Sharing History - Who Owns Monticello?

David Thorson:
Hello, my name is David Thorson. I'm a digital guide at Thomas Jefferson's Home Monticello.  You're listening to a special podcast series called Sharing History: 100 Years of Telling American Stories at Monticello.
 
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the creation of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, the private, nonprofit organization that purchased Monticello in 1923 and opened it to the public as a place to talk about Jefferson and his ideas.
 
That seems like a simple proposition. Of course, we celebrate Jefferson. He's one of our nation's founders and the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, a document that asserted America's defining values: that “all men are created equal,” and they have a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” That's a story we share every day here at Monticello.
 
But when you start to look a little deeper at the history here, things get messy, and that's what we're going to explore in this podcast. How do we tell the story of Jefferson? How do we tell the story of Monticello? How has that story changed over the years? Whose stories do we tell? Why does this matter? And what do these stories say about our shifting understanding of ourselves as Americans?
 
I'm joined today by my colleagues Dianne Pierce and Chad Wollerton.
 
Dianne Pierce:
I'm Dianne Pierce. I'm a part-time guide at Monticello.
 
Chad Wollerton:
I'm Chad Wollerton. I'm the Director of Digital Media and Strategy.
 
David Thorson:
We're calling this first episode, “Who Owns Monticello?” Monticello's ownership basically has three phases. Phase one: Jefferson builds--or has built--his architectural masterpiece and lives here with his family. It's the center of a 5,000-acre plantation where he held more than 400 people in bondage. Phase two: Jefferson dies, and eventually the house is purchased by the Levy family, who preserve Monticello as their private home for 89 years. And phase three: the Foundation buys Monticello from the Levys and opens it to the public as a museum, as a place of public history.
 
We have a whole episode on the Levys, but today we're going to zoom in on the transition from phase two to phase three. This story features a fascinating cast of characters with very different ideas about who should own Monticello and why. We’ll start in 1924 and then we’ll move back in time to talk about how we got there.

Part 1 - 1924

David Thorson:
During his lifetime, Thomas Jefferson wouldn't permit a celebration of his birthday, saying, "The only birthday I ever commemorate is that of our independence, the 4th of July." Since his death, public commemorations of his birthday, April 13th, 1743, have become annual events. The celebration of Jefferson's 181st birthday in April 1924 was unlike any before or since. Prominent politicians, lawyers, and society ladies mingled with ordinary citizens on Monticello's West Lawn. New York City grammar school children delighted the audience with patriotic songs.  Charlottesville High School students danced a minuet,  and there was a piano concert.
 
The crowd gathered that day weren't just celebrating Jefferson's birthday. They were celebrating the birth of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. The public conveyance of the deed to Monticello from the estate of its longtime private owner, Jefferson Monroe Levy, marked the culmination of a 25-year-long battle to settle the question of who owns Monticello?
 
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Dianne Pierce:
There's so many layers to ownership. There's physical ownership, and then there's the ownership of the whole spirit of the place and who has access.
 
David Thorson:
I would say if you own Monticello, you own Jefferson's narrative, and no one else can do that because they don't have the legitimacy that comes with owning Monticello.
 
Chad Wollerton:
That’s absolutely right. The object, the place, can give you that kind of power.
 
David Thorson:
It's not only who has the authority to tell the story, but whose story do we tell? In 1924, the story was Thomas Jefferson. But fast forward a hundred years later, and there are many stories. There's the story of Jefferson's family, there's the story of women at Monticello, and there's the story of an entire enslaved community who made everything here possible.

Part 2 – 1896-1909

Chad Wollerton:
The idea of preserving Monticello as a place of public memory seems to have originated with William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic Party's candidate for president in 1896. Bryan lost that election to Republican William McKinley, but he had captured the imagination of the public with his fiery, anti-gold standard speech that cast monetary policy in biblical terms. Bryan ended the speech saying, "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." It's a really crazy speech, but Bryan saw himself as the heir to Thomas Jefferson's faith in the common man, and he's an advocate for expanding the money supply by introducing silver as a co-standard with gold.

He saw Jefferson as the embodiment of Democratic party ideals, so in April 1897, Bryan proposes to Jefferson Monroe Levy, Monticello's owner, who is a New York City lawyer and Democratic Party activist, "You should sell or donate Monticello to the US government, so that it can serve as a shrine to honor Jeffersonian ideals." Levy rejects this out of hand. It gets reported in the newspaper, and another newspaper publishes this article titled, "A National Humiliation," which was a fictitious, antisemitic attack that became the basis for besmirching the Levy family stewardship of Monticello for the next half century.

