrews, by a contemporary clergyman Ethan Smith
. Brodie asserts that at first Joseph Smith was a deliberate impostor who at some point, in nearly untraceable steps, became convinced that he was indeed a prophet, although without ever escaping "the memory of the conscious artifice" that created the Book of Mormon.
called Brodie's book "a definitive biography in the finest sense of the word," and Time
praised the author for her "skill and scholarship and admirable detachment." Other reviews were less positive. Brodie was especially annoyed by the review of novelist Vardis Fisher
, who accused her of stating "as indisputable facts what can only be regarded as conjectures supported by doubtful evidence." Although Bernard DeVoto
's review was mixed as well, DeVoto praised the biography as "the best book about the Mormons so far published." DeVoto, who believed Joseph Smith was "paranoid," complained that Brodie had not provided adequate psychological explanations for Smith's behavior. Brodie herself came to believe that a thorough psychological analysis of Smith was essential and that she "hadn't gone far enough in this direction."
books that have gone before." BYU professor and LDS historian and apologist Hugh Nibley
challenged Brodie in another booklet, "No, Ma'am, That's Not History", asserting that Brodie had cited sources supportive only of her conclusions while conveniently ignoring others. Brodie herself thought the Deseret News pamphlet "a well-written, clever piece of Mormon propaganda", but she dismissed the ultimately more popular "No, Ma'am, That's Not History" as "a flippant and shallow piece."
In May 1946, the LDS Church excommunicated Brodie, and she never attempted to regain her membership. Brodie once wrote to a friend that the agony of her disillusionment with Mormonism "had to do with the pain I caused my family. The disillusionment itself was...a liberating experience." Even before publication of No Man Knows My History, Brodie sought to comfort her parents, "You brought us all up to revere the truth, which is the noblest ideal a parent can instill in his children, and the fact that we come out on somewhat different roads certainly is no reflection on you." Brodie's mother and three sisters were enthusiastic about the book, but Thomas McKay refused even to read it.
, a leader of Radical Reconstruction.
Brodie believed that previous historians had unduly vilified Stevens, and she enjoyed the prospect of rebuilding a reputation rather than, as in her Joseph Smith biography, tearing one down. Stevens as a champion of black people was a timely interest at the beginning of the Civil Rights era, and research materials were available at Yale University, where Bernard Brodie was employed. Then too, Stevens had a physical deformity, a club foot
, and Fawn Brodie wondered how this handicap might have affected his psyche.
In the view of students of historiography such as Ernst Breisach, all biographers are to some degree psychohistorians
, and any biography that refused to examine motives, character traits, and the depth of personality would be flat and uninteresting. But Brodie became interested in applying the theories of professional psychoanalysts
to the study of historical personalities, a subject especially popular during the mid-twentieth century. At first Brodie was amused at how much psychoanalysis had "become a religion" to its practitioners, but she later become a committed devotee of psychoanalytic theory. Brodie made a number of acquaintances among psychoanalysts, who helped her evaluate Thaddeus Stevens, notably Ralph R. Greenson, with whom she developed a close personal and professional relationship. Both the Brodies also subjected themselves to psychoanalysis, he for insomnia and she for chronic mild depression and sexual problems. (Bernard's employer, the RAND
Corporation, paid most of the bills.) If the problems of everyday life had been insufficient to maintain Brodie's interest in psychology, there was the case of her mother, who during this period attempted suicide three times, the second by cutting herself with a Catholic crucifix and the third (which succeeded) by setting herself on fire.
The Stevens biography took the better part of a decade to complete. In 1956, Brodie discovered evidence that Stevens might have killed a black girl who was pregnant with his child, complicating her attempt to rehabilitate his character. To decide the truth of the matter, Brodie consulted Freud. Fortunately, she also sought the advice of her husband, who acted as chief critic and editor as he had with the Joseph Smith biography, and he prevented Fawn from taking an extreme position. When the Stevens book was published in 1959, it enjoyed virtually unanimous praise from critics. Major historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction era, including David Herbert Donald
and C. Vann Woodward
, praised the biography. Donald called Brodie's psychoanalysis of Stevens "a tour de force." Most gracious was Richard N. Current
, who himself had written a less favorable account of Stevens that Brodie had criticized. Current not only urged W. W. Norton
to republish Brodie's book in paperback, but wrote a blurb praising the author for writing "more imaginatively" and "more resourcefully...than any other Stevens biographer." Thaddeus Stevens was a commercial failure that sold fewer than fifteen hundred copies before going out of print in less than a year.
In 1960 the Brodies spent a year in France, during which Fawn spent considerable energy researching and writing From Crossbow to H-Bomb, a co-authored paperback intended as a college text that treated the impact of science on military technology. Bernard Brodie had signed the contract with Random House
, but his wife did most of the research and writing.
asked Brodie to edit and write a new introduction for Sir Richard Francis Burton
's book, The City of the Saints and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (1862). Almost immediately she "was lost" to Burton, a man whom she described as "fascinating beyond belief", and she was soon planning a full biography. Like Brodie, Burton was an agnostic who was fascinated by religion and all things sexual. Though Freud was almost superfluous in such a case, Brodie once again solicited advice from the psychoanalyst community and then tried to make Burton reveal his subconscious through "free association." For instance, she noted that immediately before and after Burton wrote about his mother, he talked "about cheating, decapitation, mutilations, smashings—all the stories and metaphors are violent, negative, and hostile." The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton was published in May 1967 and was chosen as a featured selection by both the Literary Guild Book Club and the History Book Club. Reviews were again generally positive. The New York Times Book Review promoted it as an "[e]xcellent biography of a bizarre man who had a bizarre wife—and life."
even though she had never earned a Ph.D. (In fact, she had no degree in history at all; both her bachelor's and master's were in English.) As a woman, Brodie met some resistance from the large and overwhelmingly male history faculty, but her specialty in the trendy field of psychohistory
aided both her original appointment and her eventual promotion to full professor. Brodie taught both larger upper-division lectures in American history and small seminars on American political biography—of which she preferred the latter.
