One need only read the title to know what this book is about. When Brodie's monumental No Man Knows My History was released in the 1940's, it quickly became a polarizing element in the Mormon community -- by reinterpreting the life and work of the Prophet Joseph Smith, by removing him from the realm of the supernatural and accounting for his life and achievements in a purely naturalistic way. Termed a "psychobiography," Brodie's book was quickly dismissed and even initially ignored, by the Church. But, as we shall see, the level of interest in the book finally caused the Church to respond.

The question became, "What do we do with Fawn Brodie?" Daughter of a General Authority, niece of a future Prophet, how is she to be dealt with? The clash of "Family First" versus "Church First" was settled with Brodie's eventual excommunication from the Church.

Whether friend or foe of Brodie's book, there is no doubt that it has played a pivotal role in subsequent treatments of the Prophet's life. Much like Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History has been spoken of for good and for ill, and remains a landmark in Mormon studies.

The present volume is a collection of contributed articles, some of which have appeared previously in other publications. There is, therefore, a measure of duplication that is, I fear, unavoidable. The reader should not find this distracting.

I will discuss the various contributions, and then sum up my feelings at the end.

Contents

One of the important ideas discussed in this chapter is the observation that the writing of No Man Knows My History was a labor filled with uncertainty and a certain lack of clear direction. As she wrote, Brodie developed her understanding of Joseph Smith and the nature of his calling. In fact, she didn't set out to write a biography at all, but rather a history of the Mormon Church. She ultimately changed course as she realized that it was Smith she was really writing about, and the book took a new form, that of a biography.

Chapter Two, "Applause, Attack, and Ambivalence -- Varied Responses to 'No Man Knows My History'", is likewise penned by Bringhurst, and it documents the various reactions to Brodie's book. Ranging from enthusiasm to censure, everyone seemed to have an opinion.

Most interesting to me was the reaction of the Church itself. Initially silent on the issue, they were ultimately forced to go public with a condemnation of the work. I have wondered, from time to time, why the Church today chooses to let certain challenges go by. So much anti-Mormon literature has been published in the past several decades, and aside from organizations like FARMS and FAIR, you hear nary a peep in response. I suppose they believe that some things are better left alone.

Brodie's admirers were unsparing in their words of commendation. Her foes, likewise, laid into her with a ferocity that surprised me.

A cousin, Ernest McKay of Huntsville, was not content to sit back and let providence take its course relative to Brodie's alleged transgressions. He spoke out against the book as a guest lecturer at various Mormon wards in the Ogden-Huntsville area. Seeing him in action, one observer noted that McKay "knew how to choose the parts [of Brodie's book] he wanted to bring out and then tear them to pieces, and convince his audience that [Fawn Brodie] was a very naughty girl." McKay, on at least one occasion, made the rather curious statement, "One thing is certain from her book, Mrs. Jew is not convinced of the things she has written. It is plain that she has not left her CHURCH." [The reference to Mrs. Jew reflects Brodie's marriage to a Jewish man.] A third relative, Dr. Joseph Morrell of Ogden, an uncle through marriage, projected his hostile feelings toward Brodie and her book in a somewhat different fashion -- through Madelyn R. McQuown, a librarian in the Ogden Public Library, whom Brodie had known from her youth. Noted McQuown, "I have a little message for Fawn from the Church via Dr. Morrell -- that she had better stay the hell out of Utah from now on." According to McQuown, "He was careful to give me the message while he drank cocoa and ate peppermint ice cream with me." She concluded, "What do they think they could do to her? Call out the Danites?" (p. 45)

Chapter Three. The tone changes with the next chapter. Marvin S. Hill contributes, "Secular or Sectarian History? -- A Critique of 'No Man Knows My History.'" This third chapter of the present compilation views Brodie's book as dismissive of supernaturalism, relegating Smith's experience to the secular, and sectarian, worlds, and thus worthy of condemnation:

To be sure, Brodie did perceive the church initiated by Smith as "a real religious creation, one intended to be to Christianity what Christianity was to Judaism: that is a reform and a consummation," and she did compare the prophet perceptively to other radical religious leaders. But her book is not entirely adequate as a religious history because she did not consider Smith to be religiously motivated. Further, she made no attempt to trace the religious forces which brought the followers of Smith together in a movement but sought to account for Mormonism on the basis of his charisma alone. (p. 63)

Hill attempts to pick Brodie's book clean of any flesh. He raises questions aimed at discrediting both Brodie's methodology and her conclusions. It remains for the reader to decide how credible he is.

Chapter Four was, for me, an interesting and thought- provoking exposition. Titled "Fawn McKay Brodie -- At the Intersection of Secularism and Personal Alienation," and authored by Mario S. De Pillis, it explores the minimal role religion played in the intellectual tradition of the America of Brodie's day. He suggests that Brodie's approach cannot be understood merely as an alienated religionist striking back at the institution of her youth. Instead, the attempt to provide naturalistic explanations for religious phenomena was part of a larger academic milieu of which she was a part.