This little flare-up over Monticello passed quickly because the Spanish American War took up the nation's attention, and a decade would pass before the debate would resume.

In the interim, Jefferson Monroe Levy was elected to Congress, grew wealthy from real estate and stock investments. And he continued to take care of Monticello. He'd spend $10,000 a year on its upkeep. That could be anywhere from $100,000 to $200,000 in today's money, which is an incredible amount of money.
 
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David Thorson:
When I think about this, it's Hamilton versus Jefferson part two, starring William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan: two competing visions of the nation. Bryan thinks he's the heir to Jeffersonian democracy.
 
Chad Wollerton:
That's exactly right. This idea was that if you can get more money out to people, then you can allow them to start businesses, invest in their farms, and really ramp up production. Of course, it was an inflationary fear with that, and that's why people would fight against it.

Dianne Pierce:
And would you say that that's why Bryan takes up this notion of Monticello should be a public shrine?
 
David Thorson:
Absolutely. Here's the Democratic party's hero. The Republicans, they got a lock on Abraham Lincoln. We need a guy who can compete with Lincoln. The author of the Declaration of Independence, he's our guy.
 
Chad Wollerton:
One of the things I would say is that the idea for becoming a place of public memory, we're ascribing to William Jennings Bryan, but Uriah Levy, Jefferson Monroe's uncle, who purchased Monticello in the 1830s, he bought it to honor Jefferson for his stance on religious freedom. Of course, it was going to be a private ownership, but he still had the same kind of high-minded motivation in acquiring Monticello and preserving it.

And Jefferson Monroe Levy understood Monticello's importance to the United States. People were visiting here all the time during his ownership, coming to pay homage to Thomas Jefferson. He would hold public readings of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th. He was genuinely proud of Monticello and loved to share it when he could.

Part 3 – 1909-1912

Dianne Pierce:
We have a new person who appears on the scene in 1909, and this is Maude Littleton. She's the wife of New York Congressman Martin Littleton. He had been invited to give a talk at UVA, and she accompanied him and was a guest of Jefferson Monroe Levy for dinner at Monticello, which fulfilled a lifelong dream that she had had to visit Monticello. You could call her fanatical, even, in her worship of Jefferson, but she was shocked when she discovered that Levy preserved Monticello as his personal residence, and it was not what she had pictured as a temple sacred to Thomas Jefferson.
 
After that visit, she authored a tract entitled "One Wish," in which she accused the Levy family of being "aliens," unworthy of owning Monticello. She outlined her vision of Monticello as a shrine and she wanted Congress to seize it as a national monument, owned and operated by the federal government.
 
Littleton and Levy battled one another in the press and in the halls of Congress for the next three years, but finally, in December 1912, the House of Representatives rejected Littleton's proposal.
 
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David Thorson:
The House rejects this proposal, because at that time, the idea of the US government getting in the business of owning property on display was a completely foreign concept. This whole idea of the US government owning and preserving places was just not on the table.
 
Dianne Pierce:
Yeah, she was advocating for seizure, eminent domain. That's a pretty bold move. We can't not note how ironic it is that Thomas Jefferson, the advocate of small federal government, is the subject of conversation about the government seizing private property.
 
Chad Wollerton:
That seems like a spinning in the grave moment, truly, I think everyone would agree on that one.[b]
 
Dianne Pierce:
Levy bought an empty house, and so he put his furniture in. It makes perfect sense that he would've done that. But also taking very good care of it. It was falling into disrepair and so the Levy legacy was to preserve it.[c]


Chad Wollerton:
But we've already started to notice some language that keeps getting used over and over again. It's a temple, it's a shrine, it's a monument, a memorial, and that's how she's viewing it. You've used the word fanatic. She was very fanatic about this, and it is a semi-religious experience, I think, for her, so she treats it that way.
 
Dianne Pierce:
Yeah, I think the conflation of patriotism and religion here is really interesting. Those two things did not have to be equated with one another. It's not Maude Littleton alone who is doing that, but she's doing it very publicly and it is part of the zeitgeist.
 
David Thorson:
Dianne and Chad, I think those are great points.  No matter how well he's preserved it, no matter how well he's cared for it, no matter the fact that he allows people to visit for free every single day, that's not enough. Maude Littleton wants a shrine. Not a home owned by a person that she characterizes as an "alien," no matter that the Levy family had been in America since before America was the United States. She picks up on this undercurrent of anti-Semitism, which is part of American culture.
 