. LDS entrepreneur O.C. Tanner
(1904–1993) even offered Brodie $10,000 in advance to produce a manuscript. At this point, Brodie’s confidant Dale Morgan convinced her that an even closer friend, Madeline Reeder McQuown, had nearly completed a huge manuscript on Young. McQuown’s biography was, in fact, little more than rough drafts of a few early chapters, but Brodie was dissuaded and abandoned Brigham Young for Thomas Jefferson.
By May 1968, Brodie was emotionally committed to writing the biography. She understood that it could not be a full account. The study of Jefferson had become a virtual career for several living historians. For instance, Dumas Malone
was in the process of completing a six-volume biography of Jefferson, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Instead, Brodie directed her efforts to a biography of “the private man,” a study that would build on several recently published articles speculating on a possible sexual relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings
, a slave, a quadroon
, and the possible half-sister of his late wife. Not only was the topic timely during this period of increased national interest in race, sex, and presidential hypocrisy, but Brodie had also recently discovered that her own husband had been conducting an extramarital affair.
To Brodie, Jefferson’s ambiguous posturings on slavery could be explained by his personal life. If he were conducting a 28-year affair with a slave, then he could not free his slaves because once freed, Virginia law would force them all from the state. He could only continue his liaison with Hemings if his slaves remained slaves. Because of the paucity of evidence, two of the most prominent Jefferson biographers of the twentieth century, Dumas Malone
and Merrill Peterson, had discounted rumors about this sexual relationship, first published in 1802 by the unscrupulous journalist James T. Callender
when Jefferson was President. Brodie's contribution to the debate arose not from her speculations about Jefferson's psyche but from her use of Dumas Malone
's discovery that Jefferson had been in residence at Monticello
nine months prior to the birth of each of Sally Hemings's children—and that when he was not living there, she had none.
. One commentator, Merrill Peterson, "blasted" the paper. Author and publisher alike understood that the biography would be controversial. An in-house editor at W. W. Norton
was especially critical: "Doesn't [Brodie] know about making the theory fit the facts instead of trying to explain the facts to fit the theory? It's pretty fascinating, like working out a detective story, but she doesn't play fair."
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History was published in February 1974, and it became the main spring selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Brodie did her best to ensure that the three foremost Jefferson scholars, Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, and Julian Boyd, would not be invited to review the book. But she scarcely needed to worry. Brodie was interviewed on NBC's Today Show, and the book quickly "became a topic of comment in elite social-literary circles." The biography was also an immediate commercial success and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for thirteen weeks. Jefferson sold 80,000 copies in hardback, 270,000 copies in paperback, and netted Brodie $350,000 in royalties—adjusted for inflation, more than a million dollars in the early twenty-first century. Academic reviews were mixed. Literary reviews were generally positive while historians were often critical of Brodie's undue speculations.
DNA tests concluded that a male carrying the Jefferson Y chromosome
had fathered Eston Hemings, Sally Hemings' youngest child. In January 2000, a research committee commissioned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation also asserted that there was a high probability that Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemmings and possibly the father of all Hemings children listed in the Monticello
records. Some groups organized to promote Jefferson's reputation still dispute or question this conclusion.
As usual, Brodie considered a range of subjects for a new biography. Brigham Young
was now a clear field, but she decided not to “return to old ground.” Richard Nixon
had resigned the presidency shortly after she had finished Jefferson, and Brodie had spoken formally to both students and others about the former president. As a liberal Democrat, Brodie had developed a “repellent fascination" for Nixon, a man whom she called “a rattlesnake,” a “plain damn liar,” and a "shabby, pathetic felon." Although Brodie thought Nixon an imposter like Joseph Smith, she did not believe him to be the “charming imposter the Mormon leader was."
There were also personal factors motivating her malevolent interest in the former president. One of her sons had nearly been drafted in 1969 shortly after Nixon had won election on the promise to end the Vietnam War
. (At the last minute, sympathetic physicians had Bruce Brodie reclassified as unfit for military service on the basis of his allergies.)
Also, when Nixon had sought information to discredit Daniel Ellsberg
, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers
, his operatives had burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding. Ellsberg was a close friend and former RAND
associate of Bernard Brodie, and Fielding was Fawn Brodie’s long-time therapist. Brodie considered “Nixon the perpetrator of an assault on her privacy.”
Neither Brodie’s husband nor her publisher were enthusiastic about her choice of Richard Nixon as a new subject, but Brodie forged ahead anyway. She resigned her professorship at UCLA in 1977 and began the task of research, including, for the first time, in oral history
collections. Brodie herself conducted 150 interviews. She tried unsuccessfully to interview Henry Kissinger
, whom she knew on a first-name basis—-and even Nixon himself for what she described in a letter to him as “a compassionate and accurate study.” (Nixon did not reply.) Though she could find no evidence, Brodie became obsessed with the notion that Nixon had engaged in a homosexual relationship with his good friend Bebe Rebozo. Even her psychoanalyst friends tried to warn her off.
While hiking at a family reunion in 1980, Brodie became unusually tired. She was shortly diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer
, although she had never smoked. Between chemotherapy treatments she pushed ahead to complete the Nixon study, her three children and a daughter-in-law providing moral and editorial support in her time of need. Knowing that she could never complete a full biography, she ended the manuscript with Nixon's pre-presidential years, lending it an unfinished quality.
, Godfrey Hodgson questioned both her psychoanalytic approach and her motives: “[W]e are in danger of having the insights of psychotherapy used as a tool for character destruction, certainly for libel, potentially for revenge.” Sales of the book were disappointing, in part because of the reviews, in part because memoirs by Nixon associates such as Henry Kissinger
, John Ehrlichman
, and John Dean
had recently flooded the market. Perhaps Brodie’s book was most influential in stimulating Oliver Stone
to create his controversial 1995 movie Nixon
.
should not be misinterpreted as a request to return to the Church. It was Brodie’s last signed statement. In accordance with her wishes, friends spread her ashes over the Santa Monica Mountains
, which she loved and had successfully helped to save from real estate development.
