Talk:Fawn M. Brodie

Fawn M. Brodie is currently a good article nominee. Nominated by an unspecified nominator at 7 October 2006

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Talk:Fawn M. Brodie/Archive 1

Notes on POV Tags

I have nominated this page for "Good" status. However, I have some issues with the author of the article with regard to some phrases that I believe violate WP:NPOV. I have had an on-going discussion on these matters and John Foxe feels that if something is "True" then it cannot be POV. I have tried to explain the concept of NPOV as I understand it but have failed. John feels strong enough about these phrases to consider them worthy of an edit war. I request reviewers' judgements.

I consider the following phrases in the article to be POV such that wikipedia is taking a stand vs reporting information:

Well researched and smartly written found in the fifth paragraph of the No Man Knows My History Section

Gary Wills, savaged Brodie's work found in the Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History Section

There may be other POV phrases as well. --Blue Tie 02:12, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have no interest in an edit war and hope Blue Tie and I can reach consensus about these details. I've added three more citations for the "well researched and smartly written" phrase and moved the Gary Willis comment to the footnotes, where it belongs anyway. So what do you think?--John Foxe 13:04, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think that moving the Gary Wills quote to a footnote, all because you must have one word in the text is a shame, but otherwise the article is good. --Blue Tie 11:59, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The move to footnote may lose more than interesting content

This is the current version, with what I think is one edit, to make a separate paragraph regarding the DNA justification and consequent historical studies:

Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History was published in February 1974, and it became the main spring selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Brodie did her best to ensure that the three foremost Jefferson scholars, Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, and Julian Boyd, would not be invited to review the book. But she scarcely needed to worry. Brodie was interviewed on NBC's Today Show, and the book quickly "became a topic of comment in elite social-literary circles." The biography was also an immediate commercial success and remained on the New York Times best-seller list for thirteen weeks. Jefferson sold 80,000 copies in hardback, 270,000 copies in paperback, and netted Brodie $350,000 in royalties--adjusted for inflation, more than a million dollars in the early twenty-first century.^[1]

Reviews were mixed. Most were generally positive with some lifting of eyebrows at Brodie's undue speculation. ^[2]

Brodie was at least partially vindicated in 1998 when blind DNA tests concluded that a male carrying the Jefferson Y chromosome had fathered Eston Hemings, Sally Hemings' youngest child. In January 2000, a research committee commissioned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation also asserted that there was a high probability that Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemmings and possibly the father of all Hemings children listed in the Monticello records. Nevertheless, a similar study in 2001, organized by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, reached opposite conclusions, namely that it was unlikely that Jefferson had fathered any of Hemings' children. ^[3]

Note that the way this article reads the book had "generally positive" reviews. I remember the storm at the time it was released and perhaps over the next 5 years (At some point, I even think it made the cover of Time Magazine). The reviews were not "generally positive". They were greatly mixed and from my memory of it, they were more critical than supportive (except, again, people did generally find her writing to be compelling). But her approach was widely condemned, if not by literary reviewers, at least by historians. The Gary Willis quote is probably the most extreme but it is also the best worded example. I think that excluding it, slants a bit one way. I think it is a shame to exclude it because of its wording. ON the other hand, including it, it is so strong that at least one positive quote would be appropriate and would balance it.

One other note: I rechecked because I remember this being "Gary Wills" not "Gary Willis" and I think it is Wills. I have read "Willis" many places so that it almost seems right, but I think it is wrong. --Blue Tie 12:24, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I personally heard Dumas Malone go after Brodie's thesis. "I've lived with Jefferson for most of my life," he said. "And Jefferson would never have done such a thing."--John Foxe 14:47, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

^ Bringhurst, 215, 217, 185.
^ Gary Wills savaged Brodie's work in the New York Review of Books: "Two vast things, each wondrous in itself, combine to make this book a prodigy--the author's industry, and her ignorance. One can only be so intricately wrong by deep study and long effort, enough to make Ms. Brodie the fasting hermit and very saint of ignorance. The result has an eerie perfection, as if all the world's greatest builders had agreed to rear, with infinite skill, the world's ugliest building." Willis complained that Brodie had consistently found double meanings in the language of colonial America based on twentieth-century usage. Bringhurst, 217-18;New York Review of Books, 21 (18 April 1974), 26.
^ Monticello article on Jefferson and Hemmings. Defenders of Jefferson's probity used to argue that if any Jefferson DNA was to be found in descendants of Sally Hemings, it came from Thomas Jefferson's nephews, Peter and Samuel Carr. See Douglas Adair, Fame and Founding Fathers (New York: Norton, 1974). Today the finger is usually pointed at Jefferson's brother Randolph.

[1] Bringhurst, 215, 217, 185.

[2] Gary Wills savaged Brodie's work in the New York Review of Books: "Two vast things, each wondrous in itself, combine to make this book a prodigy--the author's industry, and her ignorance. One can only be so intricately wrong by deep study and long effort, enough to make Ms. Brodie the fasting hermit and very saint of ignorance. The result has an eerie perfection, as if all the world's greatest builders had agreed to rear, with infinite skill, the world's ugliest building." Willis complained that Brodie had consistently found double meanings in the language of colonial America based on twentieth-century usage. Bringhurst, 217-18;New York Review of Books, 21 (18 April 1974), 26.

[3] Monticello article on Jefferson and Hemmings. Defenders of Jefferson's probity used to argue that if any Jefferson DNA was to be found in descendants of Sally Hemings, it came from Thomas Jefferson's nephews, Peter and Samuel Carr. See Douglas Adair, Fame and Founding Fathers (New York: Norton, 1974). Today the finger is usually pointed at Jefferson's brother Randolph.

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