Remembering Fawn McKay Brodie (1915-1981)

I first met Fawn McKay Brodie in 1966 when I invited her for lunch at the urging of Isser Woloch, my colleague in French Revolutionary history, who had the genial idea that we should recruit her to the UCLA History Department. She was smart, perceptive about psychoanalysis, honest, in touch with herself, engaging, and delightful. The next year she joined our department as a Lecturer. Fawn remained a colleague and we nurtured an increasingly deep friendship for the ensuing 15 years until her death in 1981.

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Photos: 1945 and 1974

Fawn McKay married Bernard Brodie (1910-1978), a political scientist, in 1936, on the day she received her MA in English from the University of Chicago. They had three children: Richard, Bruce, and Pamela. She co-authored a book with Bernard on the history of warfare and weaponry, entitled From Crossbow to H-Bomb (1962).

Fawn taught upper division United States history; Jeffersonian America, 1800-1830; and an acclaimed graduate seminar in American political biography. She was a wonderful colleague—generous, loyal, and humane. Her promotion from Lecturer to Full Professor was achieved in 1971 with a high level of acrimonious and hurtful struggle because of the integral use of psychoanalytic method in her research, her perceived infringement on others’ teaching territory, and with the rationalization that her graduate degree was a master’s in English rather than a doctorate in history.

Professor Brodie participated in an interdisciplinary psychoanalytic/social science study group of analysts and UCLA faculty who were interested in using psychoanalytic ideas in their research. Robert M. Dorn, who trained in England with Anna Freud, initiated the group. The social science regulars were Alexander L. George of the RAND Corporation, later of Stanford University; E. Victor Wolfenstein; A.J. Slavin; Fawn; and myself. The psychoanalysts included Gerald Aronson, Ira Carson, Alfred Goldberg, Herbert Kupper, Ernst Lewy, and Leonard Rosengarten. We heard and enjoyed discussing several of Fawn’s draft chapters on Jefferson as well as her thoughts for a new edition of her biography of Joseph Smith. The study group worked together for six

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years, 1965-1971, an unusually long life span for such a group.

Fawn was born on September 15, 1915 in Ogden, Utah, of patrician Mormon stock. The venerable patriarch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, David O. McKay, was her uncle. In a charming nostalgic memoir Fawn described the family as living “in a state of genteel poverty” because of her father’s struggle to pay the mortgage and avoid bankruptcy on the family farm “in perpetual need of rescue.” Fawn notes the irony that the farm was saved in the 1930s by the New Deal which her father “detested.” Franklin D. Roosevelt’s federal farm loan re-negotiation policies halved the her father’s debt, about which he felt guilty; he remained an “old guard Republican by habit, conviction, and considerable practice” (“Inflation Idyl: A Family Farm in Huntsville,” Utah Historical Quarterly, 40:2, Spring 1972, pp. 112-121, quotations from pp. 115, 116, 120, & 121).

Her first book, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (1945) was awarded the Alfred A. Knopf fellowship in biography and has gone through two editions and seven printings. Reared in the Mormon Church’s first family, Fawn applied her literary talent and skill in historical research to creating an incisive psychological biography of Smith, the founder of Mormonism. Her title was taken from a funeral sermon delivered by Smith in 1844, when he startled his listeners by declaring: “You don’t know me; you never knew my heart. No man knows my history. I cannot tell it.” Fawn, then 29 years old, wrote:

Since that moment of candor at least three-score writers have taken up the gauntlet. Many have abused him; some have deified him; a few have tried their hands at clinical diagnosis…. It is not that documents are lacking: it in rather that they are fiercely contradictory…. The task of assembling these documents of sifting first-hand accounts from third-hand plagiarism, of fitting Mormon and non-Mormon narratives into a mosaic that makes credible history … is not a dull one. It is exciting and enlightening to see a religion born. (Brodie, 1945, pp. vii-viii)

The book was so revealing a history of the founding father of Mormonism, his fabrications and polygamy, that Fawn’s punishment came soon after its publication: she was excommunicated from her Church. Fawn occasionally spoke of the pain inflicted by that expulsion from the community of family and believers, referring to herself as a “Jack-Mormon.” Her father never read her book or spoke of it. In 1967 Fawn was named “Fellow of the Year” by the Utah State Historical Society and her reconciliation with her Mormon roots and family began. Fawn was singularly honored with the First Annual American West Lectureship sponsored by the University of Utah and the Utah State Historical Society. Her work has stood the test of time—her No Man Knows My History is today one of the essential biographies for those who would understand charismatic religious leaders.

Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (1959) compellingly relates the man to his ideas and political career. She develops the emotional and intellectual consequences of Stevens’ clubfoot, a congenital deformity that conditioned many aspects of his life and politics. By disposition he was a Calvinist, never an Emersonian optimist: “Unlike most of his contemporary New England reformers, he never completely rejected Calvinism in favor of a sentimental belief in human perfectibility. Since he, being crippled, could never be perfect, he would not be deluded by the pleasant fantasy that the world was moving ineluctably toward sweetness and light” (p. 21). In weaving together strands of evidence, such as that Stevens was a silent benefactor of many crippled boys; the reports of his childhood neighbors that the other boys laughed at him and “would mimic his limping walk”; the recollection of his fellow Congressman that “He seemed to feel, that every wrong inflicted upon the human race was a blow struck at himself”; that he defended persecuted minorities including African-Americans, Indians, Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons, Jews, and Chinese; and his speeches in which the words “branded,” “marked,” and “Cain” appear repeatedly, Fawn makes the connection between these disparate fragments of a life with the perceptive interpretation: “A lame man is a minority of one wherever he walks” (p. 26). Here she brilliantly captures the emotional source of her subject’s empathic identification with the injured and the depreciated of mankind which was to be so significant for his political stance. These, then, are not merely “interesting” anecdotes. We have a skillful and imaginative synthesis of data and concept which explain a coherent pattern of motivation where previously there had been only inconsistency, disparage-

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ment, ambiguity, and paradox. Using her empathetic powers as an historian, she convincingly demonstrates how Stevens’ deserting father, his mulatto housekeeper, his inability to defend himself when unjustly accused, and his relations with younger men all refract and interact with his political stance as the leader of radical Reconstruction, a vituperative opponent of President Johnson, a champion of African-Americans, and a leader who decisively altered the US Constitution with the three post-Civil War amendments.

Now to the biographer: how and why did Fawn have the special empathy and personal insight to give perspective to the complex character of Thaddeus Stevens? What in her life and personal background prepared her to be his historical interpreter? Fawn was a tall girl who grew to be an impressive woman. But in puberty and adolescence, height, body image, and self-esteem were to her painful sources of anxiety and shame. She would have some family member measure her weekly and mark her bedroom door. She grew to five feet, ten inches, much taller than any of the other girls her age. Her sister Flora recalls that as the mark “‘kept going higher Fawn’s tears would flow. Being … tall at puberty was a real hardship on Fawn.” All the boys in her group of friends were shorter than she. “‘She couldn’t get a boyfriend because she was taller than all the boys in Huntsville.’” When she slumped to make herself shorter, her father would admonish her to “‘Stand up! You’re Beautiful!’” What had been experienced as a handicap became an adaptive asset when she got a college job in the University of Chicago Hutchinson Commons. Because she was tall and had a long reach, she was assigned to pour second cups of coffee (Newell G. Bringhurst, Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life, 1999, pp. 28, 34, and 59 passim). As an adult woman Fawn could wear the kind of large knitted sweaters, neck pieces, and jewelry that would dwarf a smaller person. Fawn’s ability to personally identify with the physical shame of Stevens, the crippled boy, who was a “minority of one,” and Stevens’ heroic overcoming through national political achievement, as well as her personal emotional knowledge of the branding humiliation of excommunication, of being the “outsider,” helped her to empathize with his psychic scars and internal struggle.