Psychobiography
Psychobiography aims to understand historically significant individuals such as artists, political leaders, and so on, through the application of psychological theory and research...
, and No Man Knows My History, an early and still influential non-hagiographic
Hagiography
Hagiography is the study of saints.From the Greek and , it refers literally to writings on the subject of such holy people, and specifically to the biographies of saints and ecclesiastical leaders. The term hagiology, the study of hagiography, is also current in English, though less common...
biography of Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement
Latter Day Saint movement
The Latter Day Saint movement is a group of independent churches tracing their origin to a Christian primitivist movement founded by Joseph Smith, Jr. in the late 1820s. Collectively, these churches have over 14 million members...
.
Raised in Utah
Utah
Utah is a state in the Western United States. It was the 45th state to join the Union, on January 4, 1896. Approximately 80% of Utah's 2,763,885 people live along the Wasatch Front, centering on Salt Lake City. This leaves vast expanses of the state nearly uninhabited, making the population the...
in a respected, if impoverished, Latter-day Saint (LDS Church) family, Fawn McKay drifted away from Mormonism during her years of graduate work at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
and married the ethnically Jewish national defense expert Bernard Brodie, with whom she had three children. Although Fawn Brodie eventually became one of the first tenure
Tenure
Tenure commonly refers to life tenure in a job and specifically to a senior academic's contractual right not to have his or her position terminated without just cause.-19th century:...
d female professors of history at UCLA, she is best known for her five biographies, four of which aim to incorporate insights from Freudian psychology.
Brodie's depiction of Joseph Smith as a fraudulent "genius of improvisation" has been described as a "beautifully written biography ... the work of a mature scholar [that] represented the first genuine effort to come to grips with the contradictory evidence about Smith's early life." Her psychobiography of Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...
became a best-seller and reintroduced Jefferson's slave and purported mistress Sally Hemings
Sally Hemings
Sarah "Sally" Hemings was a mixed-race slave owned by President Thomas Jefferson through inheritance from his wife. She was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson by their father John Wayles...
to popular consciousness before later DNA
DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...
evidence increased the possibility of a sexual liaison. Nevertheless, Brodie's study of Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
's early career, completed while she was dying of cancer, demonstrated a weakness of psychobiography when written by an author who loathed her subject.
Early life
Brodie was the second of five children of Thomas E. McKayThomas E. McKay
Thomas Evans McKay was a Utah politician and farmer and was a general authority of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1941 until his death....
and Fawn Brimhall. Born in Ogden, Utah
Ogden, Utah
Ogden is a city in Weber County, Utah, United States. Ogden serves as the county seat of Weber County. The population was 82,825 according to the 2010 Census. The city served as a major railway hub through much of its history, and still handles a great deal of freight rail traffic which makes it a...
, she grew up in Huntsville
Huntsville, Utah
Huntsville is a town in Weber County, Utah, United States. The population was 649 at the 2000 census. It is part of the Ogden–Clearfield, Utah Metropolitan Statistical Area.-History:...
, about ten miles (16 km) east. Both her parents descended from families influential in early Mormonism. Her maternal grandfather, George H. Brimhall
George H. Brimhall
George Henry Brimhall was President of Brigham Young University. After graduating from Brigham Young Academy, Brimhall served as principal of Spanish Fork schools and then as district superintendent of Utah County schools, finally returning to Brigham Young Academy...
, was president of Brigham Young University
Brigham Young University
Brigham Young University is a private university located in Provo, Utah. It is owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , and is the United States' largest religious university and third-largest private university.Approximately 98% of the university's 34,000 students...
. Her father, Thomas Evans McKay, was a bishop, president of the LDS Swiss-Austrian mission, and an Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles
Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles
Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, commonly shortened to Assistant to the Twelve or Assistant to the Twelve Apostles, was a priesthood calling in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints between 1941 and 1976...
. Brodie's paternal uncle was David O. McKay
David O. McKay
David Oman McKay was the ninth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , serving from 1951 until his death. Ordained an apostle and member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1906, McKay was a general authority for nearly 64 years, longer than anyone else in LDS Church...
, an apostle
Apostle (Mormonism)
In the Latter Day Saint movement, an Apostle is a "special witness of the name of Jesus Christ who is sent to teach the principles of salvation to others." In many Latter Day Saint churches, an Apostle is a priesthood office of high authority within the church hierarchy. In many churches, apostles...
in the LDS Church when Brodie was born, who later became the ninth president
President of the Church (Mormonism)
In the Latter Day Saint movement, the President of the Church is generally considered to be the highest office of the church. It was the office held by Joseph Smith, Jr., founder of the movement, and the office assumed by many of Smith's claimed successors, such as Brigham Young, Joseph Smith III,...
of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Despite the religious prominence of her family, the Thomas McKays lived in genteel poverty, their property burdened by unpayable debt. The young Fawn was perpetually embarrassed that their house did not have indoor plumbing.
Fawn early demonstrated precociousness. At three she memorized and recited lengthy poems. When a whooping cough epidemic convinced Brodie's mother to homeschool
Homeschooling
Homeschooling or homeschool is the education of children at home, typically by parents but sometimes by tutors, rather than in other formal settings of public or private school...
Fawn's sister Flora, who was two years older, Fawn more than kept pace. Introduced to school in 1921, the six-year-old Fawn was advanced to the fourth grade; when she lost the school spelling bee to a twelve- year-old, "she cried and cried that this bright boy, twice her age, had spelled her down." At ten she had a poem printed in the LDS youth periodical, The Juvenile Instructor; at fourteen she was salutatorian
Salutatorian
Salutatorian is an academic title given, in the United States and Canada, to the second highest graduate of the entire graduating class of a specific discipline. Only the valedictorian is ranked higher. This honor is traditionally based on grade point average and number of credits taken, but...
of Weber High School.
