Fawn M. Brodie

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Fawn McKay Brodie (September 15, 1915–January 10, 1981) was a historian, biographer, and professor at UCLA, best known for the biographies Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, an early work of psychohistory, and No Man Knows My History, one of the first non-hagiographic biographies of Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of Mormonism.

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Early life

Brodie was the second of five children born to Thomas E. McKay and Fawn Brimhall, after whom she was named. Born in Ogden, Utah, she grew up in Huntsville, ten miles east of Ogden.

Raised in a devout Latter-day Saint home, her paternal uncle was David O. McKay, a prominent LDS leader. David O. McKay was an Apostle in the LDS church when Brodie was born and he later became the ninth President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

A whooping cough epidemic convinced Brodie's mother to homeschool Fawn's sister Flora, two years older than she. Fawn demanded to learn along with her sister, and they graduated Weber High School simultaneously in 1930 when Fawn was fourteen. In high school, Fawn began dating Dilworth Jenson. Jensen was four years her senior.

Brodie earned a B.A. in English literature from the University of Utah in 1934. By the following semester—at age nineteen—she taught English at Weber College in Ogden. She received excellent student reviews.

In June 1935, both Brodie and her lover Dilworth Jensen were accepted for graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, but Fawn and her parents agreed it was best for her to study elsewhere. This fateful decision was made after Flora eloped with Dilworth's older brother against her parent's objections. Fawn enrolled in the University of Chicago where she earned an M.A. in 1936.

At the University of Chicago, Brodie lost her faith in religion entirely. She recalled this time period to an interviewer in 1975, "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." She quit her correspondence with Dilworth Jensen who was a faithful Mormon.

Fawn met Bernard Brodie, who would become an important nuclear weapon strategist, through acquaintances at the University. They were married August 25, 1936, on the same day that Fawn Brodie received her M.A. in English. They were married in an LDS chapel, which offended Bernard Brodie's family. His parents and siblings declined to attend, and only Fawn's mother traveled from Utah.

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No Man Knows My History

After her first son was born in 1942, Brodie was awarded an Alfred A. Knopf biography fellowship in 1943 to write a biography of Joseph Smith, Jr., founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Called No Man Knows My History, the title alludes to a speech Smith gave shortly before his martyrdom in 1844. Brodie's book was published in late 1945.

The biography made many claims contrary to official LDS Church doctrine about Smith's life and teachings. Primarily, it speculated about how Smith may have written the Book of Mormon, which he claimed was translated with divine aid from an ancient record on Golden Plates. She also hypothesized connections between Masonic rituals and LDS temple rituals.

Brodie was excommunicated from the LDS Church in May 1946 for apostasy, which included refusing to edit or alter controversial material in her book. She was unsurprised about the excommunication, and proclaimed that she had lost her faith before her work on the book began. Brodie never sought to rejoin the church.

Like Brodie's later biography of Thomas Jefferson, No Man Knows My History has been criticized by some historians as speculative and biased. Another excommunicated Mormon historian, D. Michael Quinn, claims that Brodie failed to take Smith's religious claims seriously (New Mormon History, xiv). This view is popularly held among mainstream historians, much more so now than when the book was initially published.

The LDS writer and apologist Hugh Nibley challenged many of Brodie's claims in a booklet, No, Ma'am, That's Not History. Nibley asserted that Brodie cited sources only supportive of her conclusions, and conveniently ignored widely available sources that didn't support her theories. He also took issue with her rhetoric.

Brodie's biography is a favorite among critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

One criticism of the biography attacks Brodie's brief treatment of the so-called "Solomon Spalding hypothesis." The Spalding hypothesis supposed that Joseph Smith based the book of Mormon off of the Spalding manuscript, a narrative about pre-Columbian Americans. The theory speculated Smith may have been aided by Sidney Rigdon, who was more formally educated than Smith. Brodie rejected the hypothesis, but the appendix is thought to be less rigorously researched, an afterthought.

In spite of its alleged shortcomings, No Man Knows My History is often considered the standard critical biography of Joseph Smith.

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Subsequent biographies and later life

Brodie gave priority to raising her three children, but she completed four other major biographies while occasionally teaching history at UCLA. Her second biography, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (1959) was consciously an effort the rebuild the reputation of Thaddeus Stevens which she called an "about face" of her Smith biography's aims. Her third biography, The Devil Drives: A life of Sir Richard Burton (1967), was in part provoked by the interest Brodie took in Richard Francis Burton after editing a reissue of Burton's observations on plural marriage among the Mormons, in The City of the Saints, an account of his travels in the Western United States, circa 1860.

Brodie's fourth biography, on Thomas Jefferson, is her most famous outside the Mormon community. Thomas Jefferson: an Intimate History (1974) is considered an early example of psychohistory, biography that attempts to analyze the psychological motivations of historical events. The biography has been praised for exploring Thomas Jefferson's psyche but also criticized for its psybiographical methodology, and the speculative nature of Brodie's interpretations have been called into serious question. In particular, the biography's description of an extended romance between Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings was widely attacked. Gary Wills's review in the New York Review of Books is as acerbic as it is informative: "Two vast things, each wondrous in itself, combine to make this book a prodigy -— the author's industry, and her ignorance. One can only be so intricately wrong by deep study and long effort, enough to make Ms. Brodie the fasting hermit and very saint of ignorance. The result has an eerie perfection, as if all the world's greatest builders had agreed to rear, with infinite skill, the world's ugliest building." (NYROB Volume 12, Number 6, 18 April 1974)

However, Brodie was in part vindicated in 1998 when blind DNA tests conducted by Dr. Eugene Foster and a team of geneticists established that a male carrying the Jefferson Y chromosome had fathered Eston Hemmings, Sally Hemmings last child. This finding was confirmed in 2000 when a research committee commissioned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation found that there was a high probability that Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemmings and that he was possibly the father of all of her children listed in the Monticello records. (Monticello article on Jefferson and Hemmings)

Her last biography, Richard Nixon: Shaping his Character (1981) was completed as Brodie struggled with cancer. Her husband Bernard preceded her in death by cancer in 1978. Brodie maintained many of the values taught by the LDS church such as strong ties to family which may have kept her loyal to Bernard in spite of a difficult marriage. She was also aware of developments in Mormon history as suggested by the preface to the 1971 edition of No Man Knows My History in which she applauded Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought for being independent from the church.

Brodie died of cancer January 10, 1981 and was cremated. Per her wishes, friends spread her ashes over the Santa Monica Mountains near where she had spent the last 30 years of her life.

A rumor circulated that Brodie asked to be re-baptized in her last days. Actually, Brodie only thanked her brother Thomas for a "priesthood blessing"—a type of special prayer requested by Brodie intended to aid her in her illness—that he gave her in a Santa Monica, California hospital December 1980. She also added that it in no way meant she wanted to be taken back into the church.

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Brodie's bibliography

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Reference

  • {{cite book 
| first = Newell G. | last = Bringhurst
| authorlink = Newell G. Bringhurst
| chapter = Fawn McKay Brodie and her Quest for Independence
| editor = John Silletto & Susan Staker (editors)
| title = Mormon Renegades
| location = Salt Lake City
| publisher = Signature Books
| year = 2002
| id = ISBN 1-56085-154-6
}}
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External links

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