Epilogue: Why I Wrote Fawn McKay Brodie and Her Legacy: A Biographer’s Perspective

Over the course of some 13 years I was involved in an intense “affair” with a woman other than my wife. My long-term affair with Fawn McKay Brodie, literary in nature, involved the research and writing of a book-length biography on the controversial psychobiographer. In what turned out to be an obsessive affair, two questions are of relevance. First, what motivated me to produce a biography of Fawn McKay Brodie? Second, what is Fawn Brodie’s legacy, as it involves her impact on the craft of biography and historical inquiry in general?

My motives for researching and writing the life of Fawn McKay Brodie were complex and multifaceted. On a fundamental level I was drawn to Brodie because of my own Latter-day Saint (Mormon) background. Growing up in Utah, I was familiar with the controversy generated by her provocative, path-breaking biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History (1945). Most orthodox Mormons denounced her interpretation of Mormonism’s founder as a “conscious fraud.” Some attacked the author herself on a personal level, referring to her as “that awful Brodie woman” who had betrayed her patrician Mormon heritage. In the small Utah town where I lived, certain devout Latter-day Saints denounced the director of our local library for acquiring No Man Knows My History and making it available to patrons.

Despite the intense controversy surrounding the woman and her work, I did not actually get around to reading her various writings until after moving away from Utah in 1967 and entering graduate school at the University of California, Davis. At that point I had decided to write my dissertation on the history of Mormon–African-American relations, focusing on the then-controversial issue of black-priesthood denial. This decision was inspired, in part, by a 1970 pamphlet Brodie wrote on this issue, entitled “Can We Manipulate the Past?” In this work Brodie accused the Mormon Church of manipulating its own past over a period of many decades to justify its policy of denying male African-Americans the priesthood, labeling the ensuing policy “Jim Crowism in the Mormon Church.” Specifically, Mormon leaders and spokesmen deliberately “covered up” the historical fact that LDS Church founder, Joseph Smith, had allowed the priesthood ordination of black males—a practice revoked by Smith’s successors, beginning with Brigham Young. After reading Brodie’s pamphlet, I turned to No Man Knows My History, carefully reading it, finding Brodie’s well-written narrative of Joseph Smith’s life and career compelling, provocative, and absorbing. This in turn, stimulated my ideas and thinking in new directions relative to my dissertation topic. But up to this point my interaction with Brodie was limited to her published works.

After completing my dissertation in 1975, and commencing my college teaching career, I approached Fawn Brodie through correspondence. I wrote her a letter, seeking her advice concerning the publication potential for my just-completed dissertation. My writing Fawn Brodie was both impulsive and presumptuous. By this time, Brodie had achieved national prominence thanks to the recent publication of her Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History which had appeared on The New York Times Bestseller List for a total of 13 weeks in 1974. Thus, I was both surprised and flattered when she not only responded but also expressed her willingness to read what I had written. She not only offered valuable editorial advice but went so far as to help me secure a publisher for my revised dissertation. Thanks, in part, to her help, my work was ultimately published under the title, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism (1981). Brodie’s help and encouragement made me want to get to know both the woman and her work better. Unfortunately, I was never able to meet Fawn Brodie face-to-face. This opportunity was pre-empted by her tragic death from cancer in 1981.

Some six years later, in 1986, I decided to research and write a biography on Fawn Brodie, thereby seizing the opportunity to become intimately acquainted with her, albeit vicariously. Further motivating me was my academic interest in the craft and challenges of biography. I had just completed a short book-length biography entitled Brigham Young and the Expanding American Frontier (1986), published as part of the “Library of American Biography” se-

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ries under the editorship of Harvard University historian, Oscar Handlin. Thus, I was ready to be challenged by a new biographical subject.

I was further attracted to Fawn Brodie by the simple fact that I personally identified with certain aspects of her life and career, just as Fawn Brodie clearly identified with certain aspects of the lives of the five biographical subjects on whom she focused. As Brodie herself stated, “There is always a deep personal commitment in the writing of a biography,” including “compelling inner reasons.” “The subject chosen,” she continued, “can also tell us a lot about [the] biographer.” Similar observations have been made by other writers familiar with the art of biographical writing. Leon Edel, a noted biographer who spent 20 years writing his five-volume life of Henry James, stated that “biographers are invariably drawn to the writing of biography out of some deep personal motive.” James Atlas went one step further, suggesting that “the biographer’s subject enacts the main themes of the biographer’s own life.”

