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Fawn Brodie: Her Daring Decision
Jennifer Markham
[1] As the 1970s began, the official Jefferson narrative appeared practically untouched since the Founding Father's enshrinement as a political deity by biographers James Parton and Henry Randall in the mid-1800s. Although these men had since passed, a new generation of biographers, collectively known as the "Jefferson Establishment" -- comprised of such devout Jefferson scholars as Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson -- had emerged as the faithful guardians of the story and helped to further establish its prominence by producing their own flattering volumes about "Mr. Jefferson," reaffirming the sentiments of their predecessors. The beloved Virginian seemed as though he was right on course for ascendancy to true political sainthood -- that is until Fawn Brodie burst onto the scene. With the release of her bestselling Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History in 1974, Brodie audaciously bucked the "Establishment" and the past 100 years or so of historical record by claiming that Jefferson had engaged in an affair with Maria Cosway and a loving relationship with his slave Sally Hemings.
[2] Now of course this defamation of the hallowed Jefferson did not sit well with the Charlottesville faithful, who never officially stooped to review Brodie's work but found other backhanded ways to ensure that their discontent was crystal-clear. Malone did not mince his words when being interviewed after the work's publication, calling Brodie "a determined woman [who] runs far beyond the evidence and carries psychological speculation to the point of absurdity." He slammed her "mishmash of fact and fiction, surmise and conjecture" saying it was "not history as I understand the term." Likewise, during an interview Peterson dismissed Brodie's years of scholarship as worthless, saying she "has her obsessive theory and she sends it tracking through the evidence, like a hound in pursuit of game, . . . [but] in the end nothing is cornered and we are as remote from the truth as when we began" (Bringhurst, "Making" 453).
[3] However, Brodie was not naïve and knew that Jefferson had a following unlike any other historical subject, even some 150 years after his death. She noted, "there is no Wilson ‘Establishment' in Princeton, and no comparable Lincoln Establishment anywhere. Jefferson is unique in having at least five distinguished living scholars who have spent fifteen years or more absorbed in and dominated by the multitudinous details of his rich and varied life" ("Biographers" 157). Brodie had experienced their passion, their devotion, their loyalty firsthand while giving a lecture in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia in 1969, nearly five years prior to publishing her work. Afterwards reflecting upon the experience, she remarked to a close friend, "I felt at times as if I was in the lion's den" (Bringhurst, "Making" 438). But most daunting of all was their potency. The previous scholarship on Jefferson had not only been well respected by circles of Jefferson sycophants but had been lauded by outsiders too -- leaving Brodie with quite large shoes to fill. Malone was practically a historical dignitary, going on to receive the 1975 Pulitzer Prize in History and the 1983 Presidential Award for Freedom for his six-volume work. With all of these hurdles lying in Brodie's path, what motivated her to pursue a place among these renowned Jefferson scholars?
[4] Well, Fawn Brodie was definitely no stranger to controversy. Her first biography, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, characterized the founder of Mormonism to be a "fraud" and "imposter" (Bringhurst, "Making" 433). Brodie, a native of Utah and a member of a prominent Mormon family, surely knew the risk of making these accusations public and was ultimately excommunicated from the Mormon Church as a consequence of her work. Her second biography, Thaddeus Stevens: The Scourge of the South was equally contentious because of her attempts at probing the Republican congressman's inner life and the special attention she paid to an alleged sexual relationship between Stevens and his mulatto housekeeper -- remarkably similar to the type of relationship she would later represent Jefferson of having with Sally Hemings.