The first three of Fawn’s five biographical subjects were in some respect engaged with Mormonism. She wrote of Smith, the founder; Stevens was a defender; and Burton was a curious explorer of the Mormons. The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton (1967), which was adopted by the History Book Club in 1968, was on her only non-American subject, but he did travel to and describe Mormon country in 1860. He visited with Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, and wrote a book, The City of the Saints (London, 1861), describing his visit. Burton was a British explorer of East Africa who admired Islam, saying, “‘Being amongst Moslems … is a kind of repose to me … the atmosphere of Christiandom demoralizes and distresses me’” (p. 321). He penetrated the Arabian holy cities Mecca and Medina, and Harar in Somaliland. He sought in vain the headwaters of the Nile River. Burton was insatiably curious about sexuality and homosexuality, harems, polygamy, clitoridectomy, and infibulation. Fawn had a special rage at Burton’s Catholic wife, Isabel, who destroyed his letters and papers, and “‘wantonly burned’” the manuscript of his translation of a book of Eastern erotica, The Scented Garden (p. 329).

Prior to Fawn, the state of Thomas Jefferson scholarship was an idealized view of a man without corporeal or sexual feelings after his wife’s death, leading to an ascetic moralistic conclusion. We need only look at the distaste with which the distinguished Jefferson scholar Merrill Peterson handled Jefferson’s relationship with his slave and deceased wife’s half-sister, Sally Hemings:

The African Venus, Sally Hemings, was apparently the mulatto offspring of John Wayles and Elizabeth Hemings, his concubine, and hence the half-sister of Jefferson’s departed wife. Sally it was who had accompanied [Jefferson’s younger daughter] Polly to Paris in 1787. After her return she had a number of children, all light skinned, whose paternity some wanton men ascribed to Jefferson. Like most legends, this one was not created out of the whole cloth. The evidence, highly circumstantial, is far from conclusive, however, and unless Jefferson was capable of slipping badly out of character in hidden moments at Monticello, it is difficult to imagine him caught up in a miscegenous relationship. Such a mixture of the races, such a ruthless exploitation of the master-slave relationship, revolted his whole being. It is of no historical importance, but the best guess is that Sally’s children were fathered by Peter Carr (Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography, 1970, p. 707).

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By contrast, Fawn’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974) sets a new model for biography and historical interpretation by viewing Jefferson, not as an ascetic celibate after the early death of his wife, but as a complex and passionate man, capable of love and sacrifice, who was moved in his choices and decisions by the forces of his personal and social history as well as by the intellectual reasoning that is emphasized by previous Jefferson biographers such as Dumas Malone and Peterson. Fawn used her empathic capacity combined with subtle literary and psychological analysis. I find her close textual reading most persuasive. In discussing Jefferson’s diary of his trip up the Rhine in 1788, Fawn notes: “Anyone who reads with care these twenty-five pages must find it singular that in describing the countryside … he used the word ‘mulatto’ eight times.” Indeed, the plains, the soil, the valley of the Rhine, the hills, the clay, are all described as “mulatto” (p. 229). Fawn contrasts this with a-year-earlier travel diaries of France before Sally’s presence in Europe, where “mulatto” only appeared once in 48 printed pages. Fawn also shows from his account books that “Jefferson began to spend a surprising amount of money on Sally Hemings’ clothes” (p. 234). By the time of the return to America, when Sally was two months pregnant, Jefferson gave explicit orders for the arrangements of the “‘births’” [sic!] of his party on the voyage home so that on shipboard he would be close to Sally (p. 243).

Fawn had a special sensibility for sexuality in her subjects and its denial in history. In October 1971 I published a little piece on Freud in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (VII:4) in which I quoted an October 31, 1897 letter to Fliess in which Freud, at age 41, wrote: “Sexual excitement … is no longer of use for someone like me” (The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, Jeffrey M. Masson, ed. and trans., 1985, pp. 275-276). Fawn immediately wrote me a generous note saying she “greatly enjoyed” the paper, but she had “one serious reservation” about what I had written of Freud’s sexuality:

This is a dangerous assumption in any case, about any man, and certainly cannot be established by a single sentence in a letter—especially to Fliess! All might have been changed in the next week on one of those vacations with his sister-in-law. Here I am trying to restore Jefferson’s masculinity; I won’t have you doing to Freud what all Jefferson biographers have been doing to their hero for generations (Fawn Brodie to Peter Loewenberg, Monday, October, no date, 1971, in possession of the author).