I argue that Fawn McKay Brodie's immediate environment was a rich and ambiguity-fraught intersection of modern secularism with Brodie's own personal alienation from the religious tradition that formed her. (p. 94)

...an important key to understanding "No Man Knows My History" lay in the Chicago environment which, in many ways, was the distilled essence of triumphant academic secularism in the United States during the 1940's and 1950's. (p. 96)

Interestingly, De Pillis points to a somewhat parallel situation in yet another church of 19th-century American origin, the Seventh-day Adventists. Like Mormonism, Adventism has a founding prophet, Ellen G. White. Her writings continue to influence Adventism and carry great authority among orthodox Adventists. But unlike Mormonism, Adventism makes no claim of continuing prophetic authority. With the death of White came the end of the prophetic line.

Ronald Numbers, an Adventist academic, released an important work which, like Brodie's book, reinterpreted the founding prophet's life and influence. Numbers attributed the various phenomena in White's life to naturalistic causes, in essence demythologizing the White heritage.

What De Pillis fails to do is to explore the impact Numbers' book had on the wider Adventist community, and how Adventism today deals with its "heretics." I think this bears a brief examination.

An organization called "The Adventist Forum" functions much as "Sunstone" does within the Mormon community. Speakers are often at odds with the hierarchy, and present explanations of Ellen White's role as "prophetess" in ways not friendly to the official telling. But unlike Mormonism, Adventism has not found it necessary to isolate the Forum, or its members or speakers. In fact, men and women holding positions much like those in Stake Presidencies and even higher offices, are frequently speakers at the Adventist Forum. Meetings are often held in church-owned facilities. Membership and attendance are not discouraged. Employees and academics at Adventist institutions are not stigmatized by membership.

Mormonism, on the other had, has felt the need to isolate organizations like "Sunstone," bar employees from attending symposia, and, in some cases, excommunicate those who speak out against the organization. The interesting lesson -- Adventism maintains a growth rate comparable to Mormonism. And the permission of freedom of expression has served to retain members who otherwise would not be able to continue in fellowship. I look for the day when Mormonism, like Adventism, will embrace diversity, facing it head-on, and winning the hearts of people, not by isolating and stigmatizing the opposition, but by engaging them.

De Pillis' essay is rich with insights into the state of religion in the 40's and 50's, the diminishing of the importance of belief among the churches (a phenomenon he is quick to point out is not shared by Mormons). It is compelling reading.

My friend Lavina Fielding Anderson supplies the next essay. Titled "Literary Style in 'No Man Knows My History' -- An Analysis." Anderson states her purpose at the outset:

The complex historical achievement of Fawn Brodie must rest on the assessment of historians: how accurately she used the sources available to her, how limited her history was by its sources, and the extent to which she transgressed beyond their boundaries by her conclusions. But her intuition also took her to frontiers that it has taken a full fifty years to explore and where, upon exploration, that intuition has proved astonishingly correct.

Our question here is the more limited but equally important one of the impact of style on content and on credibility. (p. 147)

I have grouped Brodie's dominant literary characteristics into four categories, beginning with the simplest and ending with the most complex: literary devices, scene structure, tone, and reader identification. (p. 130)

Much of the praise of Brodie's book is centered on her skill as a writer. Anderson brings this quality into focus, increasing our appreciation for Brodie's work.

Chapter Six is an enormously detailed, and very critical, view of Brodie's account of Joseph Smith's plural marriages. Titled "Fawn Brodie on Joseph Smith's Plural Wives and Polygamy -- A Critical View," and authored by Todd Compton, author of the widely praised "In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith," it focuses a critics eye on Brodie's understanding of Joseph's involvement in plural marriage.

While Compton is generous in his allowing for Brodie's lack of accessible source materials, he nonetheless is fairly brutal in his denunciation of Brodie's conclusions. He finds her, to coin a phrase, to be sometimes wrong, but always certain. He is troubled by Brodie's affirmative statements about facts that he considers not settled in the literature of history, and calls upon a friend of Brodie's to support his thesis:

[Dale L. Morgan] told Brodie once, "You are positive beyond what the facts will support, when all the obscure lights and shadows of those facts are closely examined." He also advised her to express her opinion but not to "claim that [she had] Absolute Truth by the tail." This is a subtle critique -- from one of her closest and most scholarly friends and a fellow non- believer in supernatural religion -- of her tendency to interpret evidence inexactly and of a pronounced dogmatic streak in her nature and scholarship. The two limitations are of course related -- when Brodie had an idee fixe, she sometimes interpreted facts imprecisely in order to arrive at her desired perspective. (p. 171)

And in an even stronger broadside, Compton takes a swipe at both Brodie and the Church:

Perhaps Brodie, despite her brilliance, could not escape the absolutist, doctrinaire mentality she inherited from her father and uncle, both general authorities in the Mormon church. No Man Knows My History may be viewed as a conservative Mormon book in this paradoxical way. (p. 172)

Compton takes issue with Brodie's view that Joseph's practice of plural marriage was motived solely by a desire for sexual gratification. He points to other explanations, such as D. Michael Quinn's fine work on the subject of the Mormon hierarchy, that point to the desire to unite the leading members of the group through marriage, a practice not unknown in history.