Although Fawn grew to maturity in a rigorously religious environment that included strict Sabbatarianism and evening prayers on her knees, her mother was a closet skeptic who thought the LDS Church a "wonderful social order" but who doubted its dogma. According to Brodie, in the late 1930s, while her father headed Mormon mission
Mormon missionary
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of the most active modern practitioners of missionary work, with over 52,000 full-time missionaries worldwide, as of the end of 2010...
activities in German-speaking Europe, her mother became a "thoroughgoing heretic."
Education and marriage
From 1930 to 1932 Fawn attended Weber CollegeWeber State University
Weber State University is a public university located in the city of Ogden in Weber County, Utah, USA. It was founded in 1889 and is a coeducational, publicly supported university offering professional, liberal arts and technical certificates, as well as associate, bachelor's and master's degrees...
, a two-year institution in Ogden then owned by the LDS Church, where she became an accomplished public speaker and participated in intercollegiate debate. She then completed her B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in English literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....
at the University of Utah
University of Utah
The University of Utah, also known as the U or the U of U, is a public, coeducational research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest...
in 1934. There she began to question core Mormon beliefs, such as that the Indians had originated in ancient Palestine. Nevertheless, after graduation, at age nineteen, she returned to teach English at Weber College, where she demonstrated excellent potential as a teacher.
In high school, Fawn had begun dating a classmate, Dilworth Jensen, and they had written faithfully during Jensen's long absence on an LDS mission
Mormon missionary
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of the most active modern practitioners of missionary work, with over 52,000 full-time missionaries worldwide, as of the end of 2010...
in Europe. In June 1935, both Brodie and Jensen were accepted for graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, and friends assumed they would be married. But Flora McKay had recently eloped with Jensen's brother, whom the McKays disliked, and they encouraged Fawn to attend the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
instead. Fawn herself seemed to have had "growing doubts about marrying" Jensen.
At the University of Chicago, where she earned an M.A.
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
in 1936, Brodie lost her faith in religion entirely. In 1975, she recalled, "It was like taking a hot coat off in the summertime. The sense of liberation I had at the University of Chicago was exhilarating. I felt very quickly that I could not go back to the old life, and I never did." Nevertheless, she continued to write to Dilworth Jensen until shortly before she married Bernard Brodie on her graduation day, August 28, 1936.
Brodie was a native of Chicago, the son of Latvian Jewish immigrants who was alienated from both his family and his ethnicity. A bright, emotional graduate student in international relations, Brodie eventually became a noted expert in military strategy during the Cold War era. The McKays were horrified at the impending marriage; and not surprisingly, Dilworth Jensen felt betrayed. David O. McKay went to Chicago to warn his niece of the family's strong objections. Out of consideration for her mother, Fawn scheduled the wedding in an LDS chapel, but of the McKays, only Fawn's mother attended. None of Brodie's family came.
Composition
Having found temporary employment at the Harper Library of the University of Chicago, Brodie began researching the origins of the Book of MormonBook of Mormon
The Book of Mormon is a sacred text of the Latter Day Saint movement that adherents believe contains writings of ancient prophets who lived on the American continent from approximately 2600 BC to AD 421. It was first published in March 1830 by Joseph Smith, Jr...
. By mid-1939, she confessed to her uncle, Dean R. Brimhall (another ex-Mormon), that she now hoped to write a full scholarly biography of Joseph Smith. Progress toward that goal was slowed by the birth of the Brodies' first child and by three rapid moves, a consequence of her husband's search for a permanent position. Nevertheless, in 1943 she was encouraged enough to enter her 300-page draft in a contest for the Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is a New York publishing house, founded by Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. in 1915. It was acquired by Random House in 1960 and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House. The publishing house is known for its borzoi trademark , which was designed by co-founder...
literary fellowship, and in May her application was judged the best of the 44 entries.
Brodie continued her research at the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
in Washington, D.C., where the Brodies now lived, as well as at the headquarters of the Reorganized LDS Church in Independence, Missouri. Eventually she also returned to Utah and managed some discreet research at the LDS Church Archives, gaining access to some highly restricted materials by being introduced as "Brother McKay's daughter," a subterfuge that made her feel "guilty as hell." Her pursuit of little-known documents was not discreet enough, however, and eventually it attracted the attention of David O. McKay. After a "painful, acrimonious encounter" with her uncle, Brodie promised never again to consult materials in the Church Archives.
In partial compensation, Brodie's research was enlarged by other students of Mormonism, most notably Dale L. Morgan (1914–1971), who became a lifelong friend, mentor, and sounding board. Brodie finally completed her biography of Joseph Smith in 1944, and it was published the following year by Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is a New York publishing house, founded by Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. in 1915. It was acquired by Random House in 1960 and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House. The publishing house is known for its borzoi trademark , which was designed by co-founder...
when Brodie was only thirty.
Thesis
Its title, No Man Knows My History, alludes to a comment Joseph Smith made in a speech shortly before his assassinationDeath of Joseph Smith, Jr.
The death of Joseph Smith, Jr. on June 27, 1844 marked a turning point for the Latter Day Saint movement, of which Smith was the founder and leader. When he was attacked and killed by a mob, Smith was the mayor of Nauvoo, Illinois, and running for President of the United States...
in 1844. In the biography, Brodie presents the young Joseph as a lazy, good-natured, extroverted, and unsuccessful treasure seeker. In an attempt to improve his family's fortunes, he first developed the notion of golden plates
Golden Plates
According to Latter Day Saint belief, the golden plates are the source from which Joseph Smith, Jr. translated the Book of Mormon, a sacred text of the faith...
and then the concept of a religious novel, the Book of Mormon
Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon is a sacred text of the Latter Day Saint movement that adherents believe contains writings of ancient prophets who lived on the American continent from approximately 2600 BC to AD 421. It was first published in March 1830 by Joseph Smith, Jr...