She was right! We have Freud’s dream of July 8/9, 1915 when he was 59, of which he said the day residue “‘has to do with successful coitus Wednesday morning’” (in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, 1988, p. 163). It is relevant that this dream “‘very clearly had as its content the deaths of my sons, Martin first’” (Freud to Ferenczi, July 10, 1915, Freud-Ferenczi Correspondence, 1996, Vol. 2: p. 64). Thus, Freud relates his virility to survival and triumph over his sons.

Professor Brodie’s scholarship has a psychoanalytic thrust to it that constitutes one of the most important commentaries and correctives to American history and culture in our time. She focuses on the American need to sterilize and disembody our national heroes, as if they had neither senses nor passions. She returns to them their sexuality, their ambivalences, and their human vitality. Despite, or perhaps because of, the controversial nature of placing sexuality in the subject, she was invited to lecture on Thomas Jefferson at the Sesquicentennial of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. She had an entire session devoted to her work on Jefferson at the meeting of the Organization of American Historians. A recent vindication of her inferences, which Fawn was not to see, is that Jefferson’s paternity of Sally’s children was established by DNA testing in 1998 which matched descendants of Thomas Jefferson with those of Sally Hemings (The New York Times, June 29, 1997; November 1 and 8, 1998; January 27, 2000; July 14, 2003; Los Angeles Times, November 8, 1998). How fitting that our founder, Thomas Jefferson, America’s secular saint, also fathered African-Americans!

Fawn’s final work, Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character (1981), was published posthumously. Although she disliked Nixon’s political style, particularly his smear techniques, she had a special personal hatred of Nixon after his “plumbers” broke into and rifled her analyst Dr. Lewis Fielding’s Beverly Hills office, looking for information on Daniel Ellsberg. She had an informal, folksy personal style that enabled her to talk to Richard Nixon’s old aunts and school teachers in the Quaker town of Whittier, California, as a trusted confidant. One of her major themes is Nixon as a liar in matters

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large and small throughout his life. She contends that “Nixon lied to gain love, to store up his grandiose fantasies, to bolster his ever-wavering sense of identity. He lied in attack, hoping to win…. And always he lied, and this most aggressively, to deny that he lied…. Finally, he enjoyed lying” (p. 25). She shows Nixon lying about such trivia as his college major and his wife’s first name and birth date, as well as in his first campaign for Congress against incumbent Jerry Voorhis; about his secret slush fund in the 1952 presidential campaign; and, of course, in the Watergate cover-up. Fawn structures an argument that Nixon learned to lie in boyhood from a “myth-making mother” who denied what was uncomfortable and stretched the truth, and from a brutal, hot-tempered father who punished his boys with the strap and rod when he failed to get instant obedience, and that Richard learned to be, in his words, “pretty convincing to avoid punishment.” She argues that “almost every one of Nixon’s victories and political achievements save the elections to the vice-presidency had been won as a result of lying attack or the unexpected and fortuitous death of others” (p. 507). Fawn’s argument is persuasive as one reads her account of the shaping of the character of the president whose tenure of office ended so ignobly with the exposure of his lies.

When Fawn presented her work on Nixon at a UCLA Faculty Club evening dinner, I suggested in the discussion that her emphasis on the theme of Nixon, the liar from boyhood to maturity, from parental home to the White House, is essentially static and, while powerful, is unbalanced in its neglect of Nixon’s many ego strengths and adaptations in a long political career. In the 1952 presidential campaign, Nixon saved his candidacy and the Republican ticket with his maudlin “Checkers” speech. General Eisenhower was ready to drop him from the GOP slate; Nixon’s career appeared to be finished. We may listen to the speech today and find the emotional tone unctuous and revolting, but at that time he knew what would sell in the new media of television and he produced it. He always remained within the boundaries of the law. He had, as Fawn puts it, “the skill of a man who can profit successfully on the fringes of political graft” (p. 280). She listened to my ego psychological critique with interest, but Bernard, her husband, was angry with me, saying, “Peter, you should look at your morality!”