[5] These previous biographies and the ripples they created surely helped equip Brodie for the firestorm that was to come with the release of Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, but there was a greater force present, driving her to willingly thrust herself into the inferno -- the truth. Despite the numerous accolades of prior Jefferson scholars, as far as Brodie was concerned, their work had been incomplete. She strongly believed that because of the long-term relationship they had shared with their subject through their years of not only studying the Founding Father but of complete immersion in the Jeffersonian hub of Charlottesville, they were unable to give readers an unbiased depiction of his life. They had become protective of their subject and could not bear to taint his paradigmatic image with tales of lustful flings or miscegenistic relationships, even if they weren't tales at all. In this case, the truth served a higher purpose than just setting the historical record straight; the story of miscegenation directly correlated with the current plight facing the nation. For this reason, Brodie decided to pursue Jefferson and leave her own unique mark on the official narrative, allowing the public for the first time to have a look at the unedited version of the nation's "most securely and universally enshrined" president. (Brodie, "Political" 56)
[6] Although she may not have "[taught] at the University of Virginia, live[d] virtually in the shadow of Monticello . . . [or] walk[ed] each day in the beguiling quadrangle Jefferson designed 150 years ago" like her contemporaries, Brodie nonetheless found her way to Thomas Jefferson ("Biographers"157). Her first exposure to the Founding Father came in 1967 after securing a full-time teaching position at the University of California, Los Angeles, while she was preparing materials for courses on the Jeffersonian Period. She was immediately enamored, finding Jefferson "utterly captivating" (Bringhurst, "Making" 437). Particularly, she was interested in his ambiguity, claiming, "his ambivalences are our ambivalences" (Brodie, "Political" 59). During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period in which Brodie worked on her history of Jefferson, the United States was plagued by the same issues faced in Jefferson's time period, namely the quagmire of African American rights. Jefferson's ambivalence on the issue of slavery mirrored the opinions of many Americans regarding Civil Rights, which made him relatable and even a potential source to look for guidance.
[7] Initially, Brodie's intention was to write "a small book on Thomas Jefferson" to be done by January 1972, however her mind soon began to change as she delved further into her materials (Bringhurst, "Making"437). Around the spring of 1970 she wrote to a fellow historian Dale Morgan, "I hoped to do ‘Thomas Jefferson -- an Intimate History' -- quickly -- but the man is so magical I may end up taking 5 years or so and trying to do something important" (Bringhurst, "Making"440). Brodie indeed took about that, publishing her work in 1974 -- two years later than initially expected.
[8] Her change of plans were gradual, the beginnings of which are reflected in her 1970 essay "The Political Hero In American: His Fate and His Future," in which she addresses the current threats to political heroes. One threat she discusses is the possibility of the political hero being unable to sustain his reputation under the clinical scrutiny imposed by new age historians. As Brodie so aptly phrases it, "If the old saw is true that no man is a hero to his valet, then it is even more true that no man is a hero to his psychoanalyst" (53). But she goes on to defend this style of biography claiming,
we do not have to choose between the clinic and the shrine. We do not have to worship without reservation or to discard great achievement because it was accompanied by flaws more or less serious, or even severe pathology. We cannot go back to the years before Freud, nor should we want to. An intimate knowledge of Freudian concepts should make for compassion, not cynicism. (56)
She frowns upon the wholesale generalizations made about our heroes -- saying the possession of one flaw should not dismiss a person from veneration and instead can even be seen as a positive, proving even the most reverential figures to be mere mortals.
[9] Brodie's discussion then shifts to focus on Thomas Jefferson and the treatment of the "great Jefferson taboo," his alleged affair with Sally Hemings, by biographers/historians (58). Brodie states, "All Jefferson biographers, and almost all white historians, have for generations denounced the story as libel lacking historical foundation. Many black historians, on the other hand, have accepted the evidence as authentic, as do the new disenchanted black students" (58). Here we see Brodie's acknowledgment of the discrepancies in the Jefferson narrative depending on the storyteller. She proposes her criticism in the form of a benevolent admonition and does not attack any single member of the Establishment but simply expresses that "The good biographer . . . is ‘an artist under oath.' The honest biographer cannot deliberately refrain from revealing discoveries simply because he fears they might damage his hero's image among the young -- or the squeamish. . . . My own conviction is that every biographer should have engraved upon his typewriter, ‘Biography should not enshrine the dead but enlighten the living'" (60). As her piece comes to a close, Brodie takes a new view on the scandal that had shamefully lurked in Jefferson's closet for the past 200 or so years, transforming it into an asset. She bravely proposes, "It could be that Jefferson's slave, if the evidence should in the end point to its authenticity, will turn out under scrutiny to represent not a tragic flaw in Jefferson but evidence of psychic health. And the flaw could turn out to be what some of the compassionate abolitionists thought long ago, not a flaw in the hero but in the society" (60).