There are, indeed, clear parallels between my own life and that of Fawn Brodie. Like Fawn Brodie, I am descended from stalwart Mormon pioneer stock, my ancestors migrating west under Brigham Young’s direction. Like Fawn Brodie, who grew up in the small town environment of Huntsville, I was reared in a small Utah town some twelve miles south of Salt Lake City. As teenagers, both Fawn McKay and I questioned basic Mormon beliefs. Both of us married outside the Mormon faith. We both became alienated from the Church as a result of research into certain disturbing aspects of Mormonism’s historical past. In Brodie’s case, she developed a sense of moral outrage in determining that Joseph Smith was less than the divinely inspired prophet she had believed him to be. She labeled the Mormon leader a “conscious fraud.” In my case, I questioned Mormon truth claims in examining the contradictions and tortured reasoning used to justify Mormonism’s now defunct practice of denying blacks the priesthood.

As I became more deeply involved in research for the Brodie biography, I detected one other important element of identification. I was hauntingly reminded of my own late mother in examining certain aspects of Brodie’s personality. My mother and Fawn were contemporaries, part of what Tom Brokaw has characterized “the Greatest Generation”—those individuals born during the 1910s through the 1920s who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II. Fawn, like my mother, was a caring, empathic individual who considered the needs of her husband and children of primary importance—despite a personal thirst for learning and a desire for self-expression through writing. In putting her family first, as expected of all married women in post-World War II America, Fawn, like my own mother, deferred a career in teaching and full-time research and writing until her three children (the same number as in my own birth family) were fully grown. Both Fawn and my mother enjoyed people, eagerly interacting with a wide variety of individuals. Both women graduated from the University of Utah with degrees in English and both with honors. Both were teachers who related well with their students. Finally, both died while relatively young; Fawn was 65 and my own mother was just 49.

The biography, ultimately published under the title Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life (1999), took some 13 years to research and write. In completing it, I confronted certain obstacles. These included the ambivalence, and indeed opposition, from certain members of Brodie’s family as well as my own. Also impeding progress was my academic position as a full-time community college instructor, compelling me to teach five classes or fifteen unit hours per semester.

Offsetting such obstacles were certain benefits. On a fundamental level, I experienced the keen excitement of discovery, that is, of finding and sorting through a myriad of written information by and about Fawn Brodie—much of it heretofore unknown. Through more than three score oral interviews that I personally conducted as an essential part of my research over a five year period, I met and became acquainted with more than 60 interesting and articulate individuals who had interacted with Brodie during the course of her life. These included immediate and extended family members, childhood friends, and former students, as well as professional acquaintances whom Fawn and Bernard Brodie knew at UCLA, RAND, and within the Los Angeles psychoanalytic community.

Of greatest benefit was becoming personally acquainted with Fawn Brodie. I developed a keen appreciation for this woman, who practiced academic and intellectual honesty in both her writing and teaching. As for her body of writings, particularly

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her five biographies, I came to appreciate both the quality as well as the breadth of her subject matter. In certain instances, however, I did not agree with her analyses and interpretations, which I found at times to be overly biased and sometimes based on inadequate or questionable historical sources.

I now turn to the second fundamental question posed at the beginning of this essay. What is Fawn McKay Brodie’s legacy? The impact of Brodie’s body of work on historical scholarship and the craft of biography, is significant. Her first biography, that of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History, helped set the agenda for the so-called “new” Mormon history, particularly as it involved Mormon origins and developments within the early Latter-day Saint movement. In the words of Roger D. Launius, “In many ways it was a seminal study that served as a transition point” between “the old and the New Mormon history, with the ‘old’ generally viewed as polemical while the ‘new’ was considered less concerned with questions of religious truth and more interested in understanding why events unfolded the way they did.” Several recently published biographies of Joseph Smith are clearly inspired or influenced by Brodie’s early psychobiographical approach.

