Saving Monticello: The Newsletter
The latest about
the book, author events, and more
Newsletter Editor
- Marc Leepson
Volume
XXI, Number 12 December
2024
JANE KAMENSKY: THE INTERVIEW: In
October last year, nearly 100 years after its founding, the Thomas Jefferson
Foundation announced the appointment of Dr. Jane Komensky, Ph.D., as its new president and CEO.
Dr. Kamensky, who officially took over on
January 15 this year, is just the second historian to head the Foundation. The
late Dr. Daniel P. Jordan, Ph.D., who served as the Foundation’s director from
1985 until his retirement in 2008 was the first. Dan Jordan came to the
Mountaintop from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond where he chaired
the History Department.
Dr. Kamensky took the job at Monticello after a thirty-year
academic career, most recently at Harvard University where she was a Professor
of American History and the Foundation Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth
Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe
Institute.
She has written or co-written seven books of American
history, including A Revolution in Color, the award-winning biography of
the colonial artist John Singleton Copley, and co-edited The Oxford Handbook
of the American Revolution.
I recently spoke to Dr. Kamensky about her first year as head of the Foundation and her perspective on the Levy Family’s role in saving Monticello. What follows is our conversation, edited for length.
What did you know about the post Jefferson history of
Monticello before you took the job?
I can admit to considerable ignorance about the
post-Jefferson, pre-Foundation history of Monticello before we came here. After
the recruitment started, I was informed about the documentary [“The Levys of
Monticello”], which was the way I first learned about the remarkable history of
the Levy Family preserving this treasure for the nation.
Can you explain how the post-Jefferson history of Monticello—specifically
the Levy Family’s ownership—informs your work as the head of the Foundation?
We always need to be telling the story of what the
investment is across generations that allows a fragile thing to continue to
exist.
I have a friend in the museum world who says the first thing
we should be prompting anybody to ask when they’re looking at a historic object
in a museum or visiting an historic site is: “How is it that this is still
here?”
That’s because, ultimately, that
is the question that activates the visitor or the viewer. To ask that question
is to enter that work of preservation and transmission—to enter the work of
making a building and a landscape like Monticello a kind of living text.
A place that does that really successfully in its interpretation is the Museum of the American Revolution [in Philadelphia], whose “wow” object is Washington’s war headquarters, which is a tent. They do a wonderful orientation program with his field Oval Office—this fragile canvas tent. The sort of meta story—the story that really hits the viewer in the gut—is that the work of preserving the tent is like the work of preserving and renewing democracy.
And there’s a parallel with the Levys?
The Levys have done a more herculean thing by preserving an
immense, fragile, and demanding site by not tearing it down and re-making it in
their own image, by making a building live values that were vitally important
to Commodore Levy’s ascent through prejudice in the United States.
So, by telling that story, we are inviting our guests—as you
have invited readers of the book and the documentarians have invited viewers of
the movie—into the work of preserving this fragile fabric of self-government.
How would you characterize what Uriah and Jefferson Levy
did at Monticello during the 89 years they owned it?
We have to remember that the common condition for all human
history—and it’s written in artifactual records—is loss and destruction. The
default is not preservation; the default is loss. Entropy alone—forget about
Jefferson’s debt and the inability of his heirs to reasonably sustain the
plantation and house—entropy alone would have destroyed the thing long since.
And it’s remarkable [that the Levys stepped] into that role as preservationists and not wildly re-made the place in their own image. I think that in the preservation community it’s a relatively modern sensibility that says we should start by doing no harm. And I think the Levys brought that approach to Monticello.
I’m thinking of a counter example: the former townhouse, now the Old State
House in Boston [above], which was nearly destroyed fifty times over. One
of the first big gestures those who saved it accomplished was to tear out its
guts and put in a grand Victorian staircase. You can certainly imagine a
Victorian sensibility, wanting to do that at Monticello in an extremely
inconvenient house in a whole set of ways.
But [the Levys' allegiance to Jeffersonian ideals was such that they lived as lightly in the thing as they could. It's truly remarkable.
So, it’s not only the stepping in to save it, but then the
living with, and in, it in a way that didn’t radically remake it in their own image.
I wrote in Saving Monticello that you can make a
case that Uriah Levy was the first American house preservationist. Do you think
that’s true?
I think he was early by a generation. [It wasn’t until] around
the time of the U.S. Centennial in 1876 when the first major American museums were
founded with period rooms as centerpieces when a kind of preservationist ethic
around the colonial period—even though it was often wrong; they often put
things together that wouldn’t have gone together—begins to have some public
traction.
So, Uriah Levy is early by a long generation from that at a
time when the spirit was toward the new. I’m not enough of an architectural
historian to say, yes, you’re right, theirs is the first such example, but he’s
certainly swimming against the tide in the second and third quarter of the nineteenth
century.
Anything else about that Levys and Monticello that you’d
like to add?
I’m eager to embrace the spirit of pluralism that brought
the Levys to save Monticello. I think we need it badly in America in 2024. I
think Jefferson knew how valuable it was during his lifetime.
And the last thing I’ll offer, sort of invoking your book
title, is we all need to do the equivalent of saving Monticello every day. [I’m]
thinking about ourselves as preservationists, not only of houses and
landscapes, but also of our form of self-government, that allowed Uriah Levy
and his descendants to have the trajectory that they did.
THE
HARLEY LEWIS PAPERS: Richard Lewis, a great grandnephew of Jefferson
Levy, recently emailed to say that the family has donated the papers that his
mother, Harley Lewis, had gathered over many years dealing with her great uncle
Jefferson Levy and other family Monticello matters to the American Jewish
Historical Society in New York City.
His mother, Richard Lewis told me, “was the keeper of family
papers handed down to her from her mother, Frances Wolff Levy. When Harley
died in 2020 at the age of 94, we decided to donate all of the papers to the American
Jewish Historical Society in 2024 where they have now been archived and added
to their collections to preserve them for future generations.”
As the JHS description of the material notes: Harley Lewis (above)—who graciously shared the material with me when I was doing the research for Saving Monticello 25 years ago—“served as the family’s historian and primary connection to Monticello in the mid- to late-20th century, the home of … Thomas Jefferson, and the legacy of Commodore Levy, the first Jewish person to rise to the top of the U.S. Navy and owner of Jefferson’s Monticello purchased in 1834, and held by the family until it was sold to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in 1923 by Uriah’s nephew, Congressman Jefferson Monroe Levy (1852-1924).
“The collection contains correspondence, articles, and news clippings relating to Commodore Levy, and family correspondence, genealogy, photographs, articles, memorabilia, indentures, wills and last testaments, and some ephemera regarding families related to Uriah Levy in Virginia and New York City.” The book had a strong start. Not long after The Unlikely War Hero arrived in bookstores and at online booksellers early this month, it became the bestselling Vietnam War History book on Amazon.com And the first printing sold out within a week.
EVENTS: I will be doing more events in 2025,
including talks on Saving Monticello, as well as for my new book, The
Unlikely War Hero. It’s a slice-of-life biography of the extraordinary
Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest ranking American
prisoner held in Hanoi during the war. More info at https://bit.ly/Hegdahl
If you’d like to arrange a talk on that book, or on Saving Monticello or any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com
For details on upcoming events, check the Events
page on my website: marcleepson.com/events
COMMERCE: I have brand-new paperback copies of Saving Monticello and a few as-new hardcovers. To order personalized, autographed copies, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me directly at marcleepson@gmail.com
I also have copies of five of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We
Hailed; Ballad of the Green Beret, and Huntland.
Due to high demand, I’m temporarily out of
copies of The Unlikely War Hero but will be restocking very soon.