, based in part on an earlier work, View of the Hebrews, by a contemporary clergyman Ethan Smith
Ethan Smith
View of the Hebrews is an 1823 book written by Ethan Smith which argues that Native Americans were descended from the Hebrews. Numerous commentators on Mormon doctrine, from LDS Church general authority B. H. Roberts to biographer Fawn M...
. Brodie asserts that at first Joseph Smith was a deliberate impostor who at some point, in nearly untraceable steps, became convinced that he was indeed a prophet, although without ever escaping "the memory of the conscious artifice" that created the Book of Mormon.
Reviews
Non-Mormon reviewers praised either the author's research, the excellence of her literary style, or both. NewsweekNewsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
called Brodie's book "a definitive biography in the finest sense of the word," and Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
praised the author for her "skill and scholarship and admirable detachment." Other reviews were less positive. Brodie was especially annoyed by the review of novelist Vardis Fisher
Vardis Fisher
Vardis Alvero Fisher was a well-respected writer best known for historical novels of the old West and the monumental 12-volume Testament of Man series of novels, depicting the history of humans from cave to civilization....
, who accused her of stating "as indisputable facts what can only be regarded as conjectures supported by doubtful evidence." Although Bernard DeVoto
Bernard DeVoto
Bernard Augustine DeVoto was an American historian and author who specialized in the history of the American West.- Life and work :He was born in Ogden, Utah...
's review was mixed as well, DeVoto praised the biography as "the best book about the Mormons so far published." DeVoto, who believed Joseph Smith was "paranoid," complained that Brodie had not provided adequate psychological explanations for Smith's behavior. Brodie herself came to believe that a thorough psychological analysis of Smith was essential and that she "hadn't gone far enough in this direction."
Reaction of the LDS Church
Although No Man Knows My History was a direct attack on many foundational Mormon beliefs about Joseph Smith, the LDS Church was slow to condemn the work even as the book went into a second printing. In 1946, The Improvement Era, an official periodical of the Church, said that many of the book's citations arose from doubtful sources and that the biography was "of no interest to Latter-day Saints who have correct knowledge of the history of Joseph Smith." The "Church News" section of the Deseret News provided a lengthy critique that acknowledged the biography's "fine literary style" and then denounced it as "a composite of all anti-MormonAnti-Mormon
Anti-Mormonism is discrimination, persecution, hostility or prejudice directed at members of the Latter Day Saint movement, particularly The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints...
books that have gone before." BYU professor and LDS historian and apologist Hugh Nibley
Hugh Nibley
Hugh Winder Nibley was an American author, Mormon apologist, and professor at Brigham Young University...
challenged Brodie in another booklet, "No, Ma'am, That's Not History", asserting that Brodie had cited sources supportive only of her conclusions while conveniently ignoring others. Brodie herself thought the Deseret News pamphlet "a well-written, clever piece of Mormon propaganda", but she dismissed the ultimately more popular "No, Ma'am, That's Not History" as "a flippant and shallow piece."
In May 1946, the LDS Church excommunicated Brodie, and she never attempted to regain her membership. Brodie once wrote to a friend that the agony of her disillusionment with Mormonism "had to do with the pain I caused my family. The disillusionment itself was...a liberating experience." Even before publication of No Man Knows My History, Brodie sought to comfort her parents, "You brought us all up to revere the truth, which is the noblest ideal a parent can instill in his children, and the fact that we come out on somewhat different roads certainly is no reflection on you." Brodie's mother and three sisters were enthusiastic about the book, but Thomas McKay refused even to read it.
Thaddeus Stevens
Fawn Brodie genuinely enjoyed her roles as wife and mother, believing that rearing children, especially when they were small, was "enormously fulfilling." Eventually the Brodies had two boys and a girl. Still, Brodie was not content to be without a writing project for long. After some desultory investigation of other possibilities, she settled on a biography of Thaddeus StevensThaddeus Stevens
Thaddeus Stevens , of Pennsylvania, was a Republican leader and one of the most powerful members of the United States House of Representatives...
, a leader of Radical Reconstruction.
Brodie believed that previous historians had unduly vilified Stevens, and she enjoyed the prospect of rebuilding a reputation rather than, as in her Joseph Smith biography, tearing one down. Stevens as a champion of black people was a timely interest at the beginning of the Civil Rights era, and research materials were available at Yale University, where Bernard Brodie was employed. Then too, Stevens had a physical deformity, a club foot
Club foot
A club foot, or congenital talipes equinovarus , is a congenital deformity involving one foot or both. The affected foot appears rotated internally at the ankle. TEV is classified into 2 groups: Postural TEV or Structural TEV....
, and Fawn Brodie wondered how this handicap might have affected his psyche.
In the view of students of historiography such as Ernst Breisach, all biographers are to some degree psychohistorians
Psychohistory
Psychohistory is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It attempts to combine the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present...
, and any biography that refused to examine motives, character traits, and the depth of personality would be flat and uninteresting. But Brodie became interested in applying the theories of professional psychoanalysts
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
to the study of historical personalities, a subject especially popular during the mid-twentieth century. At first Brodie was amused at how much psychoanalysis had "become a religion" to its practitioners, but she later become a committed devotee of psychoanalytic theory. Brodie made a number of acquaintances among psychoanalysts, who helped her evaluate Thaddeus Stevens, notably Ralph R. Greenson, with whom she developed a close personal and professional relationship. Both the Brodies also subjected themselves to psychoanalysis, he for insomnia and she for chronic mild depression and sexual problems. (Bernard's employer, the RAND
RAND
RAND Corporation is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces by Douglas Aircraft Company. It is currently financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations including the healthcare industry, universities...
Corporation, paid most of the bills.) If the problems of everyday life had been insufficient to maintain Brodie's interest in psychology, there was the case of her mother, who during this period attempted suicide three times, the second by cutting herself with a Catholic crucifix and the third (which succeeded) by setting herself on fire.