Fawn Brodie’s second biography, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (1959), while less controversial than No Man Knows My History, represents a major benchmark in the so-called revisionist view of American Reconstruction history, facilitating the movement of scholarship away from the earlier, dominant “Dunning school,” which had promoted a highly unfavorable view of Reconstruction. Thaddeus Stevens broke ground in the way it examined not only the subject’s “intimate life” but also the impact of Stevens’s clubfoot, probing the critical question of what physical crippling could do to a man’s psyche.

Brodie’s third major work, The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (1967), was perhaps the least controversial of all of the author’s biographies, though it dealt with a subject who was highly controversial in and of himself. The Devil Drives continues to be acknowledged, in the words of noted Burton scholar Jim Casada, as the “best life … to date” of the flamboyant British explorer, despite the appearance of several subsequent biographies.

Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974), by far Brodie’s most popular biography and perhaps her most controversial, sent shock waves throughout the community of Jefferson scholars, particularly within the “Jefferson Establishment” based at Monticello in Virginia. The resulting storm sparked animated debate and discussion, particularly involving the central issues of slavery, race, gender, and class. These varied issues are the primary focus of the “new social history” that has come to dominate the larger field of American history. The debate at the center of Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson—specifically, the precise nature of Jefferson’s relationship with his black slave, Sally Hemings—continues unabated to the present.

Evidence of Brodie’s influence is found in the 1995 movie, Jefferson in Paris, with Nick Nolte in the title role. In the words of one reviewer, the filmmakers took “their lead from Fawn M. Brodie’s controversial best-seller.” The film, the reviewer said, did not “rake Jefferson over the coals for his racial hypocrisies”; rather, it “cast a cool objective eye on both his moral lapses and his intellectual virtues,” much as Fawn Brodie had done. Nevertheless, the larger controversy continued dividing not only historians but also members of Thomas Jefferson’s own family—his white descendants and the black descendants of Sally Hemings. In 1998, DNA tests confirmed a direct literal relationship between Eston Hemings, Sally’s youngest son, and Thomas Jefferson, thus vindicating the assertions made by Brodie a quarter century earlier.

Brodie’s fifth and final biography, Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, published in September 1981—some nine months after the author’s death—received mixed reviews. Those critical of her approach, questioned her motives. Given Brodie’s well-known disdain for Nixon, one reviewer went so far as to accuse the author of using “psychoanalysis … as a tool for character destruction” and “revenge.” Another stated: “After finishing [Brodie’s] Nixon book, I have an urge to demand that psychobiographers be barred from writing about people they dislike.” Perhaps, reflecting the mixed reviews, Brodie’s Richard Nixon was a commercial disappointment, in contrast to her Thomas Jefferson, which had sold briskly. Richard Nixon sold only some 23,000 copies—far short of its first print run.

Contributing to the disappointing sales of Brodie’s Richard Nixon was the fact that her biogra-

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phy was merely one in a deluge of books on this president published during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Brodie’s harsh assessment of Nixon ran counter to the emergence in the 1980s of a “revisionist” evaluation of the former president. Despite this, Brodie’s Richard Nixon influenced the way in which the former president is viewed by scholars and in the popular culture. Nixon scholar Roger Morris, himself a revisionist, acknowledged Brodie’s work as “far and away the most impressive intellectual spadework on the subject of Nixon’s childhood and youth.” In addition, Brodie’s vivid, detailed portrait of Richard Nixon’s troubled formative years clearly influenced filmmaker Oliver Stone in writing the screenplay for his highly controversial 1995 movie, Nixon. Stone singled out Brodie’s biography as providing “a deeper understanding of what [Nixon] was thinking and feeling, what kind of a human being he was.” Stone praised Brodie for her willingness “to push into the shadow areas—into the psychiatric areas, the relationship to mother and father and siblings—in order to understand why Nixon was so tortured.”

Taken together, all five of Brodie’s biographies, written over a period of more than 40 years, exemplify the craft of modern biography. Each work was carefully researched in an effort to capture the varied, multifaceted aspects of the subject’s life and career. Each was written in an engaging literary style, reflective of the author’s inherent skills as well as her background and training in English literature. Finally—and of particular relevance to the readers of Clio’s Psyche—Brodie drew on her experiences, training, and reading in the field of psychoanalysis, in skillfully constructing complex, psychological portraits of her varied biographical subjects.

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