“The Quicksands of Emotion”: The Friendship of Fawn McKay Brodie and Dale Morgan (article)

Dale Lowell Morgan (1914-1971), a past member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) and a historian of that same tradition, was in a fine position to understand Fawn McKay Brodie’s feelings during and after the publication of her biography of Joseph Smith. Morgan and Brodie met one another in Washington, DC, in 1943, when Brodie was well into her research on the Smith biography and when Morgan had already published such works in the history of the American West as Utah: A Guide to the State (1941) and The Humboldt: Highroad of the West (1943). After their first meeting, the two formed a fast friendship. Through their correspondence, both historians provided each other with relevant source materials, thoughtful criticism, and genuine affection.

Morgan may well have anticipated Brodie’s emotional and intellectual shifts as she worked her way through writing No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (1945), a biography of a man whom she had once placed on a pedestal as a prophet and hero. Members of what historians have called the “lost generation” of Mormon writers, both Morgan and Brodie wrote histories of the Mormon movement, while feeling they could no longer rationally be members of the faith. Morgan understood the kinds of sacrifices Brodie made when she chose to publish the biography as well as the emotional journey she underwent in moving from utter commitment to her faith to finding evidence that she felt proved that faith to be a lie. Because of this strong friendship, Morgan fiercely defended Brodie to her reading audience, while playing the role of understanding critic in private conversations. It is through this friendship that historians can better understand the complex personal and professional issues Brodie faced while writing the Smith biography.

To the public, Morgan admired Brodie’s work as that of a cautious and thoughtful historian. In his 1945 review of her work in the Saturday Review of Literature, Morgan acknowledged her careful research in unearthing Smith from the “temple of belief” that shrouded him in mystery, applauded her ability to craft a commanding narrative about a man who was “infinitely complex and steadily enigmatic,” and admired her attempts to analyze Joseph Smith throughout his career. He discussed her biography, as did other professional historians of her time, as one that should be remembered for the “informed and searching objectivity of its viewpoint.” It was, he said, “the definitive treatment of its subject” and a “job well done.”

Recognizing that a historian’s understandings of God would necessarily shape her/his telling of history, Morgan acknowledged that those who believed that God had a direct hand in human history would write an entirely different account of the facts than those who did not. He and Brodie, as members of that latter group, would look for any other possible explanation than the hand of God to explain history. His theory of history rested on this understanding. Morgan claimed that from his “point of view on God” he was “incapable of accepting the claims of Joseph Smith and the Mormons, be they however so convincing.” Morgan asserted that because of his basic

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underlying belief that no divinity existed, he would “look everywhere for explanations except to the ONE explanation that is the position of the church.” In this, and in many other things, Morgan and Brodie were of one mind.

In private, Morgan discussed the personal issues Brodie faced in writing the biography. Unlike other historians, he knew precisely what was at stake. In a letter to Brodie on December 11, 1945 Morgan recognized the gap Brodie had created between herself and her family. He wrote, “[T]he point is, you and I don’t really want to upset the beliefs of people who have lived by those beliefs and which give value and meaning to their lives.” In fact, in terms of Brodie’s own experiences, this was an understatement. Because of her connections with the Church hierarchy through both her mother (her maternal grandfather had been president of Brigham Young University) and her father (her father and uncle were both members of the General Authority; her father was Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles; and her uncle, David O. McKay later became President and Prophet), Brodie had been allowed into the Church archives. But, after an explosive argument with her uncle about the nature of her biography, Brodie vowed not to return.

As the biography progressed, Brodie felt that her parents might blame themselves for the fact that she had strayed from her faith. In a letter to her parents in May 1943, Brodie wrote, “[Y]ou 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.” She also understood that the publication of the biography would engender much grief and embarrassment within her family. In May 1943, Brodie won a pre-publication prize from Knopf for the biography. That month, she wrote to her parents that she wished they could celebrate, “[b]ut it is only fair to you both that I tell you quite frankly and honestly in advance that the book is likely to get a good bit of hostile criticism from the authorities of the Church. Certain things which I feel should be included to tell the whole story of the man, you will feel should better have been left buried.” In attempting to avoid this potential strain on the family, Brodie even offered to publish under a pseudonym to save the family from embarrassment. Brodie’s father, however, did not see the need for her to do so, so she went ahead with the book under her own name.