[10] With this foundation laid, Brodie published her next essay, "Jefferson Biographers and The Psychology of Canonization," in 1971, in which, using Freud as her crutch, she examines the inconsistencies in the depictions of Jefferson by the Establishment. She begins where she previously ended by redefining the job of biographer, saying "The delight of the biographer is not in distorting, manipulating, and elaborating truth into art . . . but in discovering truth. He is essentially a historical or psychological detective, intent, hopefully, on transcribing truth into art without distortion" (156). Then she establishes Freud's concept of a biographers' tendencies to "devote themselves to a work of idealization" that "strives to enroll the great man among their infantile models, and to relive through him, as it were, their infantile conceptions of the father" (156). Because of this psychological need to portray a subject as perfect, "they wipe out the individual features in his physiognomy, they rub out traces of his life's struggle with inner and outer resistances, and do not tolerate in him anything savoring of human weakness or imperfection; they then give us a cold, strange, ideal form instead of a man to whom we could feel distantly related," ultimately sacrificing "the truth to an illusion" and "the opportunity to penetrate into the most attractive secrets of human nature" (156). Brodie reinforces the prevalence of the phenomenon claiming that "Even those biographers who are wary of the impulse to sanctify are nonetheless often its victims; they glorify and protect by nuance, by omission, by subtle repudiation, without being in the least bit aware of the strength of their internal commitment to canonization" (156).
[11] Brodie, having constructed the basis for her offensive, continues by discussing how numerous Jefferson scholars were equally fascinated and frustrated by their inability to fully acquaint themselves with their subject. She provides such examples as Peterson who noted, "Although [Jefferson] left to posterity a vast corpus of papers, private and public, his personality remains elusive. Of all his great contemporaries Jefferson is perhaps the least self-revealing and the hardest to sound to the depths of being. It is a mortifying confession but he remains for me, finally, an impenetrable" (161). From here, Brodie boldly questions the unanimity with which scholars were able to conclude the impenetrability of the inner Jefferson while at the same time definitively dismiss his affair with Hemings as slander. She challenges their scholarship, saying "There is important material in the documents which the biographers belittle; there is controversial material which they flatly disregard as libelous, though it cries out for analysis" (161). At this moment, Brodie's motivations for pursuing Jefferson become apparent. Recognizing the flaws in the prior scholarship, her goal is to truthfully depict Jefferson -- meaning no tactful omissions and a thorough assessment of the evidence present, not only for the sake of history but for the present as well.
[12] The decision by Brodie to publish a new version of the Jefferson narrative and stand up against the deliberate oversights of the Jefferson Establishment was rash and she knew it. However, her prior experience in creating contentious works and her desire to illuminate the truth about one of America's greatest heroes fueled her to press on. Unlike previous Jefferson scholars, Brodie did not believe the "taboo" to be problematic to his future standing as political hero. To her, it humanized the elusive president, making him a more relatable figure -- and, if possible, even more valiant. She recognized that his "taboo" was the same "taboo" the United States still faced daily and wanted to use her work as a tool to enlighten the masses. In an article defending her work against criticism, Brodie included a quotation from a Virginian journalist named Murat Williams in which he applauded Brodie for her open discussion of miscegenation:
When I read reviews of Mrs. Brodie's book last spring and noted its wide circulation and wider appeal, I had a sense that justice was being done on a large scale -- not necessarily in the case of Jefferson, but rather in the case of all those Americans who are the sons and daughters of miscegenation. I felt that a veil was being lifted and that a barrier was being removed. . . . All around us we in Virginia see the living evidence of miscegenation, but what kind of pretense are we guilty of to treat it as unmentionable? . . . I look on this as a kind of gratuitous insult that belongs to the 19th Century mental outlook of Southerners, but has no part in our world.
Brodie may have been slammed by critics and the Establishment, but ultimately she knew America's necessity for her work. The denigration of her reputation was a small price to pay in shedding light upon one of the nation's most enduring social issues.