Chad Wollerton:
It's part of European culture.
 
David Thorson:
It's part of European culture as well, and it carries over. It's a handy way to pick up on de-legitimizing -- "these people" shouldn't own Monticello. Thomas Jefferson, he's the embodiment of America.
 
Chad Wollerton:
But it's her America. It's not necessarily an America that believes that somebody who is of the Jewish faith should be the keeper of something this important. Fine, that the Jews live in the United States, but this place is special. This is the era of the Dreyfus affair, too, so it's rampant.
 
David Thorson:
The timeframe we're talking about, 1910, there's an anti-immigrant backlash in the United States. Eastern Europeans are now coming to the United States and many of those Eastern Europeans are Jewish. So it gets tied up in the contemporary politics of the time.

Dianne Pierce:
And the word alien was just code. Everybody knew what it meant. The flip side of this idea of the alien is the patriotic pilgrimage, the idea that if you visit a site like Monticello, you will be indoctrinated, you will be Americanized. Go to the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum and you will become an American.
 
Chad Wollerton:
Really?

Dianne Pierce:
Oh yes, absolutely.

Chad Wollerton:
That was the idea behind it?

Dianne Pierce:
Oh yeah. The American period rooms are all about acculturating the alien to American material culture.

Part 4 – 1914-1917

David Thorson:
1914 was a watershed year in the Battle for Monticello. Maude Littleton changed tactics from direct confrontation to working behind the scenes. In March 1914, following two hearings, hours of acrimonious testimony by Littleton, who accused Levy of being a pawn of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Senator James A. Reed of Missouri sponsored a resolution unanimously passed by the Senate Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds for the United States government to acquire Monticello by purchase or seizure. The committee endorsed Littleton's statement: “Monticello should become a shrine, a place set apart where our children and our children's children go to learn the lessons of freedom.”
 
Dianne Pierce:
And then in the April 1914 issue of Good Housekeeping, Maude Littleton's friend, the journalist Dorothy Dix, wrote an article entitled "Monticello: Shrine or Bachelor's Hall?" She never visited Monticello. The article attacked Jefferson Monroe Levy in the most unsubtle terms. She used the same untruths about the house being uncared for and not open to the public as Littleton had been using. She uses the same antisemitic undertones. At one point, she says, "Monticello is a sacred souvenir. It should be a shrine to which all Americans may go and gather fresh inspiration and new faith in democracy," so those religious terms again.
 
Chad Wollerton:
So In September, William Jennings Bryan appears again. He's now the Secretary of State in the Wilson Administration. He revives the idea that Jefferson Monroe Levy might sell or donate Monticello to the United States government. He writes to Levy, "Yield to the national demand. Commemorate the great Democratic administration of President Wilson, which is being conducted on Jeffersonian principles."

Next month, in October, Jefferson Monroe Levy seems to start to crack a little bit here. He writes to Bryan saying he agrees with the idea. And he asks half a million dollars for Monticello.
 
David Thorson:
In 1914, Levy lost the primary to run for another term as a New York Congressman. Much of his ability to fend off Maude Littleton came from his position of political power. And then, he sustained staggering financial losses through failed investments.
 
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Chad Wollerton:
Good Housekeeping, that's not the place I would imagine the battle would've been waged at first, but it would've reached a very wide audience, I would imagine, at that point in time, right?
 
Dianne Pierce:
I think it was an incredibly smart move.
 
David Thorson:
Good Housekeeping back then was one of the largest circulation magazines in the United States and Dorothy Dix was a world-known author. And Maude Littleton is her pal. And the battle is now in Good Housekeeping.
 
Chad Wollerton:
Another thing that was interesting about Bryan's letter to Levy was that he's asking him to commemorate the “great Democratic administration of President Wilson,” in which “Jeffersonian principles” are being conducted.
 
David Thorson:
Yeah. Bryan comes in and he says, “I, William Jennings Bryan, am the heir to Thomas Jefferson, and my heir is Woodrow Wilson, so you’ve got to get with the idea. We're saving the Democratic Party.”
 
Chad Wollerton:
The role that Democratic Party leaders play in acquiring and preserving and then using Monticello as a place to talk about the ideals of American democracy continues for another couple decades. It is surprising how political it was.
 
David Thorson:
And then it's really the first World War that pulls the plug on this idea of Monticello becoming a federally owned piece of property.