The Stevens biography took the better part of a decade to complete. In 1956, Brodie discovered evidence that Stevens might have killed a black girl who was pregnant with his child, complicating her attempt to rehabilitate his character. To decide the truth of the matter, Brodie consulted Freud. Fortunately, she also sought the advice of her husband, who acted as chief critic and editor as he had with the Joseph Smith biography, and he prevented Fawn from taking an extreme position. When the Stevens book was published in 1959, it enjoyed virtually unanimous praise from critics. Major historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction era, including David Herbert Donald
David Herbert Donald
- Career :Majoring in history and sociology, Donald earned his bachelor degree from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. He earned his PhD in 1946 under the eminent, leading Lincoln scholar, James G. Randall at the University of Illinois...
and C. Vann Woodward
C. Vann Woodward
Comer Vann Woodward was a preeminent American historian focusing primarily on the American South and race relations. He was considered, along with Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to be one of the most influential historians of the postwar era, 1940s-1970s, both by scholars and by...
, praised the biography. Donald called Brodie's psychoanalysis of Stevens "a tour de force." Most gracious was Richard N. Current
Richard N. Current
Richard Nelson Current is an American historian.-Life:He graduated from Oberlin College, from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy with an M.A., and from the University of Wisconsin with a Ph.D. in history in 1940...
, who himself had written a less favorable account of Stevens that Brodie had criticized. Current not only urged W. W. Norton
W. W. Norton
W. W. Norton & Company is an independent American book publishing company based in New York City. It is well known for its "Norton Anthologies", particularly the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the "Norton Critical Editions" series of texts which are frequently assigned in university...
to republish Brodie's book in paperback, but wrote a blurb praising the author for writing "more imaginatively" and "more resourcefully...than any other Stevens biographer." Thaddeus Stevens was a commercial failure that sold fewer than fifteen hundred copies before going out of print in less than a year.
In 1960 the Brodies spent a year in France, during which Fawn spent considerable energy researching and writing From Crossbow to H-Bomb, a co-authored paperback intended as a college text that treated the impact of science on military technology. Bernard Brodie had signed the contract with Random House
Random House
Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...
, but his wife did most of the research and writing.
Richard Francis Burton
When the family returned to California, Alfred KnopfAlfred A. Knopf (person)
Alfred Abraham Knopf, Sr. was a leading American publisher of the 20th century, and founder of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.. His contemporaries included the likes of Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, and Frank Nelson Doubleday, J. Henry Harper and Henry Holt...
asked Brodie to edit and write a new introduction for Sir Richard Francis Burton
Richard Francis Burton
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS was a British geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat. He was known for his travels and explorations within Asia, Africa and the Americas as well as his...
's book, The City of the Saints and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (1862). Almost immediately she "was lost" to Burton, a man whom she described as "fascinating beyond belief", and she was soon planning a full biography. Like Brodie, Burton was an agnostic who was fascinated by religion and all things sexual. Though Freud was almost superfluous in such a case, Brodie once again solicited advice from the psychoanalyst community and then tried to make Burton reveal his subconscious through "free association." For instance, she noted that immediately before and after Burton wrote about his mother, he talked "about cheating, decapitation, mutilations, smashings—all the stories and metaphors are violent, negative, and hostile." The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton was published in May 1967 and was chosen as a featured selection by both the Literary Guild Book Club and the History Book Club. Reviews were again generally positive. The New York Times Book Review promoted it as an "[e]xcellent biography of a bizarre man who had a bizarre wife—and life."
Professorship at UCLA
The publication of three acclaimed biographies allowed Brodie to become a part-time lecturer in history at the University of California, Los AngelesUniversity of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...
even though she had never earned a Ph.D. (In fact, she had no degree in history at all; both her bachelor's and master's were in English.) As a woman, Brodie met some resistance from the large and overwhelmingly male history faculty, but her specialty in the trendy field of psychohistory
Psychohistory
Psychohistory is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It attempts to combine the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present...
aided both her original appointment and her eventual promotion to full professor. Brodie taught both larger upper-division lectures in American history and small seminars on American political biography—of which she preferred the latter.
Choosing the personal life of Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was a natural subject for Brodie's fourth biography. One of her courses focused on America from 1800 to 1830 (for which she wrote meticulous lectures), and her seminar in political biography might serve as an appropriate forum for a work-in-progress. Nevertheless, throughout this period, Brodie continued to be attracted by Mormon studies and had been importuned by several publishers to write a biography of Brigham YoungBrigham Young
Brigham Young was an American leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and a settler of the Western United States. He was the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1847 until his death in 1877, he founded Salt Lake City, and he served as the first governor of the Utah...
. LDS entrepreneur O.C. Tanner
O.C. Tanner (person)
Obert Clark Tanner was a University of Utah professor of philosophy, philanthropist, and founder of O.C. Tanner Co.-Early life and education:...
(1904–1993) even offered Brodie $10,000 in advance to produce a manuscript. At this point, Brodie’s confidant Dale Morgan convinced her that an even closer friend, Madeline Reeder McQuown, had nearly completed a huge manuscript on Young. McQuown’s biography was, in fact, little more than rough drafts of a few early chapters, but Brodie was dissuaded and abandoned Brigham Young for Thomas Jefferson.
By May 1968, Brodie was emotionally committed to writing the biography. She understood that it could not be a full account. The study of Jefferson had become a virtual career for several living historians. For instance, Dumas Malone
Dumas Malone
Dumas Malone was an American historian, biographer, and editor noted for his six-volume biography on Thomas Jefferson, for which he received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for history...
was in the process of completing a six-volume biography of Jefferson, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Instead, Brodie directed her efforts to a biography of “the private man,” a study that would build on several recently published articles speculating on a possible sexual relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings
Sally Hemings
Sarah "Sally" Hemings was a mixed-race slave owned by President Thomas Jefferson through inheritance from his wife. She was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson by their father John Wayles...
, a slave, a quadroon
Quadroon
Quadroon, and the associated words octoroon and quintroon are terms that, historically, were applied to define the ancestry of people of mixed-race, generally of African and Caucasian ancestry, but also, within Australia, to those of Aboriginal and Caucasian ancestry...
