December 2024

 

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.