After the book’s publication, the tensions in the family were palpable. In a letter to Morgan in September 1946, Brodie recalled that: “My father never mentions the book, and we simply act as if it did not exist. My mother read the ms. at night after he had gone to bed, and was very enthusiastic. She is a remarkable woman, and has worked out an amazing adjustment to a situation which would have made me schizophrenic long ago.” As the biography made its way in the world, it caused stress within the family network that continued for many years to come.

Morgan’s understanding of her personal concerns did not mean that he pulled his punches when he analyzed Brodie’s work in private correspondence. These critiques ranged in nature from misspellings to what Morgan deemed inaccurate historical interpretations—even years after its publication Morgan would send Brodie lists of minor errata! Morgan had a vast knowledge of Mormon history, and in fact spent almost two decades writing his own account of the history of Mormonism, one that he never completed. For this reason, and because of his love for historical minutiae, Morgan was an ideal critic.

After his first read of the biography’s manuscript, Morgan provided many comments that indicated that Brodie’s anger showed in her work. Even after the publication, with its many revisions toward an objective stance, he accused her of holding on to pieces of her past faith and culture, and allowing it to affect her writing. In a letter written in January 1946, Morgan told Brodie that “I have an idea that you haven’t come full circle yet in liberating yourself from the church. You have an intellectual but not yet an emotional objectivity about Mormonism.” After the publication of No Man Knows My History, Morgan proposed that Brodie would not “begin to have really generous feelings [about the Mormon faith], a live-and-let-live philosophy” until she had “finished disentangling from the religion.” From Morgan’s perspective, Brodie was still in a “status of rebellion” in which she tried to remain on “an unassailable intellectual plane, [with] argument held within the limits of reason, and the quicksands of emotion fenced out.” In Morgan’s diagnosis, his friend did not “fully recognize the extent to which your book was written out of an emotional compulsion and the extent to which that compulsion persists.”

Their friendship did not go unnoticed by

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those in the Church community who were angered by Brodie’s publication of the controversial biography and wanted to discredit her in any way possible. Among the many rumors that sprang up out of this climate—that Fawn was not a blood relative of the future Mormon Prophet, David O. McKay, but merely an adopted family member; that her Jewish, anti-Mormon husband had convinced her to write the text; or that she had immediately recanted after the biography’s publication—was one claiming that Brodie and Morgan had had a sexual affair and that he (the only qualified historian of the two, the rumor assumed) had written the text itself.

It was to Dale Morgan that Fawn Brodie wrote when she was excommunicated by the LDS Church in 1945. He was one of the few who could truly understand what this meant to her. Even though she had long since come to believe that the Mormon faith was based on false premises, she continued to have familial (and therefore emotional) ties to the tradition. In May 1945, Brodie received notification that a hearing would be held to determine her excommunication for apostasy. The reason given was “[t]hat in a book recently published by you, you assert matters as truths which deny the divine origin of the Book of Mormon, the restoration of the Priesthood and of Christ’s Church through the instrumentality of the Prophet Joseph Smith, contrary to the beliefs, doctrines and teachings of the Church.” Brodie did not attend the session. She was excommunicated from the Church on June 19, 1945. Only to Morgan did Brodie confess that the notice caught her “completely off guard and upset me a good deal more than I would care to have the authorities know.” For her, it symbolized “so dramatically the fact that my bridges really are irrevocably burned. Home will never be the same again.”

In many respects, Dale Morgan was the closest Brodie had to understanding what “home” meant and accepting her seeming transgressions, regardless. He was someone who knew the origins of the Church, her journey as a historian, and the price she paid to write the biography. He was a unique friend in this regard. He knew the extent and depth of that powerful suction he called the “quicksands of emotion.”

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