, and the possible half-sister of his late wife. Not only was the topic timely during this period of increased national interest in race, sex, and presidential hypocrisy, but Brodie had also recently discovered that her own husband had been conducting an extramarital affair.
To Brodie, Jefferson’s ambiguous posturings on slavery could be explained by his personal life. If he were conducting a 28-year affair with a slave, then he could not free his slaves because once freed, Virginia law would force them all from the state. He could only continue his liaison with Hemings if his slaves remained slaves. Because of the paucity of evidence, two of the most prominent Jefferson biographers of the twentieth century, Dumas Malone
Dumas Malone
Dumas Malone was an American historian, biographer, and editor noted for his six-volume biography on Thomas Jefferson, for which he received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for history...
and Merrill Peterson, had discounted rumors about this sexual relationship, first published in 1802 by the unscrupulous journalist James T. Callender
James T. Callender
James Callender was a political pamphleteer and journalist whose writing was controversial in his native Scotland and the United States. His contemporary reputation was as a "scandalmonger", due to the content of some of his reporting, which overshadowed the political content...
when Jefferson was President. Brodie's contribution to the debate arose not from her speculations about Jefferson's psyche but from her use of Dumas Malone
Dumas Malone
Dumas Malone was an American historian, biographer, and editor noted for his six-volume biography on Thomas Jefferson, for which he received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for history...
's discovery that Jefferson had been in residence at Monticello
Monticello
Monticello is a National Historic Landmark just outside Charlottesville, Virginia, United States. It was the estate of Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence, third President of the United States, and founder of the University of Virginia; it is...
nine months prior to the birth of each of Sally Hemings's children—and that when he was not living there, she had none.
Reviews
By 1971 Brodie had a $15,000 advance from her publisher and had presented a summary of her arguments at the annual meeting of the Organization of American HistoriansOrganization of American Historians
The Organization of American Historians , formerly known as the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, is the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history. OAH's members in the U.S...
. One commentator, Merrill Peterson, "blasted" the paper. Author and publisher alike understood that the biography would be controversial. An in-house editor at W. W. Norton
W. W. Norton
W. W. Norton & Company is an independent American book publishing company based in New York City. It is well known for its "Norton Anthologies", particularly the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the "Norton Critical Editions" series of texts which are frequently assigned in university...
was especially critical: "Doesn't [Brodie] know about making the theory fit the facts instead of trying to explain the facts to fit the theory? It's pretty fascinating, like working out a detective story, but she doesn't play fair."
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History was published in February 1974, and it became the main spring selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Brodie did her best to ensure that the three foremost Jefferson scholars, Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, and Julian Boyd, would not be invited to review the book. But she scarcely needed to worry. Brodie was interviewed on NBC's Today Show, and the book quickly "became a topic of comment in elite social-literary circles." The biography was also an immediate commercial success and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for thirteen weeks. Jefferson sold 80,000 copies in hardback, 270,000 copies in paperback, and netted Brodie $350,000 in royalties—adjusted for inflation, more than a million dollars in the early twenty-first century. Academic reviews were mixed. Literary reviews were generally positive while historians were often critical of Brodie's undue speculations.
Disclosure of DNA evidence
Brodie was at least partially vindicated in 1998 when blindDouble-blind
A blind or blinded experiment is a scientific experiment where some of the people involved are prevented from knowing certain information that might lead to conscious or subconscious bias on their part, invalidating the results....
DNA tests concluded that a male carrying the Jefferson Y chromosome
Y chromosome
The Y chromosome is one of the two sex-determining chromosomes in most mammals, including humans. In mammals, it contains the gene SRY, which triggers testis development if present. The human Y chromosome is composed of about 60 million base pairs...
had fathered Eston Hemings, Sally Hemings' youngest child. In January 2000, a research committee commissioned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation also asserted that there was a high probability that Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemmings and possibly the father of all Hemings children listed in the Monticello
Monticello
Monticello is a National Historic Landmark just outside Charlottesville, Virginia, United States. It was the estate of Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence, third President of the United States, and founder of the University of Virginia; it is...
records. Some groups organized to promote Jefferson's reputation still dispute or question this conclusion.
Choosing Nixon
Like many previous Jefferson biographers, Brodie developed an intense affection for her protagonist. She even claimed that in dreams, she and Jefferson became "man and wife." Not surprisingly, Bernard Brodie is supposed to have muttered, "God, I'm glad that man is out of the house." More poignantly, Fawn Brodie asked where one could go after Jefferson "but down."As usual, Brodie considered a range of subjects for a new biography. Brigham Young
Brigham Young
Brigham Young was an American leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and a settler of the Western United States. He was the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1847 until his death in 1877, he founded Salt Lake City, and he served as the first governor of the Utah...
was now a clear field, but she decided not to “return to old ground.” Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
had resigned the presidency shortly after she had finished Jefferson, and Brodie had spoken formally to both students and others about the former president. As a liberal Democrat, Brodie had developed a “repellent fascination" for Nixon, a man whom she called “a rattlesnake,” a “plain damn liar,” and a "shabby, pathetic felon." Although Brodie thought Nixon an imposter like Joseph Smith, she did not believe him to be the “charming imposter the Mormon leader was."
There were also personal factors motivating her malevolent interest in the former president. One of her sons had nearly been drafted in 1969 shortly after Nixon had won election on the promise to end the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
. (At the last minute, sympathetic physicians had Bruce Brodie reclassified as unfit for military service on the basis of his allergies.)
Also, when Nixon had sought information to discredit Daniel Ellsberg
Daniel Ellsberg
Daniel Ellsberg, PhD, is a former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War,...
, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers
Pentagon Papers
The Pentagon Papers, officially titled United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967...
, his operatives had burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding. Ellsberg was a close friend and former RAND
RAND
RAND Corporation is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces by Douglas Aircraft Company. It is currently financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations including the healthcare industry, universities...
associate of Bernard Brodie, and Fielding was Fawn Brodie’s long-time therapist. Brodie considered “Nixon the perpetrator of an assault on her privacy.”