Part 5 – 1918-1923

Chad Wollerton:
In the aftermath of World War I, politicians and the public lost interest in the plan to make Monticello a government-owned shrine to Thomas Jefferson. But by now, Levy was on the verge of bankruptcy, and he offered Monticello for sale to anyone, public or private.
 
Dianne Pierce:
In April of 1919, architect, author, and academic Fiske Kimball, who at that point was the chairman of the Archeological Institute of America, expressed interest in purchasing Monticello as a memorial to Jefferson's architectural genius, but he did balk at the $500,000 asking price.
 
In 1920, two new organizations emerged. The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association was headed by Ruth Cunningham. And then artist, author, and socialite Marietta Minnigerode Andrews formed the National Monticello Association. Levy agreed to sell Monticello to Cunningham's association for $500,000, but she was unable to raise the funds. Andrews' association was similarly unable to close a deal. In early 1923, with Jefferson Monroe Levy nearly insolvent, Monticello's preservation was in serious doubt, as his creditors considered breaking the property up into lots.
 
Chad Wollerton:
In the wake of this, three people come together to hatch a plan. Stuart Gibboney, a well-known New York City lawyer, he's a Virginia native, and he's a graduate of the University of Virginia; Gregory Doyle, who was working with Ruth Cunningham's association; and John Henry Ranger, who was Levy's lawyer and broker. They come up with this plan to save Monticello by creating an entirely new nonprofit foundation that could pull together the funds needed to acquire the house and grounds for the half million dollar asking price.

As negotiations progressed, this is in the press again, so Levy's talking to the newspapers again, and he writes, "It has long been my wish to see Monticello set apart as a great national shrine, and I regret that I am not able myself to make this gift to the nation." He's gone from “never” in 1897 to, “I just only wish that I could bestow this upon the American public.” I think after 25 some odd years of this battle, he's finally like, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
 
So everybody's coming together. The foundation creates this statement about themselves. Their purpose is "to purchase, preserve, and maintain Monticello at Charlottesville in the state of Virginia as a national memorial so that it may be forever retained as a shrine and reverently transmitted to future generations as a monument to the genius in patriotism of Thomas Jefferson, and a constant reminder of the principles inscribed in the Declaration of Independence, to foster and preserve the ideals of American Liberty and the Republican form of government, and to keep alive the name and memory of Thomas Jefferson as the apostle of human freedom." Some bold stuff.
 
Dianne Pierce:
A little long-winded.
 
Chad Wollerton:
I guess the more long-winded you are, sometimes the more intelligent you seem. I don't know.
 
David Thorson:
It's every idea that everybody's had for 25 years rolled up and tied up with a nice, neat bow.

Part 6 – 1923

David Thorson:
On December 8th, 1923, Jefferson Monroe Levy transferred ownership of Monticello to the foundation, ending almost 90 years of stewardship by his family and closing out a quarter of a century of debate over who should preserve Monticello for future generations. Just three months later, over a million dollars in debt, Jefferson Monroe Levy died at age 71.

When Foundation President Stuart Gibboney accepted the deed to Monticello, the question of ownership was settled, but the question of Monticello's place and purpose in public memory had just begun.
 
Monticello has been preserved, at various times in its history, as a shrine to Jefferson as a secular saint; as a memorial to Jefferson's political ideas; as a museum of Jefferson's possessions devoted to his pursuits in science, agriculture, and foodways; as a plantation, to explore the lives, triumphs and tragedies of the people Jefferson enslaved; and as a sight of conscience. Perhaps most enduringly, Monticello remains a place uniquely suited to explore Jefferson's successes and failures in contributing to the American experiment in self-governing.
 
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Dianne Pierce:
I was thinking about what we now call the "power of place," and the idea that there's no replacement for actual experience of the site[d]. Especially in today's world, which is so digital and virtual, everyone understands that power, and that's really, in a way, what Maude Littleton was talking about. To give her a little bit of credit, she saw that there should be access to the power of the place and what it represents.[e]
 
Chad Wollerton:
The place, the curatorial thing of Monticello creates that kind of power. And the whole history of the foundation is really, I think, a study in how we steward that honor.
 
David Thorson:
Who owns history transcends, I think, the public or private ownership. Things have really changed since this early hagiographic view of Jefferson as this person who could do no wrong to Jefferson as a human being, who has flaws as well as a vision that people strive for to this very day. I think today, coming to Monticello offers people an opportunity to think. As I've said, and I've mentioned to Chad and Dianne and everyone else who will listen to me, history makes your head hurt. It's supposed to make you think and draw your own conclusions. And hopefully, the whole idea is to make a better tomorrow, not get stuck in the past.