In the end, Compton offers a gracious, but clearly grudging, acknowledgment of the importance of Brodie's work. But he clearly believes we need to move beyond Brodie and engage the subject from a longer historical perspective.

The final offering, "From Old to New Mormon History -- Fawn Brodie and the Legacy of Scholarly Analysis of Mormonism," is from the pen of Roger D. Launius. It serves well as the closing chapter in this excellent volume. Launius is well known as a first-rate historian in the Latter Day Saint tradition. The very first sentence in his article is, in my opinion, a blockbuster:

If there had been no Fawn Brodie, Mormon historians would have had to invent her. (p. 195)

So what is his main problem with Brodie's book? In centers in his objection to Brodie's binary (my word) approach to her subject. Things are either black or white; there is no middle ground. And this approach, forcing Brodie to make what he considers strident statements where moderation would have served better, has effectively tied the hands of subsequent scholars of Mormon history:

A fully rounded portrait of Mormon culture has been slow to appear, in part because Brodie's powerful book channeled later research into directions that would respond to it. Like so many trends in historiography, it at first seemed fresh and alive with insights about early Mormonism only to eventually become a straight- jacket for investigators of the Mormon past. (p. 197)

...Latter-day Saints do not so much have a theology as they have a history. Confusing theology with history, therefore, requires that believing Saints accept a specified set of affirmations that are [sic] grounded in the "pure" thoughts and actions of past individuals, especially those of Joseph Smith. (p. 198)

But Launius takes the point further -- that subsequent research into the Joseph Smith story has been defined, and delimited, by Brodie's work, and thus detracts from the wider task of the study of Mormon history in an objective, non-apologetic manner.

The following extended citation illustrates the core of Launius' argument:

Since first appearing in 1945, No Man Knows My History has exerted a tremendous influence on the Mormon historical community, for both good and ill. It has forced other historians to come to grips with several theories that had been largely ignored beforehand or, when considered, had been dealt with in a decidedly faith-promoting manner. Brodie's heavy- handed either/or approach to interpreting Joseph Smith compelled historians to confront evidence for the purpose of refuting or revising her assessments. Looking at the historical records in a new way, opening new insights, and stretching interpretations are the meat and potatoes of historical inquiry. These are positive developments. At the same time, and Brodie is just as responsible for this as anyone else, the historical inquiry has wrapped historians into a tightly wound set of considerations about Smith. It has contributed to the insular nature of the field, and that helped ensure that it did not thrive as it might have, had new and different and challenging questions been asked that had application and interest beyond the narrow Mormon community. In part because of this, the Mormon historical community seems to be in more of a holding pattern than in the past. In spite of the amount of historical research and writing being done, and there remains a prodigious output in the 1990's, there seems to be little that is new or exciting in Mormon history. (p. 219)

In the end, I sensed that Launius was overstating his case, much as Brodie is accused of overstating her case. Of course, I can't prove it. I am not, after all, a member of the "Mormon historical community."

Conclusion

And the editor is to be commended for bringing together so many points of view, emphasizing neither the positive nor the negative (despite his own admitted admiration for the work), viewing Brodie's book not just a work of history, but as a literary accomplishment and a driving force in the direction of Mormon studies.

The writing is uniformly lively and non-technical. Both fans and detractors of Brodie's work will benefit from reading this collection, even if zealots on either side may find the entirety of the work unsatisfying.

While each author clearly has an agenda, and that agenda is pursued vector-like with both velocity and direction, the overall effect of reading this collection is the certainty that there is more to this story than we, perhaps, previously thought. Launius is unsparing in his criticism of Brodie's "either/or" approach to Joseph Smith. Readers may bring that same "either/or" approach to Brodie's book. But fairness, and a desire for a wider understanding of the person and work of Joseph Smith, demands that we take in ideas that cause us to think, and perhaps reconsider, our convictions.

There will always be those for whom such a discussion will simply not matter. The hyper-faithful will not hear anything about a fallible Joseph Smith. The hyper-critical will not allow that flawed Joseph Smith to have been motivated by spiritual conviction. As so often happens, I believe the truth is somewhere in the middle. Zealots don't like the middle.

And this book, I think, when considered in total, brings the reader into the middle ground, better armed to decide where the truth lies. And being so motivated, perhaps even moved to engage in the deeper study that Launius so desires.

I earnestly believe that the Church has a responsibility for educating the membership beyond the current level of engagement. While fine materials are issued on a regular basis, they often lack the kind of depth needed to counter the claims of Mormonism's detractors. In my review of "Echoes and Evidences of the Book of Mormon," published by FARMS, I made the point that the time has come for the membership to go beyond "testimony" and fully engage the issue of apologetics. Widely-read publications, like the Ensign, can lead the way.

I highly recommend this book to everyone interested in Mormon studies.