"No Man Knows My History" by Fawn M. Brodie

This is my second reading of Fawn Brodie's biography of Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS, Mormon) published in 1945.   Fawn M. Brodie was the daughter of Thomas E. McKay, Mormon Apostle, brother to David O. McKay, President of the LDS Church from 1951 until his death in 1970.  That a book challenging the veracity of the claimed origins of the Mormon Church was written by a respected scholar and published by a nationally renowned publisher, Knoph, was one thing.  That the writer was Mormon royalty, a scion of top-level LDS leadership, was quite another.  Creating quite a stir at the time, Brodie was excommunicated from the LDS faith after publication of the book.

Raised in the Mormon faith, I was aware of this book at a very young age... guessing ten years old (1955).  Mom was best friends with Barbara Smith, Fawn Brodie's sister.  Barbara and her husband Oliver, who was a professor at Brigham Young University, lived across the street from our house on North 1100 East in Provo, Utah.  I was friends with two Smith kids around my age... Kenny and Olivia.  I remember hearing conversations at home where Brodie was the topic.  Young as I was, discussion about a challenge to the veracity of claims of the religion of my heritage meant little to me at the time.

While the Brodie biography of Smith was never officially "banned" by the LDS Church, post publication it wasn't sold in any Church or BYU bookstores.  A devout Mormon who read the book in its immediate post publication period would probably not broadcast the fact.  I first read the book in my college years, the late 1960's, at BYU after the taint on the book had eroded somewhat.  One of my dad's dicta was, "truth cannot be honed in the absence of controversy."  So, in the spirit of uncensored inquiry, I felt justified in reading a book that had for a long time been scorned by Church leaders.  

Brodie captured the timeline of events of Joseph Smith's life with well researched exactitude.  But her narrative sought to tie Joseph Smith's seemingly fantastical claims about the discovery of golden plates and the religious history allegedly written on them, as more the product of Joseph's hyper imaginative reinterpretation of then circulating notions of early American history than direct revelations from God as claimed by Joseph Smith.

Early Smith supporters would claim that Joseph's humble beginnings and his lack of education are proof that the "Book of Mormon," a substantive, albeit turgid narrative written in flowery, Bible-like prose (it came to pass) of Christ's visitation to the American continent at the time of his resurrection, could not have been written by Joseph Smith.  It must have been, therefore, the product of divine revelation Joseph's supporters claim.   Brodie says no.  According to Brodie, beneath Smith's rough-edged, uneducated exterior was a type of genius.  Fawn Brodie says, in essence, that Joseph Smith, drawing from an atmosphere of religious fervor of his time and place, his own charismatic demeanor, his formidable imagination, his autodidactic enthusiasm, and his double down audacity, created a religious narrative that drew into his orbit thousands of people seeking the divine and not finding it in their own traditional religious experiences. 

"No Man Knows My History" does not seem to me, now almost eighty years after its publication, to be a wholly anti-Mormon book.    While Brodie may not believe the official version of LDS claims about Church origins, she pens her narrative with underlying admiration for Smith's accomplishments.  The people Smith attracts are not outliers, she avers.  They were skilled artisans, accomplished businesspeople, and intellectuals.  Brodie defends Smith in areas where others have criticized. The Church moved from Palmyra, New York to Kirtland, Ohio (Cleveland area) in the mid 1830's.  A prosperous LDS community was building.  Joseph started a bank (sans full state approval) which had to declare bankruptcy.    Many Smith critics cite this as proof of Smith as a con man.  Brodie notes, however, that it was the Panic of 1837, when the US government stopped accepting paper money for the purchase of land, that caused Joseph's bank, and most other banks in Ohio, to go bust.   

Fawn Brodie reveals with the respectful insight of someone who grew up in Mormon tradition, how the Mormons rallied around their charismatic, cheerful, sometimes reckless prophet during times of persecution and duress.  Considering the persecutions experienced by the Mormons throughout the formative years of the Church, Mormonism had every reason to collapse and disappear as a religious movement.  But it didn't!  Brodie credits the Church's progress, in the face of violent opposition, to Joseph's ability to look beyond the present moment and to make real in the eyes of his adherents a pathway to heaven.

Roughhewn Missouri slave holding settlers feared the homogeneity of the fast-growing, generally non slave owning, Mormon colony in northwestern Missouri started in the mid 1830's.  In 1839, Illinoisians rescued the beleaguered Missouri colony from being exterminated by the Missouri mobs.   Illinois granted Joseph Smith an expansive charter, to include a militia, to build his own community on the banks of the Mississippi River in Commerce (renamed Nauvoo).  

Nauvoo had become a great success story in just four short years.  By 1843, with a population of nearly twenty thousand souls, Nauvoo was Illinois' largest city, larger than Chicago or state capital, Springfield.  It was during the Nauvoo period that Joseph introduced new Mormon doctrines and practices:   LDS temple rituals; the doctrine of man's eternal progression to become like God himself; the practice of polygamy (though Smith denied this at the time).  Smith envisioned a church/state theocracy.  Smith became a US presidential candidate in 1844.    Illinoisian polls vied for the Mormon vote.  No doubt, in 1843, Joseph Smith was on a roll.

But Joseph's own hubris, according to Brodie, led to his own downfall.  Internal dissention involving some of Smith's closest associates arose as rumors circulated claiming Joseph and other senior church leaders were engaged in the practice of polygamy.  The dissenters formed a newspaper called the "Nauvoo Expositor" which published pieces unfavorable to Joseph Smith.  Smith had the press destroyed.  American-guaranteed freedom of the press meant something in those days, and Illinoisians turned against the Mormons.  Joseph was martyred by mob action in the nearby Carthage Jail, 27 June 1844.   "No Man Knows My History" lists each of Joseph Smith's plural wives, along with a mini history of the relationship, in an appendix.  

The book ends with Joseph's death.  The story of Brigham Young taking up the reins of leadership and moving the saints in a storied trek to the Great Basin is well rehearsed. In Utah, the Church learned to adapt to the exigencies of the American State.  Polygamy was renounced in the 1890's and membership was successfully nudged by Church leaders to align themselves as responsible American citizens inured to principles like, say, free speech.  The Church has flourished, as measured in terms of growing membership, since.

Fantastical origin claims notwithstanding; serious assaults on American mores (polygamy, press destruction) notwithstanding, Joseph was the energy source for what is now a worldwide church of sixteen million members which continues to flourish even as militant secularism seems to be driving many Christians away from religious practice.   By any measure, Smith's church is the most successful of American home-grown churches.  All successful religions are built on claims that that cannot be proven, claims which must be accepted on faith.  Is the host, a wafer offered to Catholics at mass, really the true body of Christ, as claimed?  No great institution is built without, visionary leaders who experience ups and downs, zigs and zags, and hitches along the way.  Can the truth of Joseph's religion, therefore, be certified by its works alone, if not by the veracity of its founding myths?    Can one have a testimony of the outcome even he is skeptical of the process?   What are we to make of the seeming disjunction between the Church's origin stories and its success today?  

Brodie has long passed from the scene, but I don't think she'd be surprised at the Church success today having ably chronicled the amazing life of the visionary Joseph Smith.  No, she didn't believe that Joseph saw God or that he unearthed ancient Golden Plates as he claimed.    But methinks that were she present today to witness the significant progress of Joseph Smith's movement, she might be willing to aver that "God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perf