The quality of Fawn’s work is evident in her scholarship; but her humanity is evidenced by the affection of her students. Graduate students were enthusiastic about her work as a teacher. She excited and stimulated them to the complex task of writing biography. She conducted her seminars with charm and personal warmth—attributes all too rare in academia. The readers of Clio’s Psyche will understand the pleas of Christopher Jencks and David Riesman 40 years ago and still pressing, for a human as well as a humane emotion-based ethos of graduate education:

The critical problem of graduate instruction in the social sciences and humanities is to narrow the gap between individual students’ personal lives and their work. The graduate school must somehow put the student in closer touch with himself, instead of making him believe that the way to get ahead is to regress himself and become a passive instrument ‘used’ by his methods and his disciplinary colleagues. This is no mean task. The difficulty of the job is not, however, an excuse for the present situation, where the student’s subjectivity is not even regarded as a problem (The Academic Revolution, 1968, p. 518).

Fawn filled this high charge with honesty, empathy, and informal charm. She was a wonderful intellectual iconoclast. She did not hesitate, indeed she delighted in, cutting through received myth, sham, and pretense. She opened up fresh, exciting, wonderful ground for new thought, offering creative insights as she linked fact, perceived inconsistencies, and analyzed and digested data and sorted things out to create new narratives for our time. She was a scholar who acutely and sensitively demonstrated understanding of psychological processes in biography. Her ability to explain and illustrate emotional connections without technical concepts or jargon is peerless. She combined profound knowledge of depth psychology, expertise in the areas of American history and biography that she researched, and a superb literary style.

A word about Fawn’s qualities as a faculty colleague and personal friend: she was a gracious and accommodating person. She was neither contentious nor polemical. Fawn and Bernard were wonderful hosts. I recall an evening at which a noted psychoanalyst felt insulted by Bernard and left in a huff with his wife in the middle of dinner. We sat around the table in stunned silence as their car descended down the Brodies’ winding driveway. It was Fawn who a

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few weeks later took the initiative to heal the breach, saying, “This is not worth losing a friendship.” In department meetings she demonstrated sagacity and good common sense. As a colleague she generously vetted my manuscripts, questioning details (“Who counted them?” was her reaction to a figure of witch burnings in Europe). In writing she always encouraged the use of the active, rather than the passive or subjunctive, voice.

As a personal friend Fawn was loyal, humane, and compassionate. When I found myself in the agon of a divorce, she was there for me, invited me to lunch at her home, and was self-disclosing and comforting. When she was writing she was totally immersed in her themes and their knotty problems. When you were at her table or she was at yours, and she was working on Jefferson, you would hear about Jefferson; when the project was Nixon, you heard of Nixon.

As Fawn fought her final battle with lung cancer in 1981, I visited her in St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. She asked me to phone her analyst, Lew Fielding, and tell him of her hospitalization. The analgesic of choice for the cruel ravages of chemotherapy was cannabis, which relieved her nausea, and which was illegal. Fawn’s daughter Pam, who was not a marijuana user, helped her mother by buying illegal marijuana and, as Fawn had trouble taking deep breaths, supplying a water pipe to relieve her pain (interviews with Bruce Brodie, Los Angeles, April 19, 2006, and Pamela Brodie of Homer, Alaska, April 20, 2006). As in her history, in her personal life Fawn was a pioneer ahead of her time. In November 1996, California voters passed the Compassionate Use Act of 1996 “to ensure that seriously ill Californians have the right to obtain and use marijuana for medical purposes” (California Health and Safety Code, Section 11362.5), a law which would have made unnecessary the stresses and contortions she and her family suffered 15 years earlier.

The history Fawn McKay Brodie wrote makes some people uncomfortable, for by its very nature it deals with human sexuality and intense personal feelings—but that is precisely what makes her work so rich and invaluable to us, her successors.

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