Fawn McKay Brodie (September 15, 1915 – January 10, 1981) was an American biographer and one of the first female professors of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is best known for Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974), a work of psychobiography, and No Man Knows My History (1945), an early biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement.This article usually uses the terms "Mormon" and "Mormonism" to describe the entire movement that originated after the publication of the Book of Mormon and Latter-day Saint and LDS to refer to the largest of the Latter day Saint denominations, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based in Salt Lake City.
Raised in Utah in a respected, if impoverished, family who were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), Fawn McKay drifted away from Mormonism during her years of graduate work at the University of Chicago and married Bernard Brodie, an academic who became a national defense expert; they had three children. Although Fawn Brodie eventually became one of the first tenured female professors of history at UCLA, she is best known for her five biographies, four of which incorporate insights from Freudian psychology.
Brodie's depiction of Joseph Smith in 1945 as a fraudulent "genius of improvisation"Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2nd. ed., 1971), 403. has been described as both 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"Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (University of Illinois Press, 2000), 165. However, the Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley claimed he was immediately struck "by the brazen inconsistencies that swarm in its pages". No, Ma'am, That's Not History (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1960), 5. and as a work that presented conjecture as fact.The New York Times Book Review, November 25, 1945, 5. Her best-selling psychobiography of Thomas Jefferson, published in 1974, was the first modern examination of evidence that Jefferson had taken his slave Sally Hemings as a concubine and fathered children by her. Brodie concluded he had done so, a conclusion supported by a 1998 DNA analysis and current scholarly consensus.
Early life Fawn McKay was the second of five children of Thomas E. McKay and Fawn Brimhall. Born in Ogden, Utah, she grew up in Huntsville, about 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 Church's Swiss-Austrian Mission, and an Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Brodie's paternal uncle, David O. McKay, was an LDS Church apostle when Brodie was born and later became the church's ninth president.Notable American Women
Despite the prominence of her family in the church, they lived in genteel poverty, their property burdened by unpayable debt.The farmhouse Brodie lived in was owned not by her parents but by the extended McKay clan, the McKay Family Corporation. Her relatives visited regularly and for extended periods each summer, but the corporation refused to provide indoor plumbing, although the Thomas McKay family desperately wanted it, and the corporation could afford to pay for it. The mortgage debt grew to thirty-five thousand dollars, "an astronomical sum for the time" that Fawn's father bore for the next thirty years "like Atlas, without hope and without lament". . The young Fawn was perpetually embarrassed that their house did not have indoor plumbing."Fawn bitterly recalled that as she 'grew older and became aware of the social implications of [the privy's] permanence [it] became...a scandalous anachronism. The coming of guests, whether our parents' friends or our own, always meant a moment of apologetic explanation, which was humiliating to make or even to overhear.'" In winter, human wastes in chamber pots had to be thawed on the kitchen stove before they could be disposed of. .
Brodie 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."Flora McKay Crawford in . 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 Brodie grew to maturity in a rigorously religious environment that included strict Sabbatarianism and evening prayers on her knees,There was a blessing at every meal, and the McKay children were not allowed to play either outside or inside the house. Even the sewing of doll clothes was forbidden. The Word of Wisdom was obeyed, with no coffee, tea, or alcoholic beverages were consumed. her mother was a closet skeptic who thought the LDS Church was a "wonderful social order" but who doubted its dogma.Flora McKay recalled that her mother "hated the temple ceremonies so bad that it was just ghastly". Among other things, her mother rejected the Mormon view of eternity and instead insisted that "eternity is one generation to another." . According to Brodie, in the late 1930s, while her father headed Mormon mission activities in German-speaking Europe, her mother became a "thoroughgoing heretic" while accompanying him there.Brodie said that two years of "playing hostess to itinerant apostles, plus some sophisticated literature and the overwhelmingly impressive spectacle of twenty centuries of European art really shocked her out of that provincialism in which twenty-five years in Huntsville had tried to enshroud her". Brodie was pleasantly surprised that at her mother's age, "there could come such delightful blossoming of courageous heresy"..
Education and marriage From 1930 to 1932, Brodie attended Weber College, 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 completed a bachelor's degree in English literature at the University of Utah in 1934.The choice of the University of Utah rather than Brigham Young University was made by Fawn's mother who, besides her own heterodoxy, did not want her girls a hundred miles away in Provo, where they would be encouraged to marry. . There she began to question core Mormon beliefs, such as that the Native Americans had originated in ancient Israel. After graduation at age nineteen, she returned to teach English at Weber College.
In high school, Brodie had begun dating a classmate, Dilworth Jensen. They wrote to each other faithfully during Jensen's long absence on an LDS mission in Europe. In June 1935, they were both accepted for graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and friends assumed they would marry. Her sister, Flora, had recently eloped with Jensen's brother, whom the McKays disliked. They encouraged Fawn to attend the University of Chicago rather than marry. She seemed to have had "growing doubts about marrying" Jensen.Although Fawn remained fond of Jensen, she wanted "freedom and a chance to be on her own. Dilworth himself apparently sensed this." The "couple continued to talk marriage, and it seemed to those who knew them that their relationship would continue despite the separation." .
At the University of Chicago, where she earned a master's degree in English in 1936, she 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."Shirley Stephenson, Biography of Fawn McKay Brodie, quoted in . She continued to write to 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 family's religion. A bright graduate student in international relations, he eventually became a noted expert in military strategy during the Cold War era. The McKays were horrified at their daughter's impending marriage; 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 did.."According to his daughter, Pamela, Bernard's family interpreted the marriage as a deliberate rejection not only of them but also of his Jewish heritage."(64)
No Man Knows My History
Composition Having found temporary employment at the Harper Library of the University of Chicago, Brodie began researching the origins of the Book of Mormon. By mid-1939, she confided to her uncle, Dean R. Brimhall (another ex-Mormon),. that she intended to write a 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. In 1943, Fawn Brodie was encouraged enough by her progress to enter her 300-page draft in a contest for the Alfred A. Knopf literary fellowship. In May, her application was judged the best of the 44 entries.Michael Kammen, In the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21; .
Brodie continued her research at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where the Brodies had moved for her husband's work, as well as at the headquarters of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Independence, Missouri. Eventually she returned to Utah, where she did research in the LDS Church Archives. She gained access to some highly restricted materials by claiming to be "Brother McKay's daughter", a subterfuge that made her feel "guilty as hell".. Her pursuit of little-known documents eventually attracted the attention of her uncle, David O. McKay. After a "painful, acrimonious encounter" with her uncle, Brodie promised never again to consult materials in the church's archives..
Brodie's research was enlarged by other students of Mormonism, most notably Dale L. Morgan, who became a lifelong friend, mentor, and sounding board."Despite his own deep fascination with Mormonism's past, Morgan...was not a practicing Latter-day Saint." . Yet Morgan twice critiqued Brodie's manuscript with "alarming frankness", convincing Brodie that what she had already written read too much like an exposé. "In general, Morgan was much more incisive and penetrating in his critique than the Knopf panel had been in awarding Brodie her fellowship. The difference was that Morgan knew Mormon history and the Knopf readers did not." (88) After Brodie published No Man Knows My History, Morgan wrote a glowing review of it for the Saturday Review of Literature. He did not reveal his own role in the book. Brodie completed her biography of Joseph Smith in 1944, and it was published in 1945 by Alfred A. Knopf, when she was thirty years old.
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