Neither Brodie’s husband nor her publisher were enthusiastic about her choice of Richard Nixon as a new subject, but Brodie forged ahead anyway. She resigned her professorship at UCLA in 1977 and began the task of research, including, for the first time, in oral history
Oral history
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews...
collections. Brodie herself conducted 150 interviews. She tried unsuccessfully to interview Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger
Heinz Alfred "Henry" Kissinger is a German-born American academic, political scientist, diplomat, and businessman. He is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and...
, whom she knew on a first-name basis—-and even Nixon himself for what she described in a letter to him as “a compassionate and accurate study.” (Nixon did not reply.) Though she could find no evidence, Brodie became obsessed with the notion that Nixon had engaged in a homosexual relationship with his good friend Bebe Rebozo. Even her psychoanalyst friends tried to warn her off.
Writing in the shadow of death
In November 1977, Bernard Brodie was diagnosed with a serious cancer, and Fawn suspended her research on Nixon: “That son of a bitch can wait.” She nursed her husband until his death a year later and then sank into “a depression from which she would never really emerge.” Under the circumstances, Nixon’s biography seemed “like a total obscenity.”While hiking at a family reunion in 1980, Brodie became unusually tired. She was shortly diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer
Lung cancer
Lung cancer is a disease characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissues of the lung. If left untreated, this growth can spread beyond the lung in a process called metastasis into nearby tissue and, eventually, into other parts of the body. Most cancers that start in lung, known as primary...
, although she had never smoked. Between chemotherapy treatments she pushed ahead to complete the Nixon study, her three children and a daughter-in-law providing moral and editorial support in her time of need. Knowing that she could never complete a full biography, she ended the manuscript with Nixon's pre-presidential years, lending it an unfinished quality.
Reviews
Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character was published in late 1981 and received reviews less enthusiastic than any of her earlier books. Writing in The New RepublicThe New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
, Godfrey Hodgson questioned both her psychoanalytic approach and her motives: “[W]e are in danger of having the insights of psychotherapy used as a tool for character destruction, certainly for libel, potentially for revenge.” Sales of the book were disappointing, in part because of the reviews, in part because memoirs by Nixon associates such as Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger
Heinz Alfred "Henry" Kissinger is a German-born American academic, political scientist, diplomat, and businessman. He is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and...
, John Ehrlichman
John Ehrlichman
John Daniel Ehrlichman was counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon. He was a key figure in events leading to the Watergate first break-in and the ensuing Watergate scandal, for which he was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury...
, and John Dean
John Dean
John Wesley Dean III is an American lawyer who served as White House Counsel to United States President Richard Nixon from July 1970 until April 1973. In this position, he became deeply involved in events leading up to the Watergate burglaries and the subsequent Watergate scandal cover-up...
had recently flooded the market. Perhaps Brodie’s book was most influential in stimulating Oliver Stone
Oliver Stone
William Oliver Stone is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Stone became well known in the late 1980s and the early 1990s for directing a series of films about the Vietnam War, for which he had previously participated as an infantry soldier. His work frequently focuses on...
to create his controversial 1995 movie Nixon
Nixon (film)
Nixon is a 1995 American biographical film directed by Oliver Stone for Cinergi Pictures that tells the story of the political and personal life of former US President Richard Nixon, played by Anthony Hopkins....
.
Death
Brodie died nine months before publication of the book. As death neared, the cancer spread to her brain and bones, and Brodie experienced intense pain. During this period, she was visited in the hospital by her brother Thomas, who had remained a practicing Latter-day Saint. Brodie asked him to “give me a blessing,” a surprising request since she had long been estranged from both her brother and the LDS Church. Even more curious was that a few days later Brodie released a note saying that her request for a priesthood blessingPriesthood blessing
A priesthood blessing in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a "prayer for healing, comfort or counsel given by a Melchizedek Priesthood holder, who lays his hands on the head of the person receiving the blessing." Priesthood blessings are considered to be non-saving ordinances by...
should not be misinterpreted as a request to return to the Church. It was Brodie’s last signed statement. In accordance with her wishes, friends spread her ashes over the Santa Monica Mountains
Santa Monica Mountains
The Santa Monica Mountains are a Transverse Range in Southern California, along the coast of the Pacific Ocean in the United States.-Geography:...
, which she loved and had successfully helped to save from real estate development.
Publications
- No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph SmithNo Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph SmithNo Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith , by Fawn McKay Brodie, was the first important non-hagiographic biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of Latter Day Saint movement. The book has never gone out of print, and sixty years after its first publication, Knopf was still selling a...
ISBN 0-679-73054-0 - Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South ISBN 0-8446-0329-5
- The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton ISBN 0-393-30166-4
- Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History ISBN 0-393-31752-8
- Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character ISBN 0-393-01467-3
Further reading
- Newell G. Bringhurst, "Fawn McKay Brodie and her Quest for Independence" in John Silletto & Susan Staker, eds. Mormon Renegades (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002) ISBN 1-56085-154-6
- Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997) ISBN 0-8139-1698-4
- Gary Topping, Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). ISBN 0-8061-3561-1
- Hartt P. Wixom, "Critiquing the Critics of Joseph Smith", (Springville, UT: Cedar Fort Publishing, 2005).
- Biography of Fawn Brodie - from an LDS apologist site.
- Excerpts from No Man Knows My History - from solomonspaulding.com, which defends the Spaulding hypothesisSpalding–Rigdon theory of Book of Mormon authorshipThe Spalding–Rigdon theory of Book of Mormon authorship is the theory that the Book of Mormon was plagiarized in part from an unpublished manuscript written by Solomon Spalding. This theory first appeared in print in the book Mormonism Unvailed, published in 1834 by E.D. Howe...
. - No Ma'am that's Not History - full text of the booklet by Hugh NibleyHugh NibleyHugh Winder Nibley was an American author, Mormon apologist, and professor at Brigham Young University...
. - A critique of Nibley's No Ma'am that